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Thurs. 29 Sept. 2011

INDEPENDENT

➢ Syria slips towards civil war as sanctions bid fails………….1

➢ While revolutionaries prepare for battle, diplomats continue to play games………………………………………………...3

EURASIA REVIEW

➢ Syria Faces A New Economic Reality………………………5

GUARDIAN

➢ Syrian economy weakens under strain of insurrection and sanctions……………………………………………………10

WALL st. JOURNAL

➢ Syria Opposition Seeks No-Fly Zone………...……………12

➢ Kurds Look Beyond Assad, With Dreams of Autonomy…16

MICHEGAN LIVE

➢ The Intel System Got It Right on Syria…………………….19

WASHINGTON POST

➢ Robert Ford and Simon Collis, ambassadors to Syria, bash Assad online………………………………………………..22

FOREIGN POLICY

➢ Syria's guerrilla pollsters…………………………………...24

FINANCIAL TIMES

➢ Syria’s protesters find new voice in the classroom..……….26

GLOBAL POST

➢ Chemical weapons unleashed in Syria?................................28

HUFFINGTON POST

➢ Working Amidst Turmoil: the British Council in Syria……29

GLOBE&MAIL

➢ Syrian forces raping women in rebel areas…..…………….32

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Syria slips towards civil war as sanctions bid fails

UN resolution diluted after veto threat from China and Russia

Alastair Beach

Independent,

Thursday, 29 September 2011

Fears are mounting that Syria may be on the verge of civil war as reports emerged yesterday that hundreds of army deserters were battling Bashar al-Assad's forces in the first major confrontation against the regime

With an intensification of violence looking increasingly likely, Britain and its EU allies have been forced to drop calls for immediate UN sanctions against Syria after major powers failed to agree upon a suitable course of action.

The UK, along with France, Germany and Portugal, circulated a heavily-diluted draft Security Council resolution condemning the Baathist regime in Damascus.

But calls for immediate sanctions were scrapped in the face of Russian and Chinese opposition. Delegates hoped that the weaker document, which demanded an "immediate end to all violence", would eventually be approved by the two veto-wielding members.

One Syrian lobbyist, who was in New York yesterday pushing for firmer action, criticised the proposed resolution as "basically useless". "In reality, it is very weak," said Wissam Tarif, executive director of the Insan human rights organisation. "It doesn't mention the International Criminal Court and it doesn't mention an arms embargo."

A series of European and US-sponsored sanctions against the Syrian regime are already in place, but no measures have yet been approved at the UN.

The developments in New York came as heavy fighting continued in the central Syrian town of Al-Rastan, an opposition stronghold which has become a bolthole for army deserters. Activists said that at least 1,000 former soldiers and armed citizens were now waging a battle against security forces, who were laying siege to the town backed up by tanks and helicopter gunships.

According to New York-based human rights organisation Avaaz, the Syrian regime was even deploying jets to bomb the town of 40,000 people, a claim that was repeated by at least two activist organisations monitoring the violence.

A third group said the jets had dropped poison gas, though it was impossible to verify either of the claims. Speaking to Avaaz, one witness said: "In Rastan they're using military jets to shell their own people."

Elsewhere in the town, there were reports of tanks shelling homes, helicopters strafing neighbourhoods with heavy machine guns, and electricity and water supplies being severed.

Nadim Houry, senior researcher for Human Rights Watch in Beirut, said he had heard reports of jets over Al-Rastan but had received no information about bombs being dropped. If the claim is true, it would mark a serious escalation of the violence. It will also heighten concerns that Syria is slipping into a Lebanese-style conflict that could seriously destabilise the region.

Radwan Ziadeh, a Syrian exile and prominent opposition voice, said the fighting in Al-Rastan highlighted the need for firmer international action.

"This is why we need a no-fly zone," he said, adding that such a measure would provide a much-needed safe haven for defecting troops.

Britain's minister for the Middle East, Alistair Burt, said: "If ever there was a stark reminder that the UN must take further action, this is it."

Although Syria's protest movement has been largely peaceful since unrest erupted in March, recently there have been numerous reports of mutinous troops cobbling themselves together into rebel groups. The area around Homs, the central Syrian city about 10 miles south of Al-Rastan, has seen the greatest number of desertions. Some of the bloodiest crackdowns on protesters have happened in the region. The battle in Al-Rastan is the first major confrontation between deserters and the regime, though the majority of troops still remain loyal to the army.

Even so, activists have told The Independent that some protesters, in the face of brutal state-sponsored violence, are now looking to arm themselves. "People are looking for contacts and finance," said one, who asked not to be named. Yesterday's continuing violence came as Human Rights Watch called for a UN investigation into the decapitation of an 18-year-old Syrian woman.

Zainab al-Hosni, from Homs, was tortured and beheaded before her body was returned to her family. A nuclear engineer was also shot dead in Homs yesterday, according to Syria's state news agency. Officials blamed "armed terrorists", but activists said the regime was targeting academics.

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While revolutionaries prepare for battle, diplomats continue to play games

Shashank Joshi

Independent,

Thursday, 29 September 2011

Earlier this month, India's representative to the UN stood up at a conference and declared that if Syria changed Article 8 of its constitution – which enshrines the supremacy of the Baath Party – then that would be reform enough.

The families of the thousands who have been murdered and tortured are unlikely to agree that the uprising has anything to do with the country's charade of a constitution, but Hardeep Singh Puri's comments illustrate the obstacles that lie ahead for those, like the US and Britain, who hope to depose the Assad dynasty.

The imposition of a seventh round of European sanctions should have been a major blow. After all, most of Syria's 100,000 barrels of daily oil exports went to Europe, and provided a third of the government budget. The last cargo left on Friday. But Syria has reacted by suspending about a quarter of all imports, saving up to $6bn (£3.8bn) annually. That means their financial reserves will stretch further. The economic dislocation caused by sanctions could induce the (majority Sunni) trading classes of Aleppo and Damascus to peel away from the (minority Alawi) regime, but the resulting hardship could also generate a nationalist backlash.

More importantly, there is no way to stop India, China or Russia from stepping in as buyers of Syrian oil – and all of these serve on the UN Security Council. Russia enjoys access to a Mediterranean naval base in the Syrian city of Tartus, and arms sales from Moscow to Damascus have rocketed over the past five years. China and India, angered at Nato's war in Libya, have no interest in deepening the precedent for regime change.

