Syrian Civil War Developments

[Big K]

Alawites get their state, the Druze in the south may get another, and you get a Kurdish state added to the Iraqi Kurdistan de-facto sooner or later.

a state who is surrounded by enemies & therefore will bow to US...

The Muslim Israel...

[cyppok]

a state who is surrounded by enemies & therefore will bow to US...

The Muslim Israel...

Maybe but those Iraq-Syria-Alwaitistan pipelines will have to terminate somewhere. Mind as well in a new state totally discharging most of the energy into world markets.

[Big K]

Maybe but those Iraq-Syria-Alwaitistan pipelines will have to terminate somewhere. Mind as well in a new state totally discharging most of the energy into world markets.

thats another reason why US needs it

[citanon]

So fellas, if Syria goes and Iran sinks further, will Turkey get back its Ottoman groove? :)

Well, that didn't take long:

Sultan Erdogan: Turkey's Rebranding Into the New, Old Ottoman Empire - Cinar Kiper - The Atlantic

[Dante]

Well, that didn't take long:

Sultan Erdogan: Turkey's Rebranding Into the New, Old Ottoman Empire - Cinar Kiper - The Atlantic

Syria has to fall first, and Turkey has to get the big share of the pie (influence), IMHO nothing is certain..things could go many other ways, from perpetual civil war, a new Afghanistan, Assad holding to direct confrontation with Iran

[cyppok]

US to deploy troops in Jordan for possible military intervention in Syria | StratRisks

US to deploy troops in Jordan for possible military intervention in Syria

Source: Al Arabiya

The Pentagon is sending about 200 soldiers from a U.S. Army headquarters unit to Jordan to assist efforts to contain violence along the Syrian border and plan for any operations needed to ensure the safety of chemical weapons in Syria, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told Congress Wednesday.

The decision to dispatch the 1st Armored Division troops of planners and specialists in intelligence, logistics and operations comes as several lawmakers pressed the Obama administration for even more aggressive steps to end the two-year civil war.

Hagel and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, faced persistent questions from senior members of the Armed Services Committee about efforts to force out Syrian President Bashar Assad. The Pentagon leaders made clear that the situation is extremely complicated and they must be certain of the endgame before any military step to try to end the bloodshed.

“You better be damned sure. No-fly zone, safe zone. Once you’re in, you can’t unwind it,” Hagel said.

Dempsey said he has spent a significant portion of his adult life trying to figure out the Mideast. “This is the toughest of all,” he said.

Regime Gains Ground

Regime Gains Ground—For Now
Posted by Matthew Barber on Wednesday, April 17th, 2013
Assad’s Forces Break Rebel Blockade in North Syria – Reuters – by Erika Solomon

Syrian government troops have broken through a six-month rebel blockade in northern Syria and are now fighting to recapture a vital highway, opposition and state media said on Monday. Rebels had kept the army bottled up in the Wadi al-Deif and Hamidiya military bases in Idlib province. But on Sunday, President Bashar al-Assad’s forces outflanked the rebels and broke through, the pro-government al-Baath newspaper said. The insurgents counter-attacked on Monday but their front has been weakened in recent weeks due to infighting and the deployment of forces to other battles, activists said. The break-out from the bases, located outside Maarat al-Nuaman town, may enable the army to recapture the main route into Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, and bolster their fragile supply lines in the heart of the rebel-held north.

I think the fracture is gaining velocity in Syria, secular vs non-secular up-rise elements.
Expectations in my view are very low for something drastic to happen now, and my counter-intuitive sense is that this is precisely the time it happens. If there is a proclamation of a state becoming closer to Switzerland in cantonisation based on ethnicity the civil war will end. Will it happen, doubt it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/midd...e-warning-live

This is the major thing people ignored. Complete split in secular vs religious.

Amnesty

Opposition leader Moaz al-Khatib has reacted to Assad's amnesty by alluding to his controversial conditional offer of talks with the Syrian government.

Writing on his Facebook page Khatib said the release of 160,000 prisoners, starting with women and children, would represent "Syria-Syria" solution to the crisis.

Earlier this year Khatib said he would be prepared to enter talks with the Syrian government if it released political prisoners and lifted passport restrictions for Syrians living abroad. But many in the opposition coalition rejected the move and insisted that Assad should agree to step down before any talks could take place.

Khatib resigned as president of the coalition last month but agreed to continue to act as leader after his resignation was rejected.

Process this a bit... What happens if half the rebels that are not religious cease the struggle? That's right only the religious extremists are left.

[Parihaka]

US to deploy troops in Jordan for possible military intervention in Syria | StratRisks



Regime Gains Ground


I think the fracture is gaining velocity in Syria, secular vs non-secular up-rise elements.
Expectations in my view are very low for something drastic to happen now, and my counter-intuitive sense is that this is precisely the time it happens. If there is a proclamation of a state becoming closer to Switzerland in cantonisation based on ethnicity the civil war will end. Will it happen, doubt it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/midd...e-warning-live

This is the major thing people ignored. Complete split in secular vs religious.


