UK Syria vote: Who MPs should (and should not) be listening to

[Originally published by Now Lebanon on 2/12/2015]

British MPs should consult Syrians, not dubious Western ideologues, on whether or not to bomb ISIS in their country.

In Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, set in February 2003, the neurosurgeon Henry Perowne is discussing the day’s big event — the million-strong march in Hyde Park against the coming invasion of Iraq — with his “newly adult” daughter, who’s just returned, flushed with righteous vivacity, from the jubilant scene.

The liberal Henry doesn’t, in fact, support the war, but when his daughter asks, slightly too judgmentally, why he hadn’t joined the enlightened masses on the streets, a friendly argument breaks out that then turns into a less-friendly argument, eventually leading Henry to realize what it is that makes him uneasy about the demonstrators:

“Let me ask you a question. Why is it among those two million idealists today I didn’t see one banner, one fist or voice raised against Saddam?”

“He’s loathsome,” she says. “It’s a given.”

“No it’s not. It’s a forgotten. Why else are you all singing and dancing in the park?”

This has always struck me as an insight of the highest moral clarity, and it bears revisiting as the British parliament meets today to vote on extending Royal Air Force strikes against ISIS in Iraq (already approved by parliament last year) to include ISIS targets in neighboring Syria as well. Today, as in 2003, any serious consideration of whether or not to intervene must begin with the acknowledgment that both options are terrible. MPs voting against the motion put forth by David Cameron’s cabinet must understand that they are doing a favor to the rapists of children, the tyrannisers of Arab and Muslim civilians generally, and the butchers of British tourists, French concert-goers, and Egyptian Christians, just as MPs voting for the motion must concede that opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn is probably right to say “we are going to kill [innocent] people in their homes by our bombs.”

Both options entail further horror and misery for civilians. There will be blood on British MPs’ hands whether they vote for or against. Neither course should be taken, then, without the requisite degrees of discomfort and remorse — there can be no singing and dancing in the park. The people who must be morally distrusted right away, in other words, are those for whom the decision comes easily.

These include, on the (purported) left, the anti-war absolutists, who care not the slightest for the welfare of Syrian civilians, or even for their opinions. Perhaps best represented in Britain by the questionably-named Stop the War Coalition, they made this clear last month when they prevented Syrian activists from speaking at a panel discussion on intervention in Syria, heckling and then calling the police on a small group who turned up hoping to have a say on the fate of their own country. To call these groups ‘anti-war’ is in fact much too kind, for they have no problem with war in Syria per se as long as it can be used against Downing Street. They are the sort who would have told you (as indeed they might still) that the most dangerous man in Europe in 1939 was Winston Churchill.

A closely related faction are those who actively support war in Syria — who expend column inches and public speaking hours defending and advocating it — when it’s carried out by regimes Britain opposes. Of these there could be no better example than Patrick Cockburn, the journalist Corbyn invited to give Labour MPs a final pep talk before parliament opened this morning. When 10 weeks ago Russia began its own intervention in Syria — which has since killed a number of rebels and a higher number of civilians, but conspicuously few ISIS fighters — Cockburn penned an op-ed titled ‘Why We Should Welcome Russia’s Entry Into Syrian War.’ Moscow’s air strikes on rebel positions and residential homes “could have a positive impact,” Cockburn explained, even helping in “de-escalating the war.” Needless to say the prospect of Britain following Russia’s lead, however, is another matter entirely.

“Based on wishful thinking and poor information,” Cockburn said in his briefing Wednesday, Britain is stumbling into the unknown “without a realistic policy to win” against ISIS. What might a realistic policy involve? “If ISIS is really going to be destroyed, it is difficult to see how the US and UK can avoid having some degree of co-operation with the Syrian army,” Cockburn wrote two weeks ago. He further applauded the “clear-sighted” remarks by former British Army head Gen. David Richards that Assad and even “Hezbollah and their Iranian backers” should be welcomed into the Coalition’s fold. In this, the ostensibly left-wing Cockburn is on common ground with such right-wingers as UKIP leader Nigel Farage and the Conservative chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, MP Crispin Blunt, both of whom have opposed fighting ISIS without an accompanying entente cordiale with Damascus.

