The following text is Chapter IV of Professor Anderson’s forthcoming book entitled The Dirty War on Syria, Global Research Publishers, Montreal, 2016 (forthcoming).
Image. Arms seized by Syrian security forces at al Omari mosque
in Daraa, March 2011. The weapons had been provided by the Saudis.
Photo: SANA
“The protest movement in Syria was overwhelmingly peaceful until September 2011”- Human Rights Watch, March 2012, Washington
“I have seen from the beginning armed protesters in those
demonstrations … they were the first to fire on the police. Very often
the violence of the security forces comes in response to the brutal
violence of the armed insurgents” – the late Father Frans Van der Lugt, January 2012, Homs Syria
“The claim that armed opposition to the government has begun only
recently is a complete lie. The killings of soldiers, police and
civilians, often in the most brutal circumstances, have been going on
virtually since the beginning”. – Professor Jeremy Salt, October 2011, Ankara Turkey
 A
double story began on the Syrian conflict, at the outset of the armed
violence in 2011, in the southern border town of Daraa. The first story
comes from independent witnesses in Syria, such as the late Father Frans
Van der Lugt in Homs. They say that armed men infiltrated the early
political reform demonstrations to shoot at both police and civilians.
This violence came from sectarian Islamists. The second comes from the
Islamist groups (‘rebels’) and their western backers. They claim there
was ‘indiscriminate’ violence from Syrian security forces to repress
political rallies and that the ‘rebels’ grew out of a secular political
reform movement.
Careful study of the independent
evidence, however, shows that the Washington-backed ‘rebel’ story, while
widespread, was part of a strategy to delegitimise the Syrian
Government, with the aim of fomenting ‘regime change’. To understand
this it is necessary to observe that, prior to the armed insurrection of
March 2011 there were shipments of arms from Saudi Arabia to Islamists
at the al Omari mosque. It is also useful to review the earlier Muslim
Brotherhood insurrection at Hama in 1982, because of the parallel myths
that have grown up around both insurrections.
US intelligence (DIA 1982) and the late British author Patrick Seale
(1988) give independent accounts of what happened at Hama. After years
of violent, sectarian attacks by Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood, by mid-1980
President Hafez al Assad had ‘broken the back’ of their sectarian
rebellion, which aimed to impose a Salafi-Islamic state. One final coup
plot was exposed and the Brotherhood ‘felt pressured into initiating’ an
uprising in their stronghold of Hama. Seale describes the start of that
violence in this way:
At 2am on the night of 2-3 February 1982 an army unit
combing the old city fell into an ambush. Roof top snipers killed
perhaps a score of soldiers … [Brotherhood leader] Abu Bakr [Umar
Jawwad] gave the order for a general uprising … hundreds of Islamist
fighters rose … by the morning some seventy leading Ba’athists had been
slaughtered and the triumphant guerrillas declared the city ‘liberated’
(Seale 1988: 332).
However the Army responded with a huge force of about 12,000 and the
battle raged for three weeks. It was a foreign-backed civil war, with
some defections from the army. Seale continues:
As the tide turned slowly in the government’s favour, the
guerrillas fell back into the old quarters … after heavy shelling,
commandos and party irregulars supported by tanks moved in … many
civilians were slaughtered in the prolonged mopping up, whole districts
razed (Seale 1988: 333).
Two months later a US intelligence report said: ‘The total casualties
for the Hama incident probably number about 2,000. This includes an
estimated 300 to 400 members of the Muslim Brotherhood’s elite ‘Secret
Apparatus’ (DIA 1982: 7).
Seale recognises that the Army also suffered heavy losses. At the
same time, ‘large numbers died in the hunt for the gunmen … government
sympathizers estimating a mere 3,000 and critics as many as 20,000 … a
figure of 5,000 to 10,000 could be close to the truth’ He adds:
‘The guerrillas were formidable opponents. They had a fortune in
foreign money … [and] no fewer than 15,000 machine guns’ (Seale 1988:
335). Subsequent Muslim Brotherhood accounts have inflated the
casualties, reaching up to ‘40,000 civilians’, thus attempting to hide
their insurrection and sectarian massacres by claiming that Hafez al
Assad had carried out a ‘civilian massacre’ (e.g. Nassar 2014). The then
Syrian President blamed a large scale foreign conspiracy for the Hama
insurrection. Seale observes that Hafez was ‘not paranoical’, as many US
weapons were captured and foreign backing had come from several US
collaborators: King Hussayn of Jordan, Lebanese Christian militias (the
Israeli-aligned ‘Guardians of the Cedar’) and Saddam Hussein in Iraq
(Seale 1988: 336-337).
