Deadly Syrian stalemate spurs new diplomacy, little hope

Galvanized by a Syrian death toll that has doubled to 36,000 in little more than a month, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has called for a new rebel hierarchy to direct the fighting against President Bashar Assad and steer Syria back to peaceful ethnic and religious coexistence.

The latest proposal for halting Syria's 19-month-old civil war brings little new strategy to the crisis. Rather, it vents frustration with the international community’s own "divisions, dysfunctionality and powerlessness," as the International Crisis Group recently noted, that have prevented brokering an end to the bloodshed.

Like European leaders before her, Clinton acknowledged this week that the West’s reliance on out-of-touch exiles within the Paris-based Syrian National Council has done more harm than good in the effort to have opposition forces speak with one voice on their plans for a post-Assad future.

Clinton told reporters accompanying her on a trip to North Africa and the Balkans on Wednesday that the Obama administration will be suggesting names and organizations it believes should play prominent roles in a reconfigured rebel alliance that Western diplomats hope to see emerge from Arab League-sponsored talks next week in the Qatari capital, Doha.

But the U.S. push to get the opposition’s act together also exudes desperation. In the two months since a failed rebel campaign to take strategic ground around major cities, fighting has ground down to a bloody impasse, giving neither Assad nor his opponents hope of imminent victory on the battlefields.

The rebels’ summer offensive also exposed the widening role of Islamic extremists who have entered the fight, bringing arms and combat experience to the side of Assad’s fractured opponents. But the Islamic militants’ alignment with Syrians trying to topple Assad also gives weight to the regime’s claims to be fighting off terrorists, not domestic political foes.

Clinton reiterated the West’s insistence that Assad have no role in Syria’s future. That prompted immediate pushback by Russia and China, which have opposed what they call foreign interference in Syrian domestic affairs.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was in Paris for talks with his French counterpart when Clinton announced the Obama administration’s latest initiative. A longtime ally and arms supplier to Syria, Russia has blocked three United Nations Security Council resolutions to censure Assad and, along with China, has rejected Western demands that the Syrian president resign and leave the country.

"If the position of our partners remains the departure of this leader who they do not like, the bloodbath will continue," Lavrov warned.

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi registered Beijing’s objections by unveiling a "four-point plan" for bringing peace to Syria that reiterates the communist state’s position that the future of Syria be left for Syrians -- including Assad -- to decide.

Beijing has a solid history of blocking international intervention on human rights grounds, apparently fearing China could become a target of such actions because of its harsh treatment of dissent and political opponents.

For some Middle East experts, the solution to Syria’s crisis lies somewhere between the Russian-Chinese "hands-off" policy and the U.S.-led Western view that only regime change will bring about peace.

"This conflict is for Syrians and their neighbors to resolve, with European and Russian involvement. The U.S. should stay one removed," said Ed Husain, senior fellow in Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

He described Clinton’s appeal for a new rebel leadership structure as "laudable, but a year too late."

"She’s driven by a desire to want to help now, but also to ensure a smooth transition in a post-Assad Syria. Sadly, reality on the ground dictates otherwise,” Husain said, alluding to entrenched battles that portend a long standoff.

Growing fears that extremists are gaining clout with the rebels also complicates diplomacy, as Syria’s Shiite, Christian, Kurdish and other minority sects are wary of how they would fare under a Sunni-dominated government allied with fundamentalist jihadis.

Clinton emphasized that extremist forces should be excluded from any new opposition forum that might emerge from Doha.

"It may seem ironic to call for a broad tent and then say 'except for those guys.' But I think the administration and other countries concerned about the future of Syria know that one of the challenges will be to have an analysis of who is who in the opposition,” said Charles Ries, a career U.S. diplomat now heading Rand Corp.’s Center for Middle East Public Policy.

Ries sees the need for "more movement on the ground in Syria" before Assad or the rebels are ready to submit to negotiations on the country’s future.

He is hesitant to declare the civil war a stalemate or the Russian-Chinese position unchangeable in the long run. But with rebels pinned down in the urban areas they hold and warding off attacks by Assad’s superior armed forces, he said, no one seems to think Assad is in the kind of imminent danger of being ousted that would be the catalyst for negotiation and compromise.

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Photo: A Syrian rebel fighter last month defends territory near Aleppo, one of many urban battlegrounds the opponents of President Bashar Assad are now struggling to hold. Credit: Zac Baillie / AFP/Getty Images

U.S., allies marshaling African proxies for fight against terrorism

"A quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing."

