It wont be that soon at all. He still maintains support of the Army, all that'll happen is that the army well step up its retaliatory attacks resulting in more Syrians dying. The Rebels will get more incensed carrying out more bomb attacks....the bloody cycle continues.
Livestream out of Syria
- Thread starter ooeat0meoo
- Start date
These things tend to domino quickly after the situation reaches a tipping point. The assassination of members of the inner circle coupled with heavy fighting in Damascus suggests things are going to unravel quickly. The fact that tanks are shelling Damascus from outside the city and helicopters are firing on neighborhoods within it, suggests that the end is imminent.
Members of his inner circle have been getting killed for over a year now and everytime one dies the same "its only a matter of time" rhetoric gets dished out, only for him to hang on.
The worrying factor is that the army is supposedly only using a fraction of its capabilities, these terrorist attacks will only encourage them to go full-frontal.
The military won't be effective without leadership from above. In either case, the fact that Alawites are such a minority will undermine the military's ability to do much more than what they have been, and the fact that such intense fighting has spread to Damascus suggests that the rebels - despite being outgunned - now have the upper hand and a majority support of Syrians. I'd give Assad three weeks, tops; but wouldn't be surprised if it happened in days.
There are reports coming in that syrian troops have been moved from golan heights.
hope they drag Assad through the streets.
So, after Russia and China stand up Syria, it seems like the West is tired of dealing with them. Not sure what that exactly entails at the moment, though.
The U.S. could easily act unilaterally using R2P is UN guideline that the security council failed to implement. Trouble is, this is an election year and Obama won't want to rock the boat this close to November.
I assume by 'partners outside the SC" they're referring to their cohort of fellow democratic, secular nations such as the Saudis, Qatar, Bahrain and Turkey.
Not sure what they're planning though, an open intervention would be utterly stupid though not to mention - disastrous.
Not sure what they're planning though, an open intervention would be utterly stupid though not to mention - disastrous.
Just the threat of such a thing will accelerate will demoralize the Syrian army and hasten Assad's departure.
So you think there's no substance behind these threats?
Depends on whether those on the outside see the FSA as taking Damascus soon. If that's the case, I would doubt the intervention would happen. If it looks like Assad ramps up his attacks on his cities, kills more civilians etc, then the likelihood of an intervention will increase.
What sort of intervention would that be then - increased arming of rebels? Libya-style aerial bombardment? Or even boots on the ground ala Iraq?
Hard to say. I would imagine that the election year factor will almost guarantee the US won't get involved militarily. It would probably be something along the lines of telling Turkey that they should invade to the south to sufficiently destabilize the regime to where they feel fighting for Assad is (rightfully) a lost cause. Erdogan is already chomping at the bit to retaliate for the fighter debacle, so he may well get his chance.
more cracks
The Iraqi-Syria border has always been more permeable than a gold-digger's condom. Where else do you think the Al-Qaeda militants had sourced from? They got bored of killing Shias and Christians in Iraq so they just carried on across the border.
I meant the rebels were in contact with someone from the inside to do the bombing.
Fair enough, I assumed you meant it was instigated by Assad himself.
It's a good thing for us after all, why would the Assad sacrifice 5 of his best men for us? anyway shelling got to it's highest level at Al-Fotor(the time when Muslims eat in Ramadan) that shows the criminal he is..
What is the news about the rebels/terrorists in Damascus syrian_scholes since yesterday ? 
What is the news about the rebels/terrorists in Damascus syrian_scholes since yesterday ?
Ok, I'm not in a good mood after the recent events in Damascus and what Bashar is doing to us here, so if you can't respect us and what Syrians really want(which is apparently not the same as what you want) I'm not going to answer any of your questions, and the revolution in Damascus is doing good and we are stronger than ever.
Stay safe Syrian_Scholes.
Ok, I'm not in a good mood after the recent events in Damascus and what Bashar is doing to us here, so if you can't respect us and what Syrians really want(which is apparently not the same as what you want) I'm not going to answer any of your questions, and the revolution in Damascus is doing good and we are stronger than ever.
It seems that Assad is on his way down. Despite the huge sacrifice getting rid of him still appears to be the easy part. Good luck with what happens next.
So the terrorists had the power to do all that then?
I've heard that Bashar's wife and kinds have gone to Russia. Expect Bashar to follow him at some point soon.
Sounds like Assad's forces have gained a bit of stability in Damascus, while the Rebels are making progress in Aleppo. Once they take it, its only a matter of time until a full scale assault into Damascus begins.