The Hama insurrection helps us understand the Daraa violence because,
once again in 2011, we saw armed Islamists using rooftop sniping
against police and government officials, drawing in the armed forces,
only to cry ‘civilian massacre’ when they and their collaborators came
under attack from the Army. Although the US, through its allies, played
an important part in the Hama insurrection, when it was all over US
intelligence dryly observed that: ‘the Syrians are pragmatists who do
not want a Muslim Brotherhood government’ (DIA 1982: vii).
In the case of Daraa, and the attacks that moved to Homs and
surrounding areas in April 2011, the clearly stated aim was once again
to topple the secular or ‘infidel-Alawi’ regime. The front-line US
collaborators were Saudi Arabia and Qatar, then Turkey. The head of the
Syrian Brotherhood, Muhammad Riyad Al-Shaqfa, issued a statement on 28
March which left no doubt that the group’s aim was sectarian. The enemy
was ‘the secular regime’ and Brotherhood members ‘have to make sure that
the revolution will be pure Islamic, and with that no other sect would
have a share of the credit after its success’ (Al-Shaqfa 2011). While
playing down the initial role of the Brotherhood, Sheikho confirms that
it ‘went on to punch above its actual weight on the ground during the
uprising … [due] to Turkish-Qatari support’, and to its general
organisational capacity (Sheikho 2013). By the time there was a ‘Free
Syrian Army Supreme Military Council’ in 2012 (more a weapons conduit
than any sort of army command), it was said to be two-thirds dominated
by the Muslim Brotherhood (Draitser 2012). Other foreign Salafi-Islamist
groups quickly joined this ‘Syrian Revolution’. A US intelligence
report in August 2012, contrary to Washington’s public statements about
‘moderate rebels’, said:
The Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI [Al Qaeda in
Iraq, later ISIS] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria …
AQI supported the Syrian Opposition from the beginning, both
ideologically and through the media (DIA 2012).
In February 2011 there was popular agitation in Syria, to some extent
influenced by the events in Egypt and Tunisia. There were
anti-government and pro-government demonstrations, and a genuine
political reform movement which for several years had agitated against
corruption and the Ba’ath Party monopoly. A 2005 report referred to ‘an
array of reform movements slowly organizing beneath the surface’ (Ghadry
2005), and indeed the ‘many faces’ of a Syrian opposition, much of it
non-Islamist, had been agitating since about that same time (Sayyid
Rasas 2013). These political opposition groups deserve attention, in
another discussion (see Chapter Five). However only one section of that
opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Salafists, was linked to
the violence that erupted in Daraa. Large anti-government demonstrations
began, to be met with huge pro-government demonstrations. In early
March some teenagers in Daraa were arrested for graffiti that had been
copied from North Africa ‘the people want to overthrow the regime’. It
was reported that they were abused by local police, President Bashar al
Assad intervened, the local governor was sacked and the teenagers were
released (Abouzeid 2011).
Yet the Islamist insurrection was underway, taking cover under the
street demonstrations. On 11 March, several days before the violence
broke out in Daraa, there were reports that Syrian forces had seized ‘a
large shipment of weapons and explosives and night-vision goggles … in a
truck coming from Iraq’. The truck was stopped at the southern Tanaf
crossing, close to Jordan. The Syrian Government news agency SANA said
the weapons were intended ‘for use in actions that affect Syria’s
internal security and spread unrest and chaos.’ Pictures showed ‘dozens
of grenades and pistols as well as rifles and ammunition belts’. The
driver said the weapons had been loaded in Baghdad and he had been paid
$5,000 to deliver them to Syria (Reuters 2011). Despite this
interception, arms did reach Daraa, a border town of about 150,000
people. This is where the ‘western-rebel’ and the independent stories
diverge, and diverge dramatically. The western media consensus was that
protestors burned and trashed government offices, and then ‘provincial
security forces opened fire on marchers, killing several’ (Abouzeid
2011). After that, ‘protestors’ staged demonstrations in front of the
al-Omari mosque, but were in turn attacked.
