Manaf Tlas

Reports of the defection of a general and personal friend of Bashar al-Assad will cheer the Syrian leader’s enemies at a meeting in Paris on Friday of the Western and Arab states that want to drive him from power.

A source in the exiled opposition said Manaf Tlas, a brigade commander in Assad’s Republican Guard, was en route to Paris where the “Friends of Syria” group of states opposed to Assad was due to meet. He has family there.

If he throws his support behind the opposition, Tlas – who attended military college with the 46-year-old Assad – would be the closest member of the Syrian leader’s inner circle to switch sides during the 16-month uprising that is now becoming a civil war with strong sectarian overtones.

Tlas, whose father served for decades as defense minister under Assad’s father, comes from the Sunni majority community. 

Opposition activists say Tlas will soon announce that he abandoned Assad because of anger at civilian deaths. A witness in Damascus said by telephone that Tlas’s house in Damascus was ransacked on Thursday by security agents after reports he had fled the country.

Western governments, which are keen to bring down Assad but have shown no appetite for assuming a direct role like the NATO bombing that helped oust Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi last year, will relish the sign of a split among Assad’s confidants.

“His defection is big news because it shows that the inner circle is disintegrating,” said a Western diplomat who knew Tlas in Damascus. “Manaf does not give the impression that he is a big thug, but he mattered in the military.”

In Washington, a U.S. official speaking on condition of anonymity, said, “General Tlas is a big name and his apparent decision to ditch Assad hurts, even though it probably didn’t come as a surprise.

“Tlas lately seems to have been on the outs, but he’s got charisma and some smarts. If he joins the insurgents that could be significant.”

Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey, Syria’s NATO-member neighbor which has become Assad’s most outspoken foe, said defections proved that the Syrian government is crumbling.

“There are soldiers escaping, they are reporting to us that they are being instructed to attack people and because of that they had to escape in order not to kill civilians,” he told France 24 television.

“Every day, generals, colonels, officers are coming, and we have, I think, around 20 generals and maybe 100 high-rank officers, colonels.” Although it is an important piece of information, others note that the numbers are a small fraction of the high-ranking officers and generals that comprise the army, which is estimated at over 350,000 soldiers.   

Turkey has moved artillery and troops towards its border with Syria in the past two weeks since Syria shot down a Turkish warplane at the frontier. Turkey now says it will treat Syrian units that approach the border as hostile.

With heavy fighting now reaching the outskirts of the capital, events on the ground are outstripping the stalled efforts of major-power diplomats.

A peace plan proposed by international envoy Kofi Annan, a former U.N. secretary-general, has proven a dead letter, with his proposed ceasefire ignored and a small, unarmed U.N. monitoring team forced to suspend its work.

French President Francois Hollande will open the third meeting of the “Friends of Syria” group, putting the onus on him to take the kind of high-profile role eight weeks into his term that predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy did in the Libyan crisis.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Britain’s William Hague will be among the foreign ministers and delegates from about 50 nations. But Assad’s U.N. veto-wielding allies Russia and China are boycotting a meeting they say is one-sided, and his main regional ally Iran has not been invited.

“Resolving the Syria issue will require the joint effort and participation of all parties in Syria. Right now, China is not considering participating in this meeting,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Liu Weimin told reporters in Beijing.

As Clinton arrived in Paris, senior U.S. officials said they hoped the talks would endorse recent transition planning by the Syrian opposition and pave the way for discussions at the U.N. Security Council as early as next week about economic sanctions against the Assad regime.

However, they were unable to say whether Russia and China, which have used their vetoes to block action on Syria in the past, would support putting more pressure on Assad in a new Security Council resolution.

“What form will that pressure take? We – and we believe most of the countries that’ll be represented in Paris – think that has to include Chapter VII economic sanctions on Assad,” a senior State Department official told reporters.

“That is the argument that we will continue to make to Russia and China,” the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said.

Neither Russia nor China is expected to attend the Paris meeting, which U.S. officials said they had been told by their French hosts could include around 80 delegations, some 40 of them led by foreign ministers.

When Russian and Chinese delegates attended a broader meeting in Geneva last Saturday, convoked by Annan, they blocked language calling for Assad to step down. They have repeatedly blocked such language in U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Friday’s meeting will focus on ways to support Syrian rebels and provide humanitarian aid. Saudi Arabia and Qatar want to fund and arm Syrian rebels, but Western powers have misgivings about the wisdom of sending more weapons into what could become a wider sectarian conflict.

Syrian troops pushed into the rebel-held northern town of Khan Sheikhoun on Thursday, activists said, in an armored assault that added 11 more victims to a death toll dissidents and Western leaders put at more than 15,000.

With rebels having made some territorial gains in recent weeks, a senior French diplomat said there were signs that even Moscow was now envisaging a post-Assad Syria, something Russian officials strongly deny.

“The situation on the ground has changed fast over the past three weeks, with security forces having no access to some areas. Those areas are not very large but some are connected,” the French diplomat said.

“We are now hearing things from within political and military circles in Russia that are surprising us and that we were not hearing before.”

Syria’s main exiled opposition groups met in Cairo on Monday to try to forge a common vision for a political transition in Syria after criticizing a blueprint agreed by the major powers.

Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi, who chaired the meeting attended by around 250 opposition figures, urged the factions “not to waste this opportunity” and to “unite.”