The rebels are more focused on Aleppo and are more in numbers there, it's hard getting inside Damascus as it is the capital, but the progress they showed when the got in Damascus is big, and it shows that they are getting ready for the real battle after a few days or weeks, they came here just to show the regime what they are capable of, they need a strategy now and they'll get into Damascus in no time....
http://news.yahoo.com/assads-forces-overrun-two-damascus-districts-010158222.html
Probably a good reason why these nutjob regimes should not have access to WMDs.
Probably a good reason why these nutjob regimes should not have access to WMDs.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/23/iraq-violence-dead
Iraq recently became the only Arab league member to object to calls demanding Assad step down, today its suffered the most violent series of terrorist attacks from Al-Qaeda in perhaps 2 years killing over 100 people.
Coincidence?
Iraq recently became the only Arab league member to object to calls demanding Assad step down, today its suffered the most violent series of terrorist attacks from Al-Qaeda in perhaps 2 years killing over 100 people.
Coincidence?
Definitely a coincidence. Maliki spent a good amount of his exile years in Syria, so his reluctance to support getting rid of Assad shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
I haven't paid close attention but this sounds somewhat similar to what happened in Libya, does Assad have any more hope than Gaddafi of holding on against so many who support a change in government?
Yes, he has a bigger, more functional Army than Qaddafi did, which should prolong his demise by a few weeks. All this will do however, is anger the majority of Syrians, which will in turn galvanize hatred for the regime and the sentiment to topple it.
I'd say it stretches beyond Maliki's personal endeavors.
A lot of the terrorist attack committed in Iraq have been committed by the same militants in Syria. We don't want the Al-Qaeda scum pouring back into our borders. Heck Zawahiri himself recently called on all 'brothers and sisters of Islam" to take arms against the Syria regime. I wouldn't be surprised if today's terror attacks in Baghdad was Al-Qaeda punishing the state of Iraq for refusing to back the insurgency in Syria.
These terrorists do tend to time their attacks for maximum effect during sensitive periods, rather than as a punishment for something or the other. The Sunni extremists are likely to stay in business as long as Maliki maintains perceptions of sectarianism.
I'm no fan of Maliki nor his sectarianism but you have to remember that Al Qaeda in Iraq's demands are to execute every single soldier/police officer/judge, and set up a regional caliphate in Baghdad. Needless to say they're going to be told to get fecked - but unfortunately that means they wont be gone anytime soon.
I'd call myself a pacifist on almost everything, but I make an exception for Al Qaeda who I think ought to be cleansed like kitchen vermin, regardless of who's borders they're infesting. You can't blame Maliki for their attacks, they'll be around so long as they're alive. It could also help if the Turks and Qataris wouldn't fund their kind in Syria.
There are varying levels of extremism in Iraq. Not all Sunnis who dislike Maliki and the Iranian orientation, are from Al-Qaeda. Many of them are tribe oriented people from Anbar, Ninewah, Diyala, and parts of Baghdad. They resent whats happening to the likes of Hashimi, Mutlaq, and so on, and blame it on Maliki being in Iran's back pocket through Sadr's back channel deal with Iran to support Maliki's coalition. Its these people that Maliki needs to appease in order to lay down a wedge between them and the more radical elements of AQI.
The problem in Iraq is not that. The problem is that there are terrorists, whoever they are, who are killing people on the streets with all sorts of terrorist attacks. There is NO way you could even try to find an excuse for that, and there is no excuse anybody can give for supporting these ugly actions.
Al Qaeda Taking Deadly New Role in Syria Conflict
CAIRO — It is the sort of image that has become a staple of the Syrian revolution, a video of masked men calling themselves the Free Syrian Army and brandishing AK-47s — with one unsettling difference. In the background hang two flags of Al Qaeda, white Arabic writing on a black field.
“We are now forming suicide cells to make jihad in the name of God,” said a speaker in the video using the classical Arabic favored by Al Qaeda.
The video, posted on YouTube, is one more bit of evidence that Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists are doing their best to hijack the Syrian revolution, with a growing although still limited success that has American intelligence officials publicly concerned, and Iraqi officials next door openly alarmed.
While leaders of the Syrian political and military opposition continue to deny any role for the extremists, Al Qaeda has helped to change the nature of the conflict, injecting the weapon it perfected in Iraq — suicide bombings — into the battle against President Bashar al-Assad with growing frequency.
