Syria News

Syria

Anwar Amro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Updated: June 17, 2012

The wave of Arab unrest that began with the Tunisian revolution reached Syria on March 15, 2011, when residents of a small southern city took to the streets to protest the torture of students who had put up anti-government graffiti. The government responded with heavy-handed force, and demonstrations quickly spread across much of the country.

President Bashar al-Assad, a British-trained doctor who inherited Syria’s harsh dictatorship from his father, Hafez al-Assad, at first wavered between force and hints of reform. But in April 2011, just days after lifting the country’s decades-old state of emergency, he set off the first of what became a series of withering crackdowns, sending tanks into restive cities as security forces opened fire on demonstrators.

Neither the violence nor Mr. Assad’s offers of political reform — rejected as shams by protest leaders — brought an end to the unrest. Similarly, the protesters have not been able to overcome direct assault by the military’s armed forces or to seize and hold significant chunks of territory.

In the summer of 2011, as the crackdown dragged on, thousands of soldiers defected and began launching attacks against the government, bringing the country to what the United Nations in December called the verge of civil war.  An opposition government in exile was formed, the Syrian National Council, but the council’s internal divisions have kept Western and Arab governments from recognizing it as such. The opposition remains a fractious collection of political groups, longtime exiles, grass-roots organizers and armed militants, divided along ideological, ethnic or sectarian lines.

The conflict is complicated by Syria’s ethnic divisions. The Assads and much of the nation’s elite, especially the military, belong to the Alawite sect, a minority in a mostly Sunni country. While the Assad government has the advantage of crushing firepower and units of loyal, elite troops, the insurgents should not be underestimated. They are highly motivated and, over time, demographics should tip in their favor. Alawites constitute about 12 percent of the 23 million Syrians. Sunni Muslims, the opposition’s backbone, make up about 75 percent of the population.

Descent Into Sectarian Civil War

The United States and countries around the world condemned President Assad, who many had hoped would soften his father’s iron-handed regime. Criticism has also come from unlikely quarters, like Syria’s neighbors, Jordan and Turkey, and the Arab League. Syria was expelled from the Arab League after it agreed to a peace plan only to step up attacks on protesters. In late 2011 and early 2012, Syria agreed to allow league observers into the country. But their presence did nothing to slow the violence.

In February 2012, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to approve a resolution condemning President Assad’s unbridled crackdown on the uprising, but China and Russia, Syria’s traditional patron, blocked all efforts for stronger Security Council action.

Emboldened by faltering diplomacy and Russia’s pledge to keep supplying weapons, the Assad government in March launched bloody assaults on insurgent strongholds, driving rebels from the cities of Homs and Idlib. According to estimates from the United Nations, the conflict has left more than 10,000 dead, thousands more displaced and as many as 40,000 people may have been detained. The Red Crescent said in May 2012 that as many as 1.5 million people needed help getting food, water or shelter.

In June 2012, a representative of the United Nations characterized the Syrian conflict as a civil war.

Diplomacy Fails; Pressure for Stronger Action

With overwhelming firepower and a willingness to kill, Mr. Assad seemed to believe that his strategy was succeeding. But analysts said sheer force alone was unlikely to eradicate what had become a diffuse and unpredictable insurgency, one able to strike out even after the government used crushing force. Broad areas of the country have become hostile territory for government troops, and attackers have managed to hit centers of power, even in the capital, Damascus.

The conflict has become a war of attrition that grows more dangerous as it goes along. Tensions have spilled over borders into Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and Jordan and raised fears that radical Islamic militants will find a new cause for recruitment.

In April, Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general now acting as a special envoy, reported that the Assad government had agreed to a six-point peace plan, which laid out a framework for a cease-fire that does not involve the president leaving power. Syria agreed, but only a week after the plan was put into effect, Ban-ki Moon, the current secretary general of the United Nations, said that Syria had failed to implement almost every aspect of the peace plan.Still, without a better alternative, the United Nations proposed sending 300 cease-fire observers to Syria.

In late May, international efforts to pressure Syria intensified in the wake of a massacre that left at least 108 villagers dead in central Syria, most of them women or children. Several Western countries moved to expel Syrian ambassadors from their soil, steps that followed comments by the chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff warning that continued atrocities could make military intervention more likely.

In June, United Nations monitors in Syria collected evidence of another mass atrocity in the desolate hamlet of Qubeir, more than 24 hours after Syrian forces and government supporters had blocked their first attempt to visit the site. The monitoring team’s journey to Qubeir, filmed and posted online, presented the outside world with the first visual proof from a neutral official source that a horrific crime had occurred there.

The U.N. Suspends Its Mission

On June 16, the U.N. suspended its observer mission in Syriabecause of the escalating violence. It was the most severe blow yet to months of international efforts to negotiate a peace plan and prevent Syria’s descent into civil war.

The U.N. said the monitors would not be withdrawn from Syria, but were being locked down in Syria’s most contested cities, unable to conduct patrols. While the decision to suspend their work was made chiefly to protect the unarmed monitors, the unstated purpose appeared to be to force Russia to intervene to assure that the observers are not the targets of Syrian forces or their sympathizers. Russia has opposed Western intervention and, by some accounts, continues to arm the forces of President Bashar al-Assad.

For President Obama, the suspension of the observers’ activities — unless it is reversed quickly — could signal the failure of the latest effort by the West to reach a diplomatic solution and ease Mr. Assad from power.

The White House issued a statement once again calling on Syria to uphold commitments it has made in recent months, “including the full implementation of a cease-fire.”

The Conflict Divides Assad’s Own Sect

As the conflict escalated to new levels of sectarian strife, Mr. Assad leaned ever more heavily on his religious base, the Alawites, for support. The Alawite core of the elite security forces is still with him, as are many Syrians from minority groups.