This goes double for the states of the region. Whereas Libya was a strategic backwater, Syria sits at the heart of the Middle East. Turkey has taken desultory steps to put pressure on Assad. To either side of Syria are fragile democracies, Lebanon and Iraq, both cautionary tales of what can happen when ethnically complex secular states fall apart.

Even in the absence of these hurdles, Syria's uprising would still be hobbled by a fractious opposition, less organised than that of Libya's revolution and with no prospect of Western military assistance.

Sergei Lavrov, Russia's Foreign Minister, has condemned Syria's protesters as troublemakers seeking to "stir up confrontation". But Lavrov and his diplomatic allies in Beijing and Delhi are oblivious to signs that a civil war is brewing. The price of guns is spiralling as the revolutionaries arm themselves. If the regime continues to enjoy this sort of diplomatic insulation, its death will be slow, bloody and explosive.

The writer is an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute

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Syria Faces A New Economic Reality

Joshua Landis,

Eurasia Review,

29 Sept. 2011,

The recently announced import suspension prohibits the import of all products that have a customs duty of over 5 percent. This notice also covers countries that Syria signed a free trade agreement with (Turkey, Ukraine and the Arab countries for example). The original signed free trade agreements will no longer be fully adhered to.

As expected, the Ministry did issue a list of products which received an exemption from the ruling. There are 51 items on this list. The first 17 are of the food products variety like meat, fish, cashew nuts, almonds and bananas. Some of the details on the list are mind-bogglingly trivial. The type of fish that was exempted from the ban for example was sword fish which made it to item number 5. Fish (with teeth) from the south pole or Australia also made it to the exemption list at number 6. But the sword fish were dropped again in item 7 which allowed all fish other than sword fish or those from the south pole and Australia.

The rest of the items are mostly medical in nature. Examples include x-ray machines, various Lab equipments, Dental chairs, and prescription and sun glasses. The only vehicles allowed are buses for the local public transportation companies, fire and ambulance trucks as well as fork lifts. Mobile phones (current customs duty of 10%) were also exempt from the ruling. This suspension is effective for all imports after September 22, 2011 (those who used a local bank prior to this date are exempt). Overall, the complexity of this ruling can only be appreciated when one delves into even more detail of what is banned and what is not.

The General Reaction to the Ruling

The deputy Minister of the Economy and Trade was in Aleppo today. He was in a packed room of businessmen at the city’s Chamber of Commerce. Several passionate pleas were made to rethink the decision and to exempt more products. Many explained how they already have goods on the way and wondered what they would with them (they did not have an L/C open before September 22nd). One wondered why cashew nuts were exempted when the U.S. used to be the largest supplier of this product (Vietnam and India are now the world’s largest exporters). To every question, the deputy Minister’s response was to ask that they do so in writing and when the Ministry receives their written questions, it will study them in detail and see how they can help. To which one food importer responded that it would be too late as his goods are already at the border and by the time his letter reaches Damascus and be read he would have already thrown away his rotting produce.

One can read more about these shock waves hitting the Syrian business community. In the meantime, government has tried its best to argue that the decision has both pluses and minuses. On the minus side, the government is aware that prices of the recently banned items will rise rather significantly. Indeed, reports of price hikes close to 40 percent have already been reported on few electronic items while companies like Sony, Sharp and others have suspended their sales in the country altogether. While the government did not mention it, the other minus will stem from the fact that the grey market will now flourish as illicit trade fills the inevitable void that will develop. On the plus side, the Minister of the economy and trade has tried to argue that this decision will help local producers and employment. The argument appears logical at first. However, by referring to the measures as “temporary”, one fails to see how local producers will add to expensive capacity and hire new employees knowing that the decision can be reversed anytime. Local manufacturers are unlikely to invest in new machinery and equipment in this atmosphere. As it is, a number of industrialists have put expansion or new projects on hold over the last few years as the government has proved incapable of delivering sufficient electricity capacity.

Syria’s external Accounts undermined by its fixed exchange rate

This article argues that while the decision to suspend imports for these products appears to have been caused by the recent sanctions imposed by the US and EU, Syria’s external accounts were already being undercut by the fixed exchange rate policy that had encouraged imports and discouraged exports for years. In the end, the authorities have found it expensive and difficult to finance the insatiable demand for foreign made products at the rate of SYP 47 to the dollar while revenues from oil production and exports fell steadily.

The 2012 Syrian Budget Rises by 59%

In addition to the pressure stemming from an imbalance in its foreign trade position, the other main problem in the economy comes from the government budgeting situation. Just yesterday, the state increased its expenditures by 59 percent when it announced its new budget for 2012. The Social subsidies alone will amount to 29% percent (US$ 7.72) of all government expenditures . This means that one third out of every Dollar that the government spends will go to supporting a hugely expensive subsidy program that has spiraled out of control thanks to the country’s demographics and illicit trading (especially in mazot – fuel oil). How large is the budget and total government expenditures this year? The number is $US 26.5 billion or 50 per cent of total nominal GDP. This is an astoundingly high number.

Failure to Tax

The US$9.8 billion jump in expenditures this year needs to be funded by increased tax collection in a business environment that will be extremely challenging. One of the examples of an obvious and gaping hole in the government’s ability to collect taxes comes from custom duties on imports. While the government imposes duties close to 50% on many products, the 2009 government revenue from this area indicates that the treasury was only able to collect US$ 0.56 billion or 4.3% of the total value of goods imported. Following the recent sanctions on Syrian crude exports, it seems that the country was able to export around 110,000 barrels per day. Revenues from such exports used to be in the range of $3.0 billion. Given the recent sanctions and even when alternative buyers are found, it is expected that this can only take place after a hair cut is offered on the globally traded price. This is likely to further erode the government’s ability to earn much needed foreign exchange. It is possible that the difficulties of finding buyers will be such that talk of barter trades will soon be discussed. Iran already does this with its own crude exports. Indeed, this morning the Financial Times claims that Syria is unable to find any buyers for its oil (See Story below).

The pros and cons of a stable exchange rate:

Since the last currency crisis in the mid-1980, Syria has defined both political and economic success by the stability of its foreign exchange regime. The central bank used the stability of its foreign exchange as the main metric of successful economic management. This metric did not include economic growth, employment level or the balance of payments as targets. Stable exchange rate led to inflation stability and this is all that mattered to the economic planners.