If these are some of the voices MPs would do well to ignore when voting Wednesday, where might they turn instead for valuable insight? A sensible starting place would surely be those Syrian civilians who stand to be most directly affected by the dispatch of Tornado GR4s to the skies above the caliphate.

‘Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently’ (RBSS) is a group of extraordinary media activists working surreptitiously from inside ISIS’s Syrian capital to bring the reality of life under the jihadists to an outside world that would otherwise have no information beyond the meticulously-doctored propaganda released by the caliph’s media team themselves. Living under perennial threat of discovery and death (two of their colleagues in south Turkey were tracked down and beheaded by an ISIS agent in October), RBSS have the most to gain from an effective intervention against ISIS and, equally, the most to lose from a botched one. One of their members, going by the pseudonym Tim Ramadan, told me Wednesday he was prepared to take a bet on the former outcome.

“We’re for any decision to eradicate Daesh [ISIS] and Assad, and to protect civilians,” said Ramadan. “We have trust in the British government, from its stance alongside the Syrian revolution, that it will place the protection of civilians among its priorities.”

When I replied that others, such as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights’ Rami Abdulrahman, object to strikes on the grounds that ISIS operates among the civilian population, making the killing of innocents inevitable, Ramadan disagreed.

“There are Daesh camps and warehouses and convoys that move in broad daylight, far from civilians. For example, France carried out almost 30 strikes in a single night that didn’t hit any civilian; all of them focused on Daesh targets. Britain, too, has the capability to do that.”

Which is not to say Ramadan’s opinion is universally shared. Other Syrian democracy activists on the ground, such as the Aleppo-based Zaina Erhaim, have come out against British strikes. The Syria Campaign, a group that works tirelessly to remind the world that Assad remains by a considerable margin the greatest killer of civilians in Syria, argues that “Bombing ISIS is not the answer” — a view shared by some leading Syrian analysts, including Hassan Hassan.

None of these people are pacifists or Corbynistas. What they typically object to is not the principle of intervention, but rather the prospect of a strategically stunted intervention that fails to account for Assad’s role in getting ISIS to where it is today.

“If I went to the UK parliament to make a speech, the first thing I would say is ask them to remove the cause, which is Assad, not the symptom which is ISIS,” an exiled Raqqa resident told the Guardian last week. “Hundreds of thousands of people died in the last few years, and no one came to bomb Damascus.”

That, of course, was in small part because of a British parliament decision against punishing Assad for murdering over 1,000 men, women and children with weapons of mass destruction (which, incidentally, he has “continued to use” as a matter of “routine,” according to delegates at this week’s Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons annual meeting). Today MPs face another decision, and if the one they make turns out in the course of time to be the wrong one, they will at least be able to say they took it in good conscience if they listen — rather than close their ears — to the voices of what ought to be their Syrian allies.

An autobiography of Syria's revolution

[Originally published by Now Lebanon on 17/8/2016]

Can it really be three years this month since the enormous sarin attack on Damascus’ East Ghouta? Events move at such dizzying pace in Syria that a massacre in the morning is already forgotten by nightfall, while last week’s atrocity is ossified history. The British novelist Martin Amis says we each become different people with every decade that passes. If so, we’re only 50% at most of who we were when demonstrations broke out across Syria in March 2011, and for many of us our perceptions of what happened have since undergone equally pronounced transformations.

It’s bad enough that we forget details; worse is the way facts registered at the time get clumsily fused with information (and misinformation) acquired later on. We now know, to take an example at random, that Al-Qaeda was actively involved – albeit on a microscopic scale – in the armed insurrection from as early in the day as August 2011. Even those who are still perfectly certain Assad is a heinous war criminal can now increasingly be heard contemplating the state of the rebel movement today and asking: was there ever really a ‘moderate’ Free Syrian Army? And, while we’re at it, just how democratic was the initial civilian uprising, anyway?

