The conflict in Syria rages on as the Battle of Aleppo enters its third week on August 2. Since March of 2011, when the first anti-government protests began in Syria, around 200,000 have been made refugees and around 20,000 people have been killed.

Aleppo, a commercial hub in Syria and the city with the largest population, is one of the most active combat locations in Syria. It is a key location since the winning of Aleppo for the rebels could mean the end of the Assad regime. BBC’s Jim Muir wrote, “The longer the situation remains unresolved, the stronger the rebels’ grip may become, as they pursue their goal of establishing a ‘liberated area’ in Aleppo and neighboring Idlib province to use as a springboard against the regime’s last stronghold, Damascus.”

Many rebels have taken hold of several districts within the city of Aleppo and Assad has sent tanks, helicopter gunships, and war planes to attack it.

On August 2 the rebel Tawheed Brigade left Tal Rifaat to give aid to the rebels in Aleppo. Also early in the morning of August 2 the rebels attacked Menagh army base with a stolen tank. Menagh is from where Assad has been launching several of his artillery and air strike attacks on Aleppo. The rebels pulled out after a short time with one rebel fighter claiming, “We hit the airport using a tank that we captured from the Assad army. We attacked the airport a few times but we have decided to retreat at this time.” However, several reports claim that the retreat may have been due to the war planes that attacked the rebels.

In Aleppo, rebels put a video online that showed them executing several prisoners; the act is being called a war crime by several organizations. The rebels also claim to have taken three police stations within the city in the last week. Also last month, Assad’s forces managed to drive most of the rebels out of Damascus and began to push an offensive on Aleppo.

Tensions between the two sides have also risen from the government activity in Damascus and the rebel activity in Aleppo. Assad, who has been in power since the death of his father in 2001, launched two attacks in Damascus on Thursday in which soldiers went door to door asking people to show their papers. The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) claimed “the bodies of 43 people were recovered. Some of them had been summarily executed.”

In the last month Assad’s top four advisers, including his own brother-in-law, were killed in a bombing. Since then, Assad has been in hiding and has only issued pre-recorded statements.

On Wednesday, August 1 the mobile phone connections were cut for the city of Aleppo leading many to believe that the government would launch an attack. In fact, on Thursday the government forces attacked the Salaheddine district in Aleppo, although most were repelled by the rebels.

The problems worsen even further for the citizens of Aleppo since the city is beginning to run out of food. The World Food Program issued a statement claiming, “The humanitarian situation is deteriorating in Aleppo and food needs are growing rapidly.”

The world’s response

Many believe that outside governments should be helping the rebels although since Russia and China are in favor of keeping Assad in power, there has been little consensus. The Security Council has created three separate resolutions that have been vetoed by Russia and China as too extreme because it would cause a regime change led by an outside power, violating sovereignty.

The UN General Assembly will be voting on a resolution written by Saudi Arabia shortly that would support the Syrian rebels.

President Obama called Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday, July 30 to “coordinate efforts to accelerate a political transition in Syria.” Although Obama will not send direct military assistance, he does seem to want to support the rebels. The Treasury Department has recently decided that it will give a license to the Syrian Support Group that will aid the rebels financially.

Jordan, a bordering country to Syria, has been helping Syrian refugees enter their country. However, in recent days Syrian soldiers shot at Jordanian troops that were helping the refugees to cross the border.

On August 2, the UN-Arab League joint special peace envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan, has announced that he will not renew his contract when it ends in August, effectively quitting his job. He claims that the Syrian people “desperately need action” but he believes that the UN Security Council is “finger pointing and name calling.”

Annan is the author of the six point peace plan that was introduced a few months ago. It called for an end to all military conflict, peaceful political negotiations, and more freedom of expression for the Syrian people. Unfortunately, neither the rebels nor the Syrian government upheld all sides of the plan and the situation quickly deteriorated.

Annan has blamed both sides in the Syrian conflict for the lack of peace but has also said that the problems were “compounded by the disunity of the international community.” He went on to state, “Syria can still be saved from the worst calamity – if the international community can show the courage and leadership necessary to compromise on their partial interests for the sake of the Syrian people – for the men, women, and children who have already suffered far too much.”

Currently it is unknown who will fill Annan’s position at the end of August, but most assuredly few are willing to take it.

Image Courtesy of   homeros / Shutterstock.com

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Two wars are being waged in Syria. There is the physical fighting going on between the rebels and government troops but there is also a media war going on in which the results of the physical battles are being hidden or changed to misrepresent facts. One young activist, Yahya Abdulrahman, a physics student at Aleppo University claimed, “The regime is fighting the people in two ways. One is with the army. The other is with the media. There are parts of the Free Syrian Army that are fighting the regime. But there are other parts fighting the regime’s hackers.””