In a flexible exchange regime, a loss of competitiveness or a widening trade imbalance usually results in a weaker currency which acts as self-correcting valve that restores the initial imbalances over time. Artificially fixed exchange rates deprive an economy from such a correcting mechanism. This is what happened in Syria. While this policy seemingly held imported inflation in check, it was causing significant damage to external accounts. As the country adopted the new social market economy and import restrictions were lifted, an import orgy was now underway. This was augmented by free trade agreements with the Arab world and later with Turkey. Local producers who lived for decades under the comfortable protection of “himaye wataniye” were now under assault from a global market place that was more efficient and competitive than them. It did not take long for Syrians to dump their manufacturing hats and transform themselves into importers. Throughout this worsening export/import imbalance, the currency value did not budge. The Central Bank intervened at any sign of SYP weakness.

For Syria to continue to finance importers at the rate of SYP 47 to $1 dollar, it needed matching foreign currency receipts from its exports, remittances or tourism. The hopes were high when it came to the latter two. Thanks to a steady fall in oil production and exports however, the country’s ability to accumulate serious foreign currency was becoming harder to accomplish. In spite of such trends, the foreign exchange regime was never modified to weaken the SYP to help make imports more expensive and/or to give local producers a much needed slight competitive advantage.

Proponents of the stable fixed Exchange rate regime pointed to stable inflation as the primary objective and how allowing the SYP to devalue will harm the economy. In reality, however, what transpired is that the government exhausted its ability to finance the country’s increasing appetite to import. Much has been discussed of the fact that the Central Bank sits on a comfortable foreign exchange reserve position of nearly US$ 18 billion. In reality, this number is impossible to verify. The official government data and accounting is simply not transparent enough to confirm such claims. More transparency is highly desirable in an effort to reduce speculation and rely on factual data during such a critical period. In the meantime, the only thing certain is that the government has decided to conserve on whatever foreign reserves it has at its disposal to prepare for an extremely challenging economic times in the period ahead.

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Syrian economy weakens under strain of insurrection and sanctions

Assad's government, desperate for cash, imposes special tax on state workers and ban on importing cars

Foreign staff in Damascus and Richard Wachman,

Guardian,

28 Sept. 2011,

Six months of insurrection and crackdown have taken a severe toll on the Syrian economy, with the currency weakening, recession deepening and the government so short of cash that it has been forced to levy a special tax on state workers.

The vital tourism industry has all but ground to a halt, depriving the country of more than £5bn in annual revenues. Cash reserves are so short that the government has suspended the import of cars to "conserve the country's foreign reserves and to reallocate it to the lower income groups", according to the Sana state news agency.

"In February both of my hotels were booked up months in advance – and all were cancelled. Today I do not have a single booking for now or any time in the future," said the manager of a chain of boutique hotels in Damascus's old city.

Workers at the Central Bank of Syria in Damascus said the government had asked public sector employees to "contribute" about £6.50 of their monthly salary to a fund for the government. Employees in the state sector earn on average about £160 per month.

The governor of the central bank, Adib Mayaleh, who was denied a visa to attend a World Bank and IMF meeting in Washington last week, said in August that Syria had spent £1.3bn defending its currency. The IMF expects the Syrian economy to contract by 2% this year. Officially, exchange rates have remained at around 66 Syrian pounds to the euro, but private currency outlets are selling euros at 73 pounds. Syrians travelling abroad and seeking foreign currency must provide their visas and plane tickets to the country of departure.

Dollar transactions into and out of the country have almost ground to a halt in the face of US sanctions and there are signs that foreign banks are refusing to do business with Syrian companies.

An EU ban on oil imports, which comes fully into force in November, will have the most impact as Europe accounts for 95% of Syrian energy exports. Turkey is also preparing sanctions which could affect bilateral trade worth £1.5bn a year.

Analysts say Syria could replace some of its lost income by redirecting business to countries such as China and India, but this will take time and may not be as easy as Damascus hopes.

Steven Heydemann, Middle East analyst at the United States Institute of Peace, said: "The economic situation in Syria is very serious indeed. There are reports the Iranians have offered to provide [President Bashar al-Assad] with $6bn to tide him over, but no evidence they have delivered on their promise, at least not so far."

Heydemann added: "The impact of sanctions will gradually strangle activity. The Syrian government likes to give the impression it's business as usual, but the reality is very different."

Yet predictions of economic collapse have been premature. Some experts claimed the government would soon run out of cash and not be able to pay employees in the massive state sector, but it continues to do so.

A foreign ministry official made clear the regime believed itself to be in a strong position. "The army is using only 10% of its capabilities," he said. The official acknowledged that business had slowed to a standstill and anger at the government's attacks on civilians had grown, especially in Damascus, but insisted the government was still strong.

Ali, a businessman and currency dealer in Damascus who imports products from Europe and Asia, said the import ban would only worsen the economy. "There are now hundreds, even thousands of businessmen who have no work today. Panic will set in," he said.

Western diplomats in Damascus said broader sanctions were in the pipeline that could include a blanket ban on all EU investment in Syria and further measures aimed at the regime's business backers.

The business elite is regarded as a pillar of support for Assad, but there have been reports that some merchants have been covertly funding the opposition. Brussels said recently it was considering additional sanctions against Syria, which could include a ban on exports of some technology products, and measures to hit telecommunications and transport.

But getting the approval of all 27 EU states is a long and arduous process and could take many months, with some countries, such as Sweden, sceptical that sanctions will prove effective in bringing down Assad's regime.

Charities have expressed concern that if the international community turns the screw too tightly this could lead to growing impoverishment of Syria's citizens. Earlier this month Syria's finance minister, Mohammad Jleilati, admitted unrest and sanctions were putting pressure on the economy, but said GDP would still rise by 1% this year.

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Syria Opposition Seeks No-Fly Zone

Anti-Assad Groups Call for Outside Aid, Arms Embargo, but Draw Tepid Response

Jay Solomon in Washington and Nour Malas in Dubai,

Wall Street Journal,

SEPTEMBER 29, 2011,

Syrian opposition groups are calling for the first time for an international intervention to protect civilians from the Assad regime's ongoing military onslaught, including the establishment of a United Nations-backed no-fly zone.

The opposition's formal calls drew a tepid response Wednesday from the Obama administration and European governments, who said there is currently little appetite to reprise the type of air campaign that helped dislodge long-serving Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi last month.