If you’ve ever caught yourself even momentarily entertaining such revisionism, Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War will make for deeply embarrassing reading. One opens its pages and steps into the spring of 2011 and suddenly it’s all there once again, just as it was: the “crowds of hundreds of thousands – men and women, adults and children,” dancing the dabke to the beat of the dirbakkeh; Christians in Homs’ Hamidiyeh throwing rice affectionately onto mostly-Muslim demonstrators in the streets below their balconies, chanting “Muslims and Christians, we all want freedom” (it rhymes in Arabic) and “One, one, one, the Syrian people are one.”

In fact, the authors Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami recreate the scene in much higher-definition than one watched it at the time. Among many things that make this the Syria book we’ve all been waiting for is the incredibly extensive and eclectic dramatis personae interviewed and quoted in its pages. Here we meet Sunni Marxist rappers organizing demonstrations with Alawite anarchists in Tartous; atheist supporters of the Free Syrian Army; and Christian women protesting in Damascus’ “conservative Muslim neighborhood” of Maydan wearing “skimpy top[s];” inter alia. Many interviews have in fact been conducted inside Syria, where the Syrian-British authors have traveled repeatedly since 2011. The result is the most vivid ground-level account of the revolution through the eyes and mouths of its own protagonists yet compiled in English.

Not, however, that this is remotely a sentimental stroll down memory lane or nostalgic lament for the golden days. Committed revolutionaries that they are, Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami are also analysts of the first rank, and they set about diagnosing where it all went wrong with a remarkably Orwellian power of facing unpleasant facts. Where the opposition has erred, the authors are unsparing. Ahrar al-Sham, the “largest” rebel brigade and also the “most extreme” save for ISIS and the group formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra, is rebuked for its slaughter of Alawite civilians, and described as “undoubtedly led by jihadist extremists who oppose the revolution’s original democratic aims.” Jaysh al-Islam, kingpin of the rebel-held Damascus suburbs, is taken to task for its Islamist authoritarianism, best exemplified by its “likely abduction and perhaps murder” of the human rights lawyer and activist Razan Zaitouneh (along with her husband and two colleagues), a figure of peerless importance in the secular, democratic, grassroots opposition, and the dedicatee of the book. The political opposition in exile is pasted for its failure to sufficiently reach out to Alawites, Kurds, and other minorities in the crucial early days when it might have made the difference.

Some perspective, however, is called for here. Bashar al-Assad’s regime remains primarily, overwhelmingly, incomparably at fault for the disaster Syria has become. In his 1993 book Cruelty and Silence, the Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya wrote that as much as he willed every moment of every day for the fall of the Saddam regime, he feared the profound damage done to Iraqi society by decades of Baathist totalitarianism would all but guarantee a nightmare of sectarian bloodletting in its wake. He could just as easily have been writing about Assad’s Syria. Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami demonstrate ably how a great portion of the opposition’s faults bear the genetic imprint of regime parentage.

Take religious sectarianism. While today often unthinkingly seen (by Arabs no less than Westerners) as a permanent, ineradicable feature of Middle Eastern society since time immemorial, the authors argue persuasively it is chiefly the bastard child of the region’s utterly unscrupulous contemporary regimes. Syria, they write, was “set on a secular trajectory similar to Europe’s” in the 1960s, when left-of-center politics dominated and the hijab (for example) was worn by fewer women than ever.

That all met a swift death with the advent of the Assads père et fils, whose approach to governance combined colonial divide-and-rule strategy with the mobster’s tactics of blackmail and extortion. It wasn’t just that Alawites were showered with socioeconomic patronage and other inducements to purchase their sympathies. Sunnis, while forbidden on pain of death from joining the Muslim Brotherhood, were permitted and even encouraged to become Salafists, the better to convince both Alawites and Western governments that the Assads – ever the arsonists and firemen at one and the same time – were all that stood between them and baying masses of fanatic lynch mobs.

