The US and Its Arab Allies Raise the Pressure on Assad

A key requirement in the build-up to Saturday’s Arab foreign ministers’ meeting in Cairo has been for daily announcements of escalating deaths in Syria. Naturally, these 20 or 30 people – or more, or less – are said to have been killed by the regime. The UN meanwhile issued a report putting the number of deaths in Syria so far at 3,500. It provided no details or breakdown.

Yet opponents of the regime – notably the gunmen of the self-styled Free Syrian Army – have begun telling us of operations, ambushes, bombings, and slayings carried out by them against the regime’s forces. Human rights groups, including the well-known Syrian Observatory, confirm that members of these forces are among the dead.

It appears that over the past month, more than 250 uniformed or civilian regime loyalists have been killed. The Syrian authorities say 1,300 army or security personnel have died during the confrontations. That means that around half the casualties are supporters of the Syrian regime. But while the gunmen boast of killing soldiers, the non-violent opposition deems any dead soldier to have been killed by the regime for refusing to obey orders.

It is not unusual for conflicting statements to be made by Syrian opposition groups. This applies to politics even more than to the situation on the ground. The unprecedented division in the Syrian opposition, both within the country and outside it, has become self-evident. It is split between those who want the battle to continue until Bashar Assad’s downfall; those who want Assad to remain in place; and a third group, prohibited from publicizing its view, that calls for a dialogue to spare Syria and the region from ruin.

There has been no worldwide condemnations of the criminal and brutal acts for which pro-opposition armed groups have begun to take credit. Perhaps the revolutionaries and their supporters do not think they occur. Meanwhile, thuggery of a political nature has become the staple of a section of the opposition, which brands anyone who criticises it as a criminal in Assad’s army.

This was apparent when supporters of Burhan Ghalioun and Riad Shaqfa in Cairo attacked the likes of Haytham Manna, Samir al-Atiyya and Hassan Abdul Azim – opposition figures who are not members of the Syrian National Council (SNC), that wholly-owned subsidiary of the transnational corporation US-Franco-Qatari Revolutions Inc. France had earlier resorted to its own brand of thuggery when it barred the likes of Fayez Sara and Michel Kilo from holding a press conference in Paris.

The same attitude is apparent in the slogans posted by YouTube revolutionaries denouncing Kilo and the National Coordinating Committee for opposing foreign intervention. But most thuggish of all was the haste with which the US State Department urged armed Syrians not to heed the Syrian authorities’ invitation to give themselves in. Perhaps the Americans have begun to appreciate who these people really are, and that their role is not yet over.

All of this adds to the evidence, which has been mounting for the past month or so, that Western political and diplomatic pressure is to be escalated against all members of the regional alliance to which Syria belongs: Iran, by talking up its nuclear program; Hamas, with the Palestinian statehood issue and by trying to use the Muslim Brotherhood to curb it; Hezbollah, via the UN Special Tribunal and exerting economic and financial pressure on Lebanon; and Syria, by turning civil war into a reality that makes intervention necessary on humanitarian or other grounds.

The parties concerned have been working for months to destabilize several countries, and can hardly be expected to stop now. They are likely to step up their activities. It is no coincidence that more networks have been uncovered for smuggling arms, money, and sophisticated communications equipment into Syria via Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, and even Iraq.

The aim is to establish a combat base to operate alongside the SNC, which the West and its Arab clients want to be the opposition’s exclusive spokesman. Every week we will hear that the regime has not complied with or implemented the Arab League plan. And when domestic and regional conditions are right, the moment will come to act, via UN resolutions or harsher measures if necessary.

It is curious that everyone ignored the remarks (later denied) attributed to the Mufti of Syria Sheikh Ahmad Hassoun, who said that the Syrian president wants to leave office after reforms have been introduced. This would, of course, be unacceptable to Assad’s enemies. Even if Assad himself said he would do that, he would be accused of deception or playing for time – the reforms could take decades and he’d remain in power.

But people close to the Syrian president, or informed of his views, say the reforms he wants to achieve go far beyond those demanded by the opposition, which is only interested in sharing in the spoils of power. Unless, that is, the NATO revolutionaries are promising the Syrian people bountiful development and democracy and the liberation of the Golan Heights – all of this at the hands of the very same corporation run out of Washington and Paris...dream on.

Ibrahim al-Amin is editor-in-chief of Al-Akhbar newspaper.

This article is an edited translation from the Arabic Edition.