News

By Sunday night, rebels captured two more bases...

...and in retaliation for successes like that the regime hit a playground with a cluster bomb, killing at least 10 children.

QUESTIONS WORTH CONSIDERING

1. How long will it take until panic sets in Damascus, especially if Aleppo falls?

2. How long can demoralized and ill-supplied Assad troops hang on in Aleppo once they lose remaining air bases on which they must depend for food and ammo?   Once gone, they can't be replaced give Assad's limited constituency.  Sounds like Stalingrad to me.

3. Will Assad wait too long to leave Damascus, knowing that any premature flight could accelerate the city's fall?

4. Where can he go in Syria and be safe at that point?

5. If captured in flight what is Assad's life expectancy?

6-7. Neither China nor Russia can shelter Assad without undermining long-range policy goals in the Mideast. But can Khamenei afford to turn down his identical twin?  If not, won't Assad's presence add to popular discontent at home?

Excerpt:

By Sunday evening, rebels claimed to have overrun two more progovernment facilities nearby in the eastern suburbs: the base of the Rahbeh Air Defense Battalion in Deir as Suleiman, and a training center of a pro-Assad Palestinian group in Douma.

In video shot at the base of the Rahbeh Battalion, the voice of a man off camera trembled with excitement as he showed a row of armored vehicles, which he said were Russian-made “Shilka” antiaircraft weapons. In the dark it was unclear if the weapons were what the rebels claimed or whether they could maneuver or use them.

The rebel claims were impossible to verify because of the Syrian government’s restrictions on journalists.

The training facility seized in Douma belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a pro-Assad group whose members have clashed recently with rebels, an activist reached in Douma said by Skype. The activist said that government security troops and Palestinians inside the facility were released after turning over their weapons.

//www.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/world/middleeast...

OT

FG:

The Iranian Americans premieres Tuesday, December 18, 2012.
Check Local Listings to see when it's airing on your local PBS station.

//www.pbs.org/programs/iranian-americans/

How Assad, mullahs use hackers to identify, prosecute dissident

To cut the risks described here, Iranians need to make thouands of DVD copies of stories like the PBS report about the crackdown on dissidents on the top of this page and circulate them widely, using a trick the mullahs used in 1979.  Nothing must stop the fight against clerical tyranny.

EXCERPT:

 Taymour Karim didn’t crack under interrogation. His Syrian captors beat him with their fists, with their boots, with sticks, with chains, with the butts of their Kalashnikovs. They hit him so hard they broke two of his teeth and three of his ribs. They threatened to keep torturing him until he died. “I believed I would never see the sun again,” he recalls. But Karim, a 31-year-old doctor who had spent the previous months protesting against the government in Damascus, refused to give up the names of his friends.

It didn’t matter. His computer had already told all. “They knew everything about me,” he says. “The people I talked to, the plans, the d

ates, the stories of other people, every movement, every word I said through Skype. They even knew the password of my Skype account.” At one point during the interrogation, Karim was presented with a stack of more than 1,000 pages of printouts, data from his Skype chats and files his torturers had downloaded remotely using a malicious computer program to penetrate his hard drive. “My computer was arrested before me,” he says.

 //www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-15/the-hackers-of-damascus

Unveiled Syrian Facebook post stirs women's rights debate

Perhaps many Iranian women inside and outside the theocratic dictatorship will be interesrted in her Facebook site and the organization to which she belongs.

Women's rights is the future.  Such demands will ever go away and any turban-head who opposses it is fighting againt a losing tide.   Repression by brutal Islamist clerics won't change attitudes. It will only accelerate women's popular demads for change and reinforce their growing hostile feelings toward clerics and conservative, totalitarian forms of Islam and in some cases against Islam itself.

Excerpt:

 Dana Bakdounis has been brought up in conservative Saudi Arabia, but it was as a reaction against conformity that she first removed her veil in August 2011.

"The veil did not suit me, but I had to wear it because of my family, and the society," she says....

The Uprising of Women in the Arab World page on Facebook.has become a forum for debate on women's rights and gender roles in the Arab world. Women, and men, from non-Arab backgrounds also comment on its photos....