At its most flagrant, this took the form of grooming fighters to join Al-Qaeda in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, facilitating their training and transport to the border. The regime’s direct collaboration with the group that would go on to spawn both ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra continued until at least 2009, according to a Guardian investigative report. Famously, Assad also released a legion of violent Islamist prisoners from their cells in 2011 (at the very moment he was arresting, torturing and murdering non-violent secularists), including Ahrar al-Sham’s Hassan Abboud, Jaysh al-Islam’s Zahran Alloush, “as well as founding members of Jabhat al-Nusra [and] important figures in ISIS,” write the authors.

More generally, the complete lack of free speech, civil society, independent media, apolitical education, and cultural space stretching back four decades drained the air of the oxygen necessary for healthy communal coexistence. “What Syria needed was a national conversation about historical fears and resentments aiming towards greater mutual understanding,” write the authors of the pre-2011 state often dubbed the ‘Kingdom of Silence.’ “Instead people discussed the other sect in bitter secret whispers, and only among their own.” Baathist monopolization of politics had a further ruinous effect – in one of their most original insights, the authors note, “The elimination or co-optation of the left removed one of religion’s natural competitors.” (To this day, the godless whisky-guzzlers of the Lebanese Communist Party stand as the last remaining obstacle in certain Shiite towns and villages to Hezbollah’s Islamization.)

The wonder, given all this, is that the revolution was ever as democratic and pluralist as it was, and that so many Syrians were so readily able to break, spontaneously and entirely of their own accord, with a lifetime’s worth of conditioning. That their experiment – carried out in unfathomably dangerous conditions – was too often met not with encouragement and support from the democratic world but with ambivalence and even hostility is one of the great tragedies of the 21st century. In the final chapter, the authors write with cold contempt of all the segments of the so-called international community that failed Syria, from the UN to Western politicians to establishment pundits to dishonorable journalists to far-right nationalists to fatuous hard-left pseudo-anti-imperialists.

The lessons, as world leaders inch closer by the day to a long-term (re-)accommodation with Assad, should need no spelling out. It’s not just that he’s incapable of unifying the country, in the preposterous euphemism of diplomats, or that the ‘stability’ he would supposedly usher in would come at a rather unsavory humanitarian price. He isn’t merely not the solution; he is the walking, breathing personification of the problem; the radix malorum of the entire catastrophe. He’s the ‘devil we know,’ all right, and he’s an agent not of stability but of cataclysmic instability. ‘We’ may have already forgotten what the revolution was about – or that a revolution happened at all – but the millions of Syrians who continue to live day and night at the capricious pleasure of Assad’s homicide machine certainly haven’t, and won’t. By reminding us of this, and how we got to where we are, Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami plainly illuminate for us the necessary path ahead.

Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami was published by Pluto Press in January 2016.

Wilfred Owen, pacifism, and Syria

[Originally posted at NOW]

To mark the one-hundredth year to have passed since the outbreak of World War 1, British poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy has rounded up ten other poets to highlight some of the finer literary produce from the front lines. It was of course inevitable that Wilfred Owen would crop up, and Duffy’s selection of his The Send-Off is certainly among the most arresting of the possibilities.

Coinciding, however, as the year 2013 does with the first use of chemical weapons in the 21st century, one can’t help thinking the more pertinent choice would have been Owen’s Dulce et Decorum est, his unforgettable recollection of the war’s infamous gassings that led to the 1925 Geneva Protocol, intended to prevent humanity from ever again resorting to that low. The whole thing must be read in its entirety, but it’s the final lines that twist the gut tightest:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Of course, anyone with access to YouTube today can hear “the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,” and it is this more than anything that will condemn this generation of world leaders for decades to come. Which begs the question: As much as Owen has deservedly become a symbol of anti-war movements, what would he make of “Hands Off Syria” and the rest of today’s pseudo-pacifists whose idea of moral courage is to wave portraits of the man responsible for East Ghouta?

Prepared for the worst?

[Originally posted at NOW]

A chemical weapons attack in Lebanon would overwhelm already-constrained medical resources.

