News from numerous sources about the Levant countries: Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan

November 12, 2020

BEIRUT (AP) — On Nov. 13, 1970, a young air force officer from the coastal hills of Syria launched a bloodless coup. It was the latest in a succession of military takeovers since independence from France in 1946, and there was no reason to think it would be the last.

Yet 50 years later, Hafez Assad’s family still rules Syria. The country is in ruins from a decade of civil war that killed a half million people, displaced half the population and wiped out the economy. Entire regions are lost from government control. But Hafez’s son, Bashar Assad, has an unquestioned grip on what remains.

His rule, half of it spent in war, is different from his father’s in some ways —dependent on allies like Iran and Russia rather than projecting Arab nationalism, run with a crony kleptocracy rather than socialism. The tools are the same: repression, rejection of compromise and brutal bloodshed.

Like the Castro family in Cuba and North Korea’s Kim dynasty, the Assads have attached their name to their country the way few non-monarchical rulers have done. “There can be no doubt that 50 years of Assad family rule, which has been ruthless, cruel and self-defeating, has left the country what can only be described as broken, failed and almost forgotten,” said Neil Quilliam, an associate fellow at Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa program.

“RUTHLESS BUT BRILLIANT”

After his 1970 takeover, Hafez Assad consolidated power. He brought into key positions members of his Alawite sect, a minority in Sunni-majority Syria, and established a Soviet-style single-party police state.

His power was absolute. His Mukhabarat — or intelligence officers — were omnipresent. He turned Syria into a Middle East powerhouse. In the Arab world, he gained respect for his uncompromising position on the Golan Heights, the strategic high ground lost to Israel in the 1967 war. He engaged in U.S.-mediated peace talks, sometimes appearing to soften, only to frustrate the Americans by pulling back and asking for more territory.

In 1981, in Iraq’s war with Iran, he sided with the Iranians against the entire Arab world backing Saddam Hussein — starting an alliance that would help save his son later. He supported the U.S.-led coalition to liberate Kuwait after Saddam’s 1990 invasion, gaining credit with the Americans.

“He was a ruthless but brilliant man who had once wiped out a whole village as a lesson to his opponents,” former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who met with Assad several times, wrote in his memoirs “My Life.”

Clinton was referring to the 1982 massacre in Hama, where Assad’s security forces killed thousands to crush a Muslim Brotherhood uprising. The massacre, one of the most notorious in the modern Middle East, left hatreds that fanned the flames of another uprising against his son years later.

“A key element of the Assad regime’s survival has been: No compromise domestically, exploit the geopolitical shifts regionally and globally, and wait your enemies out,” said Sam Dagher, author of the book “Assad or we Burn the Country: How One Family’s Lust for Power Destroyed Syria.”

CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

Bashar Assad borrowed heavily from that playbook after his father’s death in 2000. Unlike his father, critics say he repeatedly squandered opportunities and went too far.

First welcomed as a reformer and modernizer, Bashar, a British-trained eye doctor, opened the country and allowed political debates. He quickly clamped back down, faced with challenges and a rapidly changing world, beginning with the Sept. 11 attacks in America.

He opposed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, worried he would be next. He let foreign fighters enter Iraq from his territory, fueling an insurgency against the U.S. occupation and enraging the Americans.

He was forced to end Syria’s long domination of Lebanon after Damascus was blamed for the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Still, he tightened ties with Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Like his father, Bashar Assad elevated family to insulate his power — a younger, more modern generation, but one seen by many Syrians as more rapacious in amassing wealth.

The Assad family’s gravest challenge came with the Arab Spring uprisings that swept the region, reaching Syria in March 2011. His response to the initially peaceful protests was to unleash security forces to snuff them out. Instead, protests grew, turning later into an armed insurgency backed by Turkey, the U.S. and Gulf Arab nations. His military fragmented.

With his army nearing collapse, Assad opened his territory to Russia’s and Iran’s militaries and their proxies. Cities were pulverized. He was accused of using chemical weapons against his own people and killing or jailing opponents en masse. Millions fled to Europe or beyond.

For much of the world, he became a pariah. But Assad masterfully portrayed the war as a choice between his secular rule and Islamic fanatics, including the Islamic State group. Many Syrians and even European states became convinced he was the lesser evil.

Eventually, he effectively eliminated the military threat against him. He is all but certain to win presidential elections due next year in the shattered husk that is his Syria. Still, Dagher said the war transformed Syrians in irreversible ways. An economic meltdown and mounting hardship may change the calculus.

