The people vs the president Syria in turmoil as resistance turns to insurrection

Robert Fisk: The people vs the president
Syria in turmoil as resistance turns to insurrection

Wednesday, 8 June 2011

Syria's revolt against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad is
turning into an armed insurrection, with previously peaceful
demonstrators taking up arms to fight their own army and the
"shabiha" – meaning "the ghosts", in English – of Alawi militiamen
who have been killing and torturing those resisting the regime's rule.

Even more serious for Assad's still-powerful supporters, there is
growing evidence that individual Syrian soldiers are revolting
against his forces. The whole edifice of Assad's Alawi
dictatorship is now in the gravest of danger.

In 1980, Assad's father, Hafez, faced an armed uprising in the
central city of Hama, which was put down by the Special Forces of
Hafez's brother Rifaat – who is currently living, for the benefit
of war crimes investigators, in central London – at a cost of up
to 20,000 lives. But the armed revolt today is now spreading
across all of Syria, a far-mightier crisis and one infinitely more
difficult to suppress. No wonder Syrian state television has been
showing the funerals of up to 120 members of the security services
from just one location, the northern town of Jisr al-Shughour.

The first evidence of civilians turning to weapons to defend their
families came from Deraa, the city where the bloody story of the
Syrian uprising first began after intelligence officers arrested
and tortured to death a 13-year-old boy. Syrians arriving in
Beirut told me the male citizens of Deraa had grown tired of
following the example of peaceful Tunisian and Egyptian protesters
– an understandable emotion since people in those countries
suffered nothing like the brutal suppression meted out by Assad's
soldiers and militiamen – and were now sometimes "shooting back"
for the sake of "dignity" and to protect their wives and children.

Bashar and his cynical brother Maher – the present-day equivalent
of the outrageous Rifaat – may now be gambling on the old
dictator's saw that their regime must be defended against armed
Islamists supported by al-Qa'ida, a lie which was perpetrated by
Muammar Gaddafi and the now-exiled leaders Ali Abdullah Saleh of
Yemen and Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and the
still-on-the-throne al-Khalifas of Bahrain.

The few al-Qa'ida cells in the Arab world may wish this to be
true, but the Arab revolt is about the one phenomenon in the
Middle East uncontaminated by "Islamism". Only the Israelis and
the Americans may be tempted to believe otherwise.

Al Jazeera television yesterday aired extraordinary footage of a
junior Syrian officer calling upon his comrades to refuse to
continue massacring civilians in Syria. Identified as Lt
Abdul-Razak Tlas, from the town of Rastan, he said he had joined
the army "to fight the Israeli enemy", but found himself
witnessing a massacre of his own people in the town of Sanamein.
"After what we've seen from crimes in Deraa and all over Syria, I
am unable to continue with the Syrian Arab army," he announced. "I
urge the army, and I say: 'Is the army here to steal and protect
the Assad family?' I call upon all honourable officers to tell
their soldiers about the real picture, use your conscience... if
you are not honourable, stay with Assad."

Differentiating rumour from fact in Syria is getting easier by the
week. More Syrians are reaching the safety of Lebanon and Turkey
to tell their individual stories of torture and cruelty in
security police barracks and in plain-clothes police cells. Some
are still using the telephone from Syria itself – one to describe
explosions in Jisr al-Shughour and of bodies being tossed into the
river from which the town takes its name.

For well over a month, I have been watching Syrian television's
nightly news and at least half the broadcasts have included
funerals of dead soldiers. Now Syria itself declares that 120 have
been killed in one incident, an incredible loss for an army that
was supposed to instill horror into the minds of the country's
protesters. But then the supposedly invincible Syrian army often
showed itself woefully unable to suppress Lebanese militias during
the country's 1975-90 civil war. An entire battalion of Syrian
Special Forces troops was driven out of east Beirut, for example,
by a ragtag group of Christian militias who would have been
crushed by any serious professional army.

If you wish to destroy unarmed civilians, you shoot them down in
the street and then shoot down the funeral mourners and then shoot
down the mourners of the dead mourners – which is exactly what
Assad's gunmen have been doing – but when the resistors shoot
back, the Syrian army has shown a quite different response:
torture for their prisoners and fear in the face of the enemy.

But if the armed insurrection takes hold, then it is also the 11
per cent Alawi community – once the frontier force of the French
mandate against the Sunnis and now the prop of Assad against the
poorer Sunnis – which is at threat. So appalled is the Assad
regime at its enemies that it has been encouraging Palestinians to
try to cross the frontier wire on Israeli-occupied Golan. The
Israelis say this is to divert world attention from the massacres
in Syria – and they are absolutely right.

The Damascus government's Tishrin newspaper has been suggesting
that 600,000 Palestinians may soon try to "go home" to the lands
of Palestine from which the Israelis drove them in 1948, a
nightmare the Israelis would prefer not to think about – but not
as great a nightmare as that now facing the people and their
oppressors in Syria itself.

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