Sun. 17 July. 2011

SUNDAY TIMES Mothers’ tears soak both sides of Syria’s divide …...………..1

SYRIA COMMENT “The Road to Qardaha,” ………………...…………………..4

QANTARA Syria: The Opposition and the Church: A Slap in the Face for

the Pro-Democracy Movement……………………...……..13

ASIA TIMES Unfolding the Syrian paradox ……………………………...17

WASHINGTON POST Syrian killings stall bid to unite opposition ……………...…28

Impromptu words, actions drive U.S. stance on Syria ……..30

HAARETZ Ruins from ancient Syrian synagogue put on display in Israel

after 63-year delay………………………………………….34

JERUSALEM POST 'Syria increasing arms shipments to Hezbollah' …………....36

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HOME PAGEMothers’ tears soak both sides of Syria’s divideHundreds of sons, brothers and fathers have been killed by security forces or armed gangs since the start of the uprisingHala Jaber, Duma The Sunday Times,17 July 2011

When Mahmood Qadri set off on his moped to buy bread for his family’s breakfast he was unaware that overnight his regular route had been blocked by a makeshift checkpoint. The soldiers claimed they shouted at him but Mahmood, 16, did not stop. He was killed by four bullets that hit him in the head, chest, stomach and leg.

Hours later, returning home to the town of Duma after a trip to buy vegetables in Damascus, Syria’s capital, Mahmood’s elder brother, Wissam, drove towards the same checkpoint. Seeing his brother’s body, still crumpled in the dust, he panicked and accelerated. He too was shot, hit by three bullets.

The death of two sons on the same day is almost too much for their father, Omar Qadri, 57, to bear. “The regime killed my two sons, they are killers. This is a regime of killers,” said the fruit and vegetable trader.

His disgust and heartache is shared by hundreds of families in Syria whose sons, brothers and fathers have been killed by security forces or armed gangs since the start of the uprising against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, four months ago.

More than 1,700 people, including 350 members of the army and security forces, have been killed in the violence, according to the the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Yet little has been heard about the impact of the uprising on ordinary people. After years of harsh repression, most are too terrified to talk.

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Qadri mulled over my request for an interview for two weeks, fearful that his words would only bring more problems for his family. He relented, on condition that their identity was changed, because he wanted to speak up for civilians caught up in the violence.

“I want to speak for my sons because their voice has been stolen,” he said.

Wissam died days before his first wedding anniversary. “His wife was eight months pregnant with their first baby, a little girl, he was so looking forward to. Now she is orphaned, his wife widowed and my wife devastated,” Qadri said.

“They were good boys, minding their own business as we have done as a family. That is the way to survive, to put your head down and go about your life,” he said. “Why was he killed, to what purpose and for what crime?”

Qadri’s wife, Rawya,46, wept as she remembered her sons. “I still have Mahmood’s mobile telephone with me, he left it at home that day and I keep on looking at it expecting it to come back to life and bring him back as well,” she said.

“Even before my sons died whenever I heard of the death of a young man or even a soldier or security member from the regime side, my heart automatically felt for their mothers. You see, I knew how they felt for I had already experienced the loss of children first-hand and my heart and thoughts went to them and for them.

“Even the soldier has a mother and her feelings and mine are the same irrespective of which side we are on.”

Iqbal Mohamad Ibrahim lives only 90 miles north of the Qadri home in Duma but her family is on the other side of Syria’s wide social and political divide.

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Iqbal is from a military family, highly placed in Assad’s regime.

Until now she has had little in common with the Qadri family.

Just one week before Qadri’s two sons died Iqbal’s husband and two sons were killed by armed men who opened fire on their vehicles on the outskirts of Homs, a city north of Damascus.

The family was returning to their home from the suburbs where they had spent the day to escape the protests and arrests that have become increasingly common in Homs.

They were happy after a good lunch of kebabs, salads and mezes.

Iqbal travelled with her brother-in-law and his wife, while her two sons, Ahmad, 14, and Ali, 17, and their cousin Khodr, also 17, preferred the black BMW of their father Abdo al-Tillawi, 56, a brigadier. “We were about 300 metres ahead of them when we heard a hail of bullets behind us,” Iqbal recalled.

Fearing the worst, Iqbal dialled her husband’s mobile phone. A man’s voice answered. “We have piled your husband and the children one on top of the other,” the anonymous voice responded to her before hanging up.

It emerged that Iqbal’s husband, sons and nephew had not only been shot but their bodies had been mutilated and stabbed. “Homs has been riddled with armed gangs and robberies in the last few months since the events began. They come out at night like bats and they shoot in the air, rob or terrify the residents,” Iqbal said. “We call them the khafafish, the night bats.”

Iqbal’s husband had been a solider for 31 years and she is sickened that he died at the hands of fellow Syrians.

“Had it been a war, it would have been different,” she said. “He took a vow to fight any outside enemy. To defend and protect his

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country from invading forces, and it hurts me that he ended up dying in the streets with his children like this.”

Echoing Rawya Qadri, she said: “I know there are many more sons of many mothers who have been killed. All of them, whichever side they belong to, are a loss to our country.

“I ask one thing to those who killed my family. What did you know of my husband and children and with what right did you shoot and then stab them to death?” she asked.

Although her husband was in the army Iqbal insisted he had not participated in the crackdown against protesters and argues that her boys should not have been targeted.

“One of my sons tried to run for his life but was cut down. Every time I go to sleep that image comes to mind as I wonder how scared he must have been when he ran away, probably shouting, ‘Mama, where are you? Why aren’t you here to protect me?’”

Iqbal added: “People are dying from all sides in horrible, awful ways — this must stop. It’s insane, we are pulling ourselves apart.”

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“The Road to Qardaha,” Peter Jones,Syria Comment,16 July 2011,

The broad-shouldered middle-aged figure walked into the internet café and sat down in front of the manager. The black leather jacket and olive trousers – de riguer in those circles – marked him out as a member of the Mukhabarat, Syria’s feared “secret” police. He wanted to know if anybody had been looking at opposition websites critical of the government.

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“Not at all”, my friend said in Arabic, “we always look out for that kind of behaviour; in fact, on my screen here I can see everybody else’s computer so know straight away if they are doing something illicit,” at the same time closing the incriminating websites on his desktop. The policemen nodded approvingly and picked up the list – held by all Syrian internet cafes – that records the name, identity number and entry time of customers.

Before he left however, the operative had just one more question: he wanted to know how it was that young Syrians were able to find these websites in the first place? My friend began to apprise him of Google and its use as a search engine, this was clearly the first time he’d heard of this wondrous new programme, but already his mind was working, “We’re going to have to shut down this Google thing”.

“What? Close Google?” my friend said. “Yep,” came the reply.

I witnessed this exchange in early May 2011, two months on from the outbreak of protests and nearly two years on from when I had first arrived in the country with the aim of improving my spoken Arabic. As the protests grew in size and intensity the frequency with which my friends and I would encounter the state’s security apparatus increased as the country’s Alawite leadership struggled to maintain control over the country.