But diplomats from leading Arab governments said they have increasingly discussed the possibility of some sort of humanitarian intervention as the Syrian conflict's civilian death toll has climbed above 3,000, activist groups say.

These Arab officials said that just the possibility of establishing a no-fly zone over a stretch of Syrian territory could it turn into a "safe haven" that may spur more defections from the Syrian military amid growing indications that lower-ranking officers are deserting.

"There are more and more discussions of this scenario to encourage more and more soldiers' defections, yet it sounds still difficult" without U.N. backing, said an Arab diplomat.

The intervention call came Tuesday, when a coalition of leading Syrian opposition groups called on the U.N. and international community to play a greater role in protecting civilians from Syrian security forces.

These groups want Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and senior Syrian military officers to be charged with crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court at The Hague, as Col. Gadhafi has been. They called for an internationally supervised arms embargo against Damascus, the establishment of a U.N. monitoring mission and the enforcement of a no-fly zone.

The groups, which presented their petition at a press conference in Washington, include the Syrian Revolution General Commission, a grassroots body working among activists inside Syria; the Damascus Declaration of leading Syrian dissidents; the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood; and the Syrian Emergency Task Force, made up of Syrian-American activists.

"The Syrian Revolution General Commission does seek international intervention in the form of a peacekeeping mission with the intention of monitoring the safety of the civilian population," said the coalition in a statement released Tuesday.

In recent months, Syria's disparate opposition groups have appeared to take a cue from Libya's opposition movement, working to more tightly coordinate their activities and policy platforms.

The Syrian National Council, a body appointed earlier this month to try to lead the opposition, didn't join Tuesday's call. But it said civilian protection was a priority it would discuss on Oct. 2 in Istanbul, at its first general assembly meeting.

"In general, the SNC membership are on the same page as those on the ground in Syria and who have been asking for civilian protection for a while," said council member Yaser Tabbara, a U.S.-based lawyer.

Radwan Ziadeh, another council member, said one proposed scenario for a no fly-zone would cover a 10-kilometer (six-mile) area inside Syria's northern border with Turkey that would serve as a safe haven for defected soldiers. It would be modeled on the U.N.-mandated safe haven in northern Iraq in 1991.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, citing a lack of consensus among the Syrian opposition, said the U.S. believes most of the opposition doesn't want foreign military intervention of any kind. "The number one thing that we can do to help them is to get international monitors in there," Ms. Nuland said. "We need witnesses so that we can hold Assad to account."

The U.N. Security Council is set to resume discussions on Syria this week. Diplomats briefed on the negotiations said any new resolution censuring Damascus will almost certainly lack new punitive measures. There is also wide opposition to supporting any military or peace-keeping operations.

Permanent Security Council members Russia and China—along with non-permanent members including India, South Africa and Brazil—have argued against any new sanctions against the Assad regime and have pressed for dialogue.

The calls for a safe haven for deserting soldiers comes as military defections appear to pose a rising threat to Syria's regime, though dissident soldiers are far from organized or well-armed.

Activists have reported mounting clashes between what they describe as military deserters and Mr. Assad's security apparatus. The regime has responded with a military campaign this week on al-Rastan, a town north of the city of Homs that has for months served as a de facto base for the growing ranks of former military conscripts.

On Tuesday, deserters fighting the military in al-Rastan destroyed nine to 13 tanks, said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Fighter jets were deployed over al-Rastan and surrounding towns after intense fighting. Some activists reported bombings, but others said the jets broke the sound barrier while security forces on the ground carried out shootings and arrests.

"It has become a war of gangs," Mr. Abdel Rahman said, describing the deserters as poorly armed and backed by rifle-carrying civilians. "They're all trying to fight but they don't have weapons."

Mr. Abdel Rahman said he opposes the idea of a no fly-zone because it would encourage the rise of an armed rebellion rather than peaceful resistance.

Deserting soldiers, which activists estimate now number in the thousands, are largely from the lower, mostly Sunni conscript ranks. Mr. Ziadeh of the Syrian National Council estimates that some 30% of the army's conscript base has defected.

These soldiers have appeared to put up a formidable fight over the past few days. At least 13 defected soldiers have been killed over the past week—either in fighting or after being pursued by army and security forces—compared with about 100 regular military soldiers killed in clashes with the defectors, said Mr. Abdel Rahman.

"There are more stories of soldiers coming under attack," U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford said in an interview last week. "We have certainly heard that more than in June or July. In some cases it's retaliation."

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Kurds Look Beyond Assad, With Dreams of Autonomy

Farnaz Fassihi in Beirut and Wall Street Journal Reporter,

Wall Street Journal,

SEPTEMBER 29, 2011,

Leaders of Syria's large minority Kurdish population show signs of organizing against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, a movement with the potential to tip the domestic balance against Mr. Assad and complicate regional politics.

Syria's six-month prodemocracy movement has had only limited participation so far from the country's estimated 1.7 million Kurds. Several young Kurds have been active in protests and are members of the alliance of young activists that organizes demonstrations, but the cities in predominantly Kurdish areas have been largely quiet.

This doesn't translate into support for Mr. Assad, however, given the long-tense relationship between the ruling regime and the minority Kurds, against which it long discriminated.

Kurdish activists and analysts say that in the past three weeks, members of the 11 unofficial Kurdish political parties have met with Kurdish activists from the Local Coordination Committee, an alliance for young protest organizers, to plan for a post-Assad period. These Kurdish parties plan to name a special committee and hold a conference in Syria within the next few weeks, activists say.

Such a Kurdish group would be unrelated to the recently formed Syrian National Council, the country's largest opposition umbrella. While Kurds say they share the opposition's overall goal of a democratic Syria, many Kurds have also expressed frustration at what they see as protesters' Arab agenda, and also say they aspire to greater autonomy within Syria.

"Syrian Kurds are not looking to separate from Syria—though of course the idea of a Kurdistan is a dream," said Meshal Tammo, the spokesman for the Kurdish Future Movement, a political grouping in northeastern Syria.

Many of the estimated 16 million Kurds spread across Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria look to the autonomous Kurdish Northern Iraq as a model of governance. Many in Syria say they would support creating a similar federalized or autonomous zone.

"If the [Assad] regime is gone, it will offer an opportunity for the Kurds to push forward for autonomy, and of course they will try," said Joost Hiltermann, an expert on Kurds and deputy program director of Middle East for the International Crisis Group.