“A whole generation of people has been awakened and will eventually find a way to take back the country and their future,” he said. As U.S. election results rolled in, showing Joe Biden the winner, memes by Syrian opposition trolls mocked how the Assads have now outlasted nine American presidents since Richard Nixon.

“In my life, my fellow Syrians had to vote four times for the only president on the ballot … Hafez Assad. His son is still president. After migration to the U.S., I voted for six different presidents,” wrote Zaher Sahloul, a Chicago-based Syrian-American doctor who left Syria in 1989. “I wish that my homeland will witness free elections one day.”

Hafez Assad’s legacy might have looked quite different had he not shoe-horned Bashar into succeeding him, Quilliam said. “It would not have been favorable, but Bashar’s legacy will overshadow Assad’s legacy and make it synonymous with cruelty, willful destruction of a great country and the brutalization of a beautiful people,” he said.

October 29, 2020

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced on Wednesday that there are indications that Russia does not support stability and peace in Syria.

“Russia’s attack targeting the Syrian National Army forces training centre is a sign that a lasting peace and calm is not wanted in the region,” Erdogan told lawmakers of his ruling Justice and Development Party, adding that if promises to remove terrorists from areas identified in Syria are not fulfilled, Turkey has the right to eject them.

“Turkey can cleanse all of Syria of terrorist organisations if necessary,” Erdogan proclaimed. The Turkish president stressed that his country is the only one truly fighting Daesh.

Erdogan added that the entity that the US is trying to establish along the Iraqi-Syrian border would cause new conflicts and tragedies.

Source: Middle East Monitor.

Link: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20201029-turkeys-erdogan-russia-does-not-support-stability-in-syria/.

July 10, 2020

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Russia and the West are in a showdown over continuing the delivery of humanitarian aid to Syria’s mainly rebel-held northwest after the current U.N. mandate expires on Friday. Germany and Belgium on Thursday called for a vote on a draft resolution that would maintain the two border crossings from Turkey to the northwest for six months — a position supported by the U.N. secretary-general, U.N. humanitarian chief, and many aid organizations. The result is scheduled to be announced early Friday afternoon.

Without waiting for the announcement, Russia announced late Thursday that it had circulated a new resolution which would authorize just one crossing from Turkey for a year. It put the draft in a form that can be put to a vote.

A series of tweets from Russia’s deputy U.N. ambassador Dmitry Polyansky announcing the new Russian resolution and urging Western support strongly indicated that Moscow will veto the German-Belgium draft.

Russia, Syria’s closest ally, has argued that aid should be delivered from within Syria across conflict lines. But the U.N. and humanitarian groups say aid for 2.8 million needy people in the northwest can’t get in that way.

The German-Belgium resolution being voted on would extend the mandate for the two border crossings from Turkey to the northwest — Bab al-Salam and Bab al-Hawa — for six months. The Russian-drafted resolution would only authorize cross-border deliveries through the Bab al-Hawa crossing, for a year.

Germany’s U.N. ambassador, Christoph Heusgen, said Wednesday that while the Bab Al-Hawa crossing is used to deliver aid to Idlib province, the Bab al-Salam crossing reaches the region north of Aleppo, where an additional 300,000 Syrians displaced by the last offensive are now sheltering.

“Both areas are separated by conflict lines,” he said. Russia’s Polyansky tweeted Thursday evening that Bab Al-Hawa “accounts for more than 85% of total volume of operations.” “We categorically reject claims that Russia wants to stop humanitarian deliveries to the Syrian population in need,” he tweeted. “Our draft is the best proof that these allegations are groundless.”

In a third tweet, Polyansky said Western nations should “seize this opportunity” and support the Russian draft which adapts “to the situation on the ground.” “If they block our compromise proposal they will be responsible for the consequences,” the Russian envoy warned.

U.S. Ambassador Kelly Craft has accused Russia and China of “breathtaking callousness and dishonesty” and distorting the realities on the ground. Their actions in both resolutions underscore “a harrowing truth — that Russia and China have decided that millions of Syrian lives are an insignificant cost of their partnership with the murderous Assad regime,” she said in a statement.

Thursday’s rival resolutions capped a week of high-stakes rivalry over cross-border aid. The initial German-Belgium resolution authorizing two crossings for one year won support from 13 of the 15 council members on Tuesday but was vetoed by Russia and China.