PanicI watched as the predominantly Christian neighbourhood in which I lived retreated inside itself. Whipped up into a mass of hysteria as the Mukhabarat sent memos to shopkeepers warning of imminent attacks on their churches by Salafists (members of an extreme sect of Islam) – supposedly sponsored by the Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan – barricades were erected and manned throughout the night whilst underemployed youths patrolled the narrow lanes with sticks and axes waiting for this imagined threat.

To be clear, despite the tolerance and the pluralistic attitude to religion espoused by Assad’s government – its greatest selling

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point – the sectarian divisions have always run deep. Whether it were warnings by young Christian men that the manner in which I greeted others was redolent of local Muslims and as such should be avoided, or the concern with which fathers greeted news of their daughters mixing with Muslim men, the divisions were evident and in existence long before anyone had heard of a fruit seller in Tunisia.

It is this sectarianism and minority fear that account for the support the government is receiving from the Christian quarter as they identify with the government’s own minority status. Shocked by the killings being carried out by the Syrian security forces the vast majority of Christians I spoke to (nearly always in Arabic) want to see reforms, but within the framework of the current government. They fear that the fall of the regime would see the ascendency of a conservative Sunni dominated government in which their rights as a religious minority would be subordinate to those of this threatened Islamic state. As one Christian owner of a successful fast food chain pointed out to me, “in Egypt the Copts cannot build new churches or extensions on their existing ones, here (Syria) we never have that problem.”

DivisionsIt would however be a gross simplification to suggest that the divisions that now exist within Syrian society reflect religious beliefs only. Within a few months of the outbreak of protests battle lines had been drawn in workplaces. A friend of mine, a journalist for a popular lifestyle magazine in Syria, told me how her office had been split down the middle, with those supporting the incumbent working on one side and those known to be favouring change (obvious in their lack of vocal support for the President) along the other. Friends were lost and managers antagonised as Facebook pages revealed a person’s true allegiances. This same friend told how her manager, upon seeing that she belonged to an opposition Facebook group, sent her a threatening email asking that she consider very carefully her position at the company.

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And therein lays one of the truths revealed by current events: the present regime has created a system in which a few prosper at the expense of the many. It is senior managers and the businessman close to the regime that have most to lose from any upheaval.

It was interesting to hear a British friend recount to me how the views of students in the English language class (from the Central Bank) he teaches were split along seniority lines. Although the students were too frightened to make their opinions explicit, they would express their grievances with the regime by vocalising in class -in front of their bosses – their displeasure with their salaries, all the while disguised as English language practice. The managers were always content.

RichesIt was a common refrain from local friends that Syria no longer has a middle class, “ya fauk, ya tahit” (“you are either at the top or at the bottom”). Taxi drivers were often at a loss to explain to me why both cars and mobile phone units were more expensive in Syria than in the UK. Their reticence not a sign of ignorance, but an acknowledgement of the fact that a group of powerful families close to the government run what is essentially a monopoly in both industries, the criticism of whom would not be tolerated.

In 2003, Riyad Saif, a Member of Parliament and vocal opponent of the government, dared to question whether a deal made by SyriaTel (the state telecom provider, owned by the President’s cousin Rami Maklouf) was in the interest of Syria – he received five years in prison.

Aside from the knowledge that the government has presided over a period of widening income inequality in an already poor country, without making any serious effort to reform, people are upset by the prevalence of “wasta”. With no real equivalent in the English language, it is almost a cross between nepotism, power and bribery, with the difference being that it is something one possesses. The need for “wasta” permeates every level of society; it is not simply a case of a few people using their contacts to gain

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an advantage in a particular circumstance. Instead it is the ability to have a government document processed quickly, avoid military service, or simply the power to circumvent the ubiquitous payment of bribes that plague the public sector. Jokingly refereed to as “Vitamin W”, in reference to the economic pickup it provides its owners, “wasta” was used in coded criticism of the elite as a substitute for the word few would dare utter; “fasad” – corruption.

ProtestOn a Friday afternoon in mid-March I was strolling through the cobbled lanes of the old-city with my girlfriend and her mother. As we ascended the steps leading to that ancient seat of power and learning, the Omayyad Mosque, we began to hear a commotion. Hastening through the alleyway towards the sound we turned the corner into the main square, our ears suddenly assaulted by the cacophony of noise as pro-democracy protestors chanted slogans in competition with those backing the regime. “Allah, suriya, hariya” – “God, Syria, freedom” the rhyme heightening the sense of defiance in their voices.

“Allah, suriya, Bashar wa bass” – “God, Syria, and Bashar, only” retorted a choir of paid informants and Mukhabarat; the sheer volume overwhelming the democracy activists, but the incongruities of sounds and lack of harmony were almost a signpost to the hollowness of the regime they were propping up.

Making our way through the crowds in front of the mosque we eventually passed into a side street lined with buses. In the innocence of those early days the buses had not yet come to take on the symbolism that they later would, oblivious to what was happening we pressed on. We heard the shouts before we saw the man; he was being dragged from behind us, the three men – all clad in black leather jackets, one carrying an asp – pulled the stricken man past us, up to the entrance of one of the buses and deposited him inside. The bus shook as the figures inside it moved about, but we were not to know the reason, for the curtains had been drawn.

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The next few weeks witnessed a gradual escalation in the size of protests and the demands of the activists, with each Friday like a set-piece in a game of football between the regime and its opponents.

SpeechesSyrian friends living in Damascus who had been concerned by the President’s reticence in the face of the growing unrest were relieved to hear news of a first speech that they fully expected would culminate in the ending of the much reviled emergency law. As middle-class Damascenes with relatively well-paid jobs they cherished the seeming stability that this regime had provided, one only had to look to neighbouring countries to see what could happen.

In years to come, when historians analyse the events of 2011 they will no doubt look back on Assad’s first speech as a turning point. Returning to my girlfriend’s flat that evening I found her and her friend discussing the speech. I was shocked. In the past her friend had always been one of the President’s most ardent supporters, but her stance had now changed dramatically. She felt that the President had completely misunderstood the seriousness of the situation. In her mind it was a grave misjudgement to have allowed expectations over the scrapping of the emergency law to rise only for the speech to offer nothing new.

That same evening I went to my favourite internet café, ostensibly to check my email, but really I wanted to gauge the reaction of the owner (with whom I had become good friends) to the speech. He was as dismissive of the situation as ever. A middle-aged Christian who had fought in the 1973 war against Israel, he was used to life in a police-state and was confident in the regime’s ability to suppress any dissent, in fact he welcomed the regime’s actions. Speaking in Arabic he told me how he valued the stability that he thought Assad offered, the people carrying out the attacks against the government were not Syrians, but Lebanese seeking to stir up trouble, they should be dealt with severely.