Arabi also stressed the need for “a pluralist democratic system that does not discriminate between Syrians.”

Nasser al-Qudwa, deputy to UN-Arab League peace envoy Kofi Annan, echoed Arabi’s call, telling the opposition to “unify your vision and your performance.”

“This is not a choice, but a necessity if the opposition wants to gain the trust of its people in Syria,” Qudwa told the meeting which was also attended by the foreign ministers of Turkey, Iraq and Kuwait.

The two-day meeting was being held behind closed doors and comes as violence continues in Syria.

World powers meeting in Geneva at the weekend agreed on a transition plan for Syria, in a compromise with Russia and China, that was branded a failure by both the opposition and Syrian state media.

The boycotters said the talks follow the “dangerous decisions of the Geneva conference, which aim to safeguard the regime, to create a dialogue with it and to form a unity government with the assassins of our children.”

The Geneva plan did not make any explicit call for Assad to cede power, as urged by Western governments, after Russia and China insisted that Syrians themselves must decide how the transition takes place.

The opposition Syrian National Council said on Sunday that “no initiative can receive the Syrian people’s backing unless it specifically demands the fall of Bashar al-Assad and his clique.”

Of the more than 16,500 killed since the start of the uprising, 11,486 were civilians, 4,151 government troops and 870 army defectors, the Observatory said.

In its running tolls, the watchdog counts as civilians those rebel fighters who are not defectors from the army.

Meanwhile Assad, whose government refers to rebel fighters as “terrorists,” issued new “counter-terrorism” laws on Monday, the official SANA news agency said.

One law stipulates that a state employee convicted of “any act of terrorism will be fired, while the second provides for jail terms of up to 20 years with hard labor for any act of violence or kidnap for ransom, SANA said.

Elsewhere on Monday, Saudi Arabia called on the international community to take “decisive measures to stop… the mass slaughter” of the Syrian people.

Assad’s regime “must immediately end the massacres and fully implement the… (UN) plan aimed at reaching a political solution in line with the aspirations of the Syrian people,” said a statement issued after a weekly cabinet meeting chaired by King Abdullah.

It called for a “fixed timeframe” for the implementation of the Annan peace plan which demands an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of troops from urban centers.

Assad

On Wednesday Assad accused Turkey  of giving logistical backing to Syrian “terrorists” and told Ankara to stop meddling in his country’s affairs.

“Turkey’s desire to interfere in Syria’s internal affairs has put it in a position which unfortunately makes it a party to all the bloody activities” in Syria, he told the daily Cumhuriyet.

“Turkey has supplied all logistic support to the terrorists who have killed our people,” said Assad, who has been waging a bloody crackdown since a popular uprising broke out in March last year.

Turkey has repeatedly denied that it allows attacks in Syria to be launched from its territory and insists it is not giving any support to the Free Syrian Army as alleged by Syria and reports in the foreign media.

Assad: Turkish PM is motivated by sectarian instincts 

The Syrian president further accused Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of being motivated by “sectarian instincts.”

Turkey, which shares a long border with Syria, is majority Sunni Muslim, like most Syrians, while the government in Damascus, the army and the ruling party are chiefly members of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi’a Islam.

In the first part of the interview with Cumhuriyet, Assad said he regretted that his country’s defense forces shot down a Turkish fighter jet on June 22, but still insisted the plane was in Syrian airspace.

“I would have wished 100 percent that we had not attacked it,” he said two weeks after the F-4 Phantom jet on a training mission was shot at and crashed into the Mediterranean off Syria.

But he said the plane was flying at low altitude and in an air corridor used in the past by the Israeli planes to attack Syria.

He also insisted the plane was in Syrian airspace, and not international airspace as maintained by Ankara. 

Wikileaks, Al Akhbar to release ‘The Syria Files’ 

 

The daily Lebanese Arabic newspaper Al Akhbar will work with WikiLeaks over coming weeks to release a large number of emails detailing the inner workings of Syria’s political and business elite, the two organizations confirmed on Thursday.

WikiLeaks announced in a statement on Thursday it will publish more than two million emails “from Syrian political figures, ministries and associated companies, dating from August 2006 to March 2012.”

The Syria Files are set to reveal the intimate workings of the country’s ruling elite, as well as its opponents. Among the government departments included are the Ministries of Presidential Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Information, Transportation and Culture.

“The material is embarrassing to Syria, but it is also embarrassing to Syria’s opponents,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said.

“It helps us not merely to criticize one group or another, but to understand their interests, actions and thoughts. It is only through understanding this conflict that we can hope to resolve it.”

Al Akhbar’s Editor-in-Chief Ibrahim al-Amin confirmed the collaborative effort, saying it was important to determine the facts of what is transpiring on the ground in Syria.

“It is a sensitive time in Syria and it is important to sort out what is real and what is fabricated,” he said.

“One thing is obvious though, the hypocrisy of global politics has reached a new high when dealing with Syria.”

WikiLeaks revealed Al Akhbar was one of its co-publishing partners, along with Egypt’s Al Masry Al Youm, Germany’s ARD, Italy’s L’Espresso, France’s Owni, Spain’s Publico.es, and Associated Press.

Al Akhbar will be publishing stories from the Syria Files in the coming weeks as they are verified.