Syrian salvos send message to Turkey

ELIZABETH A. KENNEDY

Asso­ci­ated Press

BEIRUT — Syria’s cross-border attacks on Turkey in the past week look increas­ingly like they could be an inten­tional esca­la­tion meant to send a clear mes­sage to Ankara and beyond, that the cri­sis is sim­ply too explo­sive to risk for­eign mil­i­tary intervention.

With Turkey eager to defuse the cri­sis, the spillover of fight­ing is giv­ing new life to a long­shot polit­i­cal solu­tion, with the Turks float­ing the idea of mak­ing Pres­i­dent Bashar Assad’s long­time vice pres­i­dent, Farouk al-Sharaa, interim leader if the pres­i­dent steps aside.

A mil­i­tary option — which would involve for­eign pow­ers that already have expressed a deep reluc­tance to get­ting involved in the cri­sis — is still not on the table, ana­lysts say, despite six con­sec­u­tive days of Turk­ish retal­i­a­tion against bom­bard­ment from inside Syria.

“Syria is aware that Turkey can­not go a step fur­ther,” said Ali Tekin, assis­tant pro­fes­sor of Inter­na­tional Rela­tions at Ankara’s Bilkent Uni­ver­sity. “The Turk­ish peo­ple don’t want a war and there are no vital national inter­ests at stake to war­rant a war. Syria sees this.”

The Syr­ian con­flict has taken a promi­nent role in the U.S. pres­i­den­tial elec­tion at a time when the U.S. and its allies have shown lit­tle appetite for get­ting involved.

On Mon­day, Repub­li­can can­di­date Mitt Rom­ney said the U.S. should work with other coun­tries to arm the Syr­ian rebels, allow­ing the rebels to drive Assad from power them­selves. Rom­ney did not call for the U.S. to directly arm the Syr­ian rebels.

The most recent flare-up between Syria and Turkey started Wednes­day, when a shell fired from Syria slammed into a house in the Turk­ish bor­der vil­lage of Akcakale, killing two women and three chil­dren. That set off the most seri­ous and pro­longed erup­tion of vio­lence along the fron­tier since the upris­ing began nearly 19 months ago.

Although it was not clear whether Wednesday’s shelling was inten­tional, Turkey responded swiftly by fir­ing back and con­ven­ing par­lia­ment for a vote that autho­rized fur­ther cross-border mil­i­tary oper­a­tions if necessary.

Turk­ish Prime Min­is­ter Recep Tayyip Erdo­gan cau­tioned Dam­as­cus not to test Turkey’s “lim­its and deter­mi­na­tion.” But the Syr­ian shelling has con­tin­ued every day — lead­ing many observers to con­clude the acts are inten­tional provocation.

“It’s not an acci­dent. You can’t send shells across the bor­der by mis­take five days in a row,” said Mustafa Alani, a Mid­dle East ana­lyst of the Geneva-based Gulf Research Cen­ter, just hours before Syr­ian shelling struck Turkey for a sixth day.

There have been no other reports of casu­al­ties from the shelling since Wednesday’s deaths.

An activist group said Mon­day the num­ber of peo­ple killed in the con­flict crossed the thresh­old of 32,000 over the week­end, and the pace is accelerating.

The Britain-based Syr­ian Obser­va­tory for Human Rights said it counted 32,079 dead as of Sun­day — among them 22,980 civil­ians and civilians-turned fight­ers, 7,884 mem­bers of the Syr­ian mil­i­tary and 1,215 army defec­tors fight­ing along­side the rebels.

In the past week alone, more than 1,200 peo­ple were killed, accord­ing to the head of the Obser­va­tory, Rami Abdul-Rahman, who said he only counts named vic­tims or those whose death is ver­i­fied by other means, such as ama­teur video.

Also Mon­day, a sui­cide attacker det­o­nated a car bomb near a com­pound of the Syr­ian intel­li­gence ser­vice on the out­skirts of Dam­as­cus, a Syr­ian offi­cial said. There was no imme­di­ate word on casu­al­ties, the offi­cial said on con­di­tion of anonymity because he was not autho­rized to speak to the media.

The pro-government Al-Ikhbariya chan­nel said the explo­sion in the Harasta sub­urb was fol­lowed by armed clashes. Syr­ian rebels are increas­ingly tar­get­ing secu­rity com­pounds in Dam­as­cus, but there was no imme­di­ate claim of respon­si­bil­ity for Monday’s blast.