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Later that night, after the owner had left I sat alone with the manager of the café (another friend). A closet-atheist, raised in a Christian household he sympathised with the protestors plight and recognised their demands, but was concerned with what might happen if the regime did actually fall. Would the ensuing anarchy, bloodletting and loss of protection for religious minorities that he predicted be any better? Yes, the regime had serious faults, but the alternative being touted by the pro-democracy activists was not an improvement. And anyway he pointed out, why should he join the protestors when so many of their chants were underpinned by religious convictions (“Allawoakbar”) rather than those of freedom and humanity?

Set-piecesA few weeks later I sat with some friends in a café in the Damascus suburb of Saruja watching Barcelona play Real Madrid in the Champions League. The atmosphere was already tense as earlier that evening a man had been taken away by the Mukhabarat for shouting a pro-democracy slogan in a café opposite. Sipping at my coke I did my best to enjoy the game trying to forget the ominous presence of the two characters clad in black leather jackets sitting in the corner.

Suddenly a goal was scored and the room erupted into a scene of celebration. Within an instant the owner had turned the television off. I sat in astonished silence as he explained that there were to be no boisterous post-goal scenes in his café, gently alluding to the figures in the corner. Another slight, another small encroachment of the state into the private sphere. At once tamed and humbled the all-male crowd returned quietly to their seats, the television switched back on, the humiliation complete.

Although at that time living in Damascus, my girlfriend was originally from Homs and travelled back to visit her family every other week. I would pick her up from the Pullman bus depot in the east of Damascus on Saturday evenings making the usual enquires into how she had spent the weekend. As the protests wore on I began to notice that she was often tired upon her return to the

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capital, a matter I attributed to the stress she must be suffering as a result of the turmoil the country was experiencing. I was correct about the stress, but wrong about the tiredness.

Her restless nights were caused by the constant din reverberating around Homs as its residents repeatedly called out the first words of the “Idan” (the call to prayer) throughout the night. “Allawoakbar” they would shout from their balconies, windows and rooftops, the familiar call an act of defiance, a challenge to the regime. The irony was lost on nobody. The same words that had challenged the Shah over 30 years ago when it was heard above the rooftops of Shi’a Tehran, leading to the most pro-Syrian theocracy in the history of the 20th Century, had now been appropriated by Syrian Sunnis calling for the end of a regime that saw itself as a Shi’a sect.

The truth is that despite the language of the Enlightenment that the more media savvy western-orientated Syrians couch their calls for reform in, there is still a strong religious dimension driving many of the protestors.

PostersIt is not without reason that one of the most popular car posters among regime enthusiasts is a picture of the late President Hafez al Assad with his hands cupped about his ears in a position of prayer. The President’s Islamic credentials need to be flaunted in this manner to deflect the assertions made by Syria’s more conservative Sunnis that the Assad’s are not Muslims, much less Shi’a.

In the 1970s, pronouncements by Iranian clerics that the Alawite sect was in fact an offshoot of Shi’a Islam bolstered the regime’s religious credentials, but many remain unconvinced, seeing the present leadership as an anomaly in the country’s Sunni dominated history.

Driving back from a restaurant one night I sat listening as my Syrian friend –a conservative Sunni – denounced the President as

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a non-believer: “He prays in the Omayyad as a way to get closer to the people, it’s all for show.” Later that night, passing by the headquarters of the Alawite-dominated state security he pointed at the guards, “do you think any of these men attend a mosque?” I had heard similar things before: Sunnis criticising the President for his lack of religious credentials. A stark reminder that this was not solely a domestic issue, but rather part of the centuries long confrontation between Shi’a and Sunni that had found its most recent expression in the struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Resentment towards the Alawite nature of the regime was not confined to believers only, it was to be found amongst the secular also. Older members of Syrian society recalled the days when the people from the coastal region of Latakia – the traditional Alawite base – were known as hired help, employed as gardeners or cleaners, a designer accessory for wealthy Syrians much like the Filipinos working in Damascus today. Alawites were seen as rural types, unaccustomed to the gentrified manners and pretensions of city life, an image that they have found difficulty in shedding.

Sat in an expensive restaurant with a group of Syrian friends I noticed that the two females next to me were whispering to one another. Enquiring as to their discussion they told me that they were amused by the appearance of the women at the opposite table. According to my friends the brash clothes, heavy make-up and blonde highlights marked the women out as Alawites; a Syrian nouveau-riche whose wealth, power and status coincided with the spectacular rise in fortune of their poster-boy, the former President Hafez al-Assad. The sentiments were not new, I had heard variations on those words many times before.

GoodbyeAs I prepared to finally depart Damascus for a translation job in Beirut I spent a final few hours in my favourite internet café. The owner was there as always, but this time he was in the company of a man I had never seen before. In his early twenties the man stood up as the owner introduced me to him.

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From the full enunciation of the Arabic letter “qalf” I could tell he was from Latakia, now here in Damascus to study law he told me. Asking after my time in Syria he wanted to know if I had learnt anything about the place. Did I know the capital of Syria? Inwardly groaning at his weak attempt to make me welcome (did he really think foreigners were so ignorant of the places they visited?) I told him Damascus. “No”, came the answer. I looked up from my computer screen, now paying him full attention. “No, you’re wrong, it’s not Damascus”, he continued. Piqued by his silly game, I asked him where it was. “Qardaha” he replied.

I had seen or heard this place before somewhere, but could not at that moment place it. My face must have revealed my puzzlement for he was openly grinning now. And then I realised, if I had heard it once before, then I had certainly walked past the poster of its most famous export hundreds of times.

Crossing the border into Lebanon that night I saw his picture one last time, in full military regalia Hafez al Assad stared down at me, he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

* Peter Jones is an Arabic speaking British national who lived in Syria both before and during the uprising. Throughout the article he makes reference to encounters with the security service and protestors, as well as a number of discussions – the majority in Arabic – with Syrian friends. Since leaving Syria six weeks ago, he been working in Beirut, translating articles from Arabic into English for non-Arabic speaking journalists. He graduated from the LSE in 2004 with a Masters in economics. The year before he was awarded a first class honours degree from the same institution in the same discipline.

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Syria: The Opposition and the Church : A Slap in the Face for the Pro-Democracy MovementWhile church leaders pledge their support for the Assad regime, Christians in Syria are backing the protest movement for democratic change. The endorsement of the regime's propaganda slogans by the representatives of the churches puts them in an increasingly precarious position, as Claudia Mende reports

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Claudia Mende,Qantara de (a project funded by the German Foreign Office to promote dialogue with the Islamic world),15 July 2011,

In their official statements the representatives of Syria's churches have, to date, announced that they support the regime of Bashar al-Assad. In interviews with the European media the bishops declared their sympathy for the government and expressed little understanding for the motives behind the protest movement.

Elias Tabe, the Syrian Catholic Bishop of Damascus, told the Italian news agency SIR: "What has been going on in Syria for weeks is a plot hatched by some external force; an attempt at clear neo-colonialism by Islamic fundamentalists, Wahhabis from Saudi Arabia, from Qatar."