With most major Western intelligence agencies now firmly convinced the Syrian regime did in fact attack residential suburbs of Damascus with chemical weapons on 21 August, some of Syria’s neighbors have begun taking precautionary steps to safeguard themselves in the event that such weapons of mass destruction are turned upon their own populations.

Foremost among these has been Israel, whose government began distributing gas masks and antidote syringes to the public in the days following the alleged attack. Tel Aviv has also bolstered its deployment of Iron Dome and Patriot missile defense systems in its northern regions, aiming to intercept any potential incoming fire from Syria and/or Lebanon.

At the same time, Turkey has implemented a number of measures along its southern border, including stocking food and gas masks inside designated bunkers in seven key locations, and sending a team of 100 chemical weapons experts to the area to screen for traces of chemical agents.

In Lebanon, by contrast, no comparable precautions have been taken, and the country’s healthcare infrastructure would be ill-prepared to adequately treat victims of any chemical weapons attack, according to industry leaders with whom NOW spoke.

To be sure, security analysts see the chances of chemical weapons use in Lebanon as remote. “I don’t think it would ever happen,” said Riad Kahwaji, founder and CEO of the Institute for Near East & Gulf Military Analysis (INEGMA). Pressed to say, for the sake of argument, where the most likely site of an attack would be if one were to happen, Kahwaji suggested areas deemed to be strongholds of Sunni Islamism, such as the border town of Arsal. “If there was any scenario, it would be in places where the [Syrian regime] claims there are Islamist groups. Right now, in Lebanon, [Arsal] is the area which the regime claims is the stronghold for the Islamists.”

“I wouldn’t go as far [as chemical weapons,] even in a worst-case scenario,” said Dr. Hilal Khashan, professor of political science at the American University of Beirut. “The Americans are already going to fight [Syrian President] Assad for what happened in Syria. Now if this happens in Lebanon I think there would be no doubt that the regime in Damascus did it, and [this] could not only bring the end of the Assad regime, but maybe the end of Assad’s life. So I think it is far-fetched.”

Nor does Khashan believe extremist elements among the Syrian opposition are likely to launch chemical weapons attacks on Lebanese targets any time soon.

“Anything is possible, but I don’t know if al-Qaeda has access to chemical weapons. If they did, I think this matter would have been brought up in the past. We would have seen them used in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Yemen.”

That such attacks are deemed unlikely is fortunate for Lebanon, which has next to no capacity to treat victims of the kind seen in Damascus last month, according to Sleiman Haroun, president of the Lebanese Syndicate of Hospitals.

“We cannot pretend that we could cope with a direct attack by chemical weapons,” Haroun told NOW. “Lebanese hospitals could not handle the kind of numbers” of injured witnessed in Damascus. For one thing, there are simple space constraints.

“We have 1,500 intensive care units in the country. These are 90% occupied in normal times. So if we needed to suddenly hospitalize hundreds of chemical weapons victims, we would have a problem of space,” Haroun told NOW.

Furthermore, there is the matter of technical readiness.

“We have the proper medications and equipment, antidotes, and such, to deal with such attacks. And we have been training hospital personnel [in treating chemical weapons victims] since 2012. We now have around 220 individuals trained in this regard.” Indeed, at least four Hezbollah fighters were reportedly treated in a Beirut hospital for chemical gas encountered in Damascus following the 21 August attack.

“But I must say this is elementary, basic training, and we haven’t conducted any drills. So unfortunately, I cannot say we are ready to treat these kinds of casualties.”

The health ministry could not be reached for comment. Ayad al-Mounzer, spokesperson for the Lebanese Red Cross, declined to comment when contacted by NOW.

How Europe emboldened Obama on Syria

[Originally posted at NOW]

UK and France played significant role in persuading Obama to act on alleged chemical weapons attack, say analysts

The six days that have passed since an alleged chemical weapons attack by the Syrian regime reportedly killed over 1,000 in the suburbs of Damascus have seen an unprecedented shift in the US government’s approach to the country’s devastating conflict. Having said as recently as Friday that he sought to avoid “being drawn into” any kind of military intervention in Syria, US President Barack Obama evidently underwent a significant change of heart over the weekend, with his Secretary of State John Kerry vowing in a strongly-worded statement Monday that there would be “accountability” for the “moral obscenity” he said was “undeniably” carried out by the Syrian regime in the East Ghouta neighborhood last Wednesday. On Tuesday, Western envoys reportedly told opposition leaders to expect a series of missile strikes on Syrian targets “within days.”