Such a move would agitate Turkey and Iran, which have tried for years to crush separatist aspirations of their own Kurdish populations. As Syrian unrest has spread in the past few months, Iran and Turkey have stepped up attacks against Kurdish separatist groups PKK and PJAK along their borders with Northern Iraq.

The Assad regime—under the current president and under his father, Hafez al-Assad—has long discriminated against the Kurds. More than 500,000 Kurds had no citizenship and few prospects for obtaining it, and couldn't travel, own property or enroll in school. Kurds aren't allowed to speak Kurdish or teach it in school.

When Syrian protests broke out in mid-March, Kurdish activists said they held back from protesting, to prevent the government from framing the protests as ethnic uprising.

The regime has circled cautiously around the Kurds, largely refraining from using lethal force against protestors in Kurdish areas. Only a handful of Kurds have been among the 2,700 people the U.N. says have been killed during amid the protests. As one of his earliest concessions when demonstrations broke out in mid-March, Mr. Assad in April pledged to grant citizenship to Kurds, though Kurdish activists say only 45,000 have legalized their status.

Many Kurds worry that if Mr. Assad falls from power, their rights will not be secured if nationalist Sunnis Arabs gain control or if Islamists have more say in Syrian politics.

"The Kurds are no different from anyone else in Syria—they are scared of what will come afterwards," said Mr. Tammo of the Kurdish Future Movement.

In Syria, Arab and Kurdish divides are increasingly exacerbated as Kurds have boycotted a number of opposition conferences held outside of Syria, saying their demands have been overlooked. Kurds walked out of the first conference in July held in Turkey over disagreement over keeping the word "Arab" in the title of the country.

"It was a question of respect: Obviously there are greater issues than Kurdish grievances at stake, but Kurds need to be assured that they are an important part of a future Syria," said Massoud Akko, a Kurdish author and activist exiled in Norway, who was among those who left.

In early September, about 50 Syrian Kurds held a solidarity conference in Stockholm and issued a statement that said, "The Syrian revolution will not be complete without a just solution to the Kurdish cause."

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The Intel System Got It Right on Syria

Michael V. Hayden (director of the CIA from 2006 to 2009)

MLive (Michegan Live)

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Intelligence estimates about foreign nuclear programs seem to lead unhappy, often controversial, lives.

There was the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. That was wrong, of course. But there is a body of thought, built up on the American left, that the estimate was beyond wrong. It holds that there was a conspiracy to cook the intelligence to support a preconceived course of action; that the Bush administration, especially the vice president, pressured intelligence workers to reach the conclusions they did. “Bush lied, Americans died” was the commonly heard mantra.

In fact, we just got it wrong. In one of my last meetings with Leon Panetta when he was taking over as director of the CIA, I cautioned against accepting the left’s urban legend and said, “Leon, this was our fault. It was a clean swing and a miss.”

Five years later, it was the American right that attacked an intelligence estimate, this one about Iran and its nuclear program. I heard one of its opponents describe this estimate as “morally corrupt,” claiming that it was a sort of revenge by the intelligence community for the controversy over its Iraq judgments.

In fact, in the summer of 2007, U.S. intelligence analysts were working to update an aging assessment on Iran. That older assessment held that Iran was “determined” to acquire a nuclear weapon, and we were preparing to publish an update that reaffirmed that conclusion, though we were also going to downgrade the confidence level from high to medium -- not because we had information to the contrary but simply because the confirmatory information was aging and we had little fresh data to support it.

That summer, however, new data began to accumulate. The information suggested that Iran had stopped the weaponization of fissile material, work that would be required to design a reliable warhead. The more difficult tasks -- creating fissile material and developing missile delivery systems -- continued unabated, but there appeared to be good evidence that this one aspect had largely been put on the shelf.

None of us was blind to the reality that this conclusion would make it more difficult for the United States to isolate Iran and build an international consensus against its nuclear program. We also knew that we could be wrong. But this is where the data were taking us, and the Bush administration, to its credit, directed that we make our findings public. We did, with predictable results.

Today we are engaged in controversy over a third estimate, this one dealing with the nuclear reactor at al-Kibar, in eastern Syria. The debate has been stoked by former vice president Dick Cheney’s memoir and some follow-up articles.

Writing in The Washington Post recently, Bob Woodward described my assessment given at a meeting in the White House residence during the summer of 2007: “That’s a reactor. I have high confidence. That Syria and North Korea have been cooperating for 10 years on a nuclear reactor program, I have high confidence. North Korea built that reactor? I have medium confidence. On 1/8the question whether 3/8 it is part of a nuclear weapons program, I have low confidence.”

To be clear about the last point: I told the president that al-Kibar was part of a nuclear weapons program. Why else would the Syrians take such a risk if they were not gambling on such a game-changer? And, besides, we could conceive of no alternative uses for the facility. But since we could not identify the other essentials of a weapons program (a reprocessing plant, work on a warhead, etc.), we cautiously characterized this finding as “low confidence.”

Woodward describes the intelligence as fact-based but then says it was shaped to discourage a preemptive U.S. strike.

That’s not what intelligence does, and confusion on that point may have been generated by a coin, mentioned by Woodward, that CIA folks working on al-Kibar made after the facility was destroyed. On that coin, emblazoned across a map of Syria, were the four words that had been the rallying cry of this effort: “No core, no war.”

Except that “no war” was never taken to mean no kinetic option against al-Kibar. Rather, it referred to the overall policy direction we were following: Whatever we did to make this reactor go away (“no core”), it could not lead to a generalized conflict in the Eastern Mediterranean (“no war”).

Hence, knowledge of the facility was closely held within the U.S. government. Congressional notifications were limited. Even within the executive branch, the data were compartmentalized. All of this was designed to prevent a leak and preclude a circumstance in which we put Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in a position where he felt publicly humiliated and thought he had to respond if the facility were attacked.

As it happened, the plutonium plant at al-Kibar was destroyed by the Israelis in September 2007. Neither the Syrian, U.S. nor Israeli governments said much about it. Assad let the facility’s destruction pass. “No core, no war.”

It’s puzzling to me why al-Kibar has been resurrected. We were wrong about Iraq’s nuclear program. Fair enough. History will tell how right or wrong we were about Iran. I can accept that.

But we got al-Kibar right. And the debate in the U.S. government over its fate was informed by hard facts. The debate reflected differing views, differing approaches. They were aired. Decisions were made. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?

