Wednesday, Jun 13, 2012
(From THE WALL STREET JOURNAL)
By Sam Dagher and Nour Malas
TRIPOLI, Lebanon -- The Obama administration accused Russia of sending attack helicopters to Damascus, linking Moscow to Syria's deadly unrest on a day the United Nations' top peacekeeper said the conflict now bears the hallmarks of a civil war.
A shipment of attack helicopters is "on the way from Russia to Syria, which will escalate the conflict quite dramatically," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday, heightening pressure on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's staunchest international backer.
The accusation came as the U.N. said Syrian forces had used helicopters in recent attacks on Syrians, corroborating similar activist reports for the first time.
The government shelled several locations Tuesday, including the town of Deir el-Zour in the east, activists said. In what appeared to be the most blistering attack, helicopter gunships and tanks bombarded the mostly Sunni town of Haffa for the eighth day, trapping residents inside as others scrambled to flee, fighters and activists said. The U.N. said its observers came under fire when attempting to visit Haffa and had to turn back.
Moscow has long resisted U.S.-led international attempts to force Mr. Assad to step aside. It has defended its weapons sales to Syria, saying Damascus is buying its weapons for defense only.
"We have confronted the Russians about stopping their continued arms shipments to Syria," Mrs. Clinton said. "They have from time to time said that we shouldn't worry, everything they're shipping is unrelated to their actions internally. That's patently untrue."
A Kremlin spokesman couldn't be reached to comment.
Syrian opposition members and residents alike have begun to describe the conflict in the language of civil war.
Asked Tuesday by reporters from Reuters and Agence France-Presse whether he believed Syria's conflict had become a civil war, U.N. chief peacekeeper Herve Ladsous responded: "Yes, I think we can say that."
Syrians who live in the country's majority-Sunni heartland, meanwhile, say the conflict has taken on the dimensions of a sectarian conflict. On a recent day, Syrian refugees crowded a hospital in Tripoli, a northern Lebanese city less than 30 miles from Syria's border. Overwhelmingly Sunni villagers and rebels from Syria, they said they recently fled killings, rapes and kidnappings. These people say they have been attacked by pro-regime forces at the urging of neighboring villagers from the same Alawite sect as President Assad, a narrative that melds with accounts of other massacres on majority Sunni villages in recent weeks.
"They want to wipe us off the map," said one man in the hospital, who identified himself as Ahmed, a 30-year-old Sunni Muslim farmer who runs a generator-repair shop in the village of Abu Houri, just a few miles over the border from Lebanon.
When Syrian government forces shelled his hamlet earlier this month, Ahmed said he ran outside in a vain attempt to save his cow. He lost an eye and sustained shrapnel wounds in his stomach and legs. He and several other wounded people, including women and rebel fighters, were smuggled into Lebanon, several people in the hospital said.
It wasn't possible to confirm the specifics of Ahmed's account, but his analysis is now common in Syria's Sunni heartland: He blames residents of a neighboring Alawite-dominated village for telling the military that his hamlet was harboring rebels.
"They think we're going to attack them," he said.
Such village-against-village tensions in Syria's countryside mark a shift in the 15-month-old uprising that began with peaceful protests, largely in cities, against President Assad's regime. Mr. Assad's opponents took pains to avoid characterizing their struggle as sectarian.
But now, some antiregime activists openly charge the regime and its allies of "sectarian cleansing" of Sunnis. Some analysts now describe a pattern in which government attacks appear to be singling out Sunni strongholds among Alawite-populated villages or towns, particularly in the country's northwest.
The Syrian regime insists it is battling foreign-backed terrorists and armed gangs.
Increasingly, Sunnis have described themselves as targets because their villages separate two Alawite communities or are situated on roads deemed as strategic by the Alawite population in the area and the regime.
The predominant theme is that Alawites, an esoteric Muslim sect associated with Shiism, are trying to gain ground. Extreme versions of the narrative offered by several activists and analysts hold that Alawites are attempting to clear neighboring areas of Sunnis, to consolidate a largely Alawite enclave near Syria's coast with secure supply lines to Damascus.
Such a zone would reflect the separate coastal Alawite state created on and off between 1920 and 1936 when France was the colonial power in Syria, according to Osama Klaib, a Sunni lawyer from the Homs area and now a Tripoli-based member of the opposition Syrian National Council. The regime's "last defense is to move to a coastal state," he said.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
13-06-12 0348GMT
