REGIME IN PIECES
Claims regime ‘falling apart,’ others waiting to defect
Syria’s former prime minister, who fled the country last week, says the country’s government is crumbling.
BEIRUT — Syria’s former prime minister, who fled the country last week, said Tuesday in his first public appearance since his defection that the government of President Bashar Assad was crumbling internally under the pressure of relentless fighting against rebels and from betrayals by loyalists who want only to flee.
“Based on my experience and my position, the regime is falling apart morally, materially, economically,” the former official, Riad Farid Hijab, said at a news conference in Amman, Jordan. “Its military is rusting, and it only controls 30 percent of Syria’s territory.”
He added that many high-level civilian and military officials in Syria — “leaders with dignity” — were waiting to defect. Hijab said he f led the Syrian capital, Damascus, because the government had threatened his family and had no reasonable means to end the violence. He also urged the opposition to unify and move ahead with plans for a transitional government.
Hijab’s repudiation of the Assad government was welcomed in the United States, where the Treasury Department removed his name from a blacklist of high Syrian officials whose assets have been frozen by U. S. sanctions. In a statement announcing Hijab’s removal from the blacklist, the Treasury Department said it hoped that other Syrian officials would take “similarly courageous steps to reject the Assad regime and stand with the Syrian people.”
Hijab’s claims about the weakness of the Assad government could not be independently verified. Hijab, a Sunni technocrat from the eastern city of Deir el-Zour, was not a member of Assad’s inner circle and he was appointed to the position of prime minister only in June. But analysts said that as the highest-level civilian official to defect, he may have had access to reliable internal assessments or government sources.
Meanwhile, a Syrian rebel video purported Tuesday to show their latest captive: a lone Lebanese Shiite suspected of links to pro-regime Hezbollah whose abduction appears part of a wider strategy shift to target perceived backers of Assad.
A series of hostage-takings aimed at Assad’s few remaining supporters — Iranians and Lebanese Shiites — has sought to both send a message about the rebels’ reach and try to buff their image with seeming propaganda stunts such as captives praising their treatment and denouncing Assad’s regime.