But interviews with a dozen Alawites indicated a complex split even within their ranks. Some Alawites expressed frustration that security forces had not yet managed to crush the opposition, while others said that Mr. Assad was risking the future of the Alawites by pushing them to the brink of civil war with Sunni Muslims.

Mr. Assad’s ruling Baath Party professes a secular, pan-Arab socialism, but Sunnis, who make up about 74 percent of the population, have long bridled at what they see as sectarian rule by the Alawites, who are nominally Shiite Muslims and make up only 13 percent of the population.

Protest Timeline

June 16 The United Nations said that it was suspending its observer mission in Syria because of the escalating violence. It was the most severe blow yet to months of international efforts to negotiate a peace plan and prevent Syria’s descent into civil war. 

June 15 Russia’s chief arms exporter — Anatoly P. Isaykin of Rosoboronexport — said that his company was shipping advanced defensive missile systems to Syria that could be used to shoot down airplanes or sink ships if the United States or other nations try to intervene to halt the country’s spiral of violence. His remarks came amid reports that Moscow was preparing to send an amphibious landing vessel and a small company of marines to the Syrian port of Tartus, to provide security for military installations and infrastructure, if necessary.

June 14 United Nations monitors in Syria reported fiery devastation, the smell of death, vacated homes, looted stores and vestiges of heavy weapons during a visit to Al Heffa, a Sunni-populated village besieged for days by Syrian forces and pro-government militiamen who said they had cleansed it of rebel fighters. A spokeswoman for the monitors said the village appeared to be deserted, except for “pockets in the town where fighting is still ongoing.”

June 13 Syria announced that the village of Al Heffa, which United Nations monitors had been blocked from visiting to check on fears of a massacre there, had been “cleansed” of armed terrorist gangs, the government’s blanket term for the opposition. The Syrian Foreign Ministry declared that the U.N. monitors were now invited to visit Al Heffa to inspect the situation after “security and calm” had been restored. On the same day Russia and Iran, Syria’s staunchest allies,castigated the United States for its support of opposition forces battling President Assad and his military, and the Iranians accused the Americans and their allies of sending weapons and troops into Syria.

June 12 Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton publicly accused Russia of supplying attack helicopters to the Syrian government. Her accusation came as international cease-fire monitors in Syria aborted a fact-finding trip after they came under assault by an angry mob and gunfire, and the top United Nationspeacekeeping official said Syria was already in a state of civil war. Those developments — coupled with a newly released United Nations report that accused the Syrian military of using Syrians as young as 8 as human shields for troops — overshadowed fresh diplomatic efforts by Kofi Annan, the special envoy to Syria, to advance an ineffective peace plan.

June 10 Syrian government forces pounded parts of central Homs province in a renewed push to regain control of rebel-held territories, and activists said at least 38 people were killed by shelling there over the past 24 hours. Regime forces also unleashed a new round of heavy shelling and sent reinforcements to a mountainous area near the coastal city of Latakia, where hundreds of rebels have set up a base and fierce fighting has raged in recent days.

June 9 Activists reported new violence in southwest Syria, saying shelling by troops and clashes between soldiers and rebel fighters in the city of Dara’a had killed 17 people, including women and children. In Damascus, residents reported a night of shooting and explosions in the worst violence there since the uprising began.

June 8 Confronting a scene of congealed blood, scattered body parts, shelled buildings, bullet holes and the smell of burned flesh, United Nations monitors in Syria collected evidence of a mass atrocity in the desolate hamlet of Qubeir, more than 24 hours after Syrian forces and government supporters had blocked their first attempt to visit the site. The monitoring team’s journey to Qubeir, filmed and posted online, presented the outside world with the first visual proof from a neutral official source that a horrific crime had occurred there.

June 7 Syrian government troops and their civilian supporters blocked unarmed United Nations monitors from investigating a massacre of farm families in the tiny hamlet of Qubeir, just west of Hama. Activists said that as many as 78 people, half of them women and children, had been shot, garroted and in some cases burned alive. The monitors themselves were fired upon, United Nations officials said.

June 6 President Bashar al-Assad reorganized his government, appointing the agriculture minister, Riyad Farid Hijab, as prime minister. In Washington, representatives from more than 55 countries pressing for the resignation of Mr. Assad threatened to dramatically expand their financial pressure on his government, while Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner suggested that the use of military force was a possibility.

June 5 Syria’s Foreign Ministry said that more than a dozen Western ambassadors and envoys were no longer welcome, a response to the coordinated expulsion on May 29 of Syrian diplomats from the United States and 10 other nations. But Syria’s tough words on the diplomats appeared to be tempered by an agreement to allow international relief agencies to increase their presence and deliver aid to an estimated one million people from field offices in four cities — Dara’a, Homs, Idlib and Deir al-Zour.

June 4 The Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper warned against Western military intervention in Syria, in a strongly worded reminder that China, like Russia, is wary of forceful international action even as the civil conflict in Syria grows much bloodier. China and Russia, both members of the United Nations Security Council, have long opposed Western military intervention. The recent comments came as Arab and Western governments appeared to be considering a more muscular response to the carnage in Syria.

June 3 President Bashar al-Assad denied that the Syrian government played a role in the massacre in the village of Houla, using his first speech in five months to reiterate his line that foreigners were fomenting the violence in Syria. The May 25 attack at the village left 108 people dead, 49 of them children. The United Nations found indications the attack was carried out by the the shabiha, armed militiamen controlled by the government.

June 1 Members of the United Nations Human Rights Council called for an international inquiry into the massacre of more than 100 Syrian civilians at Houla, challenging the assertion by Syrian authorities that it was the work of opposition gunmen. The meetings coincided with activist descriptions of 11 factory workers executed in the town of Qusair, the third mass killing reported in a week.