Sirija

[dillinger]

..

[Prospero]

Od nemila do nedraga...

Farewell to Syria, for a while: في وداع سورية… مؤقتاPosted on October 13, 2013 by alisariram Farewell to Syria, for a whileBy Yassin Al Haj SalehOctober 12, 2013I have tried hard for the last two and a half years to stay in Syria. It was important for me as a writer to stay in the country and live the events I was writing about, and it was doubly important for me as a man of culture to live among the people I belong to, like they live, trying to understand their concerns. I wanted to stay not because I was doing something invaluable, but because that was my place which I could not replace. I wished to see Syria change after spending half a century of my age watching it immune to change. To stay in the country demanded great efforts from me in order to avoid falling in the sinister hands of the Assadi regime. After two and a half years of the Revolution I was compelled to also leave Damascus where I had lived for twelve years, the last two years of them in hiding. I was smuggled out of Damascus to the suburbs (gouta), then after 100 days I set out to Raqaa, the city where I had spent my childhood and teen age years and where my brothers live or those left of them. The journey to Raqqa was extremely hard, not because it took 19 days of travelling in the sweltering heat of the summer amid considerable dangers, but because even before the journey had ended and during the several stages it took, I was becoming aware that my destination and the last expanse of my journey were falling gradually under the influence of the State of Iraq and the Levant ( Daesh), this name which invokes the spectres of the figures of horror, the ghouls, of our childhood. A few days before leaving Ghouta, it came to my knowledge that the ghoul captured and imprisoned my brother Ahmad. Then at Ruhaiba in kalamoun, while I was trying to get news of my brother Ahamad, I also knew that my second younger brother Firas was captured by them too. The journey lost its meaning for me, never the less, I had to proceed with it. I needed to come to the end of a hard journey which was only made bearable by the company of some defecting young men and a cameraman friend who was recording some stages of our journey. As the trip neared its completion, my interest in it waned and the prospect of the journey’s end lost its thrill. In Raqqa, I spent two months and a half in hiding without succeeding in getting one piece of information about my brother Firas. Nothing could be worse than this. Therefore, instead of celebrating my arrival at Raqqa, I had to keep in hiding in my own liberated city, watching strangers oppress it and rule the fates of its people, confiscating public property, destroying a statue of Haroun Al-Rasheed or desecrating a church; taking people into custody where they disappeared in their prisons. All the prisoners were rebel political activists while none of them was chosen from the regime’s previous loyalists or shabiha. With the exception of this flagrant oppression of the people, their property and symbols, the new rulers have shown no sign of the spirit of public responsibility which is supposed to be the duty of those who are in power. I wished to stay in Raqqa for the longest possible time to understand why events had taken this turn and to form an idea about the new leaders. I was able to collect some useful information but not as much as I had wished because I was not able to explore the city’s streets and listen to the people tell me their stories, not to mention holding interviews with the Emirs of the State of Iraq and the Levant and their mujahideen. Not to walk in the streets of Raqqa in autumn? This is not an adequate reason for leaving, yet it is quite important on its own for me. At the onset of the Revolution, I used to say jokingly to my friends: I wish to topple the regime so as to get a passport. I wanted a passport to feel free and to travel where I wished. Today I leave behind comrades who will carry the struggle on. Our presence together inside the country used to give us courage and the strength to continue. I do not feel bitter, but I am a little angry. I realize how impossible our situation has become, yet notwithstanding, I feel that whenever I am able to understand something or shed light on another, I believe I am taming the brutal multi- headed monster which wants to keep us in darkness, without the right to speak up, and not desiring but what it desires.What frightens me most now is not to be able to understand the world outside Syria and for things to lose their clarity for me. I used to understand things Syrian. Syria was my country. I do not know exactly what I am going to do in exile. I always felt ill at ease with this word. It seems to me to be making a mockery of the people still inside the country. Perhaps its meaning will change and expand to include the whole of our terrible experience: the experience of uprootedness, seeking asylum, dispersion then eventually the hope of return. I do not know exactly what I am going to do, but I am now part of this massive Syrian exodus and the dreamt of return, although it feels right now as an amputation.This is our country which is all that we have. I know that there is no other country that can be as merciful to us as this terrible country.Translated by Alisar Iram

[Indy]

bored [syrian] snipers were targeting particular parts of civilians' bodies in a bid to entertain themselvesjbt.