The Syrian government, on the other hand, said there were unprovoked
attacks on security forces, killing police and civilians, along with the
burning of government offices. There was foreign corroboration of this
account. While its headline blamed security forces for killing
‘protesters’, the British Daily Mail (2011) showed pictures of guns,
AK47 rifles and hand grenades that security forces had recovered after
storming the al-Omari mosque. The paper noted reports that ‘an armed
gang’ had opened fire on an ambulance, killing ‘a doctor, a paramedic
and a policeman’. Media channels in neighbouring countries did report on
the killing of Syrian police, on 17-18 March. On 21 March a Lebanese
news report observed that ‘Seven policemen were killed during clashes
between the security forces and protesters in Syria’ (YaLibnan 2011),
while an Israel National News report said ‘Seven police officers and at
least four demonstrators in Syria have been killed … and the Baath party
headquarters and courthouse were torched’ (Queenan 2011). These police
had been targeted by rooftop snipers.
Even in these circumstances the Government was urging restraint and
attempting to respond to the political reform movement. President
Assad’s adviser, Dr Bouthaina Shaaban, told a news conference that the
President had ordered ‘that live ammunition should not be fired, even if
the police, security forces or officers of the state were being
killed’. Assad proposed to address the political demands, such as the
registration of political parties, removing emergency rules and allowing
greater media freedoms (al-Khalidi 2011). None of that seemed to either
interest or deter the Islamists.
Several reports, including video reports, observed rooftop snipers
firing at crowds and police, during funerals of those already killed. It
was said to be ‘unclear who was firing at whom’ (Al Jazeera 2011a), as
‘an unknown armed group on rooftops shot at protesters and security
forces’ (Maktabi 2011). Yet Al Jazeera (2011b) owned by the Qatari
monarchy, soon strongly suggested that that the snipers were
pro-government. ‘President Bashar al Assad has sent thousands of Syrian
soldiers and their heavy weaponry into Derra for an operation the regime
wants nobody in the word to see’, the Qatari channel said. However the
Al Jazeera suggestion that secret pro-government snipers were killing
‘soldiers and protestors alike’ was illogical and out of sequence. The
armed forces came to Daraa precisely because police had been shot and
killed.
Saudi Arabia, a key US regional ally, had armed and funded extremist
Salafist Sunni sects to move against the secular government. Saudi
official Anwar Al-Eshki later confirmed to BBC television that his
country had sent arms to Daraa and to the al-Omari mosque (Truth Syria
2012). From exile in Saudi Arabia, Salafi Sheikh Adnan Arour called for a
holy war against the liberal Alawi Muslims, who were said to dominate
the Syrian government: ‘by Allah we shall mince [the Alawites] in meat
grinders and feed their flesh to the dogs’ (MEMRITV 2011). The Salafist
aim was a theocratic state or caliphate. The genocidal slogan
‘Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave’ became widespread, a fact
reported by the North American media as early as May 2011 (e.g. Blanford
2011). Islamists from the FSA Farouq brigade would soon act on these
threats (Crimi 2012). Canadian analyst Michel Chossudovsky (2011)
observed: ‘The deployment of armed forces including tanks in Daraa [was]
directed against an organised armed insurrection, which has been active
in the border city since March 17-18.”
After those first few days in Daraa the killing of Syrian security
forces continued, but went largely unreported outside Syria.
Nevertheless, independent analyst Sharmine Narwani wrote about the scale
of this killing in early 2012 and again in mid-2014. An ambush and
massacre of soldiers took place near Daraa in late March or early April.
An army convoy was stopped by an oil slick on a valley road between
Daraa al-Mahata and Daraa al-Balad and the trucks were machine gunned.
Estimates of soldier deaths, from government and opposition sources
ranged from 18 to 60. A Daraa resident said these killings were not
reported because: ‘At that time, the government did not want to show
they are weak and the opposition did not want to show they are armed’.
Anti-Syrian Government blogger, Nizar Nayouf, records this massacre as
taking place in the last week of March. Another anti-Government writer,
Rami Abdul Rahman (based in England, and calling himself the ‘Syrian
Observatory of Human Rights’) says:
‘It was on the first of April and about 18 or 19 security forces …
were killed’ (Narwani 2014). Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mikdad,
himself a resident of Daraa, confirmed that: ‘this incident was hidden
by the government … as an attempt not to antagonize or not to raise
emotions and to calm things down – not to encourage any attempt to
inflame emotions which may lead to escalation of the situation’ (Narwani
2014).
Yet the significance of denying armed anti-Government killings was
that, in the western media, all deaths were reported as (a) victims of
the Army and (b) civilians. For well over six months, when a body count
was mentioned in the international media, it was usually considered
acceptable to suggest these were all ‘protestors’ killed by the Syrian
Army. For example, a Reuters report on 24 March said Daraa’s main
hospital had received ‘the bodies of at least 37 protestors killed on
Wednesday’ (Khalidi 2011). Notice that all the dead had become
‘protestors’, despite earlier reports on the killing of a number of
police and health workers.