Process this a bit... What happens if half the rebels that are not religious cease the struggle? That's right only the religious extremists are left.

Then the extremists get their ass handed to them

[Firestorm]

Then the extremists get their ass handed to them

Not if the US/NATO intervene and take down Assad. Then you'll leave Syrian in the hands of their version of the Muslim Brotherhood. In any case, the religious nuts fighting in Syria aren't going away. If Assad falls, they will be part of the new regime in one way or another.

[Parihaka]

Not if the US/NATO intervene and take down Assad. Then you'll leave Syrian in the hands of their version of the Muslim Brotherhood. In any case, the religious nuts fighting in Syria aren't going away. If Assad falls, they will be part of the new regime in one way or another.

I don't think it's in the US/NATO's interests that Assad falls. Crippled yes, but gone, no.

[dan m]

BBC News - US has 'some confidence' of Syria chemical weapons use

This sees to be a recent development. Although it seems as though no one seems to be entirely sure of whats going on.

[tbm3fan]

BBC News - US has 'some confidence' of Syria chemical weapons use

This sees to be a recent development. Although it seems as though no one seems to be entirely sure of whats going on.

Look at the "headline" difference between the BBC and CNN using the same information.


'Red line'

[troung]

They may be fighting for Syria, not Assad. They may also be winning: Robert Fisk reports from inside Syria - Middle East - World - The Independent

They may be fighting for Syria, not Assad. They may also be winning: Robert Fisk reports from inside Syria

Death stalks the Syrian regime just as it does the rebels. But on the front line of the war, the regime’s army is in no mood to surrender – and claims it doesn’t need chemical weapons

Clouds hang oppressively low over the Syrian army’s front-line mountain-top in the far north of Syria.

Rain has only just replaced snow, turning this heavily protected fortress into a swamp of mud and stagnant ponds where soldiers man their lookout posts with the wind in their faces, their elderly T-55 tanks – the old Warsaw Pact battlehorses of the 1950s – dripping under the showers, their tracks in the mud, used now only as artillery pieces. They are “rubbish tanks” – debeba khurda – I say to Colonel Mohamed, commander of the Syrian army’s Special Forces unit across this bleak landscape, and he grins at me. “We use them for static defence,” he says frankly. ‘They do not move.’”

Before the war – or “the crisis” as President Bashar al-Assad’s soldiers are constrained to call it – Jebel al-Kawaniah was a television transmission station. But when the anti-government rebels captured it, they blew up the towers, cut down the forest of fir trees around it to create a free-fire zone and built ramparts of earth to protect them from government gunfire. The Syrian army fought their way back up the hillsides last October, through the village of Qastal Maaf – which now lies pancaked and broken on the old road to the Turkish border at Kassab – and stormed on to the plateau which is now their front line.

On their maps, the Syrian army codenamed “Kawaniah Mountain” according to their own military co-ordinates. It became “Point 45” – Point 40 lies east through the mountain gloom – and they spread their troops in tents under the trees of two neighbouring hills. I climb on to one of the T-55s and can see them through the downpour. There are dull explosions across the valley and the occasional “pop” of small arms fire and, rather disconcertingly, Col Mohamed points out that the nearest forest is still in the hands of his enemies, scarcely 800 metres away. The soldier sitting in the tank turret with a heavy machine-gun doesn’t take his eyes off the trees.

It is always an eerie experience to sit among Bashar al-Assad’s soldiers. These are the “bad guys” of the regime, according to the rest of the world – although in truth the country’s secret police deserve that title – and I’m well aware that these men have been told that a Western journalist is coming to their dug-outs and basement headquarters. They ask me to use only their first names for fear that their families may be killed; they allow me to take any photographs I wish, but not to picture their faces – a rule that the rebels sometimes ask of journalists for the same reason – but every soldier and officer to whom I spoke, including a Brigadier General, gave their full names and IDs to me.

