AVOID MUSLIM SYRIA

Syrian rebels topple Assad who flees to Russia in Mideast shakeup

By Maya Gebeily and Timour Azhari
December 8, 2024

DAMASCUS, Dec 8 (Reuters) - Syrian rebels seized the capital Damascus unopposed on Sunday after a lightning advance that sent President Bashar al-Assad fleeing to Russia after a 13-year civil war and six decades of his family's autocratic rule.

In one of the biggest turning points for the Middle East in generations, the fall of Assad's government wiped out a bastion from which Iran and Russia exercised influence across the Arab world. Moscow gave asylum to Assad and his family, Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia's ambassador to international organizations in Vienna, said on his Telegram channel.

His sudden overthrow, at the hands of a revolt partly backed by Turkey and with roots in jihadist Sunni Islam, limits Iran's ability to spread weapons to its allies and could cost Russia its Mediterranean naval base. It could allow millions of refugees scattered for more than a decade in camps across Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan to finally return home.

For Syrians, it brought a sudden unexpected end to a war in deep freeze for years, with hundreds of thousands dead, cities pounded to dust and an economy hollowed by global sanctions.

"How many people were displaced across the world? How many people lived in tents? How many drowned in the seas?" the top rebel commander, Abu Mohammed al-Golani, told a huge crowd at the medieval Umayyad Mosque in central Damascus, referring to refugees who died trying to reach Europe.

"A new history, my brothers, is being written in the entire region after this great victory," he said, adding that with hard work Syria would be "a beacon for the Islamic nation."

The Assad police state - known since his father seized power in the 1960s as one of the harshest in the Middle East with hundreds of thousands of political prisoners - melted away overnight.

Bewildered and elated inmates poured out of jails after rebels blasted open their cells. Reunited families wept in joy. Newly freed prisoners were filmed at dawn running through the Damascus streets holding up the fingers of both hands to show how many years they had been in prison.

"We toppled the regime!" a voice shouted as one prisoner yelled and skipped with delight.

The White Helmets rescue organization said it had dispatched five emergency teams to the notorious Sedhaya prison to search for hidden underground cells believed to hold detainees.

DEFACED ASSAD IMAGES

As the sun set in Damascus without Assad for the first time, roads leading into the city were mostly empty, apart from motorcycles carrying armed men and rebel vehicles caked with mud as camouflage.

Some men could be seen looting a shopping centre on the road between the capital and the Lebanese border. The myriad checkpoints lining the road to Damascus were empty. Posters of Assad were torn at his eyes. A burning Syrian military truck was parked diagonally on the road out of the city.

A thick column of black smoke billowed from the Mazzeh neighbourhood, where Israeli strikes earlier had targeted Syrian state security branches, according to two security sources.

Intermittent gunfire rang out in apparent celebration.

Shops and restaurants closed early in line with a curfew imposed by the rebels. Just before it came into effect, people could be seen briskly walking home with stacks of bread.

Earlier, the rebels said they had entered the capital with no sign of army deployments. Thousands of people in cars and on foot congregated at a main square in Damascus waving and chanting "Freedom."

People were seen walking inside the Al-Rawda Presidential Palace, with some leaving carrying furniture. A motorcycle was parked on the intricately-laid parquet floor of a gilded hall.

The Syrian rebel coalition said it was working to complete the transfer of power to a transitional governing body with executive powers.

"The great Syrian revolution has moved from the stage of struggle to overthrow the Assad regime to the struggle to build a Syria together that befits the sacrifices of its people," it added in a statement.

Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali, prime minister under Assad, called for free elections and said he had been in contact with Golani to discuss the transitional period.

Golani, whose group was once Syria's branch of al Qaeda but has softened its image to reassure members of minority sects and foreign countries, said there was no room for turning back.

ARAB WORLD STUNNED

The pace of events stunned Arab capitals and raised concerns about more instability on top of the Gaza war.

U.S. President Joe Biden, in a televised address, cheered Assad's fall but acknowledged that it was also a moment of risk and uncertainty.

"As we all turn to the question of what comes next, the United States will work with our partners and the stakeholders in Syria to help them seize an opportunity to manage the risk," Biden said.

The U.S. Central Command said its forces conducted dozens of airstrikes targeting known Islamic State camps and operatives in central Syria on Sunday.

Later in the day Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said he spoke with Turkish Minister of National Defense Yasar Guler, emphasizing that the United States is watching closely.

Jubilant supporters of the revolt crowded Syrian embassies around the world, lowering red, white and black Assad-era flags and replacing them with the green, white and black flag flown by his opponents.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Assad's fall was thanks to blows Israel had dealt to Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah, once the lynchpin of Assad's security forces.

"The barbaric state has fallen," French President Emmanuel Macron said.

When the celebrations fade, Syria's new leaders face the daunting task of trying to deliver stability to a diverse country that will need billions of dollars in aid.

During the civil war, which erupted in 2011 as an uprising against Assad, his forces and their Russian allies bombed cities to rubble. The refugee crisis across the Middle East was one of the biggest of modern times and caused a political reckoning in Europe when a million people arrived in 2015.

In recent years Turkey had backed some rebels in a small redoubt in the northwest and along its border. The United States, which still has 900 soldiers on the ground, backed a Kurdish-led alliance that fought Islamic State jihadists from 2014-2017.

The biggest strategic losers were Russia and Iran, which intervened in the war's early years to rescue Assad, helping him recapture most territory and all major cities. The front lines were frozen four years ago under a deal Russia and Iran reached with Turkey.

But Moscow's focus on its war in Ukraine and the blows to Iran's allies following the war in Gaza - particularly the decimation of Hezbollah by Israel over the past two months - left Assad with scant support.

How Syria’s rebel leader went from radical jihadist to a blazer-wearing ‘revolutionary’

By Mostafa Salem, CNN
Fri December 6, 2024

Ahmed Al Sharaa, an Islamist militant in his late 20s, moved back to Syria from Iraq in 2011 with six men and a monthly stipend of $50,000 from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who would go on to become the world’s most wanted terrorist. His mission was to establish Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat Al Nusra.

Sharaa is now commanding thousands of men in an armed rebellion threatening to topple the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. He’s better known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani.

Born in the Saudi capital Riyadh to Syrian parents from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and raised in Damascus, Jolani said in an interview with PBS in 2021 that he was galvanized by the Second Palestinian Intifada (uprising) against Israel in the early 2000s and went on to become a jihadist in Iraq after the 2003 US invasion. His deep knowledge of Syria caught the attention of his commanders in Iraq as they were looking to expand their foothold in Syria during the country’s uprising.

Over the years, his influence grew despite his identity being kept under wraps. During television interviews, he never faced the camera directly and always covered his face in public appearances.

His public debut was in a 2016 video when he announced a split from Al Qaeda to create what he said was a Syria-focused anti-regime front with other local factions, called Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (the Front for the Conquest of the Levant), which later changed to Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS), or the Organization for the Liberation of the Levant.

“This new formation has no relation to any external party,” he said at the time, distancing it from his radical Islamist past.

The split was strategic. The goal was to fend off attacks from world powers like the United States and Russia, both of which had intervened in the Syrian civil war to target Islamist groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS. It was also the start of Jolani’s gradual transformation from the classic anti-West jihadist, to a more palatable revolutionary. He told PBS in 2021 that he had no desire to wage war against Western nations.

Western-style blazer

In the years that followed, Jolani replaced his jihadist camo attire for a Western-style blazer and shirt, established a semi-technocratic government in Idlib, which his group held control over, and promoted himself as a viable partner in regional and Western efforts to curb Iran’s influence in the Middle East. He conducted operations against ISIS including the 2023 high-profile killing of ISIS leader Abu Hussein Al-Husseini al-Qurashi.

“I believe that everyone in life goes through phases and experiences…As you grow, you learn, and you continue to learn until the very last day of your life.” he said when CNN asked about his transformation.

This week, his group publicly published his real name for the first time in a statement announcing the capture of Hama.

“He’s shredded all transnational ties and objectives and rooted out ISIS and Al Qaeda operatives in areas he controls,” said Dareen Khalifa, a senior advisor at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group think tank.

Soft-spoken with a well-groomed beard, the 42-year-old Jolani sat down with CNN for the first time this week wearing green military fatigue. He exuded confidence and tried to present a moderate worldview during the interview, avoiding references to jihad and repeatedly presenting his fight as a “revolution” to liberate Syria from Assad’s oppression.

His media appearance of late have also attempted to promote leadership qualities he gained over the years governing 4 million people in Idlib province, northwest Syria.

In Idlib he embarked on a campaign to eliminate ISIS as well as potential threats to his influence, arresting former commanders and eliminating rivals.

Human rights groups and local monitors have raised alarm about HTS’ more recent treatment of dissidents in Idlib, alleging that the group conducted harsh crackdowns on protests and tortured and abused dissidents. Jolani told CNN that incidents of abuse in prisons “were not done under our orders or directions” and HTS had already held those involved accountable.

Despite attempts to distance his group from extremist organizations, the United States still designated his new group a terror organization and targeted members of HTS who once fought for Al Qaeda, proving his rebranding attempts a failure.

But the landscape in Syria and the Middle East has changed since. A collapse of the Syrian regime could finally break Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance – a network of allied regional states and militias. Jolani may be positioning himself to play a key role in that outcome, hoping it will earn him favor both in the region and with the West.

In a shock offensive, insurgents breach Syria’s largest city for the first time since 2016

November 29, 2024

BEIRUT (AP) — Insurgents breached Syria’s largest city Friday and clashed with government forces for the first time since 2016, according to a war monitor and fighters, in a surprise attack that sent residents fleeing and added fresh uncertainty to a region reeling from multiple wars.

The advance on Aleppo followed a shock offensive launched by insurgents Wednesday, as thousands of fighters swept through villages and towns in Syria’s northwestern countryside. Residents fled neighborhoods on the city’s edge because of missiles and gunfire, according to witnesses in Aleppo. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the country’s unresolved civil war, said dozens of fighters from both sides were killed.

The attack injected new violence into a region experiencing dual wars in Gaza and Lebanon involving Israel, and other conflicts, including the Syrian civil war that began in 2011.

Aleppo has not been attacked by opposition forces since they were ousted from eastern neighborhoods in 2016 following a grueling military campaign in which Syrian government forces were backed by Russia, Iran and its allied groups.

But this time, there was no sign of a significant pushback from government forces or their allies. Instead, reports emerged of government forces melting away in the face of advances, and insurgents posted messages on social media calling on troops to surrender.

Robert Ford, who was the last U.S. ambassador to Syria, said the attack showed that Syrian government forces are “extremely weak.” In some cases, he said, they appear to have “almost been routed.”

This week’s advances were among the largest in recent years by opposition factions, led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, or HTS, and represent the most intense fighting in northwestern Syria since 2020, when government forces seized areas previously controlled by the opposition.

The offensive came as Iran-linked groups, primarily Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which has backed Syrian government forces since 2015, have been preoccupied with their own battles at home.

A ceasefire in Hezbollah’s two-month war with Israel took effect Wednesday, the day the Syrian opposition factions announced their offensive. Israel has also escalated its attacks against Hezbollah and Iran-linked targets in Syria during the last 70 days.

Dareen Khalifa, a senior adviser with the International Crisis Group and an expert on Syrian groups, said the insurgents have signaled for a while that they were ready for an offensive. But no one expected the swift advance of the forces toward Aleppo.

“It’s not only that the Russians are distracted and bogged down in Ukraine, but also the Iranians are distracted and bogged down elsewhere. Hezbollah’s distracted and bogged down elsewhere, and the regime is absolutely cornered,” she said. “But the surprise element comes in with how quickly the regime crumbled.”

The attack on Aleppo followed weeks of simmering low-level violence, including government attacks on opposition-held areas. Turkey, which has backed Syrian opposition groups, failed in its diplomatic efforts to prevent the government attacks, which were seen as a violation of a 2019 agreement sponsored by Russia, Turkey and Iran to freeze the line of the conflict.

Turkish security officials said Thursday that Syrian opposition groups initially launched a long-planned “limited” offensive toward Aleppo, where attacks targeting civilians originated. However, the offensive expanded as Syrian government forces began retreating from their positions, the officials said.

The aim of the offensive was to reestablish the boundaries of the de-escalation zone, according to Turkish officials.

The 2016 battle for Aleppo was a turning point in the war between Syrian government forces and rebel fighters after 2011 protests against Bashar Assad’s rule turned into an all-out war.

Russia and Iran and its allied groups helped Syrian government forces reclaim control of the city that year after a grueling military campaign and a siege that lasted for weeks.