Smart phones have been key in the Syrian uprising – just like in the Arab Spring revolutions – because, according to the Christian Science Monitor, it is a way for the people to undermine the state media (which is controlled by Assad) and get supporters within Syria and in the rest of the world. So far the Syrian government has banned access to YouTube and Facebook, but several of the youth have found ways around these government firewalls.

Having smart phones and access to computers and internet allow the rebels to communicate with friends and family as well as talk to soldiers who want to defect to the rebel army.

Many Syrian rebels have risked their lives while fighting the media war. According to the Guardian hundreds of video activists have joined the revolution through videography; most are male, young, and technologically capable individuals. Abdulrahman, one of these activists, admits that filming is just as dangerous as fighting with a gun: “If the army sees anyone with a camera they try and kill him first.”

However, the video aspect of the revolution is just as important as the actual physical fighting. Assad controls Syria’s television stations which claim that the Free Syrian Army (the rebels) is a group of “terrorists” and “al-Qaida” while also broadcasting pro-regime propaganda. Abu Mhio, a rebel media activist claims, “When we will be free, [Syrian TV] will be dead.”

If Assad controls all of the media in the country he can prevent the successes of the rebels from being reported which lowers their support and prevents more people from getting involved. In order to ensure that the world and the Syrian people actually know what is going on in Syria they must record it for themselves, even if it is emotionally tolling and life-threatening.

Abdulrahman was arrested once for video-recording a protest on his campus. After being beaten and made to sign a piece of paper claiming he was an informant, he was released and continued filming for the rebels. He has also filmed the dead in the streets to show the toll of the fighting. “I filmed one of the children killed last week. We hadn’t eaten all day because of Ramadan. But afterwards I couldn’t touch any food.”

In previous years rebels have not had such technological access to aid them in their cause. Hafez al-Assad, the current ruler’s father, ruled Syria from 1970 and was responsible for destroying the Muslim Brotherhood uprising in the city of Hama in 1982, killing at least 10,000 people. One rebel fighter explained to the Christian Science Monitor, “His father destroyed Hama in a few days, but there was no TV there and no internet to show the world. But today we have the internet, we photograph and film and have Al Jazeera, so people know. They can see what is happening.”

Few journalists have been allowed within Syria in the recent months of fighting, but those that have, have received threats. One Guardian journalist received a death threat via a tweet from a member of the regime stating, “I pray every night that you die.”

Those journalists that are allowed in the country are also not provided a lot of access. Another journalist, Alex Thomson, tweeted “Syrian government is losing the PR war” when they refused to let him interview or record the Syrian military.

Ultimately, winning the media war will be just as important as winning the physical war for both sides. The rebels have succeeded in many ways but they must take Aleppo in order to really start making changes. According to Burhan Ghalioun, a member of the Syrian National Council currently in Paris, if the rebels take Aleppo “there will be nothing more that will stand in the way of the Free Syrain Army. Hama, Homs, to the outskirts of Damascus have in large part been liberated.”

Image Courtesy of  Omar Chatriwala

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RATKO MLADIC has been arrested. Here’s what did not happen: a team of 79 members of the Bosnian special forces – on the orders of the Bosnian government – did not helicopter into Serbia, without the permission or knowledge of the Serbian government, and execute him with a bullet to the head. That’s what did not happen.

There are some very good reasons why that did not happen. The first is that it would not only have been illegal, but detrimental to the very concept of law. The second is that it would have damaged an already tender relationship between Bosnia and Serbia, thus potentially risking the lives of many innocent people. The third is that it would have been immoral for a government to execute a man without trial, against the principle of universal human rights (particularly as expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights articles 10 and 11). The fourth is, very simply, that the United States was not involved. When the United States assassinated Osama Bin Laden on May 1st, this is exactly what happened.

Ratko Mladic was allegedly responsible for war crimes just as serious as Bin Laden’s. He was a leading figure of the Bosnian Serb army during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, and in particular he is suspected of having been directly responsible for the Srebrenica massacre of 7,500 Muslim men in July 1995. He will be tried in The Hague.

Living, as I do, in London, I must ask what the UK government has to say about this. Foreign Secretary William Hague, commenting on the arrest, said that this ‘historic moment” would bring “belated justice for [Mladic's] victims”. I must also ask why exactly William Hague’s opinions on justice have changed so radically in the past month. After the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, Mr Hague “congratulated” the United States, praising President Obama’s proclamation that “justice has been done”. Needless to say, this is fundamental hypocrisy. Either justice lies in cold blooded illegal state assassination, or it lies in arrest and trial.

“If we believe in the most basic of moral principles, we will surely conclude that assassinating suspected criminals without trial is an abrogation of universal human rights, and therefore unconscionable.”