In concert with this reorientation has been a sustained and forceful advocacy campaign by European nations, particularly Britain and France. Just one day after reports of the chemical weapons attack emerged from Damascus, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius urged the use of “force” in response. On Monday, British Foreign Secretary William Hague declared that military action could and should be taken with or without UN Security Council approval, while Fabius said, “The only option that I do not envisage is to do nothing.” As though to underscore its message, Britain readied its naval vessels in the Mediterranean for a series of cruise missile strikes, and deployed fighter jets and transport planes to its sovereign base in Cyprus.

This encouragement from Europe has been a significant factor in convincing Obama that a military response to the alleged chemical attack is the appropriate course of action, according to analysts.

“It’s been the case that Britain and France have been out in front [of the US] for some time on the Syria intervention question,” said Dr. Alan Mendoza, founder and executive director of the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based think tank whose affiliates include members of UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s cabinet.

“Even before the latest developments, there were calls, particularly from France but also from David Cameron who has, I think, faced significant opposition from his backbenchers on the subject but has still maintained that he would like to do more for the Syrian people,” said Mendoza.

“[Britain and France] have been more forward-leaning [than the US,] not only now but in terms of different trade and assist programs that have been underway, in terms of engagement with the [Syrian] opposition, supporting different humanitarian aid efforts and development programs, a lot of the smaller things that you don’t hear about but have been really crucial in terms of international community outreach,” added Elizabeth O’Bagy, senior research analyst at the Institute for the Study of War and political director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force.

In terms of what motivates the Europeans to favor a more hardline approach to the Syrian regime, Mendoza argues it is chiefly attributable to the politicians’ personal convictions, particularly in the case of Cameron, whose interventionist stance is opposed not only by rivals in the Labour party but also a sizeable contingent within his own Conservative party.

“I think it’s a personal principle. The PM looks at this in a slightly different way to backbenchers who are looking at their own domestic constituents’ concerns. He’s looking at the international picture, at what’s happening in Syria, the broader strategic problems, the humanitarian nightmare. And he’s taken a principled stance, as well as, by the way, the strategically sensible stance that Britain needs to be involved.”

As for the French, domestic considerations may play a bigger role, says Mendoza. “Given the problems that [President Francois] Hollande faces at home, something like this would make it look a world leader and might assist in popularity in terms of restoring its political position. That said […] the French have always been out there on these issues. Remember the French together with the British led the Libya campaign as well.”

Indeed, even in Britain, Mendoza believes the British parliament might vote for a one-off, limited operation when it convenes on Thursday to debate the question.

“I think if chemical weapons use is proven, you will get a majority in the House of Commons who favor a response on that point. I’m not sure we’ll have a majority for a longer-term campaign.” In any case, the prime minister can legally make the decision to act without parliament’s approval, according to the BBC.

Finally, as much as these nations’ enthusiasm for action in Syria may have persuaded Obama, the president had sufficient reason of his own to act on Syria’s violation of what for over a year he had described as his “red line,” said analysts.

“To be frank I think it’s mostly because of what happened [in Damascus,] and the fact that this chemical weapon use, especially to this degree, has always been the ‘red line,’” said O’Bagy.

Mendoza agreed: “I think [Obama’s] been backed into a corner and if he wants to preserve any credibility internationally he has to make good on his own suggestion that there are ‘red lines’ that can’t be crossed.”

Syrian rebels gain, but for how long?

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

The resignation of Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi on Monday is just one of a series of recent setbacks for the embattled regime of President Bashar al-Assad. The news follows a week of unprecedented military victories for rebel forces, including the shooting down of two regime aircraft in as many days, a pledge by NATO to deploy Patriot surface-to-air missiles along the Turkish-Syrian border, and a diplomatic breakthrough that could see European nations arming the opposition by March 2013.