Besides backing opposition forces, Turkey has also established a military presence in Syria, sending troops into parts of the northwest. Separately and largely in the east of Syria, the United States has supported Syrian Kurdish forces fighting Islamic State militants.

The Syrian government did not comment on insurgents breaching Aleppo city limits.

The Kremlin said Friday that it considered the attack an encroachment on Syria’s sovereignty and that it supported the quickest possible establishment of constitutional order in the region.

“Of course, this is a violation of Syria’s sovereignty in this region,” Russian presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told a press briefing.

Syria’s armed forces said in a statement Friday that they clashed with insurgents in the countryside around Aleppo and Idlib, destroying drones and heavy weaponry. They vowed to repel the attack and accused the insurgents of spreading false information about their advances.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the insurgents detonated two car bombs Friday at the western edge of Aleppo. The war monitor said insurgents were also able to seize control of Saraqeb, south of Aleppo, a town at the strategic intersection of the highways linking Aleppo with Damascus and the coast. Syrian government authorities diverted traffic from that highway Thursday.

An insurgent commander posted a recorded message on social media calling on Aleppo residents to cooperate with the advancing forces.

Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency reported that the insurgents entered the city center Friday and now control about 70 locations in Aleppo and Idlib provinces.

Syria’s state media reported that projectiles from insurgents landed in student accommodations at Aleppo’s university in the city center, killing four people, including two students.

Syrian armed forces said the insurgents are violating a 2019 agreement that de-escalated fighting in the area, the last remaining opposition stronghold for years.

Hezbollah was “the main force” in the government’s control of Aleppo, said Rami Abdurrahman, head of the Observatory.

In a phone call with his Syrian counterpart, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi described the insurgent attacks in Syria “as a plot orchestrated by the U.S. and the Zionist regime following the regime’s defeat in Lebanon and Palestine.”

Insurgents posted videos online showing they were using drones, a new weapon for them. It was not clear to what extent the drones were used on the battleground.

Insurgents attacked a military airbase southeast of Aleppo with drones early Friday, destroying a helicopter, the Anadolu Agency reported. The opposition groups also seized heavy weapons and military vehicles belonging to the government forces, the agency said.

IDF exposes Hezbollah smuggling routes via Syria

The IDF reveals a series of attacks that thwarted attempts to transfer weapons through Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon, including a tunnel that crossed under the border.

Yoni Kempinski
Nov 25, 2024
Israel National News

For decades, the Iranian regime has been acting to fund and supply weapons to its terror proxies across the Middle East, with Hezbollah being its central proxy. Iran cooperated closely with Hezbollah to establish covert routes into Lebanon through Syrian territory, using thousands of trucks and hundreds of aircraft to smuggle thousands of missiles and additional weapon components over the years.

The smuggling route is overseen and used by Iran to arm Hezbollah, with the tacit cooperation of the Syrian authorities. Senior officials in Syria assist in the weapons smuggling effort using two main methods: storing weapons prior to their transfer to Lebanon in Syrian military warehouses, and facilitating transfers through internal crossings within Syria that are managed by the Syrian Military Security Unit.

This effort is led by Hezbollah’s Unit 4400. Established in 2000, the unit is responsible for smuggling weapons into Lebanon from Iran and its proxies and developing numerous strategic smuggling routes along the Syria-Lebanon border.
During the war, the IDF has conducted extensive intelligence-based operations against Unit 4400 and various weapons smuggling routes. These include the elimination of the commander of Unit 4400, Muhammad Ja'far Qasir, in early October in Beirut, and his designated successor, Ali Hassan Gharib, a few weeks later in Damascus. The weapons smuggling routes that pass through Syria into Lebanon were not only targeted in the last few months, but also over the years as part of a long-term effort by the IDF.

A series of strikes that disrupted attempts to transfer weapons through Syrian territory to Hezbollah in Lebanon are now cleared for publication. In this series of strikes, which were made possible due to precise intelligence gathered and developed over many years, the IDF targeted Hezbollah's ability to expand its weapons arsenal, thereby preventing the terrorist organization from launching further attacks against Israeli civilians.

The IDF will continue to operate to locate and thwart any attempt by the Iranian regime to arm its proxies in the Middle East.IDF exposes Hezbollah smuggling routes via Syria


The IDF reveals a series of attacks that thwarted attempts to transfer weapons through Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon, including a tunnel that crossed under the border.


Yoni Kempinski
Nov 25, 2024
Israel National News

For decades, the Iranian regime has been acting to fund and supply weapons to its terror proxies across the Middle East, with Hezbollah being its central proxy. Iran cooperated closely with Hezbollah to establish covert routes into Lebanon through Syrian territory, using thousands of trucks and hundreds of aircraft to smuggle thousands of missiles and additional weapon components over the years.


The smuggling route is overseen and used by Iran to arm Hezbollah, with the tacit cooperation of the Syrian authorities. Senior officials in Syria assist in the weapons smuggling effort using two main methods: storing weapons prior to their transfer to Lebanon in Syrian military warehouses, and facilitating transfers through internal crossings within Syria that are managed by the Syrian Military Security Unit.


This effort is led by Hezbollah’s Unit 4400. Established in 2000, the unit is responsible for smuggling weapons into Lebanon from Iran and its proxies and developing numerous strategic smuggling routes along the Syria-Lebanon border.
During the war, the IDF has conducted extensive intelligence-based operations against Unit 4400 and various weapons smuggling routes. These include the elimination of the commander of Unit 4400, Muhammad Ja'far Qasir, in early October in Beirut, and his designated successor, Ali Hassan Gharib, a few weeks later in Damascus. The weapons smuggling routes that pass through Syria into Lebanon were not only targeted in the last few months, but also over the years as part of a long-term effort by the IDF.

A series of strikes that disrupted attempts to transfer weapons through Syrian territory to Hezbollah in Lebanon are now cleared for publication. In this series of strikes, which were made possible due to precise intelligence gathered and developed over many years, the IDF targeted Hezbollah's ability to expand its weapons arsenal, thereby preventing the terrorist organization from launching further attacks against Israeli civilians.


The IDF will continue to operate to locate and thwart any attempt by the Iranian regime to arm its proxies in the Middle East.
IDF exposes Hezbollah smuggling routes via Syria
The IDF reveals a series of attacks that thwarted attempts to transfer weapons through Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon, including a tunnel that crossed under the border.
Yoni Kempinski
Nov 25, 2024
Israel National News

For decades, the Iranian regime has been acting to fund and supply weapons to its terror proxies across the Middle East, with Hezbollah being its central proxy. Iran cooperated closely with Hezbollah to establish covert routes into Lebanon through Syrian territory, using thousands of trucks and hundreds of aircraft to smuggle thousands of missiles and additional weapon components over the years.
The smuggling route is overseen and used by Iran to arm Hezbollah, with the tacit cooperation of the Syrian authorities. Senior officials in Syria assist in the weapons smuggling effort using two main methods: storing weapons prior to their transfer to Lebanon in Syrian military warehouses, and facilitating transfers through internal crossings within Syria that are managed by the Syrian Military Security Unit.
This effort is led by Hezbollah’s Unit 4400. Established in 2000, the unit is responsible for smuggling weapons into Lebanon from Iran and its proxies and developing numerous strategic smuggling routes along the Syria-Lebanon border.
During the war, the IDF has conducted extensive intelligence-based operations against Unit 4400 and various weapons smuggling routes. These include the elimination of the commander of Unit 4400, Muhammad Ja'far Qasir, in early October in Beirut, and his designated successor, Ali Hassan Gharib, a few weeks later in Damascus. The weapons smuggling routes that pass through Syria into Lebanon were not only targeted in the last few months, but also over the years as part of a long-term effort by the IDF.

A series of strikes that disrupted attempts to transfer weapons through Syrian territory to Hezbollah in Lebanon are now cleared for publication. In this series of strikes, which were made possible due to precise intelligence gathered and developed over many years, the IDF targeted Hezbollah's ability to expand its weapons arsenal, thereby preventing the terrorist organization from launching further attacks against Israeli civilians.
The IDF will continue to operate to locate and thwart any attempt by the Iranian regime to arm its proxies in the Middle East.

Islamic State kills 11 in central Syria gun attack, says monitor

10 civilians and a Syrian soldier are killed as gunmen attack group collecting truffles, says UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights; state news puts toll lower

By AFP
12 February 2023

BEIRUT, Lebanon — At least 11 people, mostly civilians, were killed in a central Syria attack blamed on the Islamic State group, a war monitor said Sunday.

The IS group “attacked about 75 people on Saturday while they were collecting truffles in the Palmyra area, in the eastern countryside of Homs,” said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group of unclear funding.

The attack killed “10 civilians, including a woman, and a member of the (Syrian) regime forces,” it said, adding that others remain missing.

Syria’s state news agency SANA reported the attack but gave a lower death toll, saying IS “terrorists” fired machine guns and killed four civilians, including a woman.

Ten others were wounded in the attack, some “critically,” the news agency added.

After the jihadists lost their last scraps of territory following a military onslaught backed by a US-led coalition in March 2019, IS remnants in Syria mostly retreated into desert hideouts in the country’s east.

They have since used such hideouts to ambush Kurdish-led forces and Syrian government troops while continuing to mount attacks in Iraq.

Many people, including women and children, have been targeted in recent years while truffle hunting in central, northeastern and eastern areas of Syria.

In April 2021, the extremist group launched a similar attack, abducting 19 people, mostly civilians, in the eastern countryside of the central city of Hama.

Syrian and Russian helicopters continue to launch airstrikes targeting IS desert hideouts.

The Syrian conflict, which was triggered by the suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations, has claimed around 500,000 lives and displaced around half the country’s prewar population.

Syria: dozens killed in Isis bus attack

Assault reportedly targeted Syrian regime soldiers returning to their posts in Deir ez-Zor, near Iraq border

Bethan McKernan, Middle East correspondent

Thu 31 Dec 2020

The Guardian

At least 37 people in Syria have been killed in one of the biggest attacks carried out by Islamic State since the fall of the self-proclaimed caliphate last year.

The assault on Wednesday reportedly targeted a convoy of Syrian regime soldiers and militiamen returning from leave to their posts in Deir ez-Zor province, a mainly desert area on the border with Iraq.

The official state news agency, Sana, reported that a terrorist attack on a bus on the main highway killed 25 civilians and wounded 13. Other sources, including local residents, a military defector and the UK-based monitor Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), put the toll higher and claimed soldiers were onboard. One source told Reuters that the men were from Bashar al-Assad’s elite Fourth Brigade.

According to SOHR, the bus was ambushed in a well-planned operation near the village of Shula by jihadists who set up a checkpoint to stop the convoy and detonated bombs before opening fire. Two more buses managed to escape.

“It was one of the deadliest attacks since the fall of the Isis (self-proclaimed) caliphate” last year, the Observatory head, Rami Abdel Rahman, told AFP.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the incident.

Founded amid the chaos of Syria’s civil war, Isis declared its so-called caliphate in 2014 and at one point controlled an area of Syria and Iraq as big as the UK and home to around 8 million people.

The group lost control of the last slivers of its territory in the Deir Ez-Zor desert in March 2019 after five years of offensives conducted mostly by the US and its regional allies to oust the militants from both countries.

Jihadist sleeper cells have continued to launch ambushes and hit-and-run attacks from caves and bases in Syria’s vast desert, and Isis militants and Assad’s troops often clash in the area.

There has been a marked surge in the violence in recent months, residents say. In April, 27 fighters loyal to the Damascus government and allied Iranian militiamen were killed in an Isis attack near the desert town of al-Sukhna.

Local tribes have also voiced anger over executions carried out by regime-allied Iranian militias of dozens of nomads suspected of affiliation to the militants.

In the north of the country in recent days, rebel fighters backed by Turkey have clashed with Kurdish forces near Ain Issa, a town on a strategic highway that has been patrolled by Russian and Turkish troops since US forces withdrew from the area in 2019.

Turkish forces and their Syrian insurgent allies capitalised on the US drawdown to seize territory previously controlled by the Kurdish-led SDF militia, which fought alongside the US against Isis.

Ain Issa, east of the Euphrates river, also has a sprawling camp for displaced people, where the SDF has held families of Isis fighters, including foreigners.

The violence has led Russia to send military police reinforcements to the area.

A decade of civil war in Syria has drawn in foreign powers, killed an estimated 500,000 people, and driven more than half of the pre-war population from their homes.