Antoine Audo, the Syrian Catholic Bishop of Aleppo, spoke in a similar vein in an interview with the magazine of the English organization Aid to the Church in Need: "The fanatics [the protest movement – Ed.] speak about freedom and democracy for Syria, but this is not their goal. They want to divide the Arab countries, control them, seize oil and sell arms. They seek destabilization and Islamization. Syria must resist – will resist. 80 percent of the people are behind the government, as are all the Christians."

Tradition of tolerant coexistence in SyriaAuthoritarian rule by inclusion: After Hafez al-Assad seized power in 1970, the Assads deliberately targeted the Christian minority in order to win their support The churches' representatives do see the need for reform, but they fear the fall of the regime. Syria, with its secular constitution, has vouchsafed religious freedom of a kind that does not exist anywhere else in the Middle East. After Hafez al-Assad seized power in 1970, the Assads deliberately targeted the Christian minority in order to get them on side and win their support.

However, the tradition of tolerant coexistence in Syria is far older than the Ba'ath Party regime. Christians are fully integrated into

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the work and in business life of the country, and the regime has always ensured that there was no religious discrimination.

A study by the German Konrad Adenauer Stiftung on the situation of the Christian minority in Syria found that many of President Assad's high-ranking advisers were Christians. Some bishops have direct access to the president. "The Christian churches have been bought, and have allowed themselves to be bought," criticizes Otmar Oehring, a human rights expert with the Aachen-based Catholic aid organization Missio. "They're ignoring the fact that so many people are dying."

If there really is a regime change, says human rights expert Otmar Oehring, the churches' loyalty to the regime could become "extremely dangerous" for them The churches are afraid that the tolerant Syrian model established by Assad will not endure. Many Syrians remember with anxiety the way that Iraq descended into civil war after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

This is why they persist in supporting the regime. They fear chaos, violence, and an end of the secular state that guarantees the rights of its minorities. This fear is being deliberately instrumentalized by the regime, which is constantly hammering home the idea that, if it falls, the country will be ruled instead by Salafis and radical Islamists.

Yet so far there is no one in the opposition who would demand the abolition of the secular constitution. "All the opposition groups are calling for a pluralist democracy," says the Syria expert Heiko Wimmen from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. "Whether all of them can be believed is another matter." By this Wimmen is referring not only to the Muslim Brotherhood, but also to some of the left-wing groups with no tradition of democracy.

Christians in the protest movementIt appears that not all Christians are following the leaders of their churches in their assessment of the situation. Although reports

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coming out of Syria have to be taken with a pinch of salt, Christians are definitely taking part in the popular protests, and in doing so are risking their lives alongside their Muslim fellow citizens. For them, the bishops' comments are a slap in the face.

According to the Syrian dissident and Internet activist Ahed al-Hendi, during the demonstrations in Daraa, Christians granted wounded Muslim demonstrators asylum in their churches. Al-Hendi was elected a member of the executive committee of the Syrian opposition at the recent conference in Antalya, Turkey; he lives in exile in the U.S. where he writes for the website www.cyberdissents.org.

"The regime must go, and it must be replaced by a democratic Syria." Michel Kilo, a Syrian journalist and dissident from a Christian family, spent three years in jail as a political prisoner Christians were also among the protestors in the central Syrian town of Homs. Some of them were killed. Al Jazeera broadcast pictures of Assyrian Christians who took part in anti-Assad protests in the Kurdish stronghold of Qamishli. Leading Syrian dissidents like the journalist Michel Kilo or the lawyer Anwar al-Bunni are from Christian families, just as Alavis such as Aref Dalila are visibly active in the opposition movement.

Riding it outIn the long term, the attitude of the church leaders is a very risky one. They are banking on the Assad regime staying in power despite growing unrest, and appear to have decided that they just have to 'ride it out'. The Oriental churches have a long tradition of loyalty to the ruling powers. In Egypt the Coptic patriarch Shenuda III continued to stand by Mubarak for days even as the demonstrators in Tahrir Square were calling for him to step down.

According to Otmar Oehring, by maintaining their position the Syrian churches risk calling down on themselves the wrath of the disadvantaged Sunni masses if the Baath regime does fall. Up until now, he says, there has been no anti-Christian agitation, but

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"if there really is a regime change" the churches' loyalty to the regime could become "extremely dangerous" for them.

However, just as Coptic intellectuals joined the protest movement in Egypt, the Syrian bishops' position is no longer uncontested. Dissidents who want to go down the path to becoming a modern civil society regard that position as obsolete. Ahed al-Hendi of the cyberdissents, himself a Christian, says: "Christians have always played a major role in Syria whenever political movements were created and parties founded. I don't think they can choose anything other than democracy and freedom."

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Unfolding the Syrian paradox Alastair Crooke Asia Times,15 July 2011,

Can Syria properly be understood as an example of a "pure" Arab popular revolution, an uprising of non-violent, liberal protest against tyranny that has been met only by repression? I believe this narrative to be a complete misreading, deliberately contrived to serve quite separate ambitions. The consequences of turning a blind eye to the reality of what is happening in Syria entails huge risk: the potential of sectarian conflict that would not be confined to Syria alone.

One of the problems with unfolding the Syria paradox is that there is indeed a genuine, domestic demand for change. A huge majority of Syrians want reform. They feel the claustrophobia of the state's inert heavy-handedness and of the bureaucracy's haughty indifference toward their daily trials and tribulations. Syrians resent the pervasive corruption, and the arbitrary

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tentacles of the security authorities intruding into most areas of daily life. But is the widespread demand for reform itself the explanation for the violence in Syria, as many claim?

There is this mass demand for reform. But paradoxically - and contrary to the "awakening" narrative - most Syrians also believe that President Bashar al-Assad shares their conviction for reform. The populations of Damascus, Aleppo, the middle class, the merchant class, and non-Sunni minorities (who amount to one quarter of the population), among others, including the leadership of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, fall into this category. They also believe there is no credible "other" that could bring reform.

What then is going on? Why has the conflict become so polarized and bitter, if there is indeed such broad consensus?

I believe the roots of the bitterness lie in Iraq, rather than in Syria, in two distinct ways. Firstly, they extend back into the thinking of the Sunni jihadi trend, as advanced by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which evolved in Iraq, surfaced violently in Lebanon, and was transposed into Syria with the return of many Syrian Salafist veterans at the "end" of the Iraq conflict.

Secondly, and separately, the bitterness in Syria is also linked to a profound sense of Sunni grievance felt by certain Arab states at Sunni political disempowerment following Prime Minister Nuri al-Malaki's rise to power in Iraq, for which they hold Assad responsible.

In a precursor to present events in Syria, the Lebanese army too in 2007 battled with a group of Sunni militants of diverse nationalities who had all fought in Iraq. The group, Fateh al-Islam, had infiltrated Naher al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon from Syria, and had married into Palestinian families living there.

Although the core of foreign fighters was quite small in number, they were well-armed and experienced in urban combat. They attracted a certain amount of local Lebanese support too. That

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bloody conflict with Lebanon's army endured for more than three months. At the end, Naher al-Bared was in ruins; and 168 of the Lebanese army lay dead.