Geoffrey Robertson QC, following the May 1st assassination, made the very modest point that the West correctly “insisted upon judgement at Nuremberg” for the Nazi leadership, and that this has “confounded Holocaust-deniers ever since”. His conclusion on Bin Laden’s assassination is rather more convincing than Mr. Hague’s: “it is absurd to claim that justice has been done”.

If we believe in the most basic of moral principles, we will surely conclude that assassinating suspected criminals without trial is an abrogation of universal human rights, and therefore unconscionable. The arrest of Mladic is clearly a victory for international justice. Yet we must also ask why it is that individuals responsible for crimes just as heinous as Ratko Mladic and Osama Bin Laden are given a completely free pass. Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli general and Prime Minister from 2001-2006, is strongly suspected of responsibility for the 1973 Yom-Kippur war, and the massacre of 3,500 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Rifaat al-Assad, the man directly responsible for the murder of 20,000 Sunni Muslims during the Hama Massacre of 1982, is currently living in Mayfair. Those who have denied Serbia membership of the EU on the basis of its failure to capture Mladic, have been unwittingly calling for the expulsion of the United Kingdom. Quite clearly, our own leadership does not believe in the most basic of moral principles.

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Syria is no Libya. It was never designed as such. Its important to keep that in mind while watching events unfold in the Middle East and North Africa.

In Libya the Little Green Book shapes the government structure (or the lack of one). If you aren’t familiar with the Green Book, suffice it to say that it was written by Qaddafi and that he rode his own revolution into office by championing the ideas within it. The Green Book included Qaddafi’s vague vision of what government should look like and how it should be run. He apparently wrote the whole thing to serve as a model to what his presumed utopia would one day look like. Syria’s Baath Party too once had an idealistic utopia in mind for Syria and the rest of the Arab world. Both countries developed different paths to shape their government structures. Both countries rewarded corruption, cronyism and dictatorship rule as well.

And that is where the similarities end.

The reason I am hopeful that Syria’s President, Bashaar Al Assad, will indeed be toppled is because of the subtle political similarities between Syria and Egypt. Like Egypt’s former President Mubarak – the effect of saying former still hasn’t quite rubbed off yet – Assad has accommodated his autocratic authority by keeping his cronies satisfied. But even dictators can have a hard time pleasing everyone, especially when they face popular discontent and revolt on the scale we have been seeing recently in the Middle East. Granted that the army seems to be much more in line with Assad’s plans to crush the revolution taking place there than say it was in Egypt. Nonetheless there are other reasons that the regime may crack.

Syria is an autocratic country. Unlike Libya, the structure there allows for opposition political parties, much like Egypt did, however they are consistently and methodically harassed by a skewed constitution, impartial judiciary and a demented, power crazed executive branch. Assad certainly has reason to keep it as such, being that he is an Alawite, a minority sect of Shia Islam.

But this is where the similarities with Egypt end and those with Iraq begin.

Like Iraq during Saddam’s reign, Syria is dominated by the Baath Party (resurrection in Arabic), a secular political party that was founded in Syria, and manifested itself at different times in Iraq, culminating with its rule predominately under Saddam. But secularism here is enforced. It is not accompanied by liberal ideals of tolerance. In fact, tolerance in most of the Arab world, is used mainly as a reactionary argument by their regimes against the occasional religious clashes or any other forms of internal social rift that would at any time seem to threaten the stability of those who rule. It is not proactive and it is certainly not embodied in the spirit of the Baath party. Sadly, tolerance is engineered by these regimes for one reason and one reason only, to keep a minority or unelected group of individuals in power. As cynical as that assessment may be, unfortunately that is how the situation currently stands in Syria and much of the Arab world.

If the protests rocking Syria in the past few weeks hint at anything however, it is that the ruling party and the establishment system as a whole is vulnerable and that their propaganda efforts are failing them. One important factor to consider is if that vulnerability will eventually culminate in the rejection of Assad’s one party dominates all rule.

So how are things going to end up for Assad and his Baath party should Syria fall?

My assessment is that it won’t be a pretty picture. The possibility of a fair power sharing agreement between the Sunni’s and Shia and Alawite’s is doable but not likely. An additional variable also adds worry to this already risky situation and that is the Muslim Brotherhood In Syria. Unlike Egypt, Syria had lagged in the degree of political reform during the early years of this century. The situation in Egypt pre-revolution allowed for a more vocal and heightened opposition to government rule. When the government tried to choke off the stream of reforms, the country imploded. It remains to be seen however if Syrians will be able to fight off the army – a situation that Egyptians mostly avoided during the revolution – and succeed in their cause of toppling the violent dictatorship that rules them today.

Will Syria too fall? Is so, what are the chances of it creating a multi faceted vibrant civil society to replace its currently established dictatorship? Let us know your opinion here. You can also comment on this article through our facebook page!

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