Syria: 126 killed as bomb hits buses with evacuees, group says

By Jason Hanna, Salma Abdelaziz and Eyad Kourdi, CNN

Sun April 16, 2017

The death toll from a bomb attack targeting evacuees leaving besieged Syrian towns has risen to 126, a monitoring group said Sunday.

The blast hit a convoy of buses Saturday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which reported the higher death toll.

The blast struck buses of people leaving their towns as part of a rebel-regime swap.

At least 109 of those killed were evacuees from the pro-regime Shia villages of Al-Fu'ah and Kafraya while the rest were aid workers and rebels guarding the convoy, according to the Syrian Observatory.

At least 68 children were among those killed in the attack on Saturday.

In addition to the deaths, it also injured 55 others in Rashidin, a suburb of Aleppo, according to Syria Civil Defense, also known as the White Helmets.

The convoy of buses, which were parked at the time, was carrying thousands of people from two regime-held but rebel-besieged villages in northwestern Syria, state-run media reported.

People were evacuating two rebel-held towns in southwest Syria at the same time under a so-called Four Towns Agreement.

Video shown on state television showed charred buses parked on the side of a road. People walked outside the buses, surveying the damage as well as bodies lying on the roadway and a grass median.

The evacuees were bound for regime-held parts of Aleppo.

The state-run Syrian Arab News Agency reported the convoy continued, and the first buses arrived late Saturday in Aleppo. The buses headed to the Jebrin area for a temporary housing center equipped with food and medical supplies, SANA said.

No group has claimed responsibility.

During a televised interview, Rami Abdul Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said a suicide bomber claimed he was carrying food items and blew himself up in a fuel station.

Abdul Rahman said he doesn't believe the Syrian regime is behind the attack. He said the regime kills scores of people daily using all types of weaponry and doesn't need to kill its own sympathizers.

The evacuees had been allowed to leave their villages this week as part of a Shia-Sunni exchange agreement between Syria and insurgents who have been fighting a civil war for six years.

As part of the deal, government forces are allowing thousands of rebels and civilians to leave two towns in southwest Syria: Madaya and Zabadani, according to the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Madaya and Zabadani have been under the control of anti-government fighters but facing siege from forces loyal to the regime.

The rebel group Ahrar al-Sham tweeted that some of its members died in the blast. They were at the site to ensure the convoy's passage, Ahrar al-Sham said. The group said it was investigating to find out who was responsible.

The explosion happened as both sets of evacuees were stopped in separate locations outside Aleppo. Each were heading to areas controlled by forces friendly to them.

The explosives-rigged car had been packed with children's food supplies, perhaps to disguise it, a correspondent with SANA reported.

The convoy that departed Al-Fu'ah and Kafriya had 5,000 people, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Thousands were leaving Madaya and Zabadani, including more than 2,000 rebel fighters, their families and other civilians, the monitoring group said.

The deal was brokered by Iran and Qatar, Agence France-Presse reported.

A statement from the spokesperson for the U.N. Secretary-General said: "The evacuations were being conducted in accordance with the agreement reached pursuant to the Four Towns agreement. ...

"We call on the parties to ensure the safety and security of those waiting to be evacuated. Those responsible for today's attack must be brought to justice."

The Syrian American Medical Society said in a statement: "This forced displacement is a clear violation of international humanitarian law, and marks yet another sad chapter in the history of this crisis. The absence of the UN and international community from this process has left the civilian populations especially vulnerable, leading to horrific events such as what took place today.

"The UN must not abandon its role in protecting innocent civilians and enforcing international humanitarian laws."

In a blow, twin attacks on Syrian security kill at least 32

February 25, 2017

BEIRUT (AP) — In synchronized attacks, insurgents stormed into heavily guarded security offices in Syria's central Homs city, clashed with troops and then blew themselves up, killing a senior officer and at least 31 others, state media and officials reported.

The swift, high-profile attacks against the Military Intelligence and State Security offices, among Syria's most powerful, were claimed by an al-Qaida-linked insurgent coalition known as the Levant Liberation Committee. A Syrian lawmaker on a state-affiliated TV station called it a "heavy blow" to Syria's security apparatuses.

The attacks came as Syrian government and opposition delegates meet in Geneva in U.N. -mediated talks aimed at building momentum toward peace despite low expectations of a breakthrough. The U.N. envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura called the attacks "tragic."

"Every time we had talks or a negotiation, there was always someone who was trying to spoil it. We were expecting that," he said.

Syria's ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar al-Ja'afari, who leads Damascus' delegation to the peace talks in Geneva, said the attacks were a message from the "sponsors of terrorism" to the peace talks.

Al-Ja'afari said the attacks will not go unanswered.

No footage or pictures emerged from the usually tightly secured scene of the attacks in the Homs city center. Activists said the city was on high alert after the attacks, with government troops blocking roads and forcing shops to close.

The government responded with an intense airstrike campaign against the only neighborhood on the city's outskirts still under opposition control and other parts of rural Homs.

In 2015, the government regained control of the city of Homs, which was one of the first to rise against President Bashar Assad. But the al-Waer neighborhood remained in the hands of rebels and settlement negotiations to evacuate it have repeatedly faltered.

The attack early Saturday was the most high-profile in a city that has been the scene of repeated suicide attacks since the government regained control. The head of Military Intelligence services Maj. Gen Hassan Daeboul, who was killed in Saturday's attack, had been transferred from the capital to Homs last year to address security failures in the city, according to local media reports at the time.

Syrian State News Agency SANA said Daeboul was killed by one of the suicide bombers.

The governor of Homs Province, Talal Barzani, told The Associated Press there were three blasts in total, killing more than 32 people. He said the attackers were wearing suicide belts, which they detonated in the security offices. The two agencies are two kilometers (1.2 miles) apart, and according to activists from the city they are heavily guarded, including security cameras.

According to state-affiliated al-Ikhbariya TV, at least six assailants attacked the two security compounds in Homs' adjacent al-Ghouta and al-Mahata neighborhoods, clashing with security officers before at least two of them detonated explosive vests. It was not clear if there are any civilians among the casualties.

The head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights Rami Abdurrahman said the synchronized attacks killed at least 42 security officers and personnel.

The differing casualty estimates could not be immediately reconciled and are not uncommon in the immediate aftermath of violence in Syria.

Abdurrahman said the attacks started with clashes at the checkpoints. Then, three suicide bombers blew themselves up consecutively inside the courtyard of the Military Intelligence Services building as troops gathered. The attack briefly undermined the troops' control of the building, said Abdurrahman. That attack killed at least 30, the Observatory said.

In the meantime, a similar scenario was playing out at the State Security branch, where at least 12 were killed. Brigadier Ibrahim Darwish, head of the agency, was also critically wounded, according to al-Ikhbariya.

An al-Qaida-linked insurgent coalition, the Levant Liberation Committee, said five attackers stormed the two different security offices. The group said bombs were also detonated at checkpoints outside the buildings just as rescuers were arriving, leading to more casualties, according to a statement on their Telegram channel.

A Homs-based opposition activist Bebars al-Talawy said the attackers used gun-silencers in their initial attack, enabling them to enter the premise and surprise their target.

"This is the biggest breach of security agencies in Homs," al-Talawy said, speaking in a Skype interview. "They were almost inside the offices."

Al-Talawy said Daeboul was in charge of negotiating surrender deals with the rebel holdouts in al-Waer and other rebel-held areas in rural Homs.

The coordinated attacks, using a combination of armed assault and suicide bombing, are among the most spectacular perpetrated against security agencies in the six-year old conflict. One of the most dramatic attacks came in July 2012, when insurgents detonated explosives inside a high-level crisis meeting in Damascus, killing four top regime officials, including the brother-in-law of President Bashar Assad and the then-defense minister.

The Syrian security forces run a vast intelligence network that enjoys great power and operates with little judicial oversight. Rights groups and Syria monitors hold the various branches responsible for mass arrests, torture, extrajudicial killings and firing on protesters.

In a February report, Amnesty International reported that between 5,000 and 13,000 people were killed in mass hangings in the military's Saydnaya prison in Damascus between 2011 and 2015. It said the detainees were sent to the prison from around the country by the state's four main security branches, including Military Intelligence.

After the attacks, Syrian opposition activists took to social media to recount stories of torture and abuse for which Daeboul was allegedly responsible when he managed a military intelligence unit believed responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses.

Meanwhile, government supporters hailed him as one of the country's best security officers, who "broke the back of the terrorists," a pro-government Facebook page posted. The government refers to all opposition as "terrorists."

At least 5,000 jihadists entered Syria from Turkey, including Chinese Uighurs

4-22-2016

Preparations are underway for a big fight in Aleppo. Turkey allows weapons and recruits through. Saudi Arabia blocks peace talks. For people in villages near Aleppo, there is only flight.

Damascus (AsiaNews) – Syrian Prime Minister Wael Nader al-Halqi confirmed recent reports that more than 5,000 Jihadis travelled through Turkey on their way to Idlib and the outskirts of Aleppo.

The Syrian leader told Russian news agency Sputnik that “Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar, as well as Western countries such as Great Britain and France have no real desire to move the process of the political settlement,” and are pushing for a military solution.

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Al Moallem said many countries continue to provide Islamist fighters advanced weapons, most notably Turkey.

The Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported that the minister told a Chinese special envoy on official visit to Damascus that Syria would “continue combating the terrorist organizations which are constantly supported by some countries, such as Turkey, being offered passage for terrorists and provided with advanced weapons”.

The agency went to say that an international stand must “be taken to the effect of respecting the Security Council resolutions”.

Syria’s UN Permanent Representative Houssam-Eddin Ala said that hundreds of new fighters have entered Syria through Turkey, noting that “Saudi Arabia continues to put pressure on the delegation from the Riyadh conference to reject any agreement.”

A Christian living southwest of Aleppo, who asked his name be withheld, told AsiaNews that a large number of Jihadi fighters from the Islamic Turkmen Party are being deployed.

“They received weapons and ammunition from the al Nusra Front and Jund al-Aqsa (Soldiers of Al Aqsa), which includes Syrians and others. Meanwhile, logistical work is being undertaken, with new positions with sandbags being prepared.”

“In the past few days, East Asian-looking fighters have joined the Islamic Turkmen Party, speaking Chinese,” the source added. They are probably “Chinese Uighurs coming through Turkey”.

Al Ahrar Sham fighters “are no longer on the frontline, but in the rear.”

In the village of Al Bawabiya (southwest of Aleppo, two kilometres from the Aleppo-Damascus Road, where the new Jihadis from Islamic Turkmen Party have set up their headquarters), the people are scared to death by the arrival of Turkic Uighur fighters "who have taken over abandoned houses".

"They know that preparations are underway for a big fight," he said. Residents have only two choices: “join the fighters, coerced or to survive, or quickly flee. Standing up to these armed men is impossible.” (PB)

ISIS massacres 300 and kidnaps at least 400 including women and children during attack on government-held city

•    Activists says ISIS have kidnapped at least 400 civilians in Deir Ezzor

•    Women and children are thought to have been captured and taken to Raqqa

•    ISIS have reportedly made gains on the eastern side of Deir Ezzor yesterday

•    For more of the latest Islamic State news visit www.dailymail.co.uk/isis

By TOM WYKE FOR MAILONLINE

17 January 2016

ISIS have abducted at least 400 civilians including women and children after capturing new territory in an assault on Syria's eastern city of Deir Ezzor.

Activists from the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said they believed ISIS rounded up the civilians following an attack on the north of the city.

'After their attack on Deir Ezzor yesterday, IS abducted at least 400 civilians from the residents of the Al-Baghaliyeh suburb it captured and adjacent areas in the northwest of the city,' the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

'Those abducted, all of whom are Sunnis, include women, children and family members of pro-regime fighters,' Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said.

They were transported to areas under ISIS control in the west of Deir Ezzor province and to the border with the Raqqa province to the northwest.

The IS attack on Deir Ezzor on Saturday killed at least 85 civilians and 50 regime forces, the monitor said.

ISIS posted a statement confirming they had launched a 'massive assault on Syrian regime positions' in the city of Deir Ezzor.

The jihadi group claimed they have gained control over the radio tower, several warehouses and outskirt neighbourhoods.

It also claimed it had killed 'dozens' of Assad regime soldiers.

'The battles are ongoing until now and we ask Allah for victory and consolidation.

Syria's state news agency SANA, quoting residents, said 'around 300 civilians' were killed in the onslaught and denounced a 'massacre'.

If confirmed it would be one of the highest tolls for a single day in Syria's nearly five-year war.

According to the Observatory, the advance put IS in control of around 60 percent of Deir Ezzor city, capital of the province of the same name in an oil-rich region bordering Iraq.