That event was the culmination of a pattern of movements from Afghanistan and across the region into, and from, Iraq. Most of these radicalized Sunnis coming to fight the United States occupation had gravitated towards groups loosely associated with Zarqawi. Zarqawi's al-Qaeda affiliation is not of particular significance to Syria today, but the Zarqawi "Syria" doctrine that evolved in Iraq, is crucial.

Zarqawi, like other Salafists, rejected the artificial frontiers and national divisions inherited from colonialism. Instead, he insisted on calling the aggregate of Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Jordan, and parts of Turkey and Iraq by its old name: "Bilad a-Sham". Zarqawi and his followers were virulently anti-Shi'ite - much more so than early al-Qaeda - and asserted that a-Sham was a core Sunni patrimony that had been overtaken by the Shi'ites.

According to this narrative, the Sunni heartland, Syria, had been usurped for the last 40 years by the Shi'ite al-Assads (Alawites are an orientation within Shi'ism). The rise of Hezbollah, facilitated in part by Assad, further eroded Lebanon's Sunni character, too. Likewise, they point to Assad's alleged undercutting of former Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi as an act which had delivered Iraq to the Shi'ites, namely to Malaki.

From this deep grievance at Sunni disempowerment, Zarqawi allies developed a doctrine in which Syria and Lebanon were no longer platforms from which to launch jihad, but the sites for jihad (against the Shi'ites as much as others). The Syrian Salafists eventually were to return home, nursing this grievance. Many of them - Syrians and non-Syrians - settled in the rural villages lying adjacent to Lebanon and Turkey, and similarly to their confreres in Naher al-Barad, they married locally.

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It is these elements - as in Lebanon in 2007 - who are the mainspring of armed violence against the Syrian security services. Unlike Egypt or Tunisia, Syria has experienced hundreds of dead and many hundreds of wounded members of the security forces and police. (Daraa is different: the armed element consists of Bedouin who migrate between Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria).

It is difficult to establish numbers, but perhaps 40,000-50,000 Syrians fought in Iraq. With their marriage into local communities, their support base is more extensive than actual numbers that travelled to Iraq. Their objective in Syria is similar to that in Iraq: to establish the conditions for jihad in Syria through exacerbating sectarian animosities - just as Zarqawi did in Iraq through his attacks on the Shi'ites and their shrines. Likewise, they seek a foothold in north-eastern Syria for a Salafist Islamic emirate, which would operate autonomously from the state's authority.

This segment to the opposition is not interested in "reform" or democracy: They state clearly and publicly that if it costs two million lives to overthrow the "Shi'ite" Alawites the sacrifice will have been worth the loss. Drafting of legislation permitting new political parties or expanding press freedom are matters of complete indifference for them. The Zarqawi movement rejects Western politics outright.

These Salafi groups are the first side of the Syrian "box": they do not conform to a single organization, but are generally locally-led and autonomous. Loosely inter-connected through a system of communications, they are well-financed and are externally linked.

The second side to the Syrian box are some exile groups: they too are well-financed by the US government and other foreign sources, and have external connections both in the region and the West. Some 2009 cables from the US Embassy in Damascus reveal how a number of these groups and TV stations linked to them have received tens of millions of dollars for their work from the State Department and US-based foundations, along with

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training and technical assistance. These exile movements believe they can successfully use the Salafist insurgents for their own ends.

The exiles hoped that a Salafist insurrection against the state - albeit confined initially to the periphery of Syria - would provoke such a backlash from the Syrian government that, in turn, a mass of people would be polarized into hostility to the state, and ultimately Western intervention in Syria would become inevitable - ideally following the Libyan model in Benghazi.

That has not happened, although Western leaders, such as French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, have done much to keep this prospect alive. It is the exiles, often secular and leftist, that are trying to "fix" the Syria narrative for the media. These expatriates have coached the Salafists in "color" revolution techniques in order to portray an unalloyed story of massive and unprovoked repression by a regime refusing reform, whilst the army disintegrates under the pressure of being compelled to kill its countrymen.

Al-Jazeera and al-Arabia have cooperated in advancing this narrative by broadcasting anonymous eyewitness accounts and video footage, without asking questions (see Ibrahim Al-Amine here, for instance).

Yet the Salafists understand that the exiles are using them to provoke incidents, and then to corroborate a media narrative of repression by the external opposition; this might actually serve Salafist interests, too.

These two components may be relatively small in numbers, but the emotional pull from the heightened voice of Sunni grievance - and its need for redress has a much wider and more significant constituency. It is easily fanned into action, both in Syria and in the region as a whole.

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Saudi Arabia and Gulf states explicitly trade on fears of Shi'ite "expansionism" to justify Gulf Cooperation Council repression in Bahrain and intervention in Yemen, and the "voice" of assertive sectarianism is being megaphoned into Syria too.

Sunni clerical voices are touting the Arab "awakening" as the "Sunni revolution" in riposte to the Shi'ite revolution of Iran. In March, al-Jazeera broadcast a sermon by Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, which raised the banner of the restoration of Sunni ascendency in Syria. Qaradawi, who is based in Qatar, was joined by Saudi cleric Saleh Al-Luhaidan who urged, "Kill a third of Syrians so the other two-thirds may live."

Clearly many of the protesters in traditional centers of Sunni irredentism, such as Homs and Hama in Syria, comprise of aggrieved Sunnis seeking the Alawites ouster, and a return to Sunni ascendency. These are not Salafists, but mainstream Syrians for whom the elements of Sunni ascendency, irredentism and reformism have conflated into a sole demand. This is a very frightening prospect for the quarter of the Syrians that form the non-Sunni minorities.

The marginalization of Sunnis in Iraq, Syria and more recently in Lebanon has aggrieved the Saudis and some Gulf states as much as it did the Salafists. The perception that Assad betrayed the Sunni interest in Iraq - although inaccurate - does help account for the vehemence of the Qatari-funded al-Jazeera's pre-prepared information campaign against Assad.

The French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur has reported on one Stockholm media activist who paid an early secret visit to Doha, where al-Jazeera executives offered open access to the pan-Arab channel and coached the person in how to make his videos harder hitting: "Film women and children. Insist that that they use pacificist slogans."

In contrast, Arabic press reports have been plain about the demands of Assad that Gulf states (the "Arabs of America") and

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European envoys are insisting on, in return for their support. Ibrahim al-Amine, chief editor of the independent newspaper al-Akhbar, listed reform steps, which consist of disbanding the ruling party, initiating new legislation on political parties and the press, the dismissing certain officials, withdrawing the army from the streets, and beginning direct and intensive negotiations with Israel.

The envoys also suggested that such reforms might provide Assad with the pretext to break his alliance with Hezbollah and Hamas, in addition to severing the resistance aspect of Damascus's relationship with Tehran.

Making these steps, diplomats have suggested, would facilitate improved relations with Arab states and international capitals and the prospect that oil-rich Arab states would offer Assad a $20 billion aid package, in order to smooth Assad's path away from any economic dependency on Iran.