A Russian draft resolution authorizing one crossing for six months failed to get the minimum nine “yes” votes on Wednesday. And a similar Russian amendment to the latest German-Belgium resolution was dramatically rejected earlier Thursday, getting only two “yes” votes from Russia and China.

In January, Russia scored a victory for Syria, using its veto threat to force the Security Council to adopt a resolution reducing the number of crossing points for aid deliveries from four to just two, from Turkey to the northwest. It also cut in half the yearlong mandate that had been in place since cross-border deliveries began in 2014 to six months, as Russia insisted.

The defeated German-Belgium resolution had dropped a call for the reopening of an Iraqi crossing to the northeast to deliver medical supplies for the COVID-19 pandemic. In May, Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said: “Do not waste your time on efforts to reopen the closed cross-border points.”

March 05, 2020

MOSCOW (AP) — The Turkish and Russian presidents are set to hold talks in Moscow aimed at ending hostilities in northwestern Syria involving their forces along with proxies that threaten to pit Turkey against Russia in a direct military conflict

Before the latest crisis, President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had managed to coordinate their interests in Syria even though Moscow backed Syrian President Bashar Assad while Ankara supported its foes throughout Syria’s nine-year war. Both Russia and Turkey appear eager to avoid a showdown, but the sharply conflicting interests in Idlib province make it difficult to negotiate a mutually acceptable compromise.

A Russia-backed Syrian offensive to regain control over Idlib — the last opposition-controlled region in the country — has pushed nearly a million Syrians toward Turkey. Erdogan responded by opening Turkey’s gateway to Europe in an apparent bid to coerce the West to offer more support to Ankara.

Turkey has sent thousands of troops into Idlib to repel the Syrian army, and clashes on the ground and in the air that have left dozens dead on both sides. Russia, which has helped Assad reclaim most of the country’s territory, has signaled it wouldn’t sit idle to see Turkey rout his troops.

After Turkey had downed several Syrian jets, Moscow warned Ankara that its aircraft would be unsafe if they enter Syrian airspace — a veiled threat to engage Russian military assets in Syria. Russian warplanes based in Syria have provided air cover for Assad’s offensive in Idlib.

Opposition activists in Idlib blamed Russian aircraft for Thursday’s strike on a rebel-held village which they said killed at least 15 people, including children, and wounded several others. The Russian military had no immediate comment on the claim, but it has staunchly denied similar previous claims insisting it hasn’t targeted residential areas.

The fighting in Idlib comes as the most severe test to Russia-Turkey ties since the crisis triggered by Turkey’s downing of a Russian warplane near the Syrian border in November 2015. Russia responded with an array of sweeping economic sanctions, cutting the flow of its tourists to Turkey and banning most Turkish exports — a punishment that eventually forced Turkey to back off and offer apologies.

Turkey can’t afford a replay of that costly crisis, far less a military conflict with a nuclear power, but it has a strong position to bargain with. Moscow needs Ankara as a partner in a Syrian settlement and Russia’s supply routes for its forces in Syria lie through the Turkish Straits.

Moscow also hopes to use Ankara in its standoff with the West. Last year, Turkey became the first NATO country to take delivery of sophisticated Russian air defense missile systems, angering the United States. Turkey has put its deployment on hold amid the crisis in Idlib.

The talks in Moscow will mark the 10th encounter in just over a year between Putin and Erdogan, who call each other “dear friend” and have polished a fine art of bargaining. Last October, they reached an agreement to deploy their forces across Syria’s northeastern border to fill the void left by President Donald Trump’s abrupt withdrawal of U.S. forces. Prior to that they had negotiated a series of accords that saw opposition fighters from various areas in Syria move into Idlib and in 2018 carved out a de-escalation zone in Idlib.

They blamed one another for the collapse of the Idlib deal, with Moscow holding Ankara responsible for letting al-Qaida linked militants launch attacks from the area and Turkey accusing Moscow of failing to rein in Assad.

A possible compromise on Idlib could see Assad retain control over the key M5 highway, which his forces claimed in the latest offensive. The road that spans Syria linking Damascus with Aleppo, the country’s commercial capital, is essential for Assad to consolidate his rule.

In a sign that the Kremlin firmly intends to secure control of the M5, earlier this week Russian military police have deployed to a strategic town of Saraqeb sitting on the highway to ward off any Turkish attempt to retake it.

In return, Putin could accept the presence of Turkey-backed militants in the areas alongside the border and put brakes for now on Assad’s attempts to claim full control over Idlib.