Sporadic fighting between ISIS and regime forces continued today in the northwest of the city, the monitor said.

Russian warplanes carried out airstrikes in support of regime fighters in Al-Baghaliyeh overnight, it said.

The regime still controls parts of the provincial capital and a nearby military airport despite repeated attacks from ISIS.

Islamic State militants seize Syrian city of Palmyra, threatening ancient ruins

By Loveday Morris May 20

The Washington Post

BAGHDAD — Islamic State militants seized control of the majority of the Syrian city of Palmyra on Wednesday, marking the second significant strategic gain for the group in the past week and leaving one of the region’s most renowned archaeological sites in peril.

Activists and Syrian state media said pro-government forces had withdrawn from the city 130 miles northeast of Damascus after a week-long assault by the militants. The city’s notorious Tadmor Prison, where scores of anti-regime political prisoners are incarcerated, was also in the extremist group’s hands by nightfall, activists said.

The gain consolidates the Islamic State’s control west toward the Syrian capital and east in the direction of the border with Iraq, where militants seized the city of Ramadi on Sunday. Advances by the Islamic State demonstrate the group’s ability to continue to take territory, despite recent assertions by American officials that it remains largely on the defensive after 10 months of U.S.-led airstrikes.

The fall of Palmyra to Islamic State forces effectively puts its ancient sites, which lie just on the outskirts of the modern city, in the group’s hands. Irina Bokova, director-general of UNESCO, said she was “deeply concerned” about the situation at the site, which rose to prominence as a wealthy caravan oasis in the 1st century A.D. After some 2,000 years, the striking Roman colonnades of the Temple of Baal still stand majestically in the desert.

Since its advances in Iraq last summer, the Islamic State has laid waste to sites dating to antiquity, branding them heretical according to its interpretation of Islam. Its fighters have smashed statues and buildings and sold off ancient artifacts that were small enough to be smuggled. The area surrounding Palmyra is also rich in gas and oil, potentially boosting the Islamic State’s wealth.

The “vast majority” of the city is in Islamic State hands, said a Syrian activist who is in contact with sources in the area. He spoke on the condition of anonymity for security reasons.

Clashes were continuing at the city’s military intelligence headquarters, while Islamic State fighters had surrounded the military airport and seized several weapons depots, he said.

An activist in Palmyra who for security reasons uses the pseudonym Ahmed al-Homsi said the Islamic State had released prisoners from Tadmor. The Syrian government’s warplanes were carrying out airstrikes Wednesday night, he said.

The capture of Palmyra, home to roughly 50,000 people, is one of the Islamic State’s first significant advances directly against President Bashar al-Assad’s forces. Islamic State fighters had previously won ground in Syria mainly from rebel groups.

Pro-government defense units had withdrawn from Palmyra after evacuating civilians following an attack during which Islamic State militants attempted to enter the city’s archaeological sites, the Syrian state news agency SANA reported.

Hundreds of ancient statues were removed from Palmyra for safekeeping as the militants closed in, Syrian officials told the news agency. Pro-government forces had largely pulled back 25 miles southwest to Sawwana, activists said.

Syrian Islamists: No to Democracy, Minority Rights

Rift between Syrian rebel movements grows as Islamist leader rejects democracy, declaring: ‘The Koran is our law.’

By Dalit Halevy, Maayana Miskin

12/8/2013
Israel National News

Recent statements from various leaders within the Syrian rebel movement show that the rift between secularists and Islamists remains a key issue.

A video released by a leading Islamist faction shows Islamist military leader Abu Bilal al-Homsi exhorting his followers to reject the largely secular Free Syrian Army, led by Salim Idris.

According to Al-Homsi, Idris has said that the Free Syrian Army under his command is fighting for "democracy, secularism, communism, and the rights of minority groups", including Syrian Druze.

Rebels must fight not for democracy or rights, but for Islam, Al-Homsi declared. From the beginning, the purpose of the rebellion was to institute Islamic law, he argued.

“The Koran is our law,” he emphasized.

He argued that Idris’ alleged statements constitute a betrayal of thousands of rebel fighters who died for Islam, and prove that the Free Syrian Army is taking orders from foreign powers.

Islamist groups fighting in Syria have created an “Islamic Front” including over 50 militias. The group does not include Al Qaeda-linked factions.

Western states held their first meeting with the Islamic Front last week. Their goal was reportedly to encourage Islamists to re-establish their ties with the Syrian National Coalition (SNC) and to support the upcoming “Geneva 2” peace conference.

Rebel forces report massive death toll after Syrian chemical attack

Free Syrian Army says over 1,100 people killed, though others report lower numbers; assault comes as UN inspectors in area to probe for chemical arms use; regime denies reports

BY AP AND TIMES OF ISRAEL STAFF August 21, 2013,

Syrian activists close to the country’s opposition claimed hundreds of people were killed in a devastating “poison gas” attack by regime forces outside Damascus Wednesday.

The attack came as UN chemical weapons inspectors were beginning a probe of chemical weapon use in sites around Syria.

There were several differing reports on the numbers of dead. A Free Syrian Army source told Al Arabiya the death toll stood at 1,188, while the Local Coordination Committees said some 785 people were killed. A nurse at an emergency clinic in Douma told Reuters the death toll was at 213, and the head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 40 were confirmed dead and the death toll could reach over 200.

Groups quoted activists as saying that regime forces fired “rockets with poisonous gas heads” in the attack.

The Syrian Observatory said the shelling was intense and hit the eastern suburbs of Zamalka, Arbeen and Ein Tarma. Activists told Reuters that Jobar was also targeted. The areas are largely held by rebel forces.

The intensive bombardment as well as the sound of fighter jets could be heard by residents of the Syrian capital throughout the night and early Wednesday, and gray smoke hung over towns in the eastern suburbs.

Rami Abdul-Rahman, the Syrian Observatory chief, said the activists in the area said “poisonous gas” was fired in rockets as well as from the air. He added that regime forces were on a wide offensive on the eastern and western rebel-held suburbs of Damascus.

Mohammed Saeed, an activist in the area, told The Associated Press via Skype that hundreds of dead and injured people were rushed to six makeshift hospitals in the eastern suburbs of Damascus.

“This is a massacre by chemical weapons,” said Saeed. “The visit by the UN team is a joke … Bashar is using the weapons and telling the world that he does not care.”

The use of a chemical agent could not be immediately verified. The government denied it had used chemical weapons, according to a report in the state-run SANA news agency.

An activist group in the town of Arbeen east of Damascus posted on its Facebook page pictures purporting to show rows of Syrian children, wrapped in white death shrouds, and others, with chests bared. There appeared to be very little signs of blood or physical wounds on the bodies.

The photos distributed by activists to support their claims were consistent with AP reporting of shelling in the area, though it was not known if the victims died from a poisonous gas attack.

In the hours after the attack dozens of videos were posted to YouTube showing reported victims of the attack, including children. Some videos showed dozens of bodies while others showed doctors and others struggling to treat people having seizures. The veracity of the videos could not be immediately verified.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said he was “deeply concerned” by the reports.

The Syrian Observatory called upon the UN team in Syria and all international organizations “to visit the stricken areas and to guarantee that medical and relief supplies reach the people as soon as possible.” It also called for an investigation into the attack.

The Arab League also urged the UN officials currently in Syria to “immediately” travel to the attack site and conduct an investigation.

The 20-member UN team, led by Swedish chemical weapons expert Ake Sellstrom, arrived in Damascus on Sunday to investigate three sites where chemical weapons attacks allegedly occurred: the village of Khan al-Assal just west of the embattled northern city of Aleppo and two other locations being kept secret for security reasons.

The mandate for the planned probe is limited: The team will report on whether chemical weapons were used, and if so which ones, but it will not determine the responsibility for an attack. This has led some commentators to question the value of the investigation.

Syria is said to have one of the world’s largest stockpiles of chemical weapons, including mustard gas and the nerve agent sarin, though it has never admitted possessing such weapons.

Diplomats and chemical weapons experts have raised doubts about whether the experts will find anything since the alleged incidents took place months ago.

The Syrian government initially asked the UN to investigate an alleged chemical weapons attack on March 19 in Khan al Assal, which was captured by the rebels last month. The government and rebels blame each other for the purported attack which killed at least 30 people.

Britain, France and the US followed with allegations of chemical weapons use in Homs, Damascus and elsewhere. UN Mideast envoy Robert Serry told the Security Council last month that the UN has received 13 reports of alleged chemical weapons use in Syria.

The Price of Loyalty in Syria

By ROBERT F. WORTH

Published: June 19, 2013

The New York Times

The Damascus neighborhood known as Mezze 86 is a dense, dilapidated warren of narrow hillside streets adorned with posters bearing the face of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. The presidential palace is nearby, and the area is crawling with well-armed guards and soldiers. It is next to impossible to enter unless you are accompanied by government officials or well-known locals, almost all of them members of Assad’s Alawite sect. I drove there on a quiet Friday morning in May, and we were stopped several times at checkpoints by young soldiers who examined our documents carefully before waving us on. When we arrived at our destination, in a small parking lot hemmed in by cinder-block towers, I emerged from the car to the suspicious glares of several middle-aged men in fatigues. “They are not expecting foreigners here,” one of the men who accompanied me said. “The rebels are trying constantly to hit this place, because they know who lives here.” He pointed to a damaged roof not far away. “A mortar struck very close the other day. A lady was killed just above us, and another just below.”

To many Syrians, Mezze 86 is a terrifying place, a stronghold for regime officers and the ruthless paramilitary gunmen known as shabiha, or “ghosts.” These are the men accused of carrying out much of the torture and killing that has left more than 90,000 people dead since the Syrian uprising began two years ago. Some of the older men living in the neighborhood are veterans of the notorious defense brigades, which helped carry out the 1982 massacre of Hama, where between 10,000 and 30,000 people were killed in less than a month. Yet Mezze 86 now emanates a sense of aggrieved martyrdom. The streets are lined with colorful portraits of dead soldiers; every household proclaims the fallen and the wounded and the vanished.

I went there to meet a woman named Ibtisam Ali Aboud, who had fled her home after her husband — a retired Alawite officer named Muhsin — was killed in February by rebels. Ibtisam is a woman of 50, but she looked 20 years older, her face a pale canvas of anxious lines over her long, black mourning cloak. Her son was with her, a timid-looking 17-year-old named Jafar. We spoke in a dingy, sparsely furnished room, with a picture of a bearded Alawite saint on the wall. “We never used to feel any distinction between people of different sects,” Ibtisam told me. “Now they are ready to slaughter us.” Her husband’s killer was a car mechanic named Ayham, she said, who had eaten at their table and casually borrowed money from her husband only 10 days earlier, promising to pay it back soon. Someone had been slipping notes under their door — “Die, Alawite scum,” “Get out, regime thugs” — and sectarian killings and kidnappings were growing more common; even Muhsin had narrowly escaped being taken captive by armed men. But he refused to listen to his wife’s warnings when she told him that Ayham was working with Sunni rebel gunmen. “Ayham is my friend,” he had told her. “This is Syria, not Iraq.” One night he went out to run an errand and never came home. They found his body in the family car the next day, a bullet hole in his head. The family’s small auto-repair shop was burned to the ground days later. Jafar said that he was on his way home from there when five men surrounded him. “We will cut you all to pieces if you don’t get out,” the men said. “You will follow your father to the grave.”

The family fled their home on the capital’s outskirts to Mezze 86, where they would be surrounded by other Alawites. “We are the ones who are being targeted,” Ibtisam told me. “My husband did nothing. He was a retired officer volunteering at a hospital.” Now, she said, she could barely afford to rent two cramped rooms with her four children. A dull artillery boom shook the coffee cups on the table where we sat. The men who took me to her, also Alawite, began to reel off their own stories of murdered friends and relatives, and of neighbors abducted by rebels. “You will find stories like this in every house, people killed, people kidnapped, and all because of their sect,” one of them said. “They think all Alawites are rich, because we are the same sect as Bashar al-Assad. They think we can talk to the president whenever we like. But look how we are living!”

No one in the room would say it, but there was an unspoken sense that they, too, were victims of the regime. After two years of bloody insurrection, Syria’s small Alawite community remains the war’s opaque protagonist, a core of loyalists whose fate is now irrevocably tied to Assad’s. Alawite officers commanded the regime’s shock troops when the first protests broke out in March 2011 — jailing, torturing and killing demonstrators and setting Syria on a different path from all the other Arab uprisings. Assad’s intelligence apparatus did everything it could to stoke sectarian fears and blunt the protesters’ message of peaceful change.