Such access to the Syrian army was almost unimaginable just a few months ago and there are good reasons why. The army believe they are at last winning back ground from the Free Syrian Army and the al-Nusra Islamist fighters and the various al-Qa’ida satellites that now rule much of the Syrian countryside. From Point 45 they are scarcely a mile and a half from the Turkish frontier and intend to take the ground in between. Outside Damascus they have battled their way bloodily into two rebel-held suburbs. While I was prowling through the mountaintop positions, the rebels were in danger of losing the town of Qusayr outside Homs amid opposition accusations of the widespread killing of civilians. The main road from Damascus to Latakia on the Mediterranean coast has been reopened by the army. And the line troops I met at Point 45 were a different breed of men from those soldiers who became corrupted after 29 years of semi-occupation in Lebanon, who fell back to Syria without a war to fight in 2005, the discipline of the soldiers around Damascus a joke rather than a threat to anyone. Bashar’s Special Forces now appear confident, ruthless, politically motivated, a danger to their enemies, their uniforms smart, their weapons clean. Syrians have long grown used to the claims by Israel – inevitably followed by the Washington echo machine – that chemical weapons have been used by Bashar’s forces; as an intelligence officer remarked caustically in Damascus: “Why should we use chemical weapons when our Mig aircraft and their bombs cause infinitely more destruction?” The soldiers up at Point 45 admitted the defections to the Free Syrian Army, the huge losses of their own men – inevitably referred to as “martyrs” – and made no secret of their own body counts for battles lost and won.

Their last “martyr” at Point 45 was shot by a rebel sniper two weeks ago, 22 year-old Special Forces Private Kamal Aboud from Homs. He at least died as a soldier. Colonel Mohamed spoke ruefully of the troopers on family leave who, he said, were executed with knives when they entered enemy territory. I remind myself that the UN is bringing war crimes charges against this army and I remind Colonel Mohamed – who has four bullet wounds in his arms to show that he leads his soldiers from the front, not from a bunker – that his soldiers were surely meant to be liberating the Golan Heights from Israel. Israel is to the south, I say, and here he is fighting his way north towards Turkey. Why?

“I know, but we are fighting Israel. I joined the army to fight Israel. And now I am fighting Israel’s tools. And the tools of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, so in this way we are fighting for Golan. This is a conspiracy and the West is helping the foreign terrorists who arrived in Syria, the same terrorists you are trying to kill in Mali.” I have heard this before, of course. The “moamarer”, the conspiracy, sits beside me at all interviews in Syria. But the colonel admits that the two Syrian T-55s which fire shells at Point 45 every morning – the very same vintage war-carts as his own tanks – are sets of twins, that his enemies have taken their artillery from the government army and that his opponents include men from Bashar al-Assad’s original army.

On the road to Qastel Maaf, a general tells me that on the highway to the Turkish border, the army have just killed 10 Saudis, two Egyptians and a Tunisian – I am shown no papers to prove this – but the soldiers at Point 45 produce for me three handset radios they have captured from their enemies. One is marked “HXT Commercial Terminal”, the other two are made by Hongda and the instructions are in Turkish. I ask them if they listen to the rebel communications. “Yes, but we don’t understand them,” a major says. “They are speaking in Turkish and we don’t understand Turkish.” So are they Turks or Turkmen Syrians from the villages to the east? The soldiers shrug. They say they have also heard Arabic voices speaking with Libyan and Yemeni accents. And given that the great and the good of Nato are now obsessed with “foreign jihadis” in Syria, I suspect these Syrian soldiers may well be telling the truth.

The laneways of this beautiful northern countryside conceal the viciousness of the fighting. Clusters of red and white roses smother the walls of abandoned homes. A few men tend the mass of orange orchards that glow around us, a woman combs her long hair on a roof. The lake of Balloran glistens in the spring sunshine between mountains still topped with a powder of snow. It reminds me, chillingly, of Bosnia. For several miles the villages are still occupied, a Christian Greek Orthodox township of 10 families with a church dedicated to the appearance of the Virgin to a woman called Salma; a Muslim Alawite village, then a Muslim Sunni village close to the front lines but still co-existing; a ghost of the old secular, non-sectarian Syria which both sides promise – with ever decreasing credibility – will return once the war is over.

Then I am in a smashed village called Beit Fares where hundreds of Syrian soldiers can be seen patrolling the surrounding forests, and another general fishes into his pocket and produces an army mobile phone video of dead fighters. “All are foreign,” he says. I watch closely as the camera lingers over bearded faces, some contorted in fear, others in the dreamless sleep of death. They have been heaped together. And, most sinister of all, I observe a military boot which descends twice on the heads of the dead men. On the wall of the dugout, someone has written: “We are soldiers of Assad – to hell with you dogs of the armed groups of Jabel al-Aswad and Beit Shrouk.”

These are the names of a string of tiny villages still in rebel hands – you can see the roofs of their houses from Point 45 – and Col Mohamed, a 45-year-old veteran of the Lebanese war between 1993 and 1995, lists the others: Khadra, Jebel Saouda, Zahiyeh, al-Kabir, Rabia… Their fate awaits them. When I ask the soldiers how many prisoners they took in their battles, they say “None” with a loud voice. What, I ask, even when they claim to have killed 700 “terrorists” in one engagement? “None,” they reply again.

Opposite a bullet-riddled school building is a pulverised house. “A local terrorist leader died there with all his men,” the colonel states. “They did not surrender.”