[Indy]

Vrlo zanimljiv (mada ne i neocekivan) salto sa vijkom u redovima australijskih vlasti (na istoj talasnoj duzini sa opozicijom, koja je do skoro bila vlast).Radi se o nekih 200 sirijskih boraca (pobunjenika) koji imaju australijansko drzavljanstvo. Traze se modaliteti za sprecavanje njihovog povratka u Australiju (sto - koliko se ja razumem - moze samo kroz neku formu oduzimanja drzavljanstva).(I, da, sta bi sa "podrskom" pobunjenicima protiv Assada? Ovo je onaj slucaj "too close for comfort".) We don't want that in Australia, we just don't want it in Australia

[Prospero]

Ostajte tamo!... sunce našeg nebaneće vas grijat ko što ono grijegrki su ovde zalogaji hljebagde svoga nema i državljanstva nije....

[Prospero]

FWIW:

Jihadists call for reinforcements as Syrian regime advances on AleppoAl-Qaida-linked groups are straining to hold off regime push that could threaten their supply lines to TurkeyMartin Chulov in Beirut

• theguardian.com, Thursday 14 November 2013 17.46 GMT

A member of the al-Qaida-linked Islamic State of Iraq urges people to join the fight against the regime in Aleppo, Syria. Photograph: Karam Al-Masri/AFP/Getty ImagesJihadist groups near Aleppo have called for reinforcements to fight the largest regime advance on the city in a 16-month siege, in a looming confrontation likely to test the rebel hardliners who dictate terms in Syria's far north.Clashes have taken place in the south-eastern sector of the city, which has remained firmly in opposition hands since rebel groups stormed into eastern Aleppo in mid-July 2012. While the showdown is not yet thought to be the start of a decisive push, it has sharpened focus on the prevalence of extremist groups and how they found their way to the battlefield.The two main al-Qaida-linked groups – the Islamic State of Iraq in Syria and Jabhat al-Nusra – are straining to hold off a regime push past the Aleppo airport to a military base, known as Base 80. A successful advance beyond this point would threaten rebel supply lines to Turkey, which for more than a year have funnelled militants, weapons, ammunition and food into the far north, in effect turning the area into an emirate within a crumbling nation state.Now, the first significant regime counterattack is taking shape. Jihadists have allied with mainstream opposition units to battle Syrian troops whose ranks are bolstered with large numbers of militants from a militia comprised mainly of Iraqi militants, called Abu Fadl al-Abbas.The clashes around Aleppo mark one of the few times in the two-and-a-half-year civil war that major sectarian protagonists have squared up to one another; the rebel-allied al-Qaida groups adopt an extremist Sunni ideology, while the Iraqis are fighting for Assad in the name of Shia Islam.Al-Qaida's two proxies in the Syrian conflict are comprised mostly of foreigners. Many have journeyed from Iraq, buoyed by the sectarian insurgency again raging there, while others have chosen a simpler path through the Turkish border only 40 miles (60km) to the north. Jihadists, in particular, have taken advantage of the relatively easy passage from Turkey to Syria. The ease of access continues to fuel a view in the rebel-held north that Ankara is easing the passage of al-Qaida groups, who they have identified as the most potent arm of the opposition and most likely to threaten regime power bases."How else can you explain it?" said a rebel leader in northern Syria, Haji Abu-Abdullah. "It is an open gate for all-comers. We are losing, not winning, the war because of Turkey."A second rebel leader in the Aleppo countryside agreed: "With every month that passes we are losing this war. There is clearly a policy to help al-Qaida make gains, and to make it difficult for us to hold on to what we have."Ankara hotly denies this claim. A spokesman for the Turkish foreign ministry said: "We do not support or tolerate any radical terrorist groups. It is inconceivable that a country that has suffered from terrorism as much and for as long as we have could do such a thing. We view these radical groups as a betrayal of the revolution."Turkey says it receives around 30 million visitors annually. Several years ago, it adopted a no-visa policy for most Arab states, and gives visas on arrival to most European visitors. It says it cannot stop visitors with valid passports unless there is a legal reason to do so."We need co-operation from third countries," the government spokesman said. "If there is no alert, no Interpol notice, or basis to stop them, then we won't. There is a lack of co-operation among the international community and we are at the end of the process."The high volume of jihadists in Syria has been thrown into sharp relief in recent months as governments across the world have told Turkey's national intelligence agency the numbers of their nationals thought to have travelled there. The high number of overstayers from Arab states that emerged from these figures – many of whom have crossed to Syria and not returned – has confirmed the scale of the problem.Over the past year, flights from Istanbul to southern Turkey have been noticeably full of men on their way to jihad in Syria. The border towns of Antakya, Reyhanli and Killis are openly used as recreation bases or staging points."The Turks say they are putting renewed effort into gripping this," said one senior western official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It is not clear whether this is in response to an event or a cumulative thing."While the Syrian regime faces strategic defeat in the north, the opposition groups that Turkey has resolutely backed face an equally bleak future should hardline rebel groups hold firm. Many communities – from Idlib in the west to Deir Azzor in the eastern deserts – are now under the rule of extremists, whose goals have little in common with the spirit of the uprising."The growing threat from extremists in Syria is underlying international dialogue on finding a political solution," said the western official. "What we don't want is a complete collapse of the state. Preventing a security vacuum should be a key element of the national dialogue around Geneva 2 – and should be at the heart of any deal."

