Syrian carnage sends bloody
message By Victor Kotsev
The United States-based intelligence
analysis organization Stratfor argues that the
terror attack in Damascus on Wednesday, which
claimed the lives of several top Syrian officials,
may have been engineered by the regime of Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad in order to thwart a
coup plot. It also speculates that the closely
timed attack against Israeli tourists in Bourghas,
Bulgaria, which cost seven lives, may have been an
Iranian warning to the West not to be excluded
from negotiations over the Syrian transition.
Whether or not Stratfor's assessment is
accurate, these messages of terror add to an
incredibly tense confrontation in the Middle East
and demonstrate how diverse and far-reaching the
consequences of a larger armed conflict could be.
Fears that Israel would use the occasion
to attack Iran directly
seem about as exaggerated
as speculation that the Syrian army would
retaliate against the rebels with chemical
weapons. The situation is nevertheless highly
volatile. Amid dense war clouds over the Persian
Gulf and the Levant, each escalation could trigger
responses that lead to the violence easily
spiraling out of control.
Judging from
past behavior, there may be more substance to
reports that the US and Israel would at some point
take out Syrian weapons of mass destruction - Fox
News reported that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud
Barak and US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta
discussed this but it is hard to pinpoint any time
frame for such an operation. Uncertainty reigns as
the proverbial fog of war has fully descended over
the Middle East.
In the Syrian capital
Damascus, the rebels have held their own for over
five days, and have even advanced considerably: an
impressive achievement that suggests either regime
in-fighting or a sophisticated foreign-backed
intelligence and information warfare campaign (or
both). According to reports in the international
media, government troops have been firing on
Damascus from the surrounding mountains and from
helicopters, a sign of increasing frustration and
desperation.
Elsewhere in the country,
opposition forces reportedly captured on Thursday
several important border crossings between Syria,
Turkey, and Iraq. The family of Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad, if not the president himself, is
rumored to have left the capital and sought refuge
in the city of Latakia, closer to the bastions of
support of its Alawite religious sect.
In
a tense meeting at the United Nations Security
Council on Thursday, Russia and China vetoed for
the third time a Western draft resolution
threatening Syria with sanctions. The vote drew
sharp condemnation from the US and other council
members.
"The Security Council has failed
utterly in its most important task on its agenda
this year," claimed Susan Rice, the US ambassador
to the UN. "This is the third time in 10 months
that two members have prevented the Security
Council from responding with credibility to the
Syrian conflict. The first two vetoes were very
destructive. This veto is even more dangerous and
deplorable."
The protests of Russian envoy
Vitaly Churkin that the West is "biased" ring
true, not least after the United States gave
advance warning for the "catastrophic assault" (to
borrow the words of Secretary of State Clinton)
several days before the battles in Damascus
started.
Increasingly less covertly, the
West and the Gulf countries have been supporting
the Syrian rebels. The latter's successes in the
past few days mirror in limited ways the speedy
fall of Baghdad in 2003 and of Tripoli in 2011,
and suggest heavy intelligence and information
warfare that could only come from foreign powers.
Based on unconfirmed past reports, even the use of
small teams of foreign special forces is not out
of question.
In an alternative (though not
necessarily mutually exclusive) scenario, it could
be that parts of the regime are collapsing from
within, aided by foreign intelligence, and the
recent chaos is the result. According to
Stratfor's analysis,
Those targeted in the [Damascus]
bombing - Syrian Defense Minister Dawoud Rajha,
former Defense Minister Hassan Turkmani,
Interior Minister Mohammad al-Shaar, National
Security Council chief Hisham Biktyar and Deputy
Defense Minister Assef Shawkat (the president's
brother-in-law, who was rumored to have been
killed by the regime prior to the blast) - were
top suspects in a palace coup scenario. The fate
of the president's brother Republican Guard and
Fourth Division Commander Maher al-Assad after
the blast remains a mystery, but his troops are
still fighting in and around Damascus and have
not shown signs of a breakdown in the army's
command and control.
There are some
vague indications that the bombing was a
pre-emptive move by the al-Assads to eliminate
suspected coup plotters. Whether it was a
deliberate action by the al-Assads or a sign of
the rebels' effectiveness in penetrating the
regime, the bombing is a clear sign that the
regime is falling apart.
Stratfor
argues that foreign diplomacy would be more
decisive to the outcome of the conflict on the
ground than the actions of the rebels, and that
Russia's strategy "to prolong the Syrian crisis
for a while and thus keep the United States
preoccupied" is increasingly failing. "[L]ike
everyone else with an interest in Syria, Russia is
being pushed into action," the analysis continues.
Stratfor further predicts that the West
will have a hard time shaping "an alternative
regime" in Syria, and claims that the bombing in
Bulgaria, which happened hours after the attack in
Damascus, may have been related.
"Depending on who the perpetrators were,"
writes the organization, "the July 18 bus bombing
targeting Israeli tourists in Bulgaria and botched
attack on Israeli tourists in Cyprus suggest that
Iran is relying on its militant arm to intimidate
its way into this negotiation by sending the
message that the cost of excluding Iran is too
high to bear."
On the latter point, it is
important to note that first the Israeli leaders,
and more recently an anonymous "senior American
official" interviewed by The New York Times,
pointed a finger at Iran and Hezbollah for the
bloody attack at Bourghas airport in Bulgaria.
It is certainly possible that there is a
link between the two attacks on Wednesday. The
Syrian regime has long threatened to attack Israel
if cornered, and while firing missiles at Tel Aviv
would be suicidal (and Assad may not have reached
that stage yet), terrorist attacks shrouded in
"plausible deniability" can be used to convey a
bloody message. Alternatively, Iran and Hezbollah
may have used their networks in order to help
negotiate their role in the Assad aftermath. (Once
again, in the often-odd logic of Middle Eastern
bargaining, these two scenarios are not mutually
exclusive).
For now, however, there are
few clues about the identity of the suicide
terrorist, his support network and route of
infiltration in the country - or even, as a an
independent Bulgarian analyst told the Asia Times
Online, about the type of explosives used. Initial
reports that the attacker was a Swedish national
of Algerian descent who had been detained at
Guantanamo Bay were subsequently discredited.
Claims that Iran and Hezbollah were behind the
attack, moreover, can have political and military
consequences and can be used for propaganda
purposes.
Similarly, it is too early to
call the end of the Assad rule in Syria, even as
the country is progressively collapsing into
chaos. There is a good deal of redundancy in the
Syrian security machine, and if Assad can regain
his footing, he may be able to mount a
counter-offensive. The ensuing battles threaten to
be bloody, and the violence can spill both near
and far.
Victor Kotsev is a
journalist and political analyst.
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