At the same time, the regime has been bombarding the Damascus province in a thus-far successful effort to repel an opposition advance into the capital, while also gaining on rebel positions in the Aleppo region. Perhaps most significantly, US officials claimed Wednesday that the regime had loaded aerial bombs with sarin, a deadly nerve gas, following a second warning from Washington that the use of chemical weapons would prompt military intervention.

On balance, several analysts argue the momentum has shifted in the rebels’ favor, particularly in light of their newly acquired surface-to-air weaponry. “Assad has been relying on air power to keep rebels pinned in their positions. Their ability to challenge this state of affairs has given them more confidence and enabled them to carry out bolder operations, as we are currently seeing in Damascus, Aleppo, Deir az-Zour and Daraa,” said Ammar Abdulhamid, an exiled Syrian activist and fellow at the Washington, DC-based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. “The rebels are gradually breaking the stalemate and gaining the upper-hand […] A de facto no-fly zone is being created,” he told NOW.

Yezid Sayigh, senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, agrees that “the rebels have been regularly and steadily improving their tactical performance since the end of May.” He cautions, however, that the regime “is still very capable of” using its air force and remains “very much in command of what forces it has left—and these are not insignificant forces.” Accordingly, he argues that “what looks like quite dramatic and swift rebel advances and regime losses” may instead be a move “toward a new stabilized stalemate around a line running broadly from the Turkish border through Aleppo to Deir az-Zour, versus the regime holding onto Damascus and the Lebanese border to Homs, Hama and then around to Latakia.”

Moreover, it is unclear how long the rebels’ surface-to-air missile (SAM) stocks can last. “Rebel operations and fighting capabilities have always been undermined by an unsteady flow of arms,” said Abdulhamid. “That a portion of the surface-to-air missiles in rebel possession seems to have been gained from looting the military bases that rebels conquered and not from external suppliers” means that “depletion is a serious concern.”

Opposition activist Maher al-Esber, however, believes the rebels have already seized sufficient quantities. “They took missiles from more than one place,” he told NOW. “Practically if, [for example], you have 50 missiles and [the regime] has 100 planes, you achieve complete deterrence.” Current estimates put the rebels’ SAM stockpile at around 40, against more than 300 attack aircraft.

Elsewhere, rebel gains in the north and northeast have sparked concerns about the prominence of Jabhat al-Nusra, a secretive brigade of both Syrian and foreign jihadists that has carried out dozens of suicide attacks in the last year—sometimes killing civilians—and reportedly played a decisive role in recent battles. In a rare interview this week with the Telegraph, a member of the group admitted that some of his comrades “hate the West and all non-Muslims” and “want to attack churches.”

According to Abdulhamid, while “the growing size and involvement of Jabhat al-Nusra is pretty worrying,” it remains heavily outnumbered by non-jihadist rebels. “Jabhat has its allies among rebels who share its vision for an Islamic state, but it has more enemies, as most rebel groups refuse to endorse [this] option.” Moreover, Abdulhamid foresees “clashes between Jabhat members and other rebel groups” taking place “after or even during the liberation of Damascus, [which] will ripple elsewhere in the country.”

As for the fears of chemical weapons use by the regime, Sayigh believes it is essentially a regime bluff. “[Assad] has been using the chemical weapons issue to sort of play a little game, to say ‘Look, we can make trouble, and equally we can prevent that trouble. If you want these to be secure, you need us, so they don’t fall into bad hands, i.e., Islamists.’”

Abdulhamid, however, argues the threat is credible. “The psychopathic tendencies of Assad and his inner circle have been amply documented by now. We cannot put anything beyond them. For all their manifest corruption, we are dealing here with people who seem to believe their own lies […] Assad might decide that he is a dead man no matter what happens, so he might as well die as a ‘hero’ of the resistance to imperialism and Zionism.”

Amani Hamad contributed reporting.