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SYRIAN REFUGEES FLEEING GENOCIDAL I.S. & RUSSIA-BACKED ASSAD: “ISRAEL IS ENEMY #1”

We welcome your comments to this and any other CIJR publication.

 

Russia's Military Presence in Syria: Jonathan Spyer, Jerusalem Post, Sept. 12, 2015 — The current increase of the Russian military presence in northwest Syria is a function of the declining military fortunes of the Assad regime.

Assad Regime Fans Refugee Crisis: Sam Dagher, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 11, 2015 — As hundreds of thousands of refugees flee Syria for Europe, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad has been coming down hard on those who have stayed behind, particularly people viewed as potential threats.

For Syrian Refugees in Italy, Israel Remains Enemy #1: Rossella Tercatin, Times of Israel, Sept. 12, 2015 — At a migrant reception center near Milan’s central train station, two-year-old Mahmoud sleeps on a pillow in a pair of patched-up grey pajamas, exhausted after fleeing Damascus a month ago with his parents and relatives.

Facing Iran on its Own: Louis Rene Beres, Breaking Israel News, Sept. 8, 2015 — In core matters of war and peace, timing is everything.

 

On Topic Links

 

Middle East Provocations and Predictions: Daniel Pipes, Mackenzie Institute, Sept. 9, 2015

The Russian Bear in Sheep’s Clothing: Andrew Foxall, New York Times, Sept. 15, 2015

Iran: Russia to Help Us Improve Our Centrifuges: Times of Israel, Sept. 16, 2015

Migrants Pose as Syrians to Open Door to Asylum in Europe: Manuela Mesco, Matt Bradley & Giovanni Legorano, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 12, 2015

                  

                             

RUSSIA'S MILITARY PRESENCE IN SYRIA                                                                                      

Jonathan Spyer

Jerusalem Post, Sept. 12, 2015

 

The current increase of the Russian military presence in northwest Syria is a function of the declining military fortunes of the Assad regime. It represents a quantitative, rather than qualitative, change in the nature of the Russian engagement in Syria. Moscow’s goal throughout the conflict has been to keep Syrian President Bashar Assad in power by all means necessary. The ends remain the same. But as the situation on the ground changes, so the Russian means employed to achieve this goal must change with it.

 

Since the outset of the Syrian civil war, the key problem for Assad has been manpower. Against a Sunni Arab rebellion with a vast pool of potential fighters from Syria’s 60 percent Sunni Arab majority and from among foreign volunteers, the regime has been forced to draw ever deeper from a far shallower base. At the outset of the conflict, the Syrian Arab Army was on paper a huge force – of 220,000 regular soldiers plus an additional 280,000 reserves. But the vast majority of this army was unusable by the dictator. This is because it consisted overwhelmingly of Sunni conscripts, whose trustworthiness from the regime’s point of view was seriously in doubt. Since then, the army has shrunk in size from attrition, desertion and draft dodging.

 

The story of the last four years has been the attempt by Assad and his allies to offset the reality of insufficient manpower for the task at hand. This has been achieved by two means. First, the regime has chosen to retreat from large swathes of the country, in order to be able to more effectively hold the essential areas it has to maintain with its limited numbers. The abandonment of the country’s east and north led to the emergence of the areas of control held by Kurdish, Sunni Arab rebel, and later al-Qaida and Islamic State forces in these areas.

 

But of course retreating in order to consolidate is a strategy that can be pursued only so far. At a certain point, the area remaining becomes no longer viable for the purpose intended – namely, the preservation of the regime in a form that can guarantee the needs of its Russian and Iranian backers, and the relative security of the ruling elite itself and to a lesser extent of the population which relies on it and upon which it relies.

 

To offset the arrival at this point, Assad and his friends have striven in ever more creative ways to put sufficient men in the field, and to maintain the edge in military equipment which could hold back the masses of the lightly armed rebels. There were the hastily assembled Alawi irregulars of the “shabiha.” Then an increasing commitment of Iranian regional assets – including the Lebanese Hezbollah and Iraqi Shi’ite militia forces. Then there was the Iranian-trained National Defense Forces. In recent months, northwest Syria has witnessed the arrival of “volunteers” from as far afield as the Hazara Shi’ite communities of Afghanistan (paid for by Tehran).