The evidence is mounting that Syria has become a magnet for Sunni extremists, including those operating under the banner of Al Qaeda. An important border crossing with Turkey that fell into Syrian rebels’ hands last week, Bab al-Hawa, has quickly become a jihadist congregating point.
The presence of jihadists in Syria has accelerated in recent days in part because of a convergence with the sectarian tensions across the country’s long border in Iraq. Al Qaeda, through an audio statement, has just made an undisguised bid to link its insurgency in Iraq with the revolution in Syria, depicting both as sectarian conflicts — Sunnis versus Shiites.
Iraqi officials said the extremists operating in Syria are in many cases the very same militants striking across their country. “We are 100 percent sure from security coordination with Syrian authorities that the wanted names that we have are the same wanted names that the Syrian authorities have, especially within the last three months,” Izzat al-Shahbandar — a close aide to the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki — said in an interview on Tuesday. “Al Qaeda that is operating in Iraq is the same as that which is operating in Syria,” he said.
One Qaeda operative, a 56-year-old known as Abu Thuha who lives in the Hawija district near Kirkuk in Iraq, spoke to an Iraqi reporter for The New York Times on Tuesday. “We have experience now fighting the Americans, and more experience now with the Syrian revolution,” he said. “Our big hope is to form a Syrian-Iraqi Islamic state for all Muslims, and then announce our war against Iran and Israel, and free Palestine.”
Although he is a low-level operative, his grandiose plans have been echoed by Al Nusra Front for the People of the Levant, which military and intelligence analysts say is the major Qaeda affiliate operating in Syria, with two other Qaeda-linked groups also claiming to be active there, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades and Al Baraa ibn Malik Martyrdom Brigade.
Since the start of the uprising, the Syrian government has sought to depict the opposition as dominated by Al Qaeda and jihadist allies, something the opposition has denied and independent observers said just was not true at the time. The uprising began as a peaceful protest movement and slowly turned into an armed battle in response to the government’s use of overwhelming lethal force.
Syrian state media routinely described every explosion as a suicide bombing — as they did with a bombing on July 18 that killed at least four high-ranking government officials.
Over time, though, Syria did become a draw for jihadists as the battle evolved into a sectarian war between a Sunni-dominated opposition and government and security forces dominated by the Alawite sect. Beginning in December, analysts began seeing what many thought really were suicide bombings.
Since then, there have been at least 35 car bombings and 10 confirmed suicide bombings, 4 of which have been claimed by Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front, according to data compiled by the Institute for the Study of War.
In some cases, such as on June 1, when a bomb struck at government security offices in Idlib, or on April 27, when a suicide bombing killed 11 people in Damascus, Al Nusra claimed credit for the attacks in postings on a jihadist Web site, according to the SITE monitoring group. Al Nusra also claimed responsibility for a June 30 attack on Al Ikhbariya TV, a pro-government station, which it said “was glorifying the tyrant day and night.” Seven media workers were killed, to international condemnation. Syrian opposition spokesmen denied any role.
In February, the United States’ director of national intelligence, James Clapper, told a Congressional hearing that there were “all the earmarks of an Al Qaeda-like attack” in a series of bombings against security and intelligence targets in Damascus. He and other intelligence community witnesses attributed that to the spread into Syria of the Iraqi branch of Al Qaeda.
Shortly before Mr. Clapper’s testimony, Ayman al-Zawahri, the apparent leader of Al Qaeda since the killing of Osama bin Laden, released an audio recording in which he praised the Syrian revolutionaries lavishly, calling them “the lions of the Levant,” a theme that has since been taken up repeatedly in public pronouncements by the group.
Daniel Byman, a counterterrorism expert who is a professor at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Brookings Institution, said it is clear that Al Qaeda is trying to become more active in Syria. As it has already done in Somalia and Mali, and before that in Chechnya and Yemen, the group is trying to turn a local conflict to its advantage. “There’s no question Al Qaeda wants to do that, and they are actually pretty good at this sort of thing,” he said. “They’ve done well at taking a local conflict” and taking it global.
They have done this by relying more on local fighters than on foreign ones, except at upper leadership levels — correcting a mistake that cost them credibility in the early years of the Iraqi conflict. “They learned a lot from Iraq,” Mr. Byman said. “They even write about this — they say, ‘We got on the wrong side of the locals.’ ” In Iraq, the government is led by the Shiite majority, while a Sunni minority has been Al Qaeda’s early breeding ground.