All of this underlines to the other dimension to events in Syria: its strategic position as the keystone of the arch spanning from southern Lebanon to Iran. It is this role that those in the US and Europe that concern themselves primarily with Israel's security, have sought to displace. It is not so clear, however, whether Israel is as anxious as some Western officials to see Assad toppled. Israeli officials profess respect for the president. And if Assad were to go, no one knows what may follow in Syria.

The US has a record of attempting to intervene in Syria that even predates the US Central Intelligence Agency's and British intelligence's 1953 coup in Iran against prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.

Between 1947 and 1949, American government officials intervened in Syria. Their aim was to liberate the Syrian people from a corrupt autocratic elite. What resulted was a disaster and led ultimately to the rise to power of the Assad family. Western powers may no longer remember this history, but as one BBC commentator recently noted, the Syrians surely do.

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Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US effectively has been threatening the Syrian president with continuing ultimata to make peace with Israel - in a closely worked double act with Paris. Assad's rejection of that 2003 threat has given rise to a ratcheting sequence of pressures and threats to the Syrian president, including action at the United Nations Security Council; the Special Tribunal on Lebanon over the killing of former premier Rafik al-Hariri and Israeli military action to damage Hezbollah and so to shift the balance of power in Lebanon to Assad's disadvantage.

The US also began the liberal funding of Syrian opposition groups since at least 2005; and more recently the training of activists, including Syrian activists, on the means to avoid arrest and on secure communications techniques using unlicensed telephone networks and Internet software.

It is these techniques, plus the training of activists by Western non-governmental organizations and other media outlets, that also serve armed, militarized insurrection - as well as peaceful pro-democracy protest movements.

The US has also been active in funding directly or indirectly human-rights centers that have been so active in providing the unverified casualty figures and eyewitness accounts to the media activists. Some such as the Damascus Center for Human Rights states its partnership with the US National Endowment for Democracy and others receive funding from, for example, the Democracy Council and the International Republican Institute.

The Syrian government's decision to ban foreign journalists has of course contributed to giving external activist sources of information the free hand by which to dominate the media narrative on Syria.

The missing side of the Syrian Pandora's box, which has been omitted until now, is that of the Syrian army and its response to

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the protests. The largely Russian-trained army has no experience fighting in a complicated urban setting in which there are genuine protesters together with a small number of armed insurgents who do possess urban warfare and ambush experience from Iraq, and are intent on provoking confrontation with the security forces.

The Syrian army lacks experience in counter-insurgency; it was groomed in the Warsaw Pact school of grand maneuvers and heavy brigades, in which the word "nuance" forms no part of the vocabulary. Tanks and armored brigades are wholly unsuited for crowd control operations, especially in narrow, congested areas. It's no surprise that such military movements killed unarmed protesters that were caught in the middle, inflaming tensions with genuine reformists and disconcerting the public.

Initially, army esteem was affected by the criticism. Though the stories of army mass desertion are disinformation, there was some erosion of military self-confidence at lower levels of command. And public confidence in the military wobbled, too, as casualties mounted. But it was a "wobble" that ended with the dramatic conflict around Jisr al-Shagour in mid-June, near the Turkish border.

Just as the Lebanese nation rallied behind its army in the conflict of Naher al-Bared, so too the Syrians rallied behind their army in the face of the Salafist attack firstly on the police, and subsequently on the army and on state institutions in Jisr. And, as the details of the Jisr al-Shagour conflict unrolled before the public, sentiment turned bitter towards the insurrectionists, possibly decisively.

The images from Jisr, as well as other videos circulating of lynchings and attacks on the security forces will have shocked many Syrians, who will have perceived in them the same cruel "blood lust" that accompanied the images of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's hanging in 2006.

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The Jisr events may prove to have been a pivotal moment. Army self-confidence and honor is on the rise, and the public majority now see in a way that was less evident earlier that Syria faces a serious threat unrelated to any reform agenda. Sentiment has tipped away from thinking in terms of immediate reform.

Public opinion is polarized and embittered towards the Salafists and their allies. Leftist, secular opposition circles are distancing themselves from the Salafist violence - the inherent contradiction of the divergent aspirations of the "exiles" and the Salafists, from the Syrian majority consensus, is now starkly manifest. This, essentially, is the last side to the paradoxical Syrian "box".

In this atmosphere, dramatic reform might well be viewed by the president's supporters as signaling weakness, even appeasement to those responsible for killing so many police and army officers at Jisr. Not surprisingly, Assad chose to use last week's speech to speak to his constituency: to state the difficulties and threats facing Syria, but also to lay out the road map towards an exit from danger and towards substantive reform.

Western comment overwhelmingly has described the speech as "disappointing" or "short on specifics", but this misses the point. Whereas earlier, a dramatic reform shock, such as advocated by Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu might, at a certain point, have had a transformatory "shock" effect; it is doubtful that it would achieve that now.

On the contrary, any hint of concessions having being wrested from the government by the type of violence seen at Jisr would likely anger Assad's own constituency; and yet improbably would never transcend the categorical rejection of the militant opposition seeking to exacerbate tensions to the point of making the West determined to intervene.

By carefully setting out of some very deliberate steps and processes ahead, Assad has correctly read the mood of the majority in Syria. Time will be the judge, but Assad seems set to

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emerge from a complicated parallel series of challenges directed towards him from movements and states which reflect a range of grievances, special interests, and motivations. The roots of all these are very far removed from issues of legislative and political reform in Syria.

It would hardly be surprising were Assad to see the aggregate of such measures against him effectively to constitute the mounting of a soft coup. He may query the extent of US President Barack Obama's knowledge of what has been occurring in Syria. It seems unlikely that US officials were wholly ignorant or unaware of the matrix of threats converging to threaten Assad's stability.

And if so, it will not be for the first time that Syrian officials have noted a "left" hand-"right" hand dysfunctionality in the Obama style of foreign policy, whereby contradictory policy approaches are pursued simultaneously by different US officials.

If, as seems likely, Assad does emerge from all the challenges, the tenor of his recent response to Arab and European envoys suggests that reform will be pursued, in part, to protect Syria's resistance ethos from such challenges in the future.

In 2007, Assad noted wryly, in an unscripted addition to his speech, that he had not had the time to pursue effective reform: "We did not even have time to discuss any idea related to the party law among others. At a certain stage, the economy was a priority, but we did not have time to tackle the economic situation. We have been engaged in a decisive battle [on the external front]; and we had to win. There was no other option ..."

Now "reform" is the existential external front. But if the intent of all this was intended to shift the strategic balance in the Middle East, it has not worked. It is unlikely that Assad will emerge more pliable to Western challenges - any more than he has in the past.

Alastair Crooke is founder and director of Conflicts Forum and is a former adviser to the former EU Foreign Policy Chief, Javier Solana, from 1997-2003.

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Syrian killings stall bid to unite opposition By Liz Sly and William Wan,Washington Post,July 16, 2011,

BEIRUT — An effort to unite Syria’s opposition-in-exile with the fledgling protest movement that has erupted on the streets of Syrian cities fizzled Saturday, a day after security forces shot dead 32 anti-government protesters around the country, forcing government opponents to cancel plans to gather in Damascus.