That was how British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain saw the Nazi threat against the Czech Sudetenland in 1938, a sentiment freshly evoked among war-weary citizens as the United States and its allies ponder moves to oust Islamic extremists from northern Mali, a country most Americans couldn't find on a map.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and diplomatic counterparts from France have been shopping around a plan to train and equip West African troops to drive out the Al Qaeda-aligned militants who hold sway over a swath of northern Mali the size of Texas. Ultraorthodox Muslims this year hijacked a long-simmering rebellion by ethnic Tuaregs and began imposing an extreme version of Islamic law once in power. In July, they took axes to "idolatrous" cultural treasures in Timbuktu, provoking worldwide horror at the destruction.

Like Afghanistan before 9/11, when Taliban collusion with Al Qaeda made the country a training ground for terrorism, Mali left in the grip of militant Islamists runs the risk of becoming the next launch pad for attacks on the United States and its allies.

U.S. interest in rooting out Ansar Dine and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb from northern Mali has intensified in the seven weeks since a suspected terrorist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. The Al Qaeda affiliates in Mali are believed to have played at least a supportive role in the Benghazi attack.

"The Benghazi event, with the murder of Chris Stevens, has really precipitated American intervention. It's turned the tables in the region," said Ghislaine Lydon, a history professor at UCLA and expert on precolonial Northwest Africa.

Syrian regime, rebels agree to cease-fire for holiday, envoy says

BEIRUT -- The Syrian government has agreed to a cease-fire for the upcoming Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, international envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said Wednesday.

Brahimi, the United Nations and the Arab League envoy to Syria, said most of the rebel groups battling President Bashar Assad's regime also have agreed to observe a temporary truce. Some rebel commanders said they would welcome a brief cease-fire for the civilian population on the holiday.

However, even if both sides agree, the implementation of a cease-fire remains in doubt. The fragmented opposition forces are not unified under one leadership, and it is unclear whether rebel commanders could enforce such a break in the hostilities.

A previous truce brokered by Brahimi's predecessor, Kofi Annan, fell apart almost immediately. Since then, the conflict has only grown more violent, with daily death tolls topping 150, many of them civilians.

Brahimi met with Assad on Sunday and had spent the previous week meeting with regional leaders to gather support for the cease-fire, which is anticipated to begin Friday and last four days.

Brahimi said the Syrian government planned to follow the cease-fire announcement with a statement later Wednesday or on Thursday.

"We hope to build on it and aim for a lasting and solid cease-fire," he said.

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Photo: Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations and Arab League envoy to Syria, speaks Wednesday during a news conference following a meeting at the Arab League headquarters in Cairo. Credit: Nasser Nasser / Associated Press

 

U.N. names veteran envoy to 'impossible mission' in Syria

The United Nations named veteran Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi to the daunting task of trying to bring peace to war-torn Syria, with the French chairman of the Security Council conceding that the envoy was being sent on an "impossible mission."

Brahimi, 78, will take over from former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who announced two weeks ago that he was quitting at the end of this month as joint special envoy for the world body and the Arab League. Annan cited frustration with infighting on the Security Council that prevented him from presenting a united front in his efforts to bring together loyalists of Syrian President Bashar Assad and the disparate rebel factions fighting to oust him.

Annan was unable to get either side in the now-17-month-old conflict to abide by a cease-fire that was agreed upon in April, the first of six steps he had outlined for putting an end to the bloodshed. The U.N. Security Council also rolled back from another element of Annan's peace plan when they voted to end the observer mission for Syria, a concession that the once 300-strong contingent was in too much danger while fighting persists.

Russia and China have used their vetoes as permanent members of the rotating 15-seat Security Council to block sanctions and condemnation of Assad for deploying heavy weaponry against poorly armed opponents and unarmed civilians. Russia, a longtime ally of Syria and key supplier of its arms and aircraft, fears a loss of influence in the Middle East if Assad is toppled. China routinely opposes international censure of human rights abuses in hopes of avoiding diplomatic precedent that could one day be directed at Beijing.

Brahimi was reportedly offered the job as special representative on Syria last week but accepted it only on Friday.

"The violence and the suffering in Syria must come to an end,” Eduardo del Buey, a spokesman for U.N.  Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, said in announcing Brahimi's appointment at a New York news conference. "The secretary-general appreciates Mr. Brahimi's willingness to bring his considerable talents and experience to this crucial task for which he will need, and rightly expects, the strong, clear and unified support of the international community, including the Security Council."

Brahimi, a former foreign minister in his native Algeria, has served on some of the United Nations' most challenging missions over the last two decades, including stints as special envoy on Afghanistan before and after the U.S. invasion in the fall of 2001.  He oversaw negotiations in Bonn, Germany, that led to the selection of Hamid Karzai as interim president. As special envoy on Iraq, Brahimi helped assemble an interim government to succeed the U.S. occupation after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

As Arab League envoy for Lebanon during that nation's civil war, Brahimi was acquainted with the Assad dynasty that has been in power in Syria for four decades,   a connection that may assist in his reviving a diplomatic process widely considered to have failed.