I doubt if they had the chance. But at Beit Fares, some rebels did escape earlier this year, along – so says General Wasif from Latakia – with their own local leader, a Syrian businessman. We clump into the man’s ruined villa on the hills of this abandoned Turkmen village – the inhabitants are now in Turkish refugee camps, the general tells me – and it seems that the businessman was wealthy. The villa is surrounded by irrigated orchards of lemon and pistachio and fig trees. There is a basketball court, an empty swimming pool, children’s swings, a broken marble fountain – in which there are still Turkish-labelled tins of stuffed vine leaves – and marble-walled living rooms and kitchens and a delicate plaque in Arabic above the front door saying: “God Bless This House.” It seems He did not.

I pluck some figs from the absentee businessman’s orchard. The soldiers do the same. But they taste sharp and too sour and the soldiers spit them out, preferring the oranges that hang by the roadside. General Fawaz is talking to a colleague and lifts up an exploded rocket for inspection. It is locally manufactured, the welding unprofessional – but identical to all the Qassam missiles which the Palestinian Hamas movement fires into Israel from the Gaza Strip. “Someone from Palestine told the terrorists how to make this,” General Fawaz says. Colonel Mohamed remarks quietly that when they stormed into the village, they found cars and trucks with Turkish military plates – but no Turkish soldiers.

There is an odd relationship with Turkey up here. Recep Tayyip Erdogan may condemn Assad but the nearest Turkish frontier station a mile and a half away stays open, the only border post still linking Turkey and government-controlled Syrian territory. One of the officers refers to an old story about the Umayyad Caliph Muawiya who said that he kept a thin piece of his own hair “to connect me to my enemies”. “The Turks have left this one frontier open with us,” the officer says, “so as not to cut the hair of Muawiya.” He is not smiling and I understand what he is saying. The Turks still want to maintain a physical connection with the Assad regime. Erdogan cannot be certain that Bashar al-Assad will lose this war.

Many of the soldiers show their wounds; more valuable to them, I suspect, than medals or badges of rank. Besides, the officers have already removed their gold insignia on the front lines – unlike Admiral Nelson, they do not wish to be picked off by the rebels’ early morning snipers. Dawn seems to be the killing time. On a roadway, a second lieutenant shows me his own wounds. There is a bullet’s entry below his left ear. On the other side of his head, a cruel purple scar runs upwards towards his right ear. He was shot right through the neck and survived. He was lucky.

So were the Special Forces soldiers who patrolled towards a hidden land-mine, an IED in Western parlance. A young Syrian explosives ordnance officer in Qastal Maaf shows me the two iron-cased shells that were buried under the road. One of them is almost too heavy for me to lift. The fuse is labeled in Turkish. An antenna connected to the explosives was strung from the top of an electricity pole for a line-of-sight rebel bomber to detonate. A technical mine-detector – “all our equipment is Russian,” the soldiers boasted – alerted the patrol to the explosives before the soldiers walked over them.

But death hovers over the Syrian army, just as it haunts their enemies. The airport at Latakia is now a place of permanent lamentation. No sooner do I arrive than I find families crying and tearing their faces in front of the terminal, waiting for the bodies of their soldier sons and brothers and husbands, Christians for the most part but Muslims too, for the Mediterranean coast is the heartland of Christians and Shia Alawites and a minority of Sunni Muslims. One Christian woman is restrained by an old man as she tries to lie down on the road, tears streaming down her face. A truck by the departure hall is piled with wreaths.

A general in charge of the army’s bereaved families tells me that the airport is too small for this mass mourning. “The helicopters bring our dead here from all over northern Syria,” he says. “We have to look after all these families and find them housing, but sometimes I go to homes to tell them of the death of a son and find that they have already lost three other sons as martyrs. It is too much.” Forget Private Ryan. I see beside the control tower a wounded soldier hobbling along on one foot, a bandage partly covering his face, his arm around a comrade as he limps towards the terminal.

Military statistics I was shown suggest that 1,900 soldiers from Latakia have been killed in this awful war, another 1,500 from Tartus. But you must add up the statistics of the Alawite and Christian mixed villages in the hills above Latakia to understand the individual cost. In Hayalin, for example, the village of 2,000 souls has lost 22 soldiers with another 16 listed as missing. In real terms that’s 38 dead. Many were killed in Jisr al-Shughur back in June of 2011 when the Syrian army lost 89 dead in a rebel ambush. A villager called Fouad explains that there was one survivor who came from a neighbouring village. “I telephoned him to ask what happened to the other men,” he said. “He said: ‘I don’t know because they cut out my eyes.’ He said that someone led him away and he thought he would be executed but found himself in an ambulance and was taken to hospital in Latakia.” One of the Jisr al-Shughur dead was returned to Hayalin, but relatives found that his coffin contained only his legs. “The latest martyr from Hayalin was killed only two days ago,” Fouad told me. “He was a soldier called Ali Hassan. He had just got married. They couldn’t even return his body.”