Another nineteen soldiers were gunned down on 25 April, also near
Daraa. Narwani obtained their names and details from Syria’s Defence
Ministry, and corroborated these details from another document from a
non-government source. Throughout April 2011 she calculates that
eighty-eight Syrian soldiers were killed ‘by unknown shooters in
different areas across Syria’ (Narwani 2014). She went on to refute
claims that the soldiers killed were ‘defectors’, shot by the Syrian
army for refusing to fire on civilians. Human Rights Watch, referring to
interviews with 50 unnamed ‘activists’, claimed that soldiers killed at
this time were all ‘defectors’, murdered by the Army (HRW 2011b). Yet
the funerals of loyal officers, shown on the internet at that time, were
distinct. Even Rami Abdul Rahman (the SOHR), keen to blame the Army for
killing civilians, said ‘this game of saying the Army is killing
defectors for leaving – I never accepted this’ (Narwani 2014).
Nevertheless the highly charged reports were confusing.
The violence spread north, with the assistance of Islamist fighters
from Lebanon, reaching Baniyas and areas around Homs. On 10 April nine
soldiers were shot in a bus ambush in Baniyas. In Homs, on April 17,
General Abdo Khodr al-Tallawi was killed with his two sons and a nephew,
and Syrian commander Iyad Kamel Harfoush was gunned down near his home.
Two days later, off-duty Colonel Mohammad Abdo Khadour was killed in
his car (Narwani 2014). North American commentator Joshua Landis (2011a)
reported the death of his wife’s cousin, one of the soldiers in
Baniyas. These were not the only deaths but I mention them because most
western media channels maintain the fiction, to this day, that there was
no Islamist insurrection and the ‘peaceful protestors’ did not pick up
arms until September 2011.
Al Jazeera, the principal Middle East media channel backing the
Muslim Brotherhood, blacked out these attacks, as also the reinforcement
provided by armed foreigners. Former Al Jazeera journalist Ali Hashem
was one of many who resigned from the Qatar-owned station (RT 2012),
complaining of deep bias over their presentation of the violence in
Syria. Hashem had footage of armed men arriving from Lebanon, but this
was censored by his Qatari managers. ‘In a resignation letter I was
telling the executive … it was like nothing was happening in Syria.’ He
thought the ‘Libyan revolution’ was the turning point for Al Jazeera,
marking the end of its standing as a credible media group (Hashem 2012).
Provocateurs were at work. Tunisian jihadist ‘Abu Qusay’ later
admitted he had been a prominent ‘Syrian rebel’ charged with ‘destroying
and desecrating Sunni mosques’, including by scrawling the graffiti
‘There is no God but Bashar’, a blasphemy to devout Muslims. This was
then blamed on the Syrian Army, with the aim of creating Sunni
defections from the Army. ‘Abu Qusay’ had been interviewed by foreign
journalists who did not notice by his accent that he was not Syrian
(Eretz Zen 2014).
US Journalist Nir Rosen, whose reports were generally critical of the
Syrian Government, also attacked the western consensus over the early
violence:
The issue of defectors is a distraction. Armed resistance
began long before defections started … Every day the opposition gives a
death toll, usually without any explanation … Many of those reported
killed are in fact dead opposition fighters but … described in reports
as innocent civilians killed by security forces … and every day members
of the Syrian Army, security agencies … are also killed by anti-regime
fighters (Rosen 2012).
A language and numbers game was being played to delegitimise the
Syrian Government (‘The Regime’) and the Syrian Army (‘Assad
loyalists’), suggesting they were responsible for all the violence. Just
as NATO forces were bombing Libya with the aim of overthrowing the
Libyan Government, US officials began to demand that President Assad
step down. The Brookings Institution (Shaikh 2011) claimed the President
had ‘lost the legitimacy to remain in power in Syria’. US Senators John
McCain, Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman said it was time ‘to align
ourselves unequivocally with the Syrian people in their peaceful demand
for a democratic government’ (FOX News 2011). Another ‘regime change’
campaign was out in the open.