A parallel conference of exiled regime opponents went ahead in Istanbul, but in the absence of the domestic Syrian protest movement, which had been planning to participate via Skype, the meeting failed to achieve its stated goal of coming up with a unified strategy for ousting President Bashar al-Assad.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was meeting with Turkish officials a few miles away, a day after she offered formal U.S. recognition to the Libyan rebel Transitional National Council, also while in Istanbul.

But she made no effort to meet with the Syrian opposition there, despite hopes expressed before the conference by some opposition figures that she would. Instead, she offered only lukewarm support for the Syrian gathering and made it clear that the United States hopes the protest movement will engage in dialogue with the Syrian government, something most opposition groups reject.

“We’re encouraged by what we see the Syrian people are doing for themselves. This is not anything the United States or any other country is doing,” she said after talks with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. “It’s what the Syrian people are doing, trying to form an opposition that can provide a pathway, hopefully in peaceful cooperation with the government, to a better future.”

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U.S. officials have indicated that they are unwilling to engage with the Syrian opposition until they have a clearer picture of who they are and what they want. “I think we don’t know how this is going to end yet,” Clinton told a gathering of young people in Istanbul earlier Saturday.

A small group of Syria-based activists addressed the Istanbul conference via Skype from a secret location. Walid Bunni, a human rights lawyer, said the conference had to be canceled after Syrian security forces stormed the Damascus suburb where the gathering was to have been held, and shot dead at least 15 anti-government protesters.

Yet even before the killings, it was unclear whether the effort had the support of the youthful street protesters who have done more than any of the mostly aging dissident politicians to challenge 40 years of Assad family rule.

The Local Coordination Committees, one of several groups engaged in organizing protests inside Syria, said it would not have sent representatives to the Damascus conference because it was unsure of the motives behind it and had still not drawn up a strategy of its own to oust Assad.

Underscoring that the uprising’s momentum still belongs to the street, huge crowds gathered in Damascus on Saturday for the funerals of 23 people killed in the capital on Friday during what appeared to be the biggest protests yet in the city. Videos posted on YouTube showed thousands of people marching through the central Damascus neighborhood of Rukn el-Din and many thousands more thronging the streets of the suburb of Qaboun, where 16 people died.

The Syrian opposition is also far from forming any kind of unified structure. Haitham Maleh, 80, a veteran dissident who was permitted by the Syrian authorities to travel to Istanbul for the conference, last week proposed the creation of a shadow government along the lines of the Libyan council, but the idea was

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abandoned after Syrians active in the street protest movement shot it down.

“It’s too early, it needs more work and he did not consult any other group,” said Rami Nakhle, an activist with the Local Coordination Committees in Beirut.

Wan reported from Istanbul.

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Impromptu words, actions drive U.S. stance on Syria By Joby Warrick and Mary Beth Sheridan, Washington Post,Sunday, July 17, 2011,

It was only a single word — “legitimacy” — but in diplomatic parlance it’s a bombshell, a shot at the moral underpinnings of another government. When Hillary Rodham Clinton stood before television cameras last week to talk about Syria’s autocratic leader, not even her aides expected her to go that far.

And then she did.

“From our perspective, he has lost legitimacy,” the secretary of state said of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The line, an unscripted response to a reporter’s question, was instantly hailed as a shift for the Obama administration, which until Monday had been relatively restrained in its public criticism of Assad. But while the White House had intended to sharpen its tone toward the Syrian leader, the decision to use the word was Clinton’s, according to two administration officials familiar with the incident.

Clinton’s utterance, coupled with Ambassador Robert Ford’s decision — also unscripted — to visit the opposition stronghold of

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Hama on July 7 , nudged the administration a step closer to declaring that Assad must step down. Taken together, the visit and Clinton’s remark show how the administration’s policy toward the Syrian autocrat has lately been shaped more by diplomatic improvisation than methodical planning within the White House.

With a single remark, Clinton put the administration more firmly on the side of protesters demanding Assad’s ouster, eliciting cheers from opposition groups and plaudits from former diplomats and Middle East experts who have pressed for a forceful repudiation of a government accused of killing more than 1,500 protesters since March. The calls for a harder stance increased after last week’s attack on the U.S. Embassy by a Damascus mob that smashed windows and pelted the building with fruit.

President Obama echoed Clinton’s phrase on Tuesday in a CBS News interview, though with a careful qualifier: “Increasingly you’re seeing President Assad lose legitimacy in the eyes of his people.”

The State Department’s activist approach highlighted divisions within the administration over the proper U.S. response to the crackdown. Some policy advisers, including senior members of Clinton’s staff, have cautioned against firm statements committing the United States to a policy of seeking Assad’s removal. There is no support internationally for a Libya-style military intervention in Syria, these advisers observe, and also little evidence that the country’s loosely organized opposition is prepared to take control of the country, raising the risk of prolonged turmoil or even civil war.

But after nearly four months of worsening violence and a string of broken promises by Assad, a growing faction within the administration began to urge a more assertive posture. These include Ford, the veteran diplomat and newly appointed ambassador to Damascus, as well as Clinton herself, who aides say reacted viscerally to reports of Syrian troops firing on peaceful demonstrators from tanks.

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“She was disgusted,” said a senior administration official who attended high-level meetings on Syria. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatically sensitive deliberations, said Clinton was increasingly chagrined by the behavior of Assad, a Western-educated ophthalmologist who many White House and congressional officials had regarded as a potential reformer.

Like others in the administration, Clinton “thought at first that if we gave him some space, he would do the right thing,” the official said. “Instead, we see him using increasing brutality against his own people.”

A turning point, administration officials say, occurred July 10, when Assad had promised to meet with opposition leaders to begin a formal process of political reform. U.S. and European governments had been closely watching to see whether Assad would honor commitments to begin sincere negotiations, but they were quickly disappointed as Syrian police and army troops increased their attacks on protesters in several cities.

“People here are genuinely appalled that you have a government, you have a leader who claims to want a dialogue, but at the same time is overseeing a government that is practicing torture, terror, theft, firing upon people,” Jeffrey Feltman, assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, said in an interview Friday in Istanbul.

After Ford traveled to the restive city of Hama in an effort to discourage attacks on demonstrators there, the Syrian government retaliated by allowing the attack on the U.S. embassy by mobs of Assad supporters. Clinton’s declaration that Assad had lost his legitimacy occurred hours after the attack, although officials insisted the assault did not trigger Clinton’s comments.

“A bunch of clowns throwing fruit did not change our position,” said a second administration official involved in internal policy discussions.

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By late last week, administration officials agreed on a plan to turn up the rhetorical pressure, however modestly, by declaring that Assad was “not indispensable” as Syria’s leader. The phrase was deliberately chosen to echo what U.S. officials say was a private boast Assad had made to foreign diplomats, claiming that his position as Syrian president was safe because U.S. and European leaders regarded him as “indispensable” in keeping ethnically divided Syria from fragmenting into chaos and possible civil war.