The 24 Syrian helicopter gunships that throb on the apron beyond the terminal project the power of the government’s hardware. But soldiers tell their own stories of fear and intimidation. That rebel forces threaten the families of government soldiers is a long-established fact. But one private told me bleakly of how his elder brother was ordered to persuade him to desert the army. “When I refused, they broke my brother’s legs,” he said. When I asked if others had shared this experience, an 18-year old private was brought to me. The officers offered to leave the room when I spoke to him.

He was an intelligent young man but his story was told simply and untutored. His was no set propaganda speech. “I come from Idlib Province and they came to my father and said they needed me there,” he said. “But my father refused and said, ‘If you want my son, go and bring him here – and if you do, you will not find me here to greet him.’ Then my father sent most of his family to Lebanon. My father and mother are still there and they are still being threatened.” I tell the officers later that I do not believe every Syrian defector left because of threats to his family, that some soldiers must have profoundly disagreed with the regime. They agree but insist that the army remains strong.

Colonel Mohamed, who mixes military strategy with politics, says he regards the foreign “plot” against Syria as a repeat version of the Sykes-Picot Agreement of the First World War, when Britain and France secretly decided to divide up the Middle East – including Syria – between them. “Now they want to do the same,” he says. “Britain and France want to give weapons to the terrorists to divide us, but we want to have a united Syria in which all our people live together, democratically, caring not about their religion but living peacefully…” And then came the crunch. “…under the leadership of our champion Dr Bashar al-Assad.”

But it is not that simple. The word “democracy” and the name of Assad do not blend very well in much of Syria. And I rather think that the soldiers of what is officially called the Syrian Arab Army are fighting for Syria rather than Assad. But fighting they are and maybe, for now, they are winning an unwinnable war. At Beit Fares, I peak over the parapet once more and the mist is rising off the mountains. This could be Bosnia. The country is breathtaking, the grey-green hills rolling into blue velvet mountains. A little heaven. But the fruits along this front line are bitter indeed.

[troung]

They may be fighting for Syria, not Assad. They may also be winning: Robert Fisk reports from inside Syria - Middle East - World - The Independent

They may be fighting for Syria, not Assad. They may also be winning: Robert Fisk reports from inside Syria

Death stalks the Syrian regime just as it does the rebels. But on the front line of the war, the regime’s army is in no mood to surrender – and claims it doesn’t need chemical weapons

Clouds hang oppressively low over the Syrian army’s front-line mountain-top in the far north of Syria.

Rain has only just replaced snow, turning this heavily protected fortress into a swamp of mud and stagnant ponds where soldiers man their lookout posts with the wind in their faces, their elderly T-55 tanks – the old Warsaw Pact battlehorses of the 1950s – dripping under the showers, their tracks in the mud, used now only as artillery pieces. They are “rubbish tanks” – debeba khurda – I say to Colonel Mohamed, commander of the Syrian army’s Special Forces unit across this bleak landscape, and he grins at me. “We use them for static defence,” he says frankly. ‘They do not move.’”

Before the war – or “the crisis” as President Bashar al-Assad’s soldiers are constrained to call it – Jebel al-Kawaniah was a television transmission station. But when the anti-government rebels captured it, they blew up the towers, cut down the forest of fir trees around it to create a free-fire zone and built ramparts of earth to protect them from government gunfire. The Syrian army fought their way back up the hillsides last October, through the village of Qastal Maaf – which now lies pancaked and broken on the old road to the Turkish border at Kassab – and stormed on to the plateau which is now their front line.

On their maps, the Syrian army codenamed “Kawaniah Mountain” according to their own military co-ordinates. It became “Point 45” – Point 40 lies east through the mountain gloom – and they spread their troops in tents under the trees of two neighbouring hills. I climb on to one of the T-55s and can see them through the downpour. There are dull explosions across the valley and the occasional “pop” of small arms fire and, rather disconcertingly, Col Mohamed points out that the nearest forest is still in the hands of his enemies, scarcely 800 metres away. The soldier sitting in the tank turret with a heavy machine-gun doesn’t take his eyes off the trees.

It is always an eerie experience to sit among Bashar al-Assad’s soldiers. These are the “bad guys” of the regime, according to the rest of the world – although in truth the country’s secret police deserve that title – and I’m well aware that these men have been told that a Western journalist is coming to their dug-outs and basement headquarters. They ask me to use only their first names for fear that their families may be killed; they allow me to take any photographs I wish, but not to picture their faces – a rule that the rebels sometimes ask of journalists for the same reason – but every soldier and officer to whom I spoke, including a Brigadier General, gave their full names and IDs to me.