On Sunday, one day before a wave of 40 attacks across in Iraq, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the pseudonymous leader of the group’s Iraqi affiliate, issued a rare audio statement, not only predicting the next day’s attacks, but also praising Syria’s revolutionaries. “You have taught the world lessons in courage, jihad and patience,” he said, according to a translation provided by the monitoring organization SITE.
Joseph Holliday, an analyst from the Institute for the Study of War who studies Al Qaeda and the Arab Spring, said, “The emergence of Al Qaeda-linked terrorist cells working against the regime poses risks to the United States and a challenge to those calling for material support of the armed opposition.”
He added: “It’s something to keep an eye out for, the convergence of Iraq and Syria. As the Syrian government loses the ability to project force on the periphery of its territory, what you’re going to see is an emboldened Sunni opposition emerging in Nineveh and Iraq.”
For the moment, though, the mainstream Syrian opposition is nearly uniform in its opposition to a role for Al Qaeda in its popular uprising.
“Every now and then, we hear about Al Qaeda in Syria, but there is so far no material evidence that they are here,” said Samir Nachar, a member of the executive bureau of the Syrian National Congress. “The regime has talked about it, and there were political statements from the Iraqi government that Al Qaeda has moved from Iraq to Syria, but on the ground there is no information on the presence of foreign fighters.”
In hard-pressed Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria, not far from the Iraqi border, a Free Syrian Army brigade leader, identified only as Sayid, said in an interview by Skype that he had heard rumors about Qaeda fighters, but had never actually seen one. In Deir Ezzor earlier this year, a massive truck bomb exploded near a military base — which the resistance attributed to the Assad regime, claiming it had bombed itself.
“If Al Qaeda comes to get rid of him,” Sayid said, referring to Mr. Assad, “why not? But I personally have seen none of them.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/w...into-syrias-conflict.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
CAIRO — It is the sort of image that has become a staple of the Syrian revolution, a video of masked men calling themselves the Free Syrian Army and brandishing AK-47s — with one unsettling difference. In the background hang two flags of Al Qaeda, white Arabic writing on a black field.
“We are now forming suicide cells to make jihad in the name of God,” said a speaker in the video using the classical Arabic favored by Al Qaeda.
The video, posted on YouTube, is one more bit of evidence that Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists are doing their best to hijack the Syrian revolution, with a growing although still limited success that has American intelligence officials publicly concerned, and Iraqi officials next door openly alarmed.
While leaders of the Syrian political and military opposition continue to deny any role for the extremists, Al Qaeda has helped to change the nature of the conflict, injecting the weapon it perfected in Iraq — suicide bombings — into the battle against President Bashar al-Assad with growing frequency.
The evidence is mounting that Syria has become a magnet for Sunni extremists, including those operating under the banner of Al Qaeda. An important border crossing with Turkey that fell into Syrian rebels’ hands last week, Bab al-Hawa, has quickly become a jihadist congregating point.
The presence of jihadists in Syria has accelerated in recent days in part because of a convergence with the sectarian tensions across the country’s long border in Iraq. Al Qaeda, through an audio statement, has just made an undisguised bid to link its insurgency in Iraq with the revolution in Syria, depicting both as sectarian conflicts — Sunnis versus Shiites.
Iraqi officials said the extremists operating in Syria are in many cases the very same militants striking across their country. “We are 100 percent sure from security coordination with Syrian authorities that the wanted names that we have are the same wanted names that the Syrian authorities have, especially within the last three months,” Izzat al-Shahbandar — a close aide to the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki — said in an interview on Tuesday. “Al Qaeda that is operating in Iraq is the same as that which is operating in Syria,” he said.
One Qaeda operative, a 56-year-old known as Abu Thuha who lives in the Hawija district near Kirkuk in Iraq, spoke to an Iraqi reporter for The New York Times on Tuesday. “We have experience now fighting the Americans, and more experience now with the Syrian revolution,” he said. “Our big hope is to form a Syrian-Iraqi Islamic state for all Muslims, and then announce our war against Iran and Israel, and free Palestine.”
Although he is a low-level operative, his grandiose plans have been echoed by Al Nusra Front for the People of the Levant, which military and intelligence analysts say is the major Qaeda affiliate operating in Syria, with two other Qaeda-linked groups also claiming to be active there, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades and Al Baraa ibn Malik Martyrdom Brigade.