France's U.N. ambassador and current Security Council president, Gerard Araud, told journalists in New York that Brahimi's long contemplation before accepting the job was likely because it's an "impossible mission."

Brahimi is on record, though, as saying that conflicts are man-made problems and are therefore resolvable with the proper will of the parties and the international community.

"I might very well fail, but we sometimes are lucky and we can get a breakthrough," Brahimi told the BBC in an interview from Paris. "These missions have to be undertaken. We have got to try. We have got to see that the Syrian people are not abandoned."

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--Carol J. Williams in Los Angeles

Photo: Lakhdar Brahimi, a veteran U.N. diplomat seen at a 2004 news conference in Baghdad, has accepted the post of special representative of the United Nations and the Arab League. He replaces Kofi Annan, the former U.N. chief stepping down at the end of August. Credit: Mario Tama / Getty Images

Syria conflict expected to fester as world's attention strays

Shaken by defections and rebel encroachment on its strongholds, the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad is thought by some in the international community to be headed for collapse after a nearly 17-month uprising.

But independent political analysts unencumbered by wishful thinking tend to see the latest developments in the conflict as evidence of its descent into a long, bloody fight to the death as the world's attention drifts from the savagery that diplomacy has failed to stop.

Two weeks of intense fighting around Aleppo, Syria's largest city and the center of its battered economy, have inflicted untold new casualties, sent thousands more into foreign refuge and laid bare the goal of each side to annihilate the other.

The United Nations, the Arab League, the European Union and the United States failed to force out Assad and steer the combatants toward agreement on  transitional leadership. That has sent the war spiraling out of the control of outside forces. And it looks likely to rage on with mounting civilian casualties and sectarian atrocities, according to the latest accounts by international security experts.

"Increasingly entrenched and fearing neither threats nor sanctions, the regime has burned all its domestic bridges, and hard-liners with little capacity for compromise are firmly in control," the International Crisis Group says of the Assad government in "Syria's Mutating Conflict," a dire report forecasting unbridled bloodshed.

The fractured opposition fighting to oust Assad has also become radicalized and unmanageable, "threatened from within, despite its efforts, by sectarianism, retaliatory violence and fundamentalism," the just-released ICG report says.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday while traveling in Africa that the defection of Syrian Prime Minister Riyad Farid Hijab demonstrated the urgency of devising a coordinated plan for a post-Assad Syria. On Monday, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said the defection, coupled with others by high-level military and government officials, "indicated that the Syria regime is crumbling and losing its grip on power."

On the periphery of Syria's civil war, there is less confidence that an end is nigh.

Andrew Tabler, Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has been traveling in the Lebanese border regions where refugees huddle and fighters regroup. He sees the defections as having had little influence on the determination of Assad to press on with the effort to eradicate opponents he labels "terrorists."

"These defections are not from the inner circle. The government in Syria doesn't run the country, the regime does," Tabler said in a telephone interview from northern Lebanon. "The prime minister was not the person who called the shots."

The resignation last week of the special envoy on Syria for the United Nations and the Arab League, former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, was seen as Annan's recognition that political divisions within the U.N. Security Council were undermining any chance of getting either Assad or the rebels to comply with the world body's peace plan.

With nothing left to negotiate, a mood of quiet desperation has set in among those monitoring the conflict, now estimated to have taken 20,000 lives and displaced 1.5 million. 

"What we have witnessed in the past 16 months of revolt might just be the harbinger of a far greater human disaster to come," Martin S. Indyk, a former diplomat now directing the foreign policy program  at the Brookings Institution, testified last week at the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Indyk sees the Assad regime, made up of fellow members of the minority Shiite Alawite sect, as motivated to destroy the rebels out of fear that they would be slaughtered by the Sunni majority if Assad is driven out.

Alawites and other minority sects that make up more than a quarter of Syria's population see their choice in the conflict as "kill or be killed," said Indyk, noting that the regime, despite a few high-profile defections, has a well-armed fighting force of 300,000, thousands more shabiha paramilitary fighters  and the backing of Iran and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah militia.

With virtually no hope of foreign military intervention in a U.S. election year, the analysts say, it falls to the underdog rebels to offer assurances to Syrian minority communities that their rights would be respected and their interests represented in a post-Assad leadership.