Such access to the Syrian army was almost unimaginable just a few months ago and there are good reasons why. The army believe they are at last winning back ground from the Free Syrian Army and the al-Nusra Islamist fighters and the various al-Qa’ida satellites that now rule much of the Syrian countryside. From Point 45 they are scarcely a mile and a half from the Turkish frontier and intend to take the ground in between. Outside Damascus they have battled their way bloodily into two rebel-held suburbs. While I was prowling through the mountaintop positions, the rebels were in danger of losing the town of Qusayr outside Homs amid opposition accusations of the widespread killing of civilians. The main road from Damascus to Latakia on the Mediterranean coast has been reopened by the army. And the line troops I met at Point 45 were a different breed of men from those soldiers who became corrupted after 29 years of semi-occupation in Lebanon, who fell back to Syria without a war to fight in 2005, the discipline of the soldiers around Damascus a joke rather than a threat to anyone. Bashar’s Special Forces now appear confident, ruthless, politically motivated, a danger to their enemies, their uniforms smart, their weapons clean. Syrians have long grown used to the claims by Israel – inevitably followed by the Washington echo machine – that chemical weapons have been used by Bashar’s forces; as an intelligence officer remarked caustically in Damascus: “Why should we use chemical weapons when our Mig aircraft and their bombs cause infinitely more destruction?” The soldiers up at Point 45 admitted the defections to the Free Syrian Army, the huge losses of their own men – inevitably referred to as “martyrs” – and made no secret of their own body counts for battles lost and won.

Their last “martyr” at Point 45 was shot by a rebel sniper two weeks ago, 22 year-old Special Forces Private Kamal Aboud from Homs. He at least died as a soldier. Colonel Mohamed spoke ruefully of the troopers on family leave who, he said, were executed with knives when they entered enemy territory. I remind myself that the UN is bringing war crimes charges against this army and I remind Colonel Mohamed – who has four bullet wounds in his arms to show that he leads his soldiers from the front, not from a bunker – that his soldiers were surely meant to be liberating the Golan Heights from Israel. Israel is to the south, I say, and here he is fighting his way north towards Turkey. Why?

“I know, but we are fighting Israel. I joined the army to fight Israel. And now I am fighting Israel’s tools. And the tools of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, so in this way we are fighting for Golan. This is a conspiracy and the West is helping the foreign terrorists who arrived in Syria, the same terrorists you are trying to kill in Mali.” I have heard this before, of course. The “moamarer”, the conspiracy, sits beside me at all interviews in Syria. But the colonel admits that the two Syrian T-55s which fire shells at Point 45 every morning – the very same vintage war-carts as his own tanks – are sets of twins, that his enemies have taken their artillery from the government army and that his opponents include men from Bashar al-Assad’s original army.

On the road to Qastel Maaf, a general tells me that on the highway to the Turkish border, the army have just killed 10 Saudis, two Egyptians and a Tunisian – I am shown no papers to prove this – but the soldiers at Point 45 produce for me three handset radios they have captured from their enemies. One is marked “HXT Commercial Terminal”, the other two are made by Hongda and the instructions are in Turkish. I ask them if they listen to the rebel communications. “Yes, but we don’t understand them,” a major says. “They are speaking in Turkish and we don’t understand Turkish.” So are they Turks or Turkmen Syrians from the villages to the east? The soldiers shrug. They say they have also heard Arabic voices speaking with Libyan and Yemeni accents. And given that the great and the good of Nato are now obsessed with “foreign jihadis” in Syria, I suspect these Syrian soldiers may well be telling the truth.

The laneways of this beautiful northern countryside conceal the viciousness of the fighting. Clusters of red and white roses smother the walls of abandoned homes. A few men tend the mass of orange orchards that glow around us, a woman combs her long hair on a roof. The lake of Balloran glistens in the spring sunshine between mountains still topped with a powder of snow. It reminds me, chillingly, of Bosnia. For several miles the villages are still occupied, a Christian Greek Orthodox township of 10 families with a church dedicated to the appearance of the Virgin to a woman called Salma; a Muslim Alawite village, then a Muslim Sunni village close to the front lines but still co-existing; a ghost of the old secular, non-sectarian Syria which both sides promise – with ever decreasing credibility – will return once the war is over.

Then I am in a smashed village called Beit Fares where hundreds of Syrian soldiers can be seen patrolling the surrounding forests, and another general fishes into his pocket and produces an army mobile phone video of dead fighters. “All are foreign,” he says. I watch closely as the camera lingers over bearded faces, some contorted in fear, others in the dreamless sleep of death. They have been heaped together. And, most sinister of all, I observe a military boot which descends twice on the heads of the dead men. On the wall of the dugout, someone has written: “We are soldiers of Assad – to hell with you dogs of the armed groups of Jabel al-Aswad and Beit Shrouk.”