 

Despite all this effort, the rebels have, since the spring, been pushing westward toward Latakia province. If the rebels reach Latakia, there is nowhere left to retreat to. The regime and its allies must hold the province or face defeat. The appearance of apparently Russian-crewed BTR-82A APCs on the Latakia battlefield appears to be testimony to Russia’s awareness of this – and its willingness to dig deeper for Assad – even if this means the direct deployment of Russian personnel on the battlefield in a limited way.

 

The apparent deployment of a growing force of the Russian army’s 810th Independent Marine Brigade at and around the naval depot of Tartus in Latakia province offers further evidence of this commitment, as well as a pointer to the interests in Syria that Moscow regards as vital. The bolder claims of Russian Pchela 1T UAVs and even Sukhoi Su-27 fighter jets over the skies of the Idlib battlefield are not yet confirmed. But the respected Ruslanleviev Russian investigative website found the evidence regarding the APCs and the marines around Tartus to be persuasive.

 

There is a reason why the rebel march toward Latakia cannot simply be absorbed by the regime as a further tactical withdrawal, analogous to earlier retreats from Hasakah, Quneitra, most of Deraa, Aleppo, Idlib and so on. Latakia province is the heartland of the Syrian Alawi community. It is a place where regime supporters have been able to convince themselves for most of the last four years that here, at least, they were safe. If the rebels break through on the al-Ghab Plain, and the front line moves decisively into the populated areas of Latakia, this will be over.

 

The loss of Latakia province would render the hope of keeping a regime enclave intact no longer viable. It will raise the possibility of the regime losing its control of Syria’s coastline (vital for Assad’s Russian and Iranian backers). This, in turn, could mean rebel capture of the Tartus naval depot. Hence the deployment of the marines, who, according to information available, have not yet been placed in forward positions facing the rebels. Rather, they are gathered around Tartus for its defense.

 

So the steady rebel advance in the direction of Latakia is producing a Russian response of a volume and nature not before witnessed on the Syrian battlefield. Russian weaponry and Russian diplomatic support have been the vital lifelines for Assad throughout the last four years. Previous levels of support are no longer enough. So more is being provided. Still, the current indications do not appear to suggest or presage a major conventional deployment of Russian forces. That would go against the known pattern favored by President Vladimir Putin.

 

Rather, Russian assistance, while on the increase, is likely to be limited to an active support role, perhaps extending to the use of some air power, along with behind-the-scenes advisory and training roles and the use of some specialized personnel in combat or combat support roles…

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]

                                                                       

                                                           

Contents                                                                                                

   

ASSAD REGIME FANS REFUGEE CRISIS                                                                                         

Sam Dagher                                                                                                         

Wall Street Journal, Sept. 11, 2015

 

As hundreds of thousands of refugees flee Syria for Europe, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad has been coming down hard on those who have stayed behind, particularly people viewed as potential threats. Ahmed al-Hamid is one of them. The 37-year-old doctor said security agents picked him up in late 2013 for his role establishing field hospitals in opposition areas in Homs and Damascus. After six months in jail—where he said he was beaten with batons and whips while strapped to boards—Dr. Hamid was released by a sympathetic judge. Last year, he fled to nearby Lebanon, joining an exodus of professionals, dissidents and others who were driven out for being on the wrong side of the Syrian regime. “There is no order, per se, but all conditions are being put in place so that people do not dare go back,” says Dr. Hamid, a stocky man with a shaved head.

 

Refugees from Syria’s multisided civil war have fueled Europe’s migrant crisis. More than half the nearly 400,000 who have arrived in Europe by sea so far this year are Syrian, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency. The West has focused largely on those fleeing Islamic State and its atrocities, but Mr. Assad’s regime hasn’t relented with the intimidation and force it has used since the start of the conflict more than four years ago: detention, torture and mandatory drafting into the army for military-age men, along with starvation and an aerial bombing campaign of opposition-held areas. His government has also offered subtle incentives to leave, such as an easier time obtaining a Syrian passport and less hassle booking flights to foreign countries.

 

The regime’s tactics are pushing out its opponents and those perceived hostile to Mr. Assad, while friendlier groups are rebuilding from the wreckage of war. The cumulative results are broader demographic change designed to tighten Mr. Assad’s hold over the few places he still controls. Many Syrians say the Assad regime, along with the Iran-backed Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, is specifically targeting Syria’s Sunni Arab majority. Syria’s rebels are mostly Sunni, while those defending the regime are mainly members of Mr. Assad’s Shiite-linked Alawite minority and Shiite foreign fighters.