Accord­ing to Alani, the ana­lyst, esca­lat­ing the cri­sis serves as a reminder to NATO, Turkey and the West that Syria’s civil war can inflame the region with light­ning speed. The threat of a spillover is likely to pres­sure West­ern pow­ers into draft­ing a polit­i­cal solu­tion, part of which could involve Assad’s exit from power, rather than his being top­pled by force.

A polit­i­cal solu­tion, Alani said, could pre­vent Assad “end­ing up like Gadhafi.”

Libyan leader Moam­mar Gad­hafi was cap­tured and killed by rebels on the out­skirts of his home­town of Sirte last year, and his corpse was put on pub­lic dis­play in a refrig­er­ated locker for sev­eral days.

While Ankara main­tains that the shells are com­ing from the reg­u­lar Syr­ian army, Paul Salem of the Carnegie Mid­dle East Cen­ter, a Beirut-based think tank, did not exclude the pos­si­bil­ity of “other sources, a rebel unit, fir­ing across the bor­der, try­ing to cre­ate con­di­tions for Turkey to inter­vene in Syria.”

As the bor­der skir­mishes inten­si­fied over the week­end and the world began to con­sider whether Turkey would respond more force­fully, Turk­ish For­eign Min­is­ter Ahmet Davu­to­glu tried to redi­rect atten­tion away from the mil­i­tary developments.

On Sat­ur­day, Davu­to­glu said Syr­ian Vice Pres­i­dent Farouk al-Sharaa was a fig­ure “whose hands are not con­t­a­m­i­nated in blood” and there­fore was a pos­si­ble fig­ure to head a tran­si­tional administration.

Abdul­baset Sieda, the head of the Syr­ian National Coun­cil, the main oppo­si­tion group in exile, said Mon­day his group is will­ing to con­sider Ankara’s proposal.

Sieda’s com­ments appear to be a soft­en­ing of the opposition’s stance that it will accept noth­ing less than the ouster of the Assad regime and the president’s inner cir­cle. But this appar­ent change in heart could be a way for the oppo­si­tion to appease its Turk­ish allies rather than a major shift toward a polit­i­cal set­tle­ment of the conflict.

Syr­ian Infor­ma­tion Min­is­ter Omran al-Zoubi scoffed at Davutoglu’s pro­posal, say­ing it reflects “obvi­ous polit­i­cal and diplo­matic con­fu­sion and blundering.”

“Turkey isn’t the Ottoman Sul­tanate; the Turk­ish For­eign Min­istry doesn’t name cus­to­di­ans in Dam­as­cus, Mecca, Cairo and Jerusalem,” al-Zoubi said Monday.

Turkey, which shares a 566-mile (911-kilometer) fron­tier with Syria, nearly went to war with its neigh­bor over Syr­ian sup­port for Turk­ish Kur­dish rebels in the 1990s. The rela­tion­ship improved dra­mat­i­cally since Assad came to power in 2000, and the two coun­tries reached out to build eco­nomic ties. But now, Turkey has become one of the most vocal crit­ics of the Assad regime, accus­ing it of savagery.

The rebels who are try­ing to bring down Assad have used Turkey as their base, enrag­ing the regime.

Turkey, NATO’s biggest Mus­lim mem­ber, became a regional power in the past decade, backed by a grow­ing econ­omy, emerg­ing demo­c­ra­tic cre­den­tials and his­tor­i­cal and cul­tural links to neigh­bors. It pur­sued prag­matic links with author­i­tar­ian lead­ers, but shifted to a pro-democracy posi­tion as upris­ings swept the Mid­dle East and North Africa.

From the out­set of the Syr­ian cri­sis, Turkey has tried to posi­tion itself as a major player and power-broker — some­thing some observers say was a mis­cal­cu­la­tion based on over­con­fi­dence in Ankara’s influ­ence over Dam­as­cus. As recently as April, Davu­to­glu told Par­lia­ment that Turkey “will con­tinue to guide the wave of change in the Mid­dle East.”

On Mon­day, Turk­ish Pres­i­dent Abdul­lah Gul pushed for a Syr­ian tran­si­tion, warn­ing that “the worst-case sce­nario we have all been dread­ing” is unfold­ing in Syria and along its borders.

“Sooner rather than later there will be change, a tran­si­tion,” he told reporters in Ankara. “Our only hope is that this hap­pens before more blood is shed, and before Syria self-destructs more than it already has.”

Posted by AP News on Oct 8 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.