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Robert Ford and Simon Collis, ambassadors to Syria, bash Assad online

The British and U.S. ambassadors to Syria are fed up.

Elizabeth Flock

Washington Post,

09/28/2011

To vent their frustration with the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, whose crackdown on the country’s uprising has killed an estimated 2,700 civilians since mid-March, the ambassadors have taken to slamming the regime on the embassy blog, embassy Facebook page, and online interviews, Storyful reports.

“The truth is what big brother says it is,” British Ambassador to Syria Simon Collis wrote Monday on a new embassy blog devoted to discussing the problems in Syria.

“Have any Syrian security members been punished for killing unarmed protesters or torturing prisoners?” U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford asked on the embassy Facebook page earlier this month. The government’s “repressive actions are triggering a lot of the violence... they need to stop it,” Ford reiterated in an interview published Wednesday in TIME Magazine,

The outspoken criticism comes a month after Ford was attacked in the street by a government supporter. Last week, a woman was found beheaded and mutilated, apparently by security forces, and opposition figures, trying to present a united front, called for the crackdown to stop. And on Tuesday, government troops fired machine guns on a town in central Syria, and a captain in the Syrian army defected to the protester side.

Collis says he started the blog to counteract the regime’s efforts to “pull the shutters down,” and to provide context those grainy videos of the violence that appear on YouTube.

The blog is full of full of strong statements: “The Syrian regime doesn’t want you to know that its security forces and the gangs that support them are killing, arresting and abusing mostly peaceful protesters.” It’s peppered with snarky comments: “Is it a bird, is it a bullet? It’s Syria’s new media law!” And it presses for action: “The regime wants to create its own truth. We should not let it.”

Ford is more restrained, taking time to answer the questions on the embassy Facebook page about U.S. involvement in Syria.

“A government that wants to build credibility on human rights and reform has to start sometime and somewhere with concrete steps,” he writes.

But he reiterates to TIME that the answer is not for the opposition to take up arms.

“I very frankly say to people, you don't have enough force to fight the Syrian army, you're not even close. We have to be realistic,” he says.

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Syria's guerrilla pollsters

David Kenner,

Foreign Policy Magazine,

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Syria may be the most difficult country in the world to conduct a public opinion poll. But a "guerrilla polling" team did just that, publishing a survey today that attempted to gauge national opinion in the country - and it's bad news for the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

The poll, which was conducted by a team at the University of Pepperdine, found that 86.1 percent of Syrians disapproved of Assad's job performance, and 81.7 percent were calling for regime change. Those surveyed also expressed favorable views toward the anti-government protesters in the country, with 71.1 percent of Syrians saying that they held positive views of the demonstrators while only 5.5 percent viewing them negatively.

In a yet to be released second report, the survey will also publish data that contradicts the conventional wisdom about the support of Syria's Christians for Assad. "There's some chatter about how Christians were supporting Assad, and that was just not true," said Angela Hawken, a Pepperdine professor who helped produce the study and an FP contributor.

Conducting the survey was no easy task: Planning for the study, which was conducted for the Democracy Council of California, began in earnest in March, and the team first made contact with its partners in the field in May.

"We had planned to release something in June, but things just go wrong," said Hawken. "Logistically, it was very, very difficult to move the field team around. Getting things out of the country was more complicated than we initially thought. We toasted last week when the final surveys came in and all was well."

The team included two out-of-country trainers who, operating at times from Lebanon, trained eight pollsters in the Democracy Council's methods. The pollsters then surveyed 551 respondents on their views from Aug. 24 to Sept. 2. Given the ongoing government crackdown in the Syria, both the number of respondents and the field team were smaller than a similar poll that the Democracy Council conducted in 2010.

The other challenge faced by the pollsters was getting a demographically representative sample of Syria's population. "Women were really, really resistant to participate," Hawken said. "They were just harder to reach in general - I think they are just not out and about as much - and much more nervous" about expressing their political views. When all the surveys came in, only 11 percent of the respondents were women, so Hawken's team "up-weighted" their responses to achieve a gender balance that was more representative of Syria as a whole.

Response bias was also a problem. "[T]hose agreeing to participate in such an exercise...would be inherently more likely to express anti-government sentiment," the report said. In other words, since the poll was conducted without the approval of the Syrian government, pro-Assad Syrians may have been more leery of expressing their views.

But while the survey's challenges were significant, the important fact is that it was conducted in the first place. At a time when Facebook and Youtube are changing mass protests - and when the Obama administration claims to be working to align U.S. policies with the views of Arab citizens - reliable public opinion surveys are another way for people to bypass oppressive regimes to have their voices heard. It's a brave new world out there.

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Syria’s protesters find new voice in the classroom

Abigail Fielding-Smith in Beirut

Financial Times,

September 28, 2011,

With the start of the new school year in Syria, dissent has burst out in a new forum: the country’s classrooms.

As the regime of Bashar al-Assad tightens its grip on protests in Syria it has become increasingly dangerous to participate in demonstrations.

But since the beginning of the new term on September 18, children have destroyed textbooks venerating the president, activists say, and begun chanting “no studying until the fall of the regime”.

There are also reports of demonstrations taking off from outside schools. Video footage on YouTube shows clusters of pupils, some of whom appear to be pre-teens, chanting slogans from the adult demonstrations. The footage could not be independently confirmed.

It was schoolchildren who first sparked Syria’s uprising by copying slogans from the Egyptian revolution on walls and buildings in the southern province of Deraa.

The Local Co-ordination Committees, an activist network inside Syria, insist that schoolchildren’s demonstrations have occurred “in an entirely spontaneous manner without any prior organisation, planning or co-ordination”.

But others say protest organisers suggested that schoolchildren step up their participation in the protests.

“When schools started there were instructions that perhaps activists should encourage protests in the schools,” said Wissam Tarif, a researcher with the campaign group Avaaz, who argued that the placards that some children are seen carrying in YouTube videos of student protests indicate a degree of organisation.

Whether encouraged to protest by adult activists or not, the schoolchildren have clearly not been isolated from the more than six-month uprising or the regime’s bloody response, which intensified during the recent school holidays.

“When they see their father went out and maybe didn’t come back, I think they grow up enough to understand,” said an activist in the Damascus suburbs.