Yet the past two years have made clear that those fears were not completely unfounded, and it did not take much to provoke them. Syria’s Sunnis and Alawites were at odds for hundreds of years, and the current war has revived the worst of that history. Radical jihadis among the rebels now openly call for the extermination or exile of Syria’s religious minorities. Most outsiders agree that Assad cynically manipulated the fears of his kinsmen for political survival, but few have asked — or had the opportunity to ask — how the Alawites themselves feel about Assad, and what kind of future they imagine now that the Sunni Arab world has effectively declared war on them.

“What is horrible is that everyone is now protecting his existence,” Sayyid Abdullah Nizam, a prominent cleric in Damascus, told me. “For all of the minorities, it is as if we have entered a long corridor with no light.”

On the day I arrived in Syria, in late April, I was startled by the seeming normality of the capital. There was fresh fruit in the market stalls and crowds of shoppers in the Old City; sweet apple-flavored tobacco smoke drifted from the cafes. But checkpoints were everywhere, and I could not walk 10 yards without a plainclothes member of the new National Defense Forces demanding my ID. Behind the comforting bustle of street sounds, the dull thump of artillery could be heard, day and night, like intermittent thunder. No one ever remarked on it, and in the spring sunlight it was hard to imagine that people were fighting and dying only a few miles away.

Only after taking the highway north out of Damascus did I see the war — houses reduced to rubble or burned beyond recognition, posters bearing the faces of Assad and his clan shot to pieces. As we drove past the suburb of Harasta, where some of the worst fighting has raged in recent months, a huge column of black smoke rose from a cluster of houses a few hundred yards away. My driver, a disheveled young man named Ahmad, glanced anxiously back and forth. The speedometer needle pushed past 90 miles per hour, and I wondered how our worn-out Hyundai would hold up. “This is a very dangerous area,” Ahmad said. “We must go fast.”

Beyond the suburbs, the highway skirts the embattled city of Homs and then turns west, toward the mountainous Alawite heartland along the Mediterranean. This is the route Bashar and his loyalists would take if, in the fantasy embraced by their enemies, they ever abandon the capital and try to forge a rump state in the land of their ancestors. The landscape along the highway grows greener the farther north you go, and the signs of war slowly fade. Magnificent snow-capped mountains rise to the west, and later the glittering blue plane of the sea comes into view. The hills are dotted with olive and fruit trees, and the smell of eucalyptus mingles with the sea breeze. Latakia, the capital city of Syria’s Alawite region, is a sleepy seaside town with a tattered charm. The hills around it have long provided refuge for Syria’s minorities, and once briefly formed part of an Alawite state under French protection, just after the First World War. This gives its people a different view of the country and its history, one that Western journalists have not often been permitted to see. It was in Latakia that I met a devoted regime supporter named Aliaa Ali, the 27-year-old daughter of a retired Alawite military officer and a French teacher. Aliaa has a broad, pretty face and knitted brows that convey a mix of petulance and determination. She is intelligent and fully aware, thanks in part to a year spent studying in England, of how the West views the conflict. Unlike many loyalists, she was willing to acknowledge the brutalities of her own side, and at times seemed embarrassed by the Syrian police state. “I was pro-revolution at first,” she said. “There is a lot that needs to change here, I know that. But the fact is that it turned sectarian and violent much sooner than people think.”

In early April 2011, Aliaa told me, she was in traffic on a coastal road when she heard loud explosions and gunfire that lasted for several minutes. Only after returning home to Jableh, where she lives, did she learn that nine Syrian soldiers had been ambushed and killed nearby. Early reports described them as would-be defectors killed by their superiors, but no evidence for that claim has ever emerged, and amateur video taken at the scene suggests the killers were rebel gunmen. For Aliaa and her friends, it fit a pattern: the Western media were refusing to acknowledge the violence of the uprising and ignoring the losses on the government side.

That spring, despite the protesters’ insistence on an inclusive movement, sectarian rhetoric began creeping in. One popular slogan was “We don’t want Iran, we don’t want Hezbollah, we want someone who fears God.” This may sound harmless to outsiders, but in Syria it was a clear call to Sunnis to rally against their enemies. During the summer of 2011, a bizarre rumor spread that if rebels banged on metal after midnight and uttered the right prayer during the holy month of Ramadan, Alawites would disappear. When I visited Aliaa’s home, she led me out to the balcony and showed me a terrace on the neighboring building. “You see that terrace?” she said. “They were banging on metal in the middle of the night. My father got out of bed and shouted: ‘Shut up! We’re not going to disappear!’ ” Later, as we were walking down the stairwell, she pointed out a circle with an X in it drawn on the wall. “That was a symbol the opposition used to mark their targets,” she said. “The guy who lives there is the brother of a high official.”

Aliaa’s younger brother Abdulhameed described for me his own sectarian shock. He is a 23-year-old amateur boxer who was studying in Egypt last November, living with five Syrian friends in a house in Alexandria. One night a young man with an Iraqi accent knocked on their door and asked if he was Syrian. Abdulhameed said yes, and the Iraqi walked off. Late that night, a group of men tried to break down the door, while shouting sectarian abuse. Abdulhameed and his friends fought the attackers off and drove them away. “But the worst part came after,” he said. “A few days later there was a posting on Facebook, with our exact address, saying, ‘These guys are Syrians, funded by Iran and Hezbollah to spread Shiism in Egypt, and you must kill them.’ ” Three of the Syrians gave up their studies and went home.

Aliaa and her friends did not even pretend to be impartial witnesses to the uprising. They shut their eyes to most of what happened in their country after the demonstrations began: the mass arrests and jailings, the torture, the unprovoked killings of hundreds and then thousands of peaceful protesters. In their talks with me, they scoffed at the word shabiha, saying it was a myth, and they seemed unwilling to believe the regime was responsible for the sectarian rumors that accompanied the first protests. Still, there was an emotional truth at the core of their case. They had sensed a pent-up anger directed at them as Alawites, and the unleashing of that anger felt like a revelation, a sign that they had been living a lie.

Aliaa’s own best friend — or the girl who used to be her best friend — was a Sunni named Noura. They lived just a block apart and went to school together and helped raise each other’s younger siblings. The difference of sect meant nothing, Aliaa said; most of her friends are Sunni. “Noura once told me she would name her first daughter Aliaa, and that she’d bring jasmine to my house after she was born.” In a photograph she showed me, Noura has a plump, babyish face and wears a loose head scarf; Aliaa is standing next to her with an arm wrapped around her shoulder. In 2010, Noura was engaged to a very religious man who told her she must stop going to movies and wearing short dresses, and said he would not tolerate her having any non-Sunni friends, Aliaa told me. Noura went straight to Aliaa’s house to tell her, and the two of them lay on Aliaa’s bed talking about what she could do. She soon broke off the engagement. “She told me: ‘I can’t live with a man who thinks Alawites are forbidden,’ ” Aliaa said.

Soon after the first protests broke out, Aliaa told Noura about some of the sectarian protest chants she had heard. Noura refused to believe it. The next month, when the army cracked down in Jableh, Noura was desperate, saying innocent protesters had been killed. Aliaa told Noura it was “not logical” for a government to kill its own people. Noura backed down. “Maybe we just heard different stories,” she said. As she and her family moved deeper into the opposition camp, however, the friendship began to fray. Once, after they had gone for a drive along the seafront, Noura suddenly said: “If Sunnis ever attacked you, I’d protect you. And vice versa.” Both of them laughed. “At the time, it seemed like a joke,” Aliaa told me. “We couldn’t really imagine that happening.” Aliaa traveled to England at the end of the summer, and shortly after, when Noura’s mother was arrested, the two friends stopped speaking. In October, Aliaa told me, she was half-asleep one night when she heard a buzzing on her laptop: Noura was calling to video chat. It was 4 a.m., but they spent an hour talking and laughing as if nothing had changed. “When we hung up, I burst into tears,” Aliaa told me. “I felt so happy that we were still friends, that none of the differences mattered.”

Soon afterward, Noura and her family fled to Turkey. In December, Noura unfriended Aliaa on Facebook, but Aliaa continued to check Noura’s Facebook page every day. The postings were passionately anti-Assad, and included sectarian slurs against Alawites. Noura married a Sunni man from Jableh, whose Facebook photo showed the black banner used by Al Qaeda. In mid-May, Noura posted a long passage praising Saddam Hussein, followed by this sentence: “How many ‘likes’ for the conqueror of the Shia and other heathens?” Aliaa showed me the Facebook page of Noura’s teenage brother Kamal, with an image of him clutching a Kalashnikov. “I used to carry him on my shoulders and feed him crackers,” she said.

Noura now lives in Turkey. I reached her by phone at the Syrian school that her aunt runs near the border. She acknowledged her friendship with Aliaa, but her religious zeal soon became apparent. She said her husband did not permit her to talk by phone to foreign journalists. I then spoke to her aunt Maha, the director of the school, who confirmed the outlines of Aliaa’s account of the friendship and the uprising in Jableh. Her voice rose almost to a shout as she told me only the regime was sectarian. “Before the uprising, we lived together with no problems,” she said. “They felt reassured about us, because ever since the events of Hama, they felt we would not rise up against them. But as soon as we chose the path of revolution, they felt it was directed against them, not against Assad. We told them: We only want freedom. But they shut the door in our faces; they would not talk to us.” Maha struck me as a reasonable woman who regretted the rupture, much as Aliaa did.

But when I asked her about the Alawite religion, I was startled by her response. “Aliaa is a nice girl,” she said. “But the Alawites don’t have a religion. They are a traitor sect. They collaborated with the crusaders; during the French occupation they sided with the French.”

For the Alawites, these familiar accusations have the sting of a racist epithet. The Alawite faith, developed a millennium ago, is a strange, mystic blend of Neoplatonism, Christianity, Islam and Zoroastrianism. It included a belief in reincarnation and a deification of Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. These unorthodox tenets may have led the crusaders and other outsiders to favor them, seeing them as potential allies against Muslims. The theologian Ibn Taymiyya — the ancestor of today’s hard-line Islamists — proclaimed in the early 1300s that the Alawites were “more infidel than Jews and Christians, even more infidel than many polytheists,” and urged good Muslims to slaughter and rob them. The Alawites sought shelter in the mountains, and rarely dared to come even to Latakia. Many of them were slaughtered by Ottoman armies, and parts of the community stood close to extinction at some points in their history. According to the historian Joshua Landis, as late as the 1870s, supposed Alawite bandits were impaled on spikes and left on crossroads as a warning. They lived in desperate poverty on the margins of Syria’s feudal economy, often sending their daughters into indentured servitude as maids to wealthy Sunni families.

In 1936, when the French were poised to merge the newly formed Alawite coastal state into a larger Syrian republic, six Alawite notables sent a petition begging them to reconsider. “The spirit of hatred and fanaticism embedded in the hearts of the Arab Muslims against everything that is non-Muslim has been perpetually nurtured by the Islamic religion,” they wrote. “There is no hope that the situation will ever change. Therefore, the abolition of the mandate will expose the minorities in Syria to the dangers of death and annihilation, irrespective of the fact that such abolition will annihilate the freedom of thought and belief.” One of the petition’s signers was Sulayman al-Assad, the grandfather of Syria’s current president. Later, after the French abandoned them, the Alawites rushed to embrace the cause of Syrian nationalism, and went to great lengths to make the rest of the country forget their separatist ambitions.

I thought of that petition when I entered Aliaa’s family home in Jableh, where a black-and-white portrait of her grandfather in a stiff collar and tie hangs on the living-room wall. “He studied in France in the 1930s,” Aliaa said brightly. Then she quickly added, “And later he took part in the struggle for independence — I think.”

I asked Aliaa what she thought of Alawites who joined the opposition, like the novelist Samar Yazbek, who is also from Jableh. She grew wary at the mention of Yazbek’s name. “I met her once,” Aliaa said. “She told me I had a bright future in front of me. But I don’t want a future like hers. I think Alawites who join the opposition don’t realize that they are being used as tools. Or they think they can turn this jihadi war into a democratic revolution. But they will never succeed.”

Yazbek was also in Syria during the early months of the revolution. In her diaries of the revolt’s first four months — later published in English under the title “A Woman in the Crossfire” — she describes the furious campaign conducted against her after she publicly backed the insurrection. Her family was forced to disavow her, and leaflets were passed out in Jableh denouncing her. At one point, she describes a terrifying encounter with the regime apparatus. After being driven from her house in Damascus to an interrogation center, she finds herself with a scowling officer who knocks her to the floor, spits on her and threatens to kill her. Guards then lead her blindfolded downstairs to one of the regime’s basement torture rooms, where she is forced to look at bloodied, half-dead protesters hanging from the ceiling. The officer tells her at one point that she is being duped by “Salafi Islamists” and that she must come back to the fold or die. “We’re honorable people,” he tells her. “We don’t harm our own blood. We’re not like you, traitors. You’re a black mark upon all Alawites.”