These are the names of a string of tiny villages still in rebel hands – you can see the roofs of their houses from Point 45 – and Col Mohamed, a 45-year-old veteran of the Lebanese war between 1993 and 1995, lists the others: Khadra, Jebel Saouda, Zahiyeh, al-Kabir, Rabia… Their fate awaits them. When I ask the soldiers how many prisoners they took in their battles, they say “None” with a loud voice. What, I ask, even when they claim to have killed 700 “terrorists” in one engagement? “None,” they reply again.

Opposite a bullet-riddled school building is a pulverised house. “A local terrorist leader died there with all his men,” the colonel states. “They did not surrender.”

I doubt if they had the chance. But at Beit Fares, some rebels did escape earlier this year, along – so says General Wasif from Latakia – with their own local leader, a Syrian businessman. We clump into the man’s ruined villa on the hills of this abandoned Turkmen village – the inhabitants are now in Turkish refugee camps, the general tells me – and it seems that the businessman was wealthy. The villa is surrounded by irrigated orchards of lemon and pistachio and fig trees. There is a basketball court, an empty swimming pool, children’s swings, a broken marble fountain – in which there are still Turkish-labelled tins of stuffed vine leaves – and marble-walled living rooms and kitchens and a delicate plaque in Arabic above the front door saying: “God Bless This House.” It seems He did not.

I pluck some figs from the absentee businessman’s orchard. The soldiers do the same. But they taste sharp and too sour and the soldiers spit them out, preferring the oranges that hang by the roadside. General Fawaz is talking to a colleague and lifts up an exploded rocket for inspection. It is locally manufactured, the welding unprofessional – but identical to all the Qassam missiles which the Palestinian Hamas movement fires into Israel from the Gaza Strip. “Someone from Palestine told the terrorists how to make this,” General Fawaz says. Colonel Mohamed remarks quietly that when they stormed into the village, they found cars and trucks with Turkish military plates – but no Turkish soldiers.

There is an odd relationship with Turkey up here. Recep Tayyip Erdogan may condemn Assad but the nearest Turkish frontier station a mile and a half away stays open, the only border post still linking Turkey and government-controlled Syrian territory. One of the officers refers to an old story about the Umayyad Caliph Muawiya who said that he kept a thin piece of his own hair “to connect me to my enemies”. “The Turks have left this one frontier open with us,” the officer says, “so as not to cut the hair of Muawiya.” He is not smiling and I understand what he is saying. The Turks still want to maintain a physical connection with the Assad regime. Erdogan cannot be certain that Bashar al-Assad will lose this war.

Many of the soldiers show their wounds; more valuable to them, I suspect, than medals or badges of rank. Besides, the officers have already removed their gold insignia on the front lines – unlike Admiral Nelson, they do not wish to be picked off by the rebels’ early morning snipers. Dawn seems to be the killing time. On a roadway, a second lieutenant shows me his own wounds. There is a bullet’s entry below his left ear. On the other side of his head, a cruel purple scar runs upwards towards his right ear. He was shot right through the neck and survived. He was lucky.

So were the Special Forces soldiers who patrolled towards a hidden land-mine, an IED in Western parlance. A young Syrian explosives ordnance officer in Qastal Maaf shows me the two iron-cased shells that were buried under the road. One of them is almost too heavy for me to lift. The fuse is labeled in Turkish. An antenna connected to the explosives was strung from the top of an electricity pole for a line-of-sight rebel bomber to detonate. A technical mine-detector – “all our equipment is Russian,” the soldiers boasted – alerted the patrol to the explosives before the soldiers walked over them.

But death hovers over the Syrian army, just as it haunts their enemies. The airport at Latakia is now a place of permanent lamentation. No sooner do I arrive than I find families crying and tearing their faces in front of the terminal, waiting for the bodies of their soldier sons and brothers and husbands, Christians for the most part but Muslims too, for the Mediterranean coast is the heartland of Christians and Shia Alawites and a minority of Sunni Muslims. One Christian woman is restrained by an old man as she tries to lie down on the road, tears streaming down her face. A truck by the departure hall is piled with wreaths.

A general in charge of the army’s bereaved families tells me that the airport is too small for this mass mourning. “The helicopters bring our dead here from all over northern Syria,” he says. “We have to look after all these families and find them housing, but sometimes I go to homes to tell them of the death of a son and find that they have already lost three other sons as martyrs. It is too much.” Forget Private Ryan. I see beside the control tower a wounded soldier hobbling along on one foot, a bandage partly covering his face, his arm around a comrade as he limps towards the terminal.