Activists say that security services have attacked student demonstrations and arrested schoolchildren. Some teachers are also reported to have been acting on behalf of the regime, making the classroom a kind of microcosm of the state. “Some teachers are overreacting, forcing children to buy stickers of Bashar or sing more praise than usual,” said one Damascus-based analyst.

More sinister are reports by activists that some teachers have been interviewing pupils about the activities of their older relatives during the school holidays.

It is not clear how widespread the schoolchildren’s rebellion is, but it is unlikely to counteract the downward trend of protests as the regime’s crackdown becomes more concentrated and efficient. In recent weeks, many of the activists who organise protests have been arrested.

“In July there were 1,200,000 protesting, now there are not even 200,0000 because people are arrested or in hiding,” says Rami Abdulrahman of the London-based Syrian Human Rights Observatory, who claims that 5,000 activists have been arrested in the eastern city of Deir Ezzour alone.

Its significance, however, lies in the challenge it poses to the regime’s attempt to “normalise” the situation, say observers.

In six months of protests, the regime has killed at least 2,700 people, according to the UN. It has also become an international pariah, and squandered legitimacy even among its natural supporters.

While it does appear to have constrained people’s ability to protest in public, the outbreak of dissent in schools illustrates the limitations of tanks, torture chambers and militias for keeping society as a whole in line.

“Children have spent the summer away from school, following the news as their parents do,” said the Damascus-based analyst. “The university students have spent the summer in the provinces. How do you control students and also maintain the image that everything is OK?”

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Chemical weapons unleashed in Syria?

For now it’s only farmers’ planes spraying civilians as regime escalates assault on north-west and assassinates fourth academic in a week.

Hugh Macleod,

Global Post,

Hugh MacleodSeptember 28, 2011

At least 15 residents of Rastan and Talbeiseh in north-west Syria were left bleeding from the mouth and nose and with yellowing eyes after the regime used a farmers’ plane to spray pesticide chemicals on civilians for the first time today.

Two independent sources confirmed to Avaaz, the global campaign group which has a network of citizen journalists working in Syria, that a farm plane sprayed chemicals over areas of north-west Syria where troops and security forces are for second day battling defected soldiers supported by armed residents.

The Local Coordination Committees activist group and London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a defected lieutenant died in Wednesday's clashes.

Abu Zainab, an Avaaz citizen journalist in nearby Homs, said activists had videos showing Rastan being hit with airstrikes by fighter jets but that electricity and phone line cuts meant they were not yet able to upload them. If confirmed, the videos would be the first reported case of the regime using its airforce against a protest centre.

The news came as Syria's state-run news agency SANA and activists reported the death of engineer and university professor Aws Khalil who SANA said had been shot in the head by an "armed terrorist group" operating in Homs. Activists accused the regime of going after academics in an attempt to terrorize the city's rebellious population. Khalil is the fourth Syrian academic to be assassinated in Homs since Sunday.

Abu Zainab reported several new cases of defected soldiers in Homs itself, a city that has been a focus for large popular protests against the Assad family’s 41-year dictatorship and which has suffered repeated assaults by regime forces. Abu Jafar, a second Avaaz citizen journalist in Homs, reported that a sniper based over the Homs Grand Hotel shot professor Khalil near the Baath University, where he worked.

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Working Amidst Turmoil: the British Council in Syria

Elizabeth White (British Council’s Country Director in Syria)

Huffington Post,

29/9/11

On a recent visit to London, people looked alarmed when I said I'd just come from Damascus. One after another they said 'I can't believe you're still there! Is it safe? How can you work there?'

Is it safe? How can we work here?

The unrest in Syria has been going on for six months now, and may well continue for a long while yet. Damascus, rich in security, is and has been calm and quiet, the streets all but untroubled. In provincial cities, however, and in the outer suburbs of Damascus, the situation continues: in many places, and often, they live with gunfire, protests, clashes, arrests, military operations, road ambushes, and the rule of fear. Close on three thousand people are said to have lost their lives, God rest them all.

Around the second month of the unrest, when military operations turned heavy, there was a time of great alarm. The Foreign Office travel advice shot up to its maximum level, advising against all travel to Syria. The British Council's English teachers went home. We closed the open courses in our teaching centre. We miserably cancelled concerts, seminars, conferences, visits, theatre tours - our whole programme for the spring and summer.

Life in the capital changed; people stayed at home, and the restaurants of the capital were empty. Tourists disappeared, taking with them the livelihoods of half the Old City. The old conversations also disappeared: people now talked of nothing but the situation, telling each other the stories they know, constructing a piecemeal record of what we thought was happening.

Six months is a long time. These are still terrible times. Nothing has changed in the places where there is trouble; the protestors continue to come out on the streets, the security forces continue to take their measures against the protests. Criticism from all corners of the world showers down on Syria, to little heed. Sanctions are put in place, and the state declares itself robust.

No-one can see an obvious ending to the troubles, and no-one can predict how long this can last. And so, as happens, people make the necessary accommodations with the situation, and go about their daily lives, not quite as normal.

And the British Council? We're open. And busy. Not as normal, but busy.

Our doors are open, and a hundred or so people a day come in to our café and study centre - to talk, to read, to study, to pass the time. We continue with a minimal level of English teaching, with local teachers teaching closed group classes, and daily we fend off the many requests for our classes to open again. The exams team haven't touched the ground for months; demand for exams is always high in times of trouble, when qualifications could be necessary for work elsewhere.

And - our own accommodations - we've rearranged all our activity. We can't bring anyone into the country? We focus on opportunities for people to travel, sending artists, educationalists, English Language Teaching professionals, to conferences, festivals, meetings in the UK. We can't organise our seminar on Partnerships in Higher Education in Aleppo? We'll organise it in Beirut instead, and two buses of academics will travel over the border for the two days. We can't bring RADA theatre trainers here? We set up courses for RADA-trained Syrian trainers to pass on the skills they've already learned; in times of turmoil it's good to be able to learn.

Digital and media materials - the Selector music programme, our LearnEnglish radio series - get more listeners than ever. We've made significant new partnerships for our Active Citizens programme, and for cultural policy development. We keep up the contacts we have, and try to plan along with them for what we can do when better times come - and what we can do right now.

And we look after each other, and watch out for the effects of stress, and balance any differences of opinion, and make sure that morale is good. It helps a lot that everyone's very sure of just how important it is to be doing this kind of work right now; we hear it from our friends, our contacts, on our Facebook page, from those we're working with, from our own consciences.