 

Only two pro-regime Shiite villages remain in northern Idlib province after Mr. Assad lost an air base there this week to the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front. Both Mr. Assad and his main allies in the war—Hezbollah, Iran and Russia—appear intent on maintaining control over Damascus and a corridor of territory connecting the capital with the Mediterranean coast via Homs…

 

In Damascus, the demographic changes aimed at surrounding Mr. Assad with regime-friendly groups are increasingly visible. Many residents say parts of the city’s historic quarter are now unrecognizable because of the growing presence of Iran-trained Syrian Shiite militiamen and their families. Several predominantly Sunni areas around Damascus have been recently recaptured by the regime and its allies, prompting most residents who are seen as sympathetic to the opposition to flee. Syrian officials say they are proceeding with an ambitious urban renewal plan that seeks to construct better housing and infrastructure, and that there are no broader efforts to repopulate cities with people friendly to the regime.

 

“Our current preoccupation is people’s return,” said Homs governor Talal al-Barazi, who was appointed by Mr. Assad. “Demographic changes in any area are forbidden.” A 27-year-old mechanical engineer and opposition activist, who asked not to be identified because his family remains in the eastern suburbs of Damascus, estimates that only 500,000 civilians are left in the area. That’s about one-third the number from two years ago, when the regime was blamed for a major chemical weapons attack on the area.

 

Since then the regime has kept up its bombardment of the area. In August, 556 people, including 123 children, were killed in regime airstrikes on the area, according to tallies released by local medics. The activist arrived in Beirut last month after paying to be smuggled out through a tunnel that connects the eastern suburbs with Damascus. Many Syrians who come to Lebanon are looking to move on to Europe. And those who had settled temporarily in Tripoli are doing the same.

 

Since the start of the conflict in Syria, this northern Lebanese city transformed into a “second Homs” for many natives of the Syrian city. Located just about 70 miles from Tripoli, Homs is close by but remains a distant dream for many Syrians. “It’s impossible to go back,” said Saeed Al-Sowas, a Homs native living in Tripoli. “Even those who remain inside now feel like strangers in their homeland.” Mr. Sowas, 25 years old, who now works in a barber shop in Tripoli, says he can count at least 40 of his friends and acquaintances, mostly Homs natives, who left Tripoli for Europe since the start of this summer. He plans to join them in Europe by the end of September. He was able to obtain a Syrian passport for $1,100, a sum that he said included bribes. The Sowas family home is in central Homs, a heavily damaged area that remains largely abandoned after the regime regained it from rebels in May 2014.

 

In Damascus, authorities last month began implementing a plan to build new housing units, and have started razing predominantly Sunni areas designated as illegal slums. A ceremony last month inaugurated a section of the reclaimed land for a park dedicated to the late dictator Kim Il Sung of North Korea, which has long cooperated with Syria on military and trade affairs. As many as 150,000 people living in the slums risk being displaced. Similar slums in the city occupied by Alawites weren’t affected by the regime’s housing plan…

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]

 

                                                                       

Contents                                                                                      

   

FOR SYRIAN REFUGEES IN ITALY, ISRAEL REMAINS ENEMY #1                                                               

Rossella Tercatin                                     

Times of Israel, Sept. 12, 2015

 

At a migrant reception center near Milan’s central train station, two-year-old Mahmoud sleeps on a pillow in a pair of patched-up grey pajamas, exhausted after fleeing Damascus a month ago with his parents and relatives. Their nightmarish journey across the Mediterranean Sea from Libya was marred by beatings, starvation and dehydration, and the fear of drowning in rough waters. Yet despite the cruelty at the hands of Libyan smugglers, despite the suffering that was inflicted upon them by their own government that forced them to flee for their lives, Mahmoud’s family and other Syrian refugees I met still view Israel as their real enemy.

 

“First of all I respect all religions, including Judaism… In Syria we have all races and religions living together, we are all brothers… but Israel, Israel is the ultimate enemy, that’s what we’ve been told since we were kids,” said baby Mahmud’s cousin Adman, 21, who studied tourism in Syria. “But I want to stress something: Jews are not my enemy. Zionists are my enemy.” Adman was surprised that he was being interviewed by a Jewish reporter, and, more so, for an Israeli newspaper. He jumped.