“For those Syrians who have endured 17 months of repression, for whom the instinct of revenge must be hard to suppress, this might seem an inappropriate, unrealistic mission,” said Robert Malley, the crisis group's Middle East program director. "But it is a necessary and inescapable one if the transition is to be worth the enormous price that is being paid."

Tabler, of the Near East Policy institute, doubts that the scattered rebel units could provide such assurances.

"After 17 months of slaughter, I wouldn't rely on the better angels of anyone's nature," he said, predicting the war will be "a grinder."

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Photo: A Syrian boy peers out Tuesday from a schoolhouse in the town of Kafr Hamra, north of Aleppo, where his family has taken refuge from intensifying fighting between rebels and government forces. Credit: Khalil Hamra / Associated Press

 

Kofi Annan to step down as special envoy to Syria

BEIRUT -- Kofi  Annan, the former United Nations secretary-general who has been the point man for a failing international peace plan for strife-torn Syria, is quitting as special envoy to Syria as of Aug. 31, the U.N. said Thursday.

His resignation was announced by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who lauded Annan's "determined and courageous efforts" in attempting to forge peace in Syria.

The veteran diplomat from Ghana had served as special envoy to Syria for both the United Nations and the Arab League.

PHOTOS: Syria conflict

His departure would seem to dim any prospects for peace in Syria, where violence has been surging as a revolt against President Bashar Assad is in its 16th month. Annan leaves as rebels and the government fight for control of its most populous city, Aleppo, in a battle that many say could be decisive.

Syria deemed too dangerous for U.N. monitors to resume mission

The head of United Nations peacekeeping operations told the Security Council on Tuesday that violence in Syria has escalated to a point where it was too dangerous for the world body's 300 unarmed monitors to resume their mission to observe and report on cease-fire violations.

"The ongoing violence continues to prevent UNSMIS [the monitoring mission] from carrying out its mandated tasks to monitor and report on the cessation of violence," peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous told a closed meeting of the Security Council, according to a U.N. official.

The mission's mandate expires in less than a month, and Ladsous and an Arab League envoy who also addressed the diplomatic gathering reportedly indicated that unless fighting between forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad and rebel factions ceases, the United Nations won't recommend extending the monitors' presence.

Norwegian Gen. Robert Mood, commander of the monitoring mission, pulled the observers back to their quarters June 16, declaring the work too dangerous as both sides in the 16-month-old conflict ignore a peace plan drafted by former U.N. chief Kofi Annan.

Mood reported to the Security Council that the monitors had been directly fired on at least 10 times before their patrols were suspended, and that nine U.N. vehicles had sustained damage from small-arms fire or roadside bombs. None of the monitors have been injured in the attacks, he said.

Russia's U.N. ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, told reporters after the Security Council session that Ladsous and Arab League special envoy Nasser Kidwa gave accounts of the security situation that were "very frank, very objective, and of course their description of the situation in Syria was extremely grim."

U.N. envoy says Iran should be included in Syria peace efforts

U.N. special envoy Kofi Annan called Friday for Iran to be included in the next efforts to bring peace to Syria, countering U.S. objections to Tehran's involvement by saying all nations with influence on the warring parties should play a role.

Annan's six-point peace plan for ending the 16-month-old uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad has been ignored by the Damascus government and the scattered rebel forces seeking Assad's ouster.

While again appealing for respect of a cease-fire proclaimed three months ago, Annan conceded that the artillery bombardments by government forces and guerrilla strikes by opposition fighters have raged unabated and that more effective intervention is needed.

"The longer we wait, the darker Syria's future becomes," Annan said at a news conference in Geneva.

Annan earlier this month proposed convening a "contact group" of nations with influence in the region, as the Syrian fighting descends into all-out civil war. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov last week suggested that the broader diplomatic initiative should include Iran, a close ally of Assad, but Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton immediately rejected the idea.

"It is time for countries of influence to raise the level of pressure on the parties on the ground, and to persuade them that it is in their interest to stop the killing and start talking," Annan said, quickly adding that cooperation is sorely lacking among those states.

U.N. debates alternatives to failed Syria peace plan

United Nations special envoy Kofi Annan and other leaders at the world body acknowledged Thursday that a six-point peace plan for Syria wasn't working and called for a new strategy to end the 15-month-old conflict that has taken more than 10,000 lives.

Annan, architect of the blueprint that has been widely ignored by both sides of the conflict since its imposition in mid-April, sounded a defeated note in asking the U.N. Security Council to broaden the diplomatic alliance trying to persuade the Syrian government and the rebels to negotiate an end to the fighting before it explodes into all-out civil war.

The expanded diplomatic effort, also being pushed by Moscow, would include the five permanent members of the Security Council -- the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France -- the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and Syrian neighbors Turkey and Iran.