When I spoke to Yazbek, who is now living in Paris, she told me she believed that the Alawite community had been the Assad clan’s first victim, that they had been used as “human shields” to keep the regime in power. “They believe the regime’s rhetoric, that they would be massacred if Assad falls,” she said. “But this is not true. They are very afraid, and very confused.” Some Alawites inside Syria quietly make the same point, though it is far more dangerous for them to do so. But the ones I spoke to also argued that it does not matter whether the Alawites were duped or not, because their sectarian fears have been realized. In Latakia, I met an Alawite cartoonist named Issam Hassan, who told me that many Alawites who sympathized with the opposition have shifted to the other side. “The government knew it couldn’t fight peaceful protesters, so it pushed them to violence,” he said. “But now, the violence we have seen on the rebel side has frightened everyone. And look at the media: Al Jazeera and Syrian state television take different sides, but both are pushing toward the same end. They are promoting hatred.”

On a warm Thursday night in Damascus, I met on old friend at a club called Bar 808, one of the last holdouts for the city’s hipster youth and a popular spot among those who quietly sympathize with the opposition. I pushed through the crowds and entered a throbbing den of young Syrians dancing and drinking and making out. At the bar, my friend Khaled gave me a sweaty bear hug and bought me a beer. He is a novelist and a bohemian, with a massive head of steel-gray curls and a raucous laugh. But the past two years have aged him. We talked about mutual friends, most of them now scattered in Beirut or in Europe. “I can’t give up on the revolution,” Khaled said. “I won’t leave Damascus.” He put his arm around a young woman and introduced her as Rita. “Khaled is the only optimist left in Syria,” Rita said. When I asked her about the opposition, she said: “I am ashamed to say it, but the opposition has lost its meaning. Now it is only killing, nothing but killing. The jihadis are speaking of a caliphate, and the Christians are really frightened.” There was a pause, filled by the churn of Arab pop music. “I waited all my life for this revolution,” Rita said. “But now I think maybe it shouldn’t have happened. At least not this way.”

If the opposition has lost its meaning, so has the regime. The Assad clan has always defined its Syria as the “beating heart of Arabism,” the bulwark of the Palestinian cause. The Baath Party was meant to embody this spirit, and Syria’s minorities were eager to prove their loyalty as Arabs in a Muslim-majority society. This was the glue that would hold together the country’s fractious communities. But now Syria has been formally excommunicated by the Arab League, the reigning pan-Arab institution, and the old unifying ideologies — paid lip service until the crisis began — are openly mocked.

On a quiet side street in one of Damascus’s richest neighborhoods, a prominent lawyer invited me to join him and his friends in an opulent, booklined study. There were soft leather couches and European chocolates on the coffee table. A 16-frame video screen showed every approach to the house. One of the guests was the Rev. Gabriel Daoud, a Syriac Orthodox priest who sprawled on an armchair in his black robe. The subject of Syria’s minorities came up, and Father Daoud’s face registered his irritation. “Minorities — it’s a false name,” he said. “It should be the quality of the people, not the quantity. It gives you the idea that minorities are small and weak. But we are the original people of this country.” As for the protesters and their demands for freedom, Father Daoud smirked: “They don’t want hurriya, they want houriaat.” Hurriya is the Arabic word for “freedom,” and houriaat is the plural of houri, the dark-eyed virgins that suicide bombers are promised in the afterlife.

Daoud spoke bitterly about the kidnapping of two Christian bishops, whose fate was unknown. “They may have Syrian nationality, but not the mentality,” Daoud said of the rebels. “We are proud of our secularism. We cannot live with these barbarians.” When I raised the subject of Arab nationalism, one of the guests in the room winced. “We are Mesopotamian, not Arabic,” he said. “We don’t want to be Arabic.”

I heard this kind of talk everywhere in Syria. In Latakia, a young Alawite woman who had spent time in the United States spoke about the uprising in blatantly racist terms. “The protests started well, but after a while, the people participating were not educated,” she said. “It’s like your riots in Detroit in 1967. They are like losers — not good people. Like blacks in the U.S.A.” The “barbarians” these people were talking about — the rural poor, who are overwhelmingly Sunni and the backbone of the opposition — probably constitute half of Syria’s population.

Syria’s national myths may be fracturing, but it is hard to see how the map could be reconfigured in any stable way. There is some speculation that Assad may retreat to the coastal mountains if the war turns against him, which it has not done lately. That region is calm and quiet compared with Damascus, and relatively self-sufficient. But the population is said to have doubled there since the war started, thanks to a flood of refugees from other parts of Syria. Some are Alawites returning to their home villages. But tens of thousands of Sunnis have also resettled there, seeking refuge on the coast from Aleppo and other war-torn areas. The city’s hotels are packed with middle-class people toting heavy suitcases, and poorer exiles are camped out at a vast sports center, where they live in crowded tents amid a reek of urine. The local Information Ministry official warned me gruffly: “Be careful, many of them are with the Free Syrian Army. They do not say this, but we know.” The state of Alawistan, if it were to ever be formed, would be riddled with potential insurgents.

Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, grew up in a two-room stone house in the mountains and helped out with the farmwork. As president, he loved to remind people of his origins. In the 1980s, when Syria’s socialist economy was at its nadir, he said in one speech: “Fellow peasants, no hand will after this day be above your hand. . . . You are the producers. Yours is the power.” Hafez’s children grew up in the palace and never understood or cared much about Syria’s poor. Bashar’s economic reforms in the early 2000s brought new restaurants and nightclubs to Damascus, but the countryside sank deeper into poverty. In late 2010, I drove through Syria’s agricultural belt and was amazed by the damage wrought by five years of drought and government neglect. Many peasants had abandoned their desiccated farms and moved to slums on the outskirts of the cities, where they became perfect tinder for the revolt.

But there is another reason for the unpolished face of the Syrian rebellion, a crueler one. One night in Damascus, I met a 33-year-old computer programmer named Amir who had been part of the nonviolent protest movement from the beginning. “We started the protests with three principles: nonviolence, no foreign interference and no sectarianism,” Amir said in English as we strolled in the cool night air. “The regime targeted the protesters until they were forced to abandon all three of them.”

I asked if he was still active in the rebellion. “They put me in prison for two days,” he said. “I was not tortured, no one even said a bad word to me. But for me it was — ” He stumbled for words, then turned toward me. “You know how Dante went to hell and was allowed to return? This cell was 10 meters square, with 152 people in it. It was two stories underground. There is no air, you feel constantly that you will choke. They had an undeclared system: for the first week, you stand, all day and all night. Then you get to lean against the wall for a few days. Then you get to sit. When you are standing, you are terrified to fall asleep, because you may never get up. Some people were there for only a few hours, some for days or weeks, and some had been tortured in ways I never imagined. For food, you get a bit of bread and some water, but that does not matter. You get about 30 seconds, once a day, in the bathroom, but trust me, you are not even worried about that. Because there are people in there who are literally asking for death.” He stopped talking, and after a pause, I asked him why he had been arrested.

“I lit a candle at a funeral vigil,” he said.

Did it have to happen this way? Just over a decade ago, many of the Syrians now fighting their government saw Bashar al-Assad as a kind of savior, a gentle figure who would lead them away from brutality. He was never meant for the presidency; his older brother, Basil, was the heir apparent. Only after Basil died in a car crash in 1994 was Bashar — long-necked, awkward, quiet — withdrawn from ophthalmology school in London and anointed. He has been an enigma since the day he became president in 2000, a man who seems to want to steer Syria on a different course but has never actually done so.

In April, I met Manaf Tlass, one of Bashar’s oldest friends, and asked him to narrate the conflict from Bashar’s perspective. Tlass, whose father served as Syria’s defense minister for three decades, was a general in Syria’s Republican Guard until he defected last July. He knew Bashar in childhood and was a member of his inner circle for years. We met at a cafe in Paris on a warm afternoon, and Tlass, who is sometimes mocked as a dandy, wore a blue silk shirt, unbuttoned to the middle of his chest, and aviator sunglasses.

On the day the crisis broke out, Tlass said, “Bashar called me and said, ‘What would you do?’ ” It was mid-March 2011, and the southern city of Dara’a was in uproar after the local security director — a cousin of Assad’s — ordered the imprisonment and torture of a group of boys who had scrawled antiregime graffiti on a wall. Tlass told me he urged Assad to visit Dara’a himself, and to order the arrest of the local security director. Others, including the leaders of Turkey and Qatar, have said they gave him similar advice.

Tlass said he continued to urge Assad to manage the crisis through negotiation rather than force, and with Assad’s permission, he began meeting with civic groups in towns where unrest had broken out, sometimes with as many as 300 people. He would hear their grievances and write down lists of possible fixes to local police corruption, lack of water or electricity and other problems. He would identify local leaders who could be trusted, then forward the list of issues and names to Bashar’s people. Each time, the leaders were promptly arrested.

Finally, Tlass told me, he confronted members of the Makhlouf family, Assad’s first cousins, who are now said to be his closest advisers. “There was a big disagreement,” Tlass said. “They wanted to handle the problem with security, the old way.” He decided to speak to Assad directly, but his old friend put him off for two weeks. When they finally met, Assad made clear that he was no longer interested in Tlass’s advice. “Bashar knew from the start that this was a big crisis,” Tlass said. “He decided to play on the instincts of the people.”

One morning in early May, I drove with Aliaa Ali and her brother to their ancestral town, Duraykish, in the Alawite mountain hinterland. The road climbs up from the coast along hairpin turns into a magnificent landscape of lush, terraced hills and orchards. We stopped briefly to look at a new monument to the town’s war dead, an imposing 25-foot marble plaque engraved with hundreds of names. We parked the car at the bottom of a narrow hillside street named for Aliaa’s grandfather and walked up to the family house, a 100-year-old stone building with ceramic tiles that had begun to wear away. Aliaa’s uncle, Amer Ali, stood waiting for us, a sturdy-looking man of about 50 with closely cropped, graying hair. He led us upstairs to a large, high-ceilinged room where sunlight splashed in through two open walls. Dozens of people waited inside.

Amer Ali had gathered them to tell their stories of relatives or spouses lost to the war. I listened to them, one by one. They were working-class people: soldiers, construction workers, police officers. All were Alawites, as far as I could tell. Some were probably shabiha, though none of them would have used that word. One of them, a middle-aged construction worker named Adib Sulayman, pulled out his cellphone and showed me the message he received after his son Yamin was kidnapped by rebels: “We have executed God’s will and killed your son. If you are still fighting with Bashar, we will come to your houses and cut you into pieces. Never fight against us.”

A 20-year-old man who had been shot twice in the head and had lost some of his memory and half his hearing told me he would go back to the front as soon as his wounds healed. His father stared at me and said: “I would be proud to have my son become a martyr. I am in my 50s, but I am ready to sacrifice my life, too. They thought we would be weak in this crisis, but we are strong.”

After lunch, Aliaa’s uncle showed me around the house. On the wall was a Sword of Ali, an important symbol for Alawites, with verses engraved on the blade. There were old farming tools, a stick for catching snakes, hunting knives and a century-old carbine — a kind of visual history of the Alawite people. There were ancient Phoenician amphorae and a framed photograph of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah.

Later, Amer Ali led me to the roof, where we gazed out at the town where his family has lived for hundreds of years. The hills were lovely in the golden afternoon sunlight. You could see an ancient spring with a stone arch over it, and a mosque that was built by one of his ancestors 240 years ago. Aliaa stood next to me on the terrace, looking out at the town with an expression of rapturous pride. I asked her how it made her feel to know that Western human rights groups had documented repeated atrocities by the Syrian regime — some, perhaps, by people like the ones we had just talked to. Aliaa glanced downward. “Yes, there have been atrocities,” she said. “You can never deny that there have been atrocities. But you have to ask yourself: What will happen if Bashar falls? That’s why I believe victory is the only option. If Bashar falls, Syria falls. And then we, here, will all be in the niqab” — the full veil worn in conservative Muslim societies — “or we will be dead.”

Before we climbed back down, Aliaa’s uncle showed me a rusted white tripod, set in the center of the roof, under a gazebo. “It is for telescopes, for looking at the stars,” he said. He looked up at the cloudless evening sky, then down the mountain toward where the hills give way to the vast Syrian plain. “But we can use it to set up a sniper rifle and defend ourselves here.”