In June, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton dismissed the idea that
‘foreign instigators’ had been at work, saying that ‘the vast majority
of casualties have been unarmed civilians’ (Clinton 2011). In fact, as
Clinton knew very well, her Saudi Arabian allies had armed extremists
from the very beginning. Her casualty assertion was also wrong. The
United Nations (which would later abandon its body count) estimated from
several sources that, by early 2012, there were more than 5,000
casualties, and that deaths in the first year of conflict included 478
police and 2,091 from the military and security forces (OHCHR 2012: 2;
Narwani 2014). That is, more than half the casualties in the first year
were those of the Syrian security forces. That independent calculation
was not reflected in western media reports. Western groups such as Human
Rights Watch, along with US columnists (e.g. Allaf 2012) continued to
claim, even after the early 2012 defeat of the sectarian Farouq-FSA in
Homs, and well into 2012, that Syrian security forces had been
massacring ‘unarmed protestors’, that the Syrian people ‘had no choice’
but to take up arms, and that this ‘protest movement’ had been
‘overwhelmingly peaceful until September 2011’ (HRW 2011a, HRW 2012).
The evidence cited above shows that this story was quite false.
In fact, the political reform movement had been driven off the
streets by Salafi-Islamist gunmen, over the course of March and April.
For years opposition groups had agitated against corruption and the
Ba’ath Party monopoly. However most did not want destruction of what was
a socially inclusive if authoritarian state, and most were against both
the sectarian violence and the involvement of foreign powers. They
backed Syria’s protection of minorities, the relatively high status of
women and the country’s free education and health care, while opposing
the corrupt networks and the feared political police (Wikstrom 2011;
Otrakji 2012).
In June reporter Hala Jaber (2011) observed that about five thousand
people turned up for a demonstration at Ma’arrat al-Numan, a small town
in north-west Syria, between Aleppo and Hama. She says several
‘protestors’ had been shot the week before, while trying to block the
road between Damascus and Aleppo. After some negotiations which reduced
the security forces in the town, ‘men with heavy beards in cars and
pick-ups with no registration plates’ with ‘rifles and rocket-propelled
grenades’ began shooting at the reduced numbers of security forces. A
military helicopter was sent to support the security forces. After this
clash ‘four policemen and 12 of their attackers were dead or dying.
Another 20 policemen were wounded’. Officers who escaped the fight were
hidden by some of the tribal elders who had participated in the original
demonstration. When the next ‘demonstration for democracy’ took place,
the following Friday, ‘only 350 people turned up’, mostly young men and
some bearded militants (Jaber 2011). Five thousand protestors had been
reduced to 350, after the open Salafist attacks.
After months of media manipulations, disguising the Islamist
insurrection, Syrians such as Samer al Akhras, a young man from a Sunni
family, who used to watch Al Jazeera because he preferred it to state
TV, became convinced to back the Syrian government. He saw first-hand
the fabrication of reports on Al Jazeera and wrote, in late June 2011:
I am a Syrian citizen and I am a human. After 4 months of
your fake freedom … You say peaceful demonstration and you shoot our
citizen. From today … I am [now] a Sergeant in the Reserve Army. If I
catch anyone … in any terrorist organization working on the field in
Syria I am gonna shoot you as you are shooting us. This is our land not
yours, the slaves of American fake freedom (al Akhras 2011).
References:
Abouzeid, Rania (2011) ‘Syria’s Revolt, how graffiti stirred an uprising’, Time, 22 March
Daily Mail (2011) ‘Nine protesters killed after security forces open fire by Syrian mosque’, 24 March
Haidar, Ali
(2013) interview with this writer, Damascus 28 December. [Ali Haidar
was President of the Syrian Social National Party (SSNP), a secular
rival to the Ba’ath Party. In 2012 President Bashar al Assad
incorporated him into the Syrian government as Minister for
Reconciliation.]
OHCHR
(2012) ‘Periodic Update’, Independent International Commission of
Inquiry established pursuant to resolution A/HRC/S – 17/1 and extended
through resolution A/HRC/Res/19/22, 24 may, online:
Queenan, Gavriel (2011) ‘Syria: Seven Police Killed, Buildings torched in protests’, Israel National News, Arutz Sheva, March 21
Truth Syria
(2012) ‘Syria – Daraa revolution was armed to the teeth from the very
beginning’, BBC interview with Anwar Al-Eshki, YouTube interview, video
originally uploaded 10 April, latest version 7 November, online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoGmrWWJ77w
Seale, Patrick (1988) Asad: the struggle for the Middle East, University of California Press, Berkeley CA
Dr Tim Anderson is a Senior Lecturer in
Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He researches and writes
on development, rights and self-determination in Latin America, the
Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. He has published many dozens of
chapters and articles in a range of academic books and journals. His
last book was Land and Livelihoods in Papua New Guinea (2015).
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