U.S. and British officials have balked at any inclusion of Iran, a staunch ally of Syrian President Bashar  Assad and the regional nemesis of the West.

Annan spoke dejectedly of the prospects for his current plan to resolve the conflict, and he alluded to the need to consider other actions "if the plan is not working, or if we decide it's not the way to go."

"Syria is not Libya; it won't implode, it will explode beyond its borders," Annan said after a closed-door meeting of the 15-member Security Council. He noted that refugee outflows to Turkey and Jordan and sectarian fighting in Lebanon already demonstrate that the conflict threatens the entire region.

Annan, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Arab League envoy Nabil Elaraby gave dispiriting accounts of the prospects for peace in Syria after 10 hours of intense meetings at the world body's headquarters in New York. They also signaled that the "stimulating discussion" and "passionate views" aired at the Security Council session show that the only U.N. forum with the power to impose pressure or punishment on the government in Damascus remains deeply divided over how to proceed.

The U.N. ambassadors of Russia and China reiterated at the General Assembly their opposition to any solution involving military intervention in Syria or forced "regime change," arguing that it was up to the Syrian people, not foreign powers, to decide who should govern in the future.

In Istanbul, Turkey, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made it clear that Washington wanted Assad to transfer power and leave the country so that a representative interim government could be put in place.

"The time has come for the international community to unite around a plan for post-Assad Syria," Clinton said.

The diplomatic scramble over Syria followed word of another large-scale massacre, this time near the central city of Hama. Opposition activists alleged that government shelling and execution-style killings by pro-government thugs in Mazraat al Kabir, west of Hama, killed 78 people, among them women and children.

Syrian state television blamed "terrorists" for the slayings, its code word for armed rebels trying to oust Assad.

U.N. observers who tried to reach the village to assess the incident were shot at and blocked from entering, the monitoring mission said in a statement.

"Each day seems to bring new additions to the grim catalog of atrocities," Ban said of the mass bloodshed reportedly carried out early Wednesday. He accused Assad of tolerating the killing of innocents, saying he had "lost all legitimacy" as a leader.

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 Photo:  U.N. special envoy Kofi Annan, Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and Nabil Elaraby of the League of Arab States brief reporters in New York on Thursday after 10 hours of diplomatic gatherings aimed at halting the bloodshed in Syria. Credit: Andrew Burton / Getty Images

Counter-terrorism official says drones help prevent deeper conflicts

WASHINGTON -- President Obama’s top counter-terrorism advisor defended using drones to launch deadly missiles against militants and terrorist leaders in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, arguing Monday that the unmanned aircraft have helped prevent deeper military conflicts.

The comments by John Brennan, shortly before the first anniversary of the raid by U.S. Navy SEALs that killed Osama bin Laden, marked the first time that a senior White House official has spoken at length in public about drone operations, which have been widely reported but are officially covert.

The administration’s growing reliance on drones has stirred deep controversy at home and abroad. On Sunday, unmanned aircraft killed at least three suspected militants in the tribal region of northern Pakistan despite the Pakistani government's insistence that the U.S. attacks have infringed on the country's sovereignty and killed or injured hundreds of civilians over the last three years.

But in a speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Washington-based think tank, Brennan said civilian casualties from drone strikes were “exceedingly rare.”

“We take it seriously,” he said. “We go back and review our actions.”

Brennan strained to answer critics who have sought information for years on how U.S. officials decide whom to target, and how often civilians have been accidentally killed.

“We only authorize a particular operation against a specific individual if we have a high degree of confidence that the individual being targeted is indeed the terrorist we are pursuing,” he said. “This is a very high bar.”

Brennan said the campaign of targeted drone strikes has reduced danger to U.S. pilots, limited civilian casualties and helped prevent deeper U.S. military actions overseas.

“Large, intrusive military deployments risk playing into Al Qaeda’s strategy of trying to draw us into long, costly wars that drain us financially, inflame anti-American resentment and inspire the next generation of terrorists,” he said.

Until recently, no Obama administration official publicly acknowledged the covert drone program, although hundreds of CIA drone strikes have been reported in Pakistan since 2009.

Obama acknowledged the classified program Jan. 30 when he said the U.S. has to be “judicious in how we use drones,” in response to a question about attacks in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Brennan said he was speaking about the drone program because Obama had instructed officials to be more open about it. 

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Photo: Marc Grossman, right, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, holds talks with Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, left, in Islamabad, Pakistan, on April 26. Pakistan reiterated its opposition to U.S. drone attacks in its territory. Credit: Sajjad Qayyumsajjad Qayyum / AFP