Since the start of the uprising, the Syrian government has sought to depict the opposition as dominated by Al Qaeda and jihadist allies, something the opposition has denied and independent observers said just was not true at the time. The uprising began as a peaceful protest movement and slowly turned into an armed battle in response to the government’s use of overwhelming lethal force.
Syrian state media routinely described every explosion as a suicide bombing — as they did with a bombing on July 18 that killed at least four high-ranking government officials.
Over time, though, Syria did become a draw for jihadists as the battle evolved into a sectarian war between a Sunni-dominated opposition and government and security forces dominated by the Alawite sect. Beginning in December, analysts began seeing what many thought really were suicide bombings.
Since then, there have been at least 35 car bombings and 10 confirmed suicide bombings, 4 of which have been claimed by Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front, according to data compiled by the Institute for the Study of War.
In some cases, such as on June 1, when a bomb struck at government security offices in Idlib, or on April 27, when a suicide bombing killed 11 people in Damascus, Al Nusra claimed credit for the attacks in postings on a jihadist Web site, according to the SITE monitoring group. Al Nusra also claimed responsibility for a June 30 attack on Al Ikhbariya TV, a pro-government station, which it said “was glorifying the tyrant day and night.” Seven media workers were killed, to international condemnation. Syrian opposition spokesmen denied any role.
In February, the United States’ director of national intelligence, James Clapper, told a Congressional hearing that there were “all the earmarks of an Al Qaeda-like attack” in a series of bombings against security and intelligence targets in Damascus. He and other intelligence community witnesses attributed that to the spread into Syria of the Iraqi branch of Al Qaeda.
Shortly before Mr. Clapper’s testimony, Ayman al-Zawahri, the apparent leader of Al Qaeda since the killing of Osama bin Laden, released an audio recording in which he praised the Syrian revolutionaries lavishly, calling them “the lions of the Levant,” a theme that has since been taken up repeatedly in public pronouncements by the group.
Daniel Byman, a counterterrorism expert who is a professor at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Brookings Institution, said it is clear that Al Qaeda is trying to become more active in Syria. As it has already done in Somalia and Mali, and before that in Chechnya and Yemen, the group is trying to turn a local conflict to its advantage. “There’s no question Al Qaeda wants to do that, and they are actually pretty good at this sort of thing,” he said. “They’ve done well at taking a local conflict” and taking it global.
They have done this by relying more on local fighters than on foreign ones, except at upper leadership levels — correcting a mistake that cost them credibility in the early years of the Iraqi conflict. “They learned a lot from Iraq,” Mr. Byman said. “They even write about this — they say, ‘We got on the wrong side of the locals.’ ” In Iraq, the government is led by the Shiite majority, while a Sunni minority has been Al Qaeda’s early breeding ground.
On Sunday, one day before a wave of 40 attacks across in Iraq, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the pseudonymous leader of the group’s Iraqi affiliate, issued a rare audio statement, not only predicting the next day’s attacks, but also praising Syria’s revolutionaries. “You have taught the world lessons in courage, jihad and patience,” he said, according to a translation provided by the monitoring organization SITE.
Joseph Holliday, an analyst from the Institute for the Study of War who studies Al Qaeda and the Arab Spring, said, “The emergence of Al Qaeda-linked terrorist cells working against the regime poses risks to the United States and a challenge to those calling for material support of the armed opposition.”
He added: “It’s something to keep an eye out for, the convergence of Iraq and Syria. As the Syrian government loses the ability to project force on the periphery of its territory, what you’re going to see is an emboldened Sunni opposition emerging in Nineveh and Iraq.”
For the moment, though, the mainstream Syrian opposition is nearly uniform in its opposition to a role for Al Qaeda in its popular uprising.
“Every now and then, we hear about Al Qaeda in Syria, but there is so far no material evidence that they are here,” said Samir Nachar, a member of the executive bureau of the Syrian National Congress. “The regime has talked about it, and there were political statements from the Iraqi government that Al Qaeda has moved from Iraq to Syria, but on the ground there is no information on the presence of foreign fighters.”
In hard-pressed Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria, not far from the Iraqi border, a Free Syrian Army brigade leader, identified only as Sayid, said in an interview by Skype that he had heard rumors about Qaeda fighters, but had never actually seen one. In Deir Ezzor earlier this year, a massive truck bomb exploded near a military base — which the resistance attributed to the Assad regime, claiming it had bombed itself.
“If Al Qaeda comes to get rid of him,” Sayid said, referring to Mr. Assad, “why not? But I personally have seen none of them.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/w...into-syrias-conflict.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all