Sexual Violence Forcing Syrians to Flee Abroad, IRC Says

By Caroline Alexander - Jan 14, 2013

Bloomberg

Rape and other forms of extreme sexual violence in Syria, often committed in front of family members, is a major reason for increasing numbers of people to flee their homeland, the International Rescue Commission said.

“Many women and girls relayed accounts of being attacked in public or in their homes, primarily by armed men,” according to the 28-page report from the New York-based refugee assistance agency. “Sexual violence was consistently identified by Syrian women, men and community leaders as a primary reason their families fled the country.”

Cases described in the report included attacks by armed rapists, especially at the roadblocks that have proliferated across Syria. The IRC was told of a nine-year-old girl who had been brutally raped, of a man whose genitalia were destroyed by attackers and of a father “who shot his daughter when an armed group approached to prevent the ‘disgrace’ of her being raped.”

More than 600,000 Syrians have fled the country to seek refuge in countries including Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey since the conflict began in March 2011, the United Nations estimates. Another 200,000 are awaiting registration or are unaccounted for, and about 4 million Syrians are in dire need of assistance, the IRC said.

The last four months of 2012 saw a “dramatic spike” in Syrian refugee numbers which would strain the already limited resources in host countries and threaten to increase political, ethnic and sectarian tensions throughout the region, it said.

Humanitarian Emergency

“The Middle East is once again facing a human displacement tragedy,” the IRC said. “The magnitude of the crisis demands a decisive response from the international community.”

The group proposed a six-point plan to address the crisis that includes increasing humanitarian aid and preparations for a protracted humanitarian emergency.

In addition, the IRC recommends opening borders, expanding assistance inside Syria and offering additional assistance to women and girls in and outside refugee camps.

Victims of sexual violence need medical and counseling services in the countries to which they have fled to help them recover, the IRC said. They also need help in face of unsafe conditions in camps and increased levels of domestic violence.

The stigma around the “dishonor” of rape means the crime is rarely reported, the IRC said. Many of those interviewed said they feared retribution or were afraid of being killed by family members for bringing shame to the family if they spoke out, it added. As a result, reports of early and or forced marriage of women and girls are increasing, it said.

IRC was founded in 1933 after Albert Einstein called for an American branch of the European International Relief Association. It works in more than 40 countries, according to its website.

Syrian violence rages despite Arab League's presence

Dec. 31, 2011

Detroit Free Press

BEIRUT -- Any hope that the presence of Arab League observers in Syria would bring an end to months of bloodshed evaporated Friday as opposition activists reported that security forces fired on anti-government demonstrations and clashes broke out with army defectors in a suburb of Damascus.

As many as 32 people were killed across Syria, according to the Local Coordination Committees, a network of activists who organize protests and report on the violence.

Opposition activists have expressed growing frustration with the observer mission, which is in Syria to monitor compliance with a regional peace plan calling for the withdrawal of security forces from urban areas, the release of political prisoners and free access for international media. The activists say the mission is too small and too easily misled by the government, which is providing security and logistic support.

League officials have said they are getting good cooperation from the government, which blames the continued bloodshed on what it describes as foreign-backed armed gangs.

Fridays are a major day for protests across the Muslim world, as demonstrators spill into the streets after midday prayers. Syrian opposition groups urged supporters to show their strength by retaking city and town squares from which they have been violently repelled since the uprising began in March.

Tens of thousands were said to have turned out in the flashpoint provinces of Homs, Hama, Dara and Idlib.

Witnesses said security forces fired at a large crowd in the Damascus suburb of Duma, triggering fierce clashes with army defectors fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army. Dozens of people were wounded, they said.

The clashes came despite an announcement by the Free Syrian Army that it had suspended attacks against security forces for the duration of the league's mission, which officially began Tuesday.

The Free Syrian Army has claimed responsibility for a number of assaults on military installations and convoys, raising concern that the country could slide into civil war.

The United Nations says more than 5,000 people have been killed since March. The government disputes the figure and says most of the casualties have been security force members.

In Syria, fear and violence recall dark days of 1980s

Syria activists had intended this uprising to be peaceful and less confrontational. But with Bashar Assad using the same violence and mass detentions his father did, history seems to be repeating.

By Raja Abdulrahim, Los Angeles Times

December 4, 2011

As the Syrian uprising extends into its ninth month, a cycle of detentions and missing people amid a violent crackdown is playing out like a tragic case of deja vu.

Syrian President Bashar Assad has been employing the same tactics that his father, Hafez Assad, used 30 years ago when a Muslim Brotherhood uprising was met with mass detentions, imprisonments that would ultimately span decades and, finally, the massacre of at least 10,000 people in the city of Hama.

Then as now, fears about detentions permeate those moments when errands run long, people don't come home when expected or phones go unanswered. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in London, estimates that more than 45,000 people have been detained, although Amnesty International puts the number at 13,000 or more.

"No one dares ask about them, except in indirect ways," said Dima, a Damascus-based activist who was using an alias for safety reasons. "If anyone asks about his son, he will be questioned, and he can be detained. The only way we are hearing about people who are being detained is when a friend in prison is released."

It was the same three decades ago, she said, when few dared to ask openly about missing loved ones.

"Of course, the people are saying that this is a repetition of the previous crisis," Dima said. "The situation of the '80s is repeating in the same way."

Syrian activists initially had hoped to avoid reliving history by organizing a different uprising that would be characterized by peaceful protests, attempts to cut across sectarian lines and, in the early days, demands for reform rather than a leadership ouster.

But painful parallels with the past became undeniable this summer, the day before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan began, when security forces laid siege to Hama and killed dozens of people.

Now talk of history repeating itself is a common topic of discussion, Dima said.

"These tactics are played and replayed. These are the tactics they know; they are not very imaginative," said Murhaf Jouejati, a professor of Middle East studies at the National Defense University in Washington. "They employ the playbook, they go to the instructions guide, so they are repeating the same behavior that they have been taught."

Indeed, a recent list compiled by activists of the methods of torture being used against detained Syrians now reads like a stolen script from the prison stories that were told by the earlier generation.

Othman Sahiouni's brother, Bassam, was grabbed by security forces May 7. For months the family didn't know where Bassam was or even whether he was still alive, and they could not ask for official information without risking another family member being seized.

News eventually came back from a released prisoner that Bassam was in a jail in Homs. He had been tortured, the family learned, and when he tried to go on a hunger strike authorities broke his arm.

Now the family waits for other prisoners to be released to get an update on Bassam's condition.

"The same crisis [as in the '80s], the same killing, the same mass graves. Nothing has changed," Othman Sahiouni said. "Everyone has an extreme sense of fear; the children, the women, the men."

And as protests against the regime grew in recent months, Assad gave lip service to plans for peace proposed by the Arab League and others while cranking up the violence against dissidents. The league finally suspended Syria, one of its founding members, and levied sanctions against it.

Amr Al-Azm, a professor of history at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio, who was in Cairo last month for meetings of the opposition Syrian National Council, said the government's tactics were not surprising.

"They say, 'When this happened, we did this and we survived. This is not the time to try new things,'" Al-Azm said. "This is an ongoing cycle of the regime; it never really stops."

As the Assad government continues to follow its lethal playbook, the opposition's response also has begun to resemble the armed uprising of 30 years ago as army defectors join the Free Syrian Army, resulting in a rise of attacks on security forces and government buildings.

But the move toward an armed struggle, stemming from frustration over a death toll that the United Nations estimates to be more than 4,000, could weaken international support for the opposition.

Last month, the foreign minister of Russia, an ally of Syria, said the unrest was beginning to resemble a civil war. The comments were echoed a day later by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

There are serious concerns for Syria's future, given the brutal way the previous uprising was finally crushed. In Syria, meanwhile, activists report that more people are being killed by torture in the prisons, with families learning their fates only when they are called to retrieve bodies. Relatives are often forced to sign papers placing the blame for the death elsewhere.

"Every day killing, killing, killing," said Ahmad Sharbaji, who has two brothers in detention.

Sharbaji's brother, Yahya, was arrested in early September along with another activist, Ghaith Matar. A few days later, Matar's badly tortured body was released.

The Sharbaji family has yet to hear any news about Yahya's whereabouts. Some recently released prisoners, however, were able to relay that Ahmad Sharbaji's other brother, Maan, was in the prison clinic being treated for undisclosed injuries.

"No one in Syria can ask about the detained," Sharbaji said. "Who is going to answer you? There is no one to answer you. … It's like it was in the '80s."

A prominent businessman in Aleppo has characterized Syria as "a society in custody." Emergency rule imposed in 1963 remains in effect, and the authorities continue to harass and imprison human rights defenders and other non-violent critics of government policies. The government strictly limits freedom of expression, association, and assembly, and treats ethnic minority Kurds as second-class citizens. Women face legal as well as societal discrimination and have little means for redress when they become victims of rape or domestic violence.

In a positive development, the government released more than one hundred long-time political prisoners in 2004, bringing to more than seven hundred the number of such prisoners freed by President Bashar al-Asad since he came to power in June 2000. Thousands of political prisoners, however, reportedly still languish in Syria's prisons.

Arbitrary Arrest and Detention, Torture, and "Disappearances"

Syria has a long record of arbitrary arrests, systematic torture, prolonged detention of suspects, and grossly unfair trials. Thousands of political prisoners, many of them members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood and the Communist Party, remain in detention. In recent years, dozens of people suspected of being connected to the Muslin Brotherhood have been arrested upon their voluntary or forced return home from exile.

The London-based Syrian Human Rights Committee (SHRC) has alleged that several political prisoners died in custody in 2004 as a result of torture. While hundreds of long-term political prisoners have been released in recent years, many remain in detention even after serving their full prison sentences. The SHRC estimates that about four thousand political prisoners remain in detention in Syria today. The authorities have refused to divulge information regarding numbers or names of people in detention on political or security-related charges.

The government has never acknowledged responsibility for an estimated 17,000 persons—Lebanese citizens and stateless Palestinians—who were "disappeared" in Lebanon in the early 1990s and are known or believed to be imprisoned in Syria.

Arrests of Human Rights Activists and Political Critics

Human rights activists continue to be a frequent target of the government. In April 2004 the authorities arrested Aktham Nu'aisse, the fifty-three-year old head of the Committees for the Defense of Democratic Liberties and Human Rights in Syria after he organized a peaceful demonstration outside the parliament building calling for an end to emergency rule. He was released on bail in mid-August and permitted to travel abroad, but at this writing still faces charges under Syria's emergency law, including "opposing the objectives of the revolution."

Dr. Arif Dalila, a prominent economics professor and one of many imprisoned critics of the government, continues to serve a ten-year prison term imposed in July 2002 for his non-violent criticism of government policies. Mamoun al-Homsi, a democracy activist and former member of parliament, is currently serving a five-year jail term for "attempting to change the constitution." Five men remained in detention in late 2004 after being arrested more than a year earlier for downloading material critical of the government from a banned Web site and e-mailing it to others.

Discrimination and Violence Against Kurds

On March 12, 2004, a clash between supporters of rival Kurd and Arab soccer teams in Qamishli, a largely Kurdish city near the border with Turkey, left several dead and many injured. The following day, Kurds vandalized shops and offices during a funeral for the riot victims, and the violence spread to nearby areas. Police responded with live ammunition, killing at least two dozen people, injuring hundreds, and arresting many hundreds more. Human Rights Watch has received credible information that some of those detained were tortured in custody, and at least two of them reportedly died in detention.

Kurds are the largest non-Arab ethnic minority in Syria, comprising about 10 percent of Syria's population of 18.5 million, and have long called for reforms to address systematic discrimination, including the arbitrary denial of citizenship to an estimated 120,000 Syria-born Kurds. In June 2004 the authorities reportedly warned leaders of two unrecognized Kurdish political parties that no independent political activities would be tolerated.

Discrimination against Women

Syria's constitution guarantees equality for men and women, and many women are active in public life, but personal status laws as well as the penal code contain provisions that discriminate against women. The penal code allows for the suspension of legal punishment for a rapist if he chooses to marry his victim, and provides leniency for so-called "honor" crimes, such as assault or killing of women by male relatives for alleged sexual misconduct. Punishment for adultery for women is twice that for men. A husband also has a right to request that his wife be banned from traveling abroad, and divorce laws are discriminatory.

The government keeps no statistics regarding gender-based crimes such as domestic violence and sexual assault against women, although nongovernmental organizations say that domestic violence is common and that the government does not do enough to combat it or provide for victims.

