Tanks, troops move to snuff out Syria resistance

ELIZABETH A. KENNEDY

Asso­ci­ated Press

BOYNUYOGUN, Turkey — Syr­ian tanks and the government’s most loyal troops pushed into more towns and vil­lages Tues­day, try­ing to snuff out any chance that the upris­ing against Pres­i­dent Bashar Assad could gain a base for a wider armed rebellion.

Fac­ing the most seri­ous threat to his family’s 40-year rul­ing dynasty, Assad has aban­doned most pre­tenses of reform as his mil­i­tary seals off strate­gic areas in the north and east — includ­ing the town of Jisr al-Shughour, which was spin­ning out of gov­ern­ment con­trol before the mil­i­tary moved in on Sunday.

“The (Syr­ian forces) dam­age homes and build­ings, kill even ani­mals, set trees and farm­lands on fire,” said Moham­mad Hes­nawi, 26. He fled Jisr al-Shughour over the week­end and spoke to The Asso­ci­ated Press from this bor­der area of Turkey, where some 8,000 Syr­i­ans are seek­ing refuge in camps.

Pro-democracy activists, cit­ing wit­nesses, said the mil­i­tary also sur­rounded al-Boukamal, along the Iraqi bor­der, an area that was a major smug­gling route for insur­gents and weapons into Iraq in the 2000s. Syr­ian offi­cials have expressed con­cern over a reverse flow of arms into Syria, and in March secu­rity forces seized a large quan­tity of weapons hid­den in a truck com­ing from Iraq.

Activists say more than 1,400 Syr­i­ans have died and some 10,000 have been detained in the gov­ern­ment crack­down since the pop­u­lar upris­ing began in mid-March, inspired by the rev­o­lu­tions in Tunisia and Egypt.

Assad ini­tially responded with vague promises of reform, but the increas­ingly deadly gov­ern­ment crack­down has only added fuel to the move­ment. Thou­sands of pro­test­ers across the coun­try now vow to con­tinue until Assad leaves power.

There is no sign of that, how­ever. The crack­down has oblit­er­ated a view held by many in Syria and abroad of Assad as a reformer at heart, one con­strained by mem­bers of his late father’s old guard who were fight­ing change, espe­cially priv­i­leged mem­bers of the Assads’ minor­ity Alaw­ite sect.

An off­shoot of Shi­ite Islam, the Alaw­ites rep­re­sent about 11 per­cent of Syria’s pop­u­la­tion, which is over­whelm­ingly Sunni Mus­lim. The sect’s long­time dom­i­nance has bred resent­ments, which Assad has worked to tamp down by push­ing a strictly sec­u­lar iden­tity in Syria.

But Assad is now rely­ing heav­ily on his Alaw­ite power base to crush the resis­tance, par­tic­u­larly amid rumors that Sunni army con­scripts have been refus­ing to fire on civilians.

The pres­i­dent and commander-in-chief’s lat­est mil­i­tary moves in the north and east are being car­ried out by his most trusted forces — many of them Alaw­ites whose fate is linked to the regime’s. The bloody new push, against civil­ians who took up arms and report­edly mil­i­tary muti­neers, was clearly designed to keep the oppo­si­tion from estab­lish­ing a base, as hap­pened in Libya, where rebels try­ing to over­throw Moam­mar Gad­hafi took over Benghazi.

In Wash­ing­ton, State Depart­ment spokesman Mark Toner said the U.S. con­demns the “bar­baric acts” in Syria. In a state­ment, Sec­re­tary of State Hillary Rod­ham Clin­ton accused Iran of assist­ing its ally Syria in the oppo­si­tion crackdown.

She didn’t detail such assis­tance, but Syr­ian human rights activist Ammar Qurabi, at a Paris news con­fer­ence, claimed the Ira­ni­ans have sent guns and elec­tric batons to Syr­ian author­i­ties, and Iran­ian com­puter experts were in Dam­as­cus hack­ing into activists’ email and Face­book accounts.

For its part, Tehran on Tues­day warned the U.S. against any mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion in Syria. “This would be a mis­take and an engage­ment in a scene which can bring dire con­se­quences for the region,” Iran­ian For­eign Min­istry spokesman Ramin Mehman­parast told reporters.

Wash­ing­ton and its allies have shown lit­tle appetite, how­ever, for inter­ven­ing in yet another Arab nation in tur­moil, as NATO has done in Libya. There is real con­cern that Assad’s ouster would spread chaos around the region.

Assad has had to jug­gle many fac­tors in the Syr­ian polit­i­cal land­scape: its siz­able minor­ity pop­u­la­tions; a major­ity Sunni pop­u­la­tion drawn in part to Mus­lim fun­da­men­tal­ism; an influ­en­tial mil­i­tary, and alliances with such exter­nal Shi­ite forces as Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

The gov­ern­ment crack­down has brought intense inter­na­tional con­dem­na­tion and sanc­tions on Syr­ian fig­ures includ­ing Assad, a soft-spoken, British-trained eye doc­tor who told the Wall Street Jour­nal in Jan­u­ary his coun­try was immune to the unrest sweep­ing the Arab world because he is in tune with his people’s needs.

Now an inter­na­tional pariah, Assad will strug­gle to regain a sem­blance of legit­i­macy if he man­ages to quell a revolt spread­ing quickly across the coun­try and to a wider cross-section of society.

On Tues­day, activists said about 2,000 doc­tors, phar­ma­cists, lawyers and engi­neers protest­ing in the cen­tral city of Hama called for the regime’s down­fall — a sig­nif­i­cant shift in a move­ment that so far appears dom­i­nated by the young, poor and disenfranchised.

For the most part, the oppo­si­tion has yet to bring out the mid­dle and upper mid­dle classes in Dam­as­cus and Aleppo, Syria’s two key cities. The monied classes have been Assad sup­port­ers, pre­fer­ring a heavy-handed regime to instability.

If that sup­port unrav­els, Assad’s dic­ta­tor­ship could begin to wob­ble, 11 years after he inher­ited power from his father, the late Hafez Assad, who ruled with an iron hand for three decades.

It was impos­si­ble to inde­pen­dently con­firm the crowd esti­mate of the Hama protest, made by the Local Coor­di­na­tion Com­mit­tees in Syria, a group that doc­u­ments the anti-regime movement.

Only sketchy reports are emerg­ing from Syria, since for­eign jour­nal­ists have been expelled and local reporters face tight con­trols. Most wit­nesses inside the coun­try speak on con­di­tion of anonymity, fear­ing ret­ri­bu­tion from the government.

Refugees in Turkey offer a grim pic­ture of what they left behind, but the Turk­ish gov­ern­ment has largely pre­vented access to the camps. Turkey’s prime min­is­ter has accused Assad’s regime of “sav­agery,” but also said he would reach out to the Syr­ian leader to help solve the crisis.

Neil Sam­monds of Amnesty Inter­na­tional appealed to Turkey to allow access to the camps. But he stressed that inside Syria, thou­sands are still des­per­ate for help.

“They’re liv­ing under trees, exposed to the ele­ments,” he said. “Last night was a ter­ri­ble storm — rain, thun­der, light­ning and all the rest of it. And that’s women, elderly, chil­dren, who have been walk­ing for days from the Jisr-Al-Shugour area. No one is help­ing them until now.”

Many seemed to be help­ing them­selves. Male refugees emerg­ing from Syria on Tues­day could be seen car­ry­ing bread, water and milk for chil­dren, as well as dia­pers, to dis­traught fam­i­lies just across the bor­der in Turkey.

Posted by AP News on Jun 14 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.