At times when many doors are closing for Syrians, it's all the more necessary to keep open opportunities for sharing and contact and exchange - and for a breath of air from the world beyond the borders. Someone said to me the other day 'It's funny, but as long as the British Council here stays open, we have a feeling that we might still matter'. It's quite a remit.

I hope that when better times do come, we will be well prepared to meet them.

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Syrian forces raping women in rebel areas, activists report

Graeme Smith

Globe and Mail (Canadian daily)

Wednesday, Sep. 28, 2011

Syrian activists say regime forces have abducted and raped women in rebellious parts of the country, possibly using sexual violence as a means of quelling dissent.

An opposition campaigner has supplied The Globe and Mail with details about six previously unknown cases of violence against women in recent months, saying that more such incidents remain hidden as Damascus struggles to contain the uprising.

The allegations could not be confirmed. Major human rights organizations have so far refrained from accusing the Syrian authorities of widespread attacks against women; nearly all of those named as victims of government crackdowns in the past six months have been men and boys.

Syria's information ministry did not respond to requests for comment, but state-controlled media have previously accused activists of lying and fabricating evidence.

If accurate, the stories would be sensational: women dumped naked and bloody in the fields; Syrian units forcing girls to strip and act as servants in a so-called “rape house;” a young mother so traumatized that she loses her mind.

Human rights investigators say they have heard similar stories, but the cases have proved difficult to confirm. Syria restricts media access and monitors communications. Arab families often feel shamed into silence about attacks on female relatives.

None of the victims or their families could be reached directly, but information transmitted out of the country via encrypted chat messages and secret online message boards suggests that the attacks on women may go beyond the case of Zainab al-Hosni, the 18-year-old whose beheaded and mutilated corpse was discovered last week. Plainclothes security agents arrested her in July, and the possibility that she died in custody prompted outraged statements from Amnesty International and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

At the time, Ms. al-Hosni was believed to be the first woman targeted by Syrian security forces since the beginning of the uprising in mid-March.

But an activist who calls herself Rose Alhomsi, a 21-year-old who runs a charity for Syrian women, says she has gathered several other examples.

“The purpose of these rapes, if we confirm them to be by security officers … is a systemic buildup in the regime's game to suppress protests by playing on a very, very sensitive string in Syrian culture,” Ms. Alhomsi said.

One piece of information that deepens the concern about sexual violence becoming a part of the strategy of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Ms. Alhomsi says, was passed along from opposition sympathizers in Syrian military hospitals: They said that packages of condoms were distributed to security forces before sweeps into restive areas.

The activists described several separate attacks on women around the northern city of Jisr al-Shughour and the western governorate of Homs, two hotbeds of rebellion in recent months.

The victims appear to have been suspected of having links to opposition groups. In the case of Hiba Bazirkaan, 26, of Homs, activists say she was fingered by the owner of a hair salon who was later revealed as a snitch for the government.

Ms. Bazirkaan was headed to a pharmacy on May 13 to buy medicine for her infant daughter, almost two years old. As mother and daughter walked past an ice-cream shop, activists say, a van with black-tinted windows pulled up to the curb and men forced them inside. Ms. Bazirkaan was released from custody about a week later, activists say.

“She was in a state of shock,” a person close to the family said, according to an activist. “We understood from her that it was not just one person who abused her. Every time we would ask her [a question], or feed her, or even come near her, she would scream in fright.”

Ms. Bazirkaan's daughter was drowsy and had soiled herself, activists say, and later died of kidney failure; they believe she had been heavily sedated in custody.

The young mother is now receiving treatment for mental trauma, activists say.

In other cases, activists claim that women have disappeared altogether. A woman named Abeer Alsharbootli was last seen on Sept. 21, climbing into a taxi with her two sons, five and three years old. Lina Sabbagh, 22, vanished in August; Doha Abdulghafar Alshawa, 30, went missing last week. It's rumoured locally that the families of Ms. Sabbagh and Ms. Alshawa were instructed by authorities in Homs to sign documents saying that the young women ran away with boyfriends.

Activists say their research has led to indications that 16 to 18 women have recently been abducted in and around Homs. No further details have emerged. Residents in a suburb of the city have told activists that they woke one morning to find five young women in a field, naked, bleeding and terrified. Relatives collected the women and refuse to speak about what happened.

Ms. Alhomsi said that her sister interviewed women at refugee camps in Turkey, near the Syrian border. Two girls, in separate camps, described security forces rounding up young women at a university near Jisr al-Shughour and holding them captive in a house.

“The security forces had forced these girls to remove their clothes and serve them all day long, at the end of each day they were raped by numerous security members,” Ms. Alhomsi said.

Nadim Houry, senior researcher for Syria for Human Rights Watch, said attempts to substantiate such unproven allegations have proven frustrating.

“Rape is always very sensational, and the claims take a life of their own,” Mr. Houry said. “Do we have evidence that the security services have been using rape as a tool of war? The short answer is ‘No.’ We have received reports of incidents, but it's very hard to verify.”

A SYRIAN WOMAN SPEAKS

A young woman named Nora, from the rebellious Syrian city of Homs, has been collecting stories about female victims in her part of the country. After gathering anecdotes about rape and abduction for The Globe and Mail, she took a moment to reflect on her work.

You must be very brave to investigate women’s issues in Syria right now. How do you keep yourself safe?

Most of the time we have to hide our names, or use fake names, and we work through a series of relatives to find information about a person. I work with a group, but I only know one of the members personally.

Do you know if any regime member has ordered these rapes? Or is there any regime group, or regiment, that is particularly notorious?

We do not have 100-per-cent evidence that the regime is responsible for such events, but this is not surprising or far from their [previous] actions. The regime uses rape as a playing card with activists' families because it knows – a woman, especially in a Middle Eastern culture – her dignity is the most important thing to her, and she will kill to protect this. Thus the regime uses this tactic to deter activists from carrying out their activities in protection of their wives, daughters, and mothers.

Approximately how many women have been abducted, if you had to guess?

We don't have exact numbers or documented cases. Families remain silent and secretive in giving any kind of information out, and most of the time they don’t even report their daughters missing.

You have spent time with the families and victims. Can you describe the psychological effect on them?

Despite the pain, their determination was overwhelming. Not only their enthusiasm, but their faith in the revolution.

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Arkansas Online: 'Syrians taking up arms'.. [important article but it needs subscription]..

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