 

“Wow, I’m almost shaking. I’ve never met a Jew before,” he said and paused. “Why would an Israeli paper be interested in stories about Syrian refugees,” he asked. He was amazed after I told him about the current debates in Israel concerning the absorption of refugees from Syria, and how the Israeli military was treating wounded Syrians in makeshift field hospitals near the border. Despite his surprise and interest, he still warned me not tell the other refugees that I was Jewish. “Some of them could react badly,” he said.

 

Sitting with her parents and brother, Mais, 21, is another refugee from Syria whose family also harbors strong resentment towards Israel. “Israel is a colonial power, that’s it. They stole the Palestinians’ land,” her mother Inaia was quick to respond when asked her thoughts on the subject. Beneath her bright purple headscarf, Mais smiles sweetly, looking a bit tired, but relieved that the horrific journey from Syria was behind her. “Our house was bombarded three times and the road my brother and I used to take to go to university does not exist any more,” she said. “There was no future in Syria.”

 

Mais’s family tried fleeing to Egypt two years ago but without success. “We wanted to be in a fellow Arab country, we felt it was important. But they treated us extremely badly,” explained her father Imad, who worked in olive production back home in Idlib. “We could not work, we could not do anything.”

 

As the night goes on, many refugees leave for designated shelters. Each are provided with a bright orange cloth bag of toiletries and other basic goods from donors and organizations. Twenty-eight-year-old Rima works for one of those organizations — Arca, the Italian NGO, which was chosen by Milan’s municipality to run the migrant registration facility. Since 2013, Arca has registered and assisted about 87,000 migrants, most of them Syrians and Eritreans. Rima moved to Italy from Syria in 2004 with her family but moved back to Syria in 2009 because of the economic crisis. With the start of the Syrian civil war, they moved yet again to Italy.

 

Rima is a veteran at the center. She registers the migrants, jokes with them, listens to their requests, translates, talks on the phone and organizes their accommodations for the night in one of the several shelters set up in the city. “Since the beginning of the war I have lost an uncle, some cousins, a baby nephew. This is why working in this center for me is so important,” she said. “It’s the one thing I can do for my people. Everyone here could be my family. Their pain is my pain.”

 

When she finds out that I am interested in understanding what Syrians think about Israel, she hesitates but is willing to engage. “For Syrians, Israel is Palestinian territory,” she explained. “Palestinians are our relatives, our friends, our neighbors, because a lot of them flee to Syria. My paternal grandmother is Palestinian, she left Haifa in 1948, when she was 10.” But, she insisted that she isn’t in any way against Jews. “It’s written in the Quran, we must respect Jews,” she said. Asked about her perspective on the war in Syria, she says that the war will end when Russia and Iran will stop giving arms to the regime, and America will decide that they have had enough.

 

Only a few hundred feet away from the shelter providing temporary refuge for the migrants is Milan’s Holocaust Memorial. So, it is only natural for the Holocaust to come up in conversation. “I know about the Holocaust and when I was in Italy I always took part in the ceremonies for [Holocaust] Memorial Day at school. It was terrible,” said Rima. “In Syria, we don’t study it in the same way, it’s only a couple of lines of the textbooks. That is why I wanted to find out more about it, and I saw some movies on the topic, like ‘The Pianist.'” However, when asked if she would be willing to read or explore different perspectives on Middle East issues and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she simply said, “Not really, I don’t read too much.”

 

A similar reaction arose when I brought up the possibility of a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. “I don’t think that Jews should have a state. They are a religion, not a people,” Rima explained. “They can be Syrian Jews, German Jews, Italian Jews. But I don’t think a Jewish state has any reason to exist.”      

                                                          

Contents                                                                                      

                                                              

FACING IRAN ON ITS OWN                                                                                             

Louis Rene Beres

Breaking Israel News, Sept. 8, 2015

 

In core matters of war and peace, timing is everything. For Israel, now cheerlessly confirmed in its long-held view that U.S.-led diplomacy with Iran was misconceived, future strategic options should be determined with great care. In essence, this means that the beleaguered mini-state’s nuclear policies, going forward, should be extrapolated from carefully fashioned doctrine, and not assembled, ad hoc, or “on the fly,” in assorted and more-or-less discrete reactions to periodic crises.

