WORLD_ Syrian Fighting Flares Ahead of Talks

Syrian Fighting Flares Ahead of Talks
By ANNE BARNARD
Published: March 30, 2012

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Two days before a major international gathering aimed at marshaling efforts to end the Syrian crisis, fierce fighting continued on Friday in the north and center of the country while internal and exiled opposition forces jockeyed for influence and tried to better coordinate efforts to bring down President Bashar al-Assad.

The Local Coordinating Committees, a coalition of opposition groups in Syria, issued a statement complaining that opponents of President Assad were not represented at an Arab League meeting on Thursday in Baghdad — an omission demonstrating that the Arab League, from which the Syrian government is suspended, is not ready to take further steps against the Damascus authorities, like calling for Mr. Assad to step down and certainly not to recognize the fractious opposition as a representative of Syria.

Activist groups also depicted a patchwork of unrest across Syria from Homs and Hama in the center to the east of the country and the area around Damascus, the capital, further south. The Local Coordinating Committees said 30 people had died. Such reports cannot be independently verified, partly because of tight restrictions by the Syrian authorities on reporting.

Activists posted video purporting to show that snipers were preventing the government’s opponents from retrieving bodies from the streets. “The risk of being sniped has made it impossible to retrieve bodies from the streets and give them a proper and dignified burial,” the committees said in a posting alongside video showing people using chains, a pulley and what appeared to be a long cable to drag abandoned bodies as automatic weapons fire rattled nearby. The developments came after Syria’s exiled opposition groups met in Istanbul where the so-called Friends of Syria coalition, which includes many Western and Arab governments, are to hold a high-level meeting on Sunday. The exiles, grouped in the Syrian National Council, have been seeking an elusive unity to bolster their role as interlocutors with international powers trying to end to Syria’s yearlong uprising.

Those maneuvers seemed to be matched by efforts among armed opponents of Mr. Assad inside Syria to establish a formal command structure. In a video shown on Al Arabiya satellite television, a man identified as an army defector with the rank of colonel said that the armed opposition had formed military councils in the cities of Homs and Hama in the center of the country, Idlib in the north, Damascus, and Deir Azzour in the east each with its own local leader that were now coordinating with the Free Syrian Army leadership outside the country.

The leadership’s credentials have been questioned in the past as the Free Syrian Army has been depicted as a decentralized collection of armed groups without a real command structure. Fighters inside routinely castigate the outside leaders as failing to help them with weapons supplies, cash or cohesive political direction.

Despite those distinctions, Syrian insurgents appeared on Thursday to have stepped up a campaign to assassinate senior military officials, reinforcing and exacerbating the hostility between the Syrian government and rebel fighters who argue that armed struggle is their only chance for survival.

On Thursday, the Syrian government and opposition groups said that at least two senior military officers had been assassinated in two cities over the past several days. The killings came as Arab leaders met in Iraq to focus on the Syrian crisis and President Assad faced more pressure to carry out a peace plan endorsed by the Arab League and the United Nations.

But the killings seemed to dim even the glimmer of hope that the government might reconcile with the opposition. Instead, they validated the claims of activists and fighters who have said in recent interviews that rebel fighters were increasingly embracing insurgency tactics, including plans to assassinate government and security officials.

Such attacks send “a message to the regime that we can reach their leaders,” a fighter calling himself Abu Yazid said in an interview via Skype last week, shortly after an unusual battle between opposition fighters and government forces in the wealthy and well-protected Damascus neighborhood of Mezze.

Abu Yazid said he had taken part in the battle, which he said began as rebels attempted to assassinate Assef Shawkat, a brother-in-law of Mr. Assad and one of the government’s most feared security chiefs. Mr. Shawkat, like several other senior officials, has a house in the neighborhood.

It was impossible to corroborate that version of events; the government said only that a member of the security forces and two opposition fighters were killed in a raid on a “hide-out of an armed terrorist group.” But on Thursday, the government and opposition groups both reported new assassinations.

Opposition groups reported that four military officers were killed in three separate attacks in Aleppo and Hama, while the government said armed groups had killed two army colonels on their way to work in Aleppo. It was unclear whether both were referring to the same events.

The killings showed why it would be difficult to get Mr. Assad to put into effect the peace plan he has accepted on paper. In a letter on Thursday to the leaders of a group of emerging nations that includes his two major allies, Russia and China, Mr. Assad declared that he would not carry out the plan until groups of what he called terrorists stopped attacking officials and crucial infrastructure like pipelines.

The armed opposition has said it has no choice but to embrace such tactics in the face of overwhelming force.

Although Mr. Assad said that he would “spare no effort” to carry out the peace plan, which includes the release of arbitrarily detained prisoners, daily cease-fires to allow the provision of humanitarian aid and access for journalists, he added that his opponents must first commit “to stop all terrorist acts, disarm gunmen and to ending their terrorist acts, kidnapping, killing innocents and sabotaging infrastructure of both public and private sectors,” the state news agency SANA reported. He also demanded that other countries cease all financing for his armed opponents.

The plan is being promoted by Kofi Annan, the special envoy on Syria appointed by the Arab League and the United Nations. In a sign of the influence on events of Iran — Syria’s most powerful regional ally — Mr. Annan is expected to visit Tehran soon. Mr. Annan’s spokesman was quoted on Friday as saying Mr. Assad should implement the peace plan “now.” But Mr. Assad won fresh support when Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, told the visiting Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Iran “is vehemently opposed to any intervention by foreign forces in Syrian internal affairs,” Iranian state media reported on Friday.

Mr. Assad’s promises have been met with skepticism and outright mockery by opponents in Syria and abroad. “The regime pretended that they agreed, but what happened?” said Walid Banani, a member of the Syrian National Council, at a news conference in Istanbul. “There are more killings, mass murders and no withdrawal of forces from streets.”

It was hard to tell whether the assassinations represented a coincidence or a new degree of organization on the part of rebels who recently announced the formation of military councils in various cities to coordinate the loosely knit armed groups.

Either way, the tactics — along with roadside bombings of military vehicles and buses carrying pro-government fighters — are similar to those of insurgents in places like Iraq, where the American military characterized them as “terrorist” attacks, as Mr. Assad does.

Mr. Assad and his supporters say that they have the right to use force against an unpredictable armed movement that is attacking institutions of the state — and that Western critics of his military response are hypocrites.

Roadside bombs have become more common. On Thursday, SANA reported that engineers had dismantled “a large number” of bombs made of gas cans and fire extinguishers that had been placed along roads at the entrances to cities in Idlib Province. Also on Thursday, opposition supporters posted a video of a tank entering the suburb of Dael in Dara’a Province. The video shows an explosion as a gray cloud engulfs the tank and a voice says, “God is great.”

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul, and Alan Cowell from Paris.



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