Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Hit hard, Aleppo’s rebels retreat
Ammo is short amid bombing, shelling deluge
BEIRUT — Rebel fighters in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, said Wednesday that government forces had launched a ground assault, forcing them to pull back from parts of the city because their ammunition was running low, as new disputes arose around the contentious issue of foreign support for President Bashar Assad and for the opposition.
In Aleppo, several rebel commanders said shelling and bomb attacks early Wednesday had reached new levels of intensity.
Residents who had not fled the city reported receiving text messages in the morning asking them to cooperate with the government. One text, signed by the Syrian army, read: “Dear brothers, informing about terrorists means you are saving yourself and your family.”
Both the opposition and Syrian state television said the Syrian military had tried to reclaim the strategic neighborhood of
Salaheddine, where much of the fighting has been concentrated.
A rebel commander identified as Abu Mohammed, chief of the insurgent Shahbaa Brigade in Aleppo, said in a telephone interview that the fight with loyalist soldiers would apparently be a long battle because of an ammunition shortage.
A spokesman for the main rebel brigade in Aleppo said heavy clashes were occurring but neither side had advanced.
But Abu Mohmammed said some rebel fighters had to retreat because of the ammunition shortage.
Specifically, he said the rebels needed a daily supply of at least 60 rocket-propelled grenades, often used against armored vehicles, to counter a buildup of government forces including tanks and snipers in Salaheddine, a middle-class neighborhood in the city’s southwest.
Other commanders spoke of a significant buildup by government troops near the southern edge of the city, which is Syria’s commercial heart.
Syrian state television reported Wednesday that the army had already “cleaned” Salaheddine, seizing ammunition caches and killing several “terrorists” — the official term for the rebels — while arresting others, including fighters from unidentified foreign countries.
Rebels said troops had already moved into parts of the area. But broader suggestions that a long-awaited ground offensive had begun against the rebels could not be independently confirmed.
The developments coincided with several conflicting reports regarding the roles of other countries in Syria’s conflict.
In Jordan, the state news agency reported that Syria’s prime minister, Riad Farid Hijab, completed his widely reported defection by arriving in Jordan early Wednesday — not Monday, as Jordanian officials and Syrian rebels and activists had all initially reported.
Jordanian officials did not respond to requests for comment on the discrepancy, but analysts said Jordan either lied initially to confuse the Syrian government and protect Hijab from capture at the border or is changing its story now to minimize its own role in the original defection, to maintain its public stance of neutrality.
“They did not take a position on the first day of the defection because they were scared of a reaction,” said Talal Atrissi, a Lebanese political analyst. “They might also have been protecting him for security reasons.”
Free Syrian Army spokesman Ahmed Kassem, who said Monday that Hijab had defected, said Wednesday that Hijab had actually been inside Syrian territory for the past two days waiting to cross. He said the rebels’ earlier statements to reporters were meant to “confuse the Syrian regime over the prime minister’s whereabouts.”
A report aired by AlJazeera on Wednesday claimed to show exclusive footage of Hijab’s convoy in the “final stages of the defection” from Syria. Eight sport utility vehicles are visible, tearing through rocky desert terrain with armed rebel fighters hanging out of the windows.
“The operation was exhausting and very complex,” Yasser al Aboud, a Free Syrian Army commander, tells Al-Jazeera in a video chat. “It involved more than one battalion and brigade, ranging from units working in Damascus and its countryside to ones in the south.”
Aboud said several decoy cars were sent in different directions, with the rebels deliberately allowing the Syrian government to monitor conversations of one false convoy heading north toward the Turkish border. Hijab allegedly fled with 35 members of his family, according to the Al- Jazeera report.
There were also new, disputed accounts regarding the identity of dozens of Iranians taken prisoner in Syria by rebels over the weekend and an equally contentious claim by the insurgents that they had killed a senior Russian general acting as a military adviser to government forces around the capital, Damascus.
A rebel group calling itself the Hawks Special Operations Battalion said in a video posted on YouTube that it had “eliminated” Gen. Vladimir Petrovich Kochyev. The video showed what the rebels said was a copy of an identity card issued by the Russian military.
There was no independent corroboration of the claim, which was denied strenuously in Moscow by Russian media reports saying the general had been in Syria but was currently on vacation outside Moscow. The same media outlets later quoted the officer by name as saying he was alive and in Moscow.
It was not clear whether the claims and counterclaims were part of the broader propaganda war between Damascus and its adversaries that has burgeoned in the information vacuum created by restrictions on independent reporting.
Russia, which has a naval base in Syria, is Assad’s most important international sponsor, and Iran is his biggest regional ally.
Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency said Wednesday that Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, flying back from Turkey, had told Iranian reporters that “some” of the Iranian captives in Syria seized last weekend were “retired” members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.
But he went on that “their appearance and clothes and documents show they are honest pilgrims.”
Iran has insisted that the captives are religious pilgrims, while their captors say they were on a military mission.
Hours later, an unnamed Foreign Ministry official denied the minister’s reported remarks on Iran’s Arabiclanguage Al Alam state television channel, saying there was “no truth in any reports linking the kidnapped Iranians in Syria to the Revolutionary Guards.”
Confusion also accompanied official Iranian announcements of an international conference on Syria to be convened today in Tehran. Iran’s semiofficial Fars News Agency quoted Hussein Amir Abdollahian, the deputy foreign minister for Arab and African affairs, as saying “a remarkable number of interested and influential regional and world states” were sending emissaries.
But less than 24 hours before the conference was to begin, Iran had not disclosed which countries would be represented at the conference. Its tentative nature was reflected in a Twitter message by Russia’s Foreign Ministry, which said that “if the meeting takes place, Russia will be represented by its Ambassador to Iran.”
At the United Nations, France announced that it was organizing a ministerial-level meeting for members of the Security Council to discuss Syria, to be held on Aug. 30. The French mission to the United Nations, which currently holds the rotating post of Security Council president, said Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius would lead that conference, which would be devoted to “examining the humanitarian situation in Syria and neighboring countries.”
A pessimistic mood has set in among analysts monitoring the conflict, now estimated to have taken 20,000 lives and displaced 1.5 million.
“What we have witnessed in the past 16 months of revolt might just be the harbinger of a far greater human disaster to come,” Martin Indyk, a former diplomat now directing the foreign- policy program at the Brookings Institution, testified last week at the U. S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
Indyk sees the Assad regime, made up of fellow members of the minority Shiite Alawite sect, as motivated to destroy the rebels out of fear that they would be slaughtered by the Sunni majority if Assad is driven out.
With virtually no hope of foreign military intervention in a U. S. election year, the analysts say, it falls to the underdog rebels to offer assurances to Syrian minority communities that their rights would be respected and their interests represented in a post-assad leadership.
Andrew Tabler, Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, doubts that the scattered rebel units could provide such assurances.
“After 17 months of slaughter, I wouldn’t rely on the better angels of anyone’s nature,” he said, predicting the war will be “a grinder.”