Key International Actors

In May 2004, following U.S. Congressional passage of the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Act, President Bush banned exports of goods to Syria and Syrian commercial flights to the United States, and froze assets of "certain Syrian individuals and government entities." The law, in authorizing such sanctions, cited Syria's hosting of Palestinian militant groups, its support for Lebanon's Hizballah organization, its military presence in Lebanon, its purported efforts to develop chemical and biological weapons, and its alleged support for anti-U.S. forces in Iraq.

In September 2002, the United States forcibly transferred Maher Arar, a dual Canadian-Syrian national whom the U.S. government alleges to have ties with al-Qaeda to Syria, despite Syria's long record of torturing detainees to extract confessions. Arar was arrested in September 2002 while traveling from Tunisia to Canada through New York's Kennedy Airport. U.S. immigration authorities flew Arar to Jordan, where he was handed over to Syrian authorities, despite his repeated statements to U.S. officials that he would be tortured in Syria. After he was released without charge ten months later and allowed to return to Canada, Arar alleged that he had been tortured repeatedly with cables and electrical cords by Syrian interrogators. In January 2004, Arar filed suit in U.S. federal court alleging violations of the Torture Victim Protection Act.

A Syrian-born German national, Muhammad Haydar Zammar, was arrested in Morocco in November 2001 and secretly transferred to Syria, reportedly with the assistance of the United States. He is said to be in solitary confinement in a tiny underground cell in the Palestine Branch of Military Intelligence headquarters in Damascus, where torture and ill-treatment are reportedly common.

The European Commission and Syria initialed an Association Agreement in October 2004 which will be signed in early 2005 and then sent to the parliaments of all European Union member states and the European Parliament for ratification. The text stipulates that Syria must implement all international non-proliferation accords and that "respect for human rights and democratic principles" constitutes "an essential element of the agreement." No E.U. member state appeared at this writing to have called attention to the discrepancy between Syria's practices and the human rights provision of the agreement.

In September 2004, France joined the U.S. to co-sponsor U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559, which demands that "outside powers"—i.e., Syria—withdraw their military forces from Lebanon.

Iraq Says Syria Harbors Foreign Killers

John Ward Anderson and Hasan Shammari

14 Nov 2005

BAGHDAD, Nov. 13 -- Top Iraqi defense officials on Sunday accused Syria of allowing foreign fighters to operate training camps on Syrian soil and sneak into Iraq to commit suicide bombings.

"We do not have the least doubt that nine out of 10 of the suicide bombers who carry out suicide bombing operations among Iraqi citizens . . . are Arabs who have crossed the border with Syria," the Iraqi national security adviser, Mowaffak Rubaie, told journalists in Cairo, the Reuters news service reported.

"Most of those who blow themselves up in Iraq are Saudi nationals," he added.

Iraqi Defense Minister Sadoun Dulaimi also criticized Syria.

"We have more than 450 detainees who came from different Arab and Muslim countries to train in Syria and enter with their booby-trapped vehicles into Iraq to bring destruction and killings," Dulaimi said after meeting with Jordanian Prime Minister Adnan Badran in Amman, according to the Associated Press.

"Let me tell the Syrians that if the Iraqi volcano explodes, no neighboring capital will be saved," Dulaimi said, warning that the aim of terrorists was "to kill tolerance and destroy coexistence in Arab and Muslim cities."

The charges came as Jordan blamed Iraqi suicide bombers for three blasts at hotels in Amman on Wednesday that killed 57 people. The allegations also echo complaints from U.S. military officials that Syria has done little to patrol its 376-mile border with Iraq.

In Iraq, meanwhile, two Marines were killed Saturday when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb in Amiriyah, about 25 miles southwest of Baghdad, the U.S. military said in a statement Sunday. And a U.S. soldier died Saturday in "a non-hostile" traffic accident near Rawah, in western Iraq, about 50 miles from the Syrian border, the military said in a separate statement.

In Baqubah, about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, Iraqi forces arrested 371 suspected terrorists on Saturday, including the town's mayor, the deputy chairman of the city council, the deputy chief of the appeals court and several police officers, Maj. Gen. Mohammed Hasan Tamimi, a senior Interior Ministry official, said Sunday.

Local officials expressed outrage at the sweeping arrests, complaining that they were based on unsubstantiated tips. The mayor, Khaid Sanjari, said he was released Sunday without being questioned. Oaf Rahoomi, the deputy provincial governor, called the arrests "random" and charged that the operation had "sectarian goals" aimed at preventing Sunni Arabs from taking part in national elections scheduled for Dec. 15.

Sunni Arabs, who make up about 20 percent of Iraq's population, controlled the country under former president Saddam Hussein. Shiite Muslims, who account for 60 percent of the population, now dominate the country's security forces.

Confusion continued to surround the fate of a former top aide to Hussein, Izzat Ibrahim Douri, the country's most wanted man, after an obscure Arabic-language Web site reported Friday that he had died. Douri, who would be about 63 and reportedly has leukemia, is considered the highest-ranking member of Hussein's inner circle still at large.

Another Web site, the official site of the Arab Baath Socialist Party, reported Sunday that "the holy warrior Izzat Douri" was "fine," calling earlier reports of his death baseless.

"We apologize to our brothers and sisters for publishing a statement announcing the death of brother Izzat Douri, Abu Ahmed, may God extend his life," the brief message stated.

It was not possible to independently confirm the reports. Many reports of Douri's death appear to be based on Internet echoes from the Web site in Britain with Baathist ties that first reported his death on Friday -- interspersed with a variety of stories and pictures of such figures as Paul McCartney, Rosa Parks and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

There have been several reports that Douri might be spreading false rumors about himself, and a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, warned that the reports of Douri's death could be a hoax.

"Coalition officials question the validity of the Baath party claim that Douri has died," the U.S. military said in a statement Sunday night. A reward of up $10 million would be paid "for information leading to al-Douri's capture or his gravesite," it said.

Embassies burn in cartoon protest

Syrians have set fire to the Norwegian and Danish embassies in Damascus in protest at the publication of newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

Protesters scaled the Danish site amid chants of "God is great", before moving on to attack the Norwegian mission.

Denmark and Norway condemned Syria for failing its international obligations and urged their citizens to leave.

The cartoons have sparked Muslim outrage across the world, following their publication in a Danish paper.

One depicts Muhammad as a terrorist. Any images of the Prophet are banned under Islamic tradition.

However, several European papers reprinted the cartoons, citing free speech.

The publications have prompted diplomatic sanctions, boycotts and death threats in some Arab nations.

In other developments:

· Palestinians protest in Gaza and the West Bank, as other demonstrators gather at the Danish embassy in London

· Two Jordanian editors who published the cartoons have been arrested

· Iran says it should consider abandoning commercial and trade deals with countries where the cartoons have appeared

· The Vatican says the right to freedom of expression does not imply the right to offend religious beliefs.

'We defend you'

Syrians have been staging sit-ins outside the Danish embassy since the row intensified earlier this week, when Damascus recalled its ambassador.

On Saturday, hundreds hurled stones and stormed the Danish site, before moving to the Norwegian embassy.

"With our blood and souls we defend you, O Prophet of God," they chanted outside the Danish building, which also houses the Swedish and Chilean missions.

Some removed the Danish flag and replaced it with another reading: "There is no god but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God."

The embassy was closed, and no diplomats were reported to have been injured in either attack.

Outside the Norwegian embassy, police fired tear gas to try to disperse the protesters, but some broke in and set it ablaze.

Demonstrators also tried to storm the French mission, but were stopped.

Danish 'distress'

In Copenhagen, the government called on its nationals to leave Syria at once.

On Friday, the Danish prime minister made a new bid to calm anger, by explaining his position over the publication to Muslim ambassadors.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he could never apologise for a newspaper's actions, but said he was "distressed" at offence caused.

The cartoons originated in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten paper and have been reprinted in newspapers in France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands and Spain - who say they were exercising their right to free speech.

Jyllands-Posten has apologised for causing offence to Muslims, although it maintains it was legal under Danish law to print the cartoons.

CARTOON ROW

30 Sept: Danish paper publishes cartoons

20 Oct: Muslim ambassadors complain to Danish PM

10 Jan: Norwegian publication reprints cartoons

26 Jan: Saudi Arabia recalls its ambassador

30 Jan: Gunmen raid EU's Gaza office demanding apology

31 Jan: Danish paper apologises

1 Feb: Papers in France, Germany, Italy and Spain reprint cartoons

SYRIA: ANTI-HEADSCARF BOOK IS BANNED

Damascus, 18 Jan. (AKI) - Reversing a previous decision, Syrian authorities have banned the sale of a 50-page booklet titled 'Let the Headscarf be torn off,' by an Iranian woman author. The information ministry has ordered bookstores to remove all copies of Chahdortt Djavann's book from their shelves, and Syrian prime minister Muhammad Naji al-Otri has told state institutions to sever links with the book's Syrian publisher, Petra.

Despite the outrage the book has provoked in some quarters of Syria's Muslim community, Petra's director, Luway al-Huseyn, believes the decision to withdraw the book from the market has nothing to do with religion. "The reaction against the book was triggered by the security services," al-Huseyn told Adnkronos International (AKI).

"To date I have not received any direct complaint from religious leaders, which leads me to think that it is just a question between me and the security services, he said.

Last November the book had been distributed with the authorities' consent at a conference in Damascus titled "Women and tradition" organised by the higher education Ministry.

In the book, first published in France in 2003, Chadortt, who lives in Paris, condemns the use of the Muslim headscarf throughout the world and criticises Islam's view of women. She has reportedly received several threatening telephone calls on account of this.

"It is not right to force a girl to cover her head with the hijab, When she reaches the age of 18 she can than choose to do so if she wants," the book says.

Syrian human rights activist Haytham al-Malih, whose own books have been banned by the Damascus government has however criticised the book for "distorting the Islamic religion."

The book is "not scientific nor precise when it states that Muslims consider the birth of baby girls as a shameful thing," he says.

"If the author was born into a family which hates girls, this cannot be blamed on Islam," he adds.

UN report broke Syrian taboo

By SAMAR KASSABLI

Tuesday, April 11, 2006 · Last updated 3:34 p.m. PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

DAMASCUS, Syria -- A U.N.-funded report on violence against Syrian women that appeared in state-run media broke a long-held taboo against public discourse on such issues, activists said Tuesday.

The activists said they hope the government's willingness to publicize the matter will help raise awareness in this conservative society.

The study found that about 22 percent of married women in Syria said they had been verbally or physically assaulted, with about 10 percent saying they had been beaten.

Of that 10 percent, eight in 10 said the beating came from a family member, the study found.

The state-run Al-Baath newspaper ran a story about the news conference announcing the study's results, though the results themselves were not published. The report quoted activists saying that women were subjected to violence daily and that some laws discriminated against women.

Still, the mere publication of the report was an indication the government, which controls many aspects of political life and the media, wanted to raise awareness.

"Violence against women always existed in Syria, like any other society. But talk about it is new," said Muna Ghanem, head of the state-run Family Affairs' Association, a branch of the General Union of Women. She said the group was preparing to run awareness campaigns on TV.

It was not clear why President Bashar Assad's government allowed the report to appear. Since coming to power in 2000, Assad has embarked on limited economic and political reforms, easing some of the rigid restrictions in place under his late father.

Unlike many countries in the conservative Arab world, women in Syria have reached high political positions, but activists say their status within society still lags behind.

The study, released last week by the state-run General Union of Women, was funded by the United Nations Development Fund for Women.

Aref Sheikh, the coordinator in Syria of the U.N. fund, said some in Syria's government do support the discussion of such social problems, while others deny the problems exist.

He said the study could serve as the basis for debate and action by politicians to change laws.

"It's very important to put the issue of violence against women in Syria on the table and discuss it publicly," Sheikh told The Associated Press.

The study of nearly 1,900 families said women were beaten for reasons ranging from neglecting housework to bombarding husbands with too many questions.

Mohammad Habash, head of the Islamic Studies Center and a legislator, said the report's figures were "horrible" but added that violence against women is "part of the prevailing mentality in the region."

Ways to deal with the issue include pressing for a change in the way Muslim societies look at women and in developing laws relating to women, activists said.

Still, Syria has made important strides.

Syria boasts the highest-ranking female official in the Arab world, Najah al-Attar, appointed second vice president about three weeks ago. The country also has two female Cabinet ministers out of 30.

There are 30 women lawmakers in the 250-seat legislature, and 19 percent of lawyers in Syria are women.

Associated Press reporter Dale Gavlak in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.

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