 

More precisely, should Israel decide to decline any residual preemption options, and prepare instead for aptly reliable and protracted dissuasion of its nearly-nuclear Iranian adversary, several corresponding decisions would be necessary. These closely-intersecting judgments would concern a still-expanding role for multilayered ballistic missile defense, and also, a well-reasoned and incremental discontinuance of deliberate nuclear ambiguity. In this connection, among other things, Jerusalem will need to convince Tehran that Israel’s nuclear forces are (1) substantially secure from all enemy first-strike attacks, and (2) entirely capable of penetrating all enemy active defenses.

 

To succeed with any policy of long-term deterrence, a nearly-nuclear Iran would first need to be convinced that Israel’s nuclear weapons were actually usable. In turn, this complex task of strategic persuasion would require some consciously nuanced efforts to remove “the bomb” from Israel’s “basement.” One specific reason for undertaking any such conspicuous removal would be to assure Iranian decision-makers that Israeli nuclear weapons were not only abundantly “real,” but also amenable to variable situational calibrations. The strategic rationale of such assurance would be to convince Iran that Israel stands ready to confront widely-different degrees of plausible enemy threat.

 

In the “good old days” of the original U.S.-U.S.S.R. Cold War  (we may now be on the brink of “Cold War II”), such tangibly measured strategic calculations had been granted their own specific name. Then, the proper term was “escalation dominance.” Early on, therefore, it had been understood, by both superpowers, that adequate security from nuclear attack must always include not only mutually-reinforcing or “synergistic” protections against “bolt-from-the-blue” missile attacks, but also the avoidance of unwitting or uncontrolled escalations. Such unpredictably rapid jumps in coercive intensity, it had already been noted, could too-quickly propel certain determined adversaries from “normally” conventional engagements to atomic war.

 

Occasionally, especially in many-sided strategic calculations, truth can be counter-intuitive. On this point, regarding needed Israeli preparations for safety from a nearly-nuclear Iran, there exists an obvious, but still generally overlooked, irony. It is that in all foreseeable circumstances of nuclear deterrence, the credibility of pertinent Israeli threats could sometimes vary inversely with perceived destructiveness. This suggests, at a minimum, that one distinctly compelling reason for moving deliberately from nuclear ambiguity to certain limited forms of nuclear disclosure would be to communicate the following vital message to Iran: Israel’s retaliatory nuclear weapons are not too destructive for actual operational use.

 

Soon, Israel’s decision-makers will need to proceed more self-consciously and explicitly on rendering another important judgment. This closely-related decision would concern making an essentially fundamental strategic choice between “assured destruction” and “nuclear war fighting” postures. To draw upon appropriate military parlance, assured destruction strategies are those postures generally referred to as “counter-value” or “mutual assured destruction” (MAD) strategies…

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]

 

Contents                                                                                                                                               

 

On Topic

                                                                                                        

Middle East Provocations and Predictions: Daniel Pipes, Mackenzie Institute, Sept. 9, 2015—The Middle East stands out as the world’s most volatile, combustible, and troubled region; not coincidentally, it also inspires the most intense policy debates – think of the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Iran deal. The following tour d’horizon offers interpretations and speculations on Iran, ISIS, Syria-Iraq, the Kurds, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, Islamism, then concludes with some thoughts on policy choices. My one-sentence conclusion: some good news lies under the onslaught of misunderstandings, mistakes, and misery.

The Russian Bear in Sheep’s Clothing: Andrew Foxall, New York Times, Sept. 15, 2015 —Syria is being destroyed. The civil war, now more than four years old, has left the country in ruins. The implacable Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant controls vast areas of the north and east, and the barbaric regime of President Bashar al-Assad maintains its Damascus stronghold.

Iran: Russia to Help Us Improve Our Centrifuges: Times of Israel, Sept. 16, 2015—Russia has agreed to help Iran upgrade its uranium-enriching centrifuges, Iran’s nuclear chief said.

Migrants Pose as Syrians to Open Door to Asylum in Europe: Manuela Mesco, Matt Bradley & Giovanni Legorano, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 12, 2015—At Budapest’s Keleti Train Station last week, Mahmoud, a Syrian from Aleppo, looked around the underground concourse packed with new arrivals like himself.

 

 

 

                                                                      

 

              

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