Clinton used the phrase at the start of a joint news conference Monday with European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.

“President Assad is not indispensable, and we have absolutely nothing invested in him remaining in power,” Clinton said.

Then, pressed by a reporter to clarify her views about Assad, she went off script. “I mean, from our perspective, he has lost legitimacy,” she added.

Former senior diplomats and Middle East experts praised the apparent policy shift.

“Up until now, it kind of looked like we were bending over backward not to be too critical,” creating an impression of a “double standard in the Middle East,” said John Negroponte, a former senior diplomat and U.N. ambassador.

Others chided the White House for taking caution to absurd extremes.

“If I had to describe the administration’s policy, I’d call it ‘The Late Show,’ ’’ said Elliott Abrams, a former top Middle East adviser to the George W. Bush administration. “They’re not being asked to sell arms to the Syrian protesters. They’re being asked to take a clearer moral and diplomatic stance.”

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Late or not, Clinton has made clear that she does not regret the choice of words.

“We have said that Syria can’t go back to the way it was before,” she told reporters on Friday at a news conference in Istanbul. “Assad has lost his legitimacy in the eyes of his people because of the brutality of their crackdown, including today.”

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Ruins from ancient Syrian synagogue put on display in Israel after 63-year delayAn archaeological exhibit slated to open on Mount Scopus in 1948 finally kicked off last month with a display of tiles from the famed Dura Europos synagogue. Ran Shapira Haaretz,17 July 2011,

Painted tiles from an impressive ancient synagogue in Syria, along with other archaeological artifacts, went on display on Mount Scopus last month - after a 63-year delay.

The exhibits were originally intended to be shown to the public on Mount Scopus in 1948, but the outbreak of the War of Independence froze plans to open the nearly-completed museum built there. The exhibits were placed in drawers for decades and became accessible to the public only last month.

Among the artifacts are tiles from the ancient synagogue discovered in the city of Dura Europos, which is located in the Syrian desert above the banks of the Euphrates. To this day - about 80 years after its discovery - this 3rd century synagogue is considered one of the most complete and impressive examples of Jewish religious structures from that period.

One of the prominent characteristics of the building, a reconstruction of which is now displayed in the National Museum

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in Damascus, is beautiful paintings depicting scenes from the Bible, on its walls and ceiling. The Yale University delegation that studied the site in 1932 invited Eliezer Sukenik to visit the site and to join in the publication of the findings of the dig. Sukenik, one of the first Jewish Israeli archaeologists (his son and successor was Yigael Yadin ), immediately accepted.

About a month after the invitation, Sukenik traveled by train to Damascus and from there to the excavation site. He returned with considerable bounty thanks to the generosity of his colleagues from Yale: three painted tiles that had adorned the ceiling of the synagogue.

The painted tiles from Dura Europos were meant to be one of the important exhibits in the project initiated by Sukenik: a museum that would display items related to the history of the Jewish people, on the Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus. The plan to build the museum, which was called the Museum for Jewish Antiquities, came up shortly before the synagogue in Dura Europos was discovered in 1932. Sukenik and his colleagues, including Nahman Avigad, wanted to collect items related to the history of the Jewish people in ancient times and to display them to the public.

The museum was designed by architects Carl Rubin and Itzhak Yavetz, as part of a master plan for the campus, which was designed by German Jewish architect Erich Mendelsohn. The building was dedicated in 1941. Afterwards they began to fill it with items, but the museum never opened. Two months before the scheduled opening date, the battles of the War of Independence erupted and the building on Mount Scopus was evacuated.

When the faculty of the Hebrew University returned to Mount Scopus after its recapture in 1967, the archaeological artifacts returned as well. But the building that had been designated for the museum - the sign was placed on the gate of the building 70 years ago - housed the offices of the Archaeological Institute and its collections room. The findings remained in drawers and were used

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by archaeologists and students. Only recently did Daphna Tsoran, the acting curator of the collections room, begin to display the findings to the public.

Since June one can see the ceiling tiles from Dura Europos and other fascinating finds at an exhibition on the Mount Scopus campus, in the original building where they were supposed to be displayed 63 years ago.

Finding the items was like detective work, says Tsoran. Along the way she learned much about the nature of early archaeological research in Israel. Some of the findings, as revealed by letters and diary entries that Tsoran found in the archives, were uncovered by hikers, who reported the discovery to scholars.

Tsoran also discovered that while Sukenik and his colleagues were thought to be interested only in finds connected to Israelis or Jews, they in fact made great efforts to bring items to the museum from all over the ancient East. In the National Museum in Beirut, for example, there is a sarcophagus of one of the kings of the Phoenician coastal city Byblos (today Jubail ) with a Phoenician inscription. Sukenik ordered a copy of the inscription that was engraved on the sarcophagus. He turned to the Solel Boneh construction company, which had a branch in Beirut during the Mandate period, to bring the inscription to Jerusalem. The company agreed and loaded the copy onto a truck that was headed for Israel. Now the inscription can also be viewed on Mount Scopus.

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'Syria increasing arms shipments to Hezbollah' Intel officials tell 'The Times' Syria gave Shi'ite group Scud D missiles putting "Israel, Jordan, large parts of Turkey within Hezbollah's range." By Jerusalem Post staff and Yaakov Katz,Jerusalem Post,16/07/2011

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Damascus is increasing shipments of advanced missiles and other weapons to Hezbollah amid continuing unrest in Syria, The Times of London reported Friday quoting Western intelligence officials.

The officials said Syria provided Hezbollah with eight Scud D missiles that have a range of 700 kilometers.

The missiles "are accurate to within tens of meters and bring all of Israel, Jordan and large parts of Turkey within Hezbollah's range," the officials were quoted by the newspaper as saying.

They also said that, "This is the first time that a terror organization has obtained a missile of this type," which is considered a "strategic weapon" that "has been held only by national armies."

The Times also quoted an Israeli intelligence official who said Syria "was engaged in a serious arms build-up," adding that the weapons transfers started after the revolution began in Egypt.

The report comes after the French paper Le Figaro reported last month that a stash of Lebanese weapons destined for Hezbollah was hidden and distributed in densely-populated urban areas including the southern Syrian city of Homs and cities just outside Damascus.

In May, Western intelligence agencies expressed concern that Hezbollah might try to transfer the advanced weaponry it reportedly maintains on Syrian soil if it feels that Syrian President Bashar Assad’s reign is on the verge of ending.

Last year, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu revealed in a meeting with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi that Hezbollah was storing Scud missiles in military bases in Syria.

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Haaretz: 'Pro-Palestinian group in the Netherlands calls for boycott of Israeli bus company'..

Yedioth Ahronoth: 'Israeli diplomat assaulted in Panama'..

LATIMES: 'SYRIA: Videos said to show violent clashes in Damascus suburbs'..

Washington Post: David Ignatius 'Obama’s communications gap'..

Haaretz: ‘The settlers' real conquest’.. [As in Syria, Israel is quickly progressing to a situation in which the minority controls the majority]..

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