Military statistics I was shown suggest that 1,900 soldiers from Latakia have been killed in this awful war, another 1,500 from Tartus. But you must add up the statistics of the Alawite and Christian mixed villages in the hills above Latakia to understand the individual cost. In Hayalin, for example, the village of 2,000 souls has lost 22 soldiers with another 16 listed as missing. In real terms that’s 38 dead. Many were killed in Jisr al-Shughur back in June of 2011 when the Syrian army lost 89 dead in a rebel ambush. A villager called Fouad explains that there was one survivor who came from a neighbouring village. “I telephoned him to ask what happened to the other men,” he said. “He said: ‘I don’t know because they cut out my eyes.’ He said that someone led him away and he thought he would be executed but found himself in an ambulance and was taken to hospital in Latakia.” One of the Jisr al-Shughur dead was returned to Hayalin, but relatives found that his coffin contained only his legs. “The latest martyr from Hayalin was killed only two days ago,” Fouad told me. “He was a soldier called Ali Hassan. He had just got married. They couldn’t even return his body.”

The 24 Syrian helicopter gunships that throb on the apron beyond the terminal project the power of the government’s hardware. But soldiers tell their own stories of fear and intimidation. That rebel forces threaten the families of government soldiers is a long-established fact. But one private told me bleakly of how his elder brother was ordered to persuade him to desert the army. “When I refused, they broke my brother’s legs,” he said. When I asked if others had shared this experience, an 18-year old private was brought to me. The officers offered to leave the room when I spoke to him.

He was an intelligent young man but his story was told simply and untutored. His was no set propaganda speech. “I come from Idlib Province and they came to my father and said they needed me there,” he said. “But my father refused and said, ‘If you want my son, go and bring him here – and if you do, you will not find me here to greet him.’ Then my father sent most of his family to Lebanon. My father and mother are still there and they are still being threatened.” I tell the officers later that I do not believe every Syrian defector left because of threats to his family, that some soldiers must have profoundly disagreed with the regime. They agree but insist that the army remains strong.

Colonel Mohamed, who mixes military strategy with politics, says he regards the foreign “plot” against Syria as a repeat version of the Sykes-Picot Agreement of the First World War, when Britain and France secretly decided to divide up the Middle East – including Syria – between them. “Now they want to do the same,” he says. “Britain and France want to give weapons to the terrorists to divide us, but we want to have a united Syria in which all our people live together, democratically, caring not about their religion but living peacefully…” And then came the crunch. “…under the leadership of our champion Dr Bashar al-Assad.”

But it is not that simple. The word “democracy” and the name of Assad do not blend very well in much of Syria. And I rather think that the soldiers of what is officially called the Syrian Arab Army are fighting for Syria rather than Assad. But fighting they are and maybe, for now, they are winning an unwinnable war. At Beit Fares, I peak over the parapet once more and the mist is rising off the mountains. This could be Bosnia. The country is breathtaking, the grey-green hills rolling into blue velvet mountains. A little heaven. But the fruits along this front line are bitter indeed.

[Mihais]

Great news.Finally the idiots have smartened.And so it semi-oficially begins the distancing from the jihadists.
About the Syrian army these days,it sounds mean and lean.But they will create another problem if/when they win.All the surviving rebels will flee the country into Turkey or Iraq.And those are hard chaps as well with the added bonus of religious fanaticism and deisre for revenge.Against those that defeated them and against those that didn't helped them.So the best way might be to close the border and let the fellows from the article take no prisoners.

[Minskaya]

Sources: U.S. believes Israel has conducted an airstrike into Syria
By Barbara Starr, CNN Pentagon Correspondent
12:24 AM EDT, Sat May 4, 2013

(CNN) -- The United States believes Israel has conducted an airstrike into Syria, two U.S. officials tell CNN. U.S. and Western intelligence agencies are reviewing classified data showing Israel most likely conducted a strike in the Thursday-Friday time frame, according to both officials. This is the same time frame that the U.S. collected additional data showing Israel was flying a high number of warplanes over Lebanon.

One official said the United States had limited information so far and could not yet confirm those are the specific warplanes that conducted a strike. Based on initial indications, the U.S. does not believe Israeli warplanes entered Syrian airspace to conduct the strikes. Both officials said there is no reason to believe Israel struck at a chemical weapons storage facilities. The Israelis have long said they would strike at any targets that prove to be the transfer of any kinds of weapons to Hezbollah or other terrorist groups, as well as at any effort to smuggle Syrian weapons into Lebanon that could threaten Israel.

The Lebanese army website listed 16 flights by Israeli warplanes penetrating Lebanon's airspace from Thursday evening through Friday afternoon local time. The Israeli military had no comment. But a source in the Israeli defense establishment told CNN's Sara Sidner, "We will do whatever is necessary to stop the transfer of weapons from Syria to terrorist organizations. We have done it in the past and we will do it if necessary in the future."

Source: CNN