 "I was so happy when I received lots of messages from girls wearing the veil. They showed their support for me, saying 'we respect what you did, you're a brave girl, we want to do the same but we do not have the audacity'. I even received messages from old women."

 Dana is just one of the women who are making their voices heard despite the uproar.

She and others like her are expressing a feeling of newfound liberation, some are de-veiling, and many are engaging in a global debate about women's rights, forming a brave and vocal online nexus to a region that is often, at least in the West, synonymous with extremism and female submission.

 //www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20315531

Rebels say another major air base will fall in days

Excerpt:

 Rebels who have besieged Sheikh Suleiman army base for nearly two months are confident it will fall in days, giving them full control of a swathe of northwest Syria from Aleppo to the Turkish border.

Their optimism has been buoyed by a steady stream of defectors from the ranks of the several hundred troops defending the strategic base, the last major garrison still in army hands between the border and Syria's northern metropolis.

"We have been besieging the base for nearly two months, the 300 or 400 soldiers entrenched inside are in a desperate situation," rebel commander Sheikh Tawfik told AFP....

Read more: //www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2012/Nov-24/196076-syria-rebels-ready-final-assault-on-sheikh-suleiman-base.ashx#ixzz2AK3ZoTW6 
(The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: //www.dailystar.com.lb) 

Syrian rebels capture 3 military bases in just one week

EXCERPT:

 Syrian rebels' success in seizing three military bases in less than a week has underscored the growing difficulty faced by Damascus in securing its outposts and stopping a rebel encroachment that has claimed large swaths of the east and north of the country.

Attacks on the bases, one north-east of Aleppo, a second at Mayedin in the far east and a third near Damascus, yielded a large number of weapons, which had been in desperately short supply, especially in positions across Syria's second city.

 //www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/23/syrian-rebels-capture-military-bases

Azadi

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ0DZxuF23M&list=UU...

Is Putin giving up on Assad?

Once again the Russians have arranged to meet with the Syrian opposition. Previous meetings sought a cease fire in which the opposition would negotiate with Assad.   Given the current military tide in Syria, even the Russians can't be looking for such a deal now.  So what are they up to?  

When it first became self-evident that  Assad could not win militarily,  Bashir borrowed a strategy from the Nazis (Litice) and Putin (Chechnya).  For every defeat, the regime would retaliate with brutal and indiscriminate destruction mass killing of civilian "hostages" until the opposition buckled.   That strategy failed for the same reason attempts to bomb people into submission failed in World War II, whether in London or in Berlin. Historians agree that the main psychological effect is to solidify civilian determination to resist rather than weaken it.     

Today Assad and Puti find themselves with no viable strategy.  Watching Bashir's endess defeats on the battlefield, the formation of a new government, its diplomatic successes and the introduction of Patriot anti-aid defenses on the Turkish border--Russia may have decided to withdraw support from Assad.  Had Putin done so much earlier, he might have won some gratitude.  To act when confronted with a fait accompli won't earn him beans now.  Ditto in Khamenei's case.

Putin may try to save face by asking the opposition to approve a safe exile for Assad in Russia.  Six month ago the opposition might have said OK.  Now it is akin to asking the Jews to approve a safe harbor for Hitler and Himmler in March of 1945.  Any nation that provides Assad with a safe exit this late andafter so many crimes will remain an enemy of the Syrian people every minute Assad remains on its soil.  What does any nation gain in return?

Suppose Assad somehow managed a "safe" exile in Russia. Given his relative youth, how long would it last?  Putin already faces growing demonstrations over his tyrannical ways.  Instabilty will grow as Russia's geostrategic and economic position weakens thanks tp coming energy changes (see my recent blog on that).  Putin or his successor can the look forward to what Assad faces now.  Given Russia's vast size and the distance between large cities, rebellion may be even harder to put down. 

The best Assad and his pals can hope for now is to throw themselves on the mercy of the Hague Court, assuming he can get to the Hague before the Syrian people can grab the SOB.   In that case he spends life in prison in relative comfort instead of ending up like Khadafi or Saddam.