[Bane5]

rat koji se nikad nece zavrsiti...

[Prospero]

barem šale ne manjka:

Ал Каида одрубила главу погрешном човекуНакон што су грешком убили команданта сунитске побуњеничке групе, побуњеници у Сирији повезани са Ал Каидом тражили "разумевање и опроштај". У публикованом снимку, тријумфално приказали главу погубљеника, за коју су мислили да је непријатељ.Исламска држава Ирак и припадници Ал Шама извинили су се након што су сазнали да су, уместо непријатеља, убили колегу екстремисту, преноси Телеграф.Милитантни исламски побуњеници у Сирији повезане са Ал Каидом тражили су "разумевање и опроштај" за одсецање и приказивање главе погрешног човека.У публикованом снимку, припадници Исламске Државе Ирак и Ал Шама тријумфално су описали погубљење, како су рекли, припадника ирачке шиитске полиције, која се бори на страни председника Башара ел Асада.Међутим, установљено је да је на снимку приказана глава члана Ахрар ел Шама, сунитске исламистичке побуњеничке групе, која се бори заједно са групом ИСИ, иако не заступа идеологију Ал Каиде.Након истраге, портпарол ИСИ-а саопштио је да је погубљен Мухамед Фарес, командант који је неколико дана пре тога нестао. Иако то није могло бити потврђено, на ранијем снимку где Фарес држи говор може се уочити сличност са главом приказаном на снимку побуњеника.

[Prospero]

Strategija iz leta 2012?

Huge bomb hits Syria government siteA bomb attack on a Syrian government building near Damascus has killed 31 people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.Four generals were among the dead, the activist group said.The explosives are thought to have been placed in the basement, meaning opposition fighters were able to breach security to get into the building.There has been no confirmation of the attack on the state media, or by government officials.But Damascus has experienced increasing violence recently, as clashes between government forces and rebels in the suburbs intensify.Three people were killed on Thursday by bombs and mortar fire near the historic Old City of Damascus.On Monday the driver of a school bus and four children died when a mortar hit their vehicle.

[Bane5]

to bi trebalo da je ovo...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4Fnu-a5qxIako je to onda mi deluje kao da je zgrada prilicno prazna pa sumnjam u podatke o nastradalima.

Edited November 17, 2013 by Bane5

[Prospero]

Čekaj dok SOHR primi sve podatke na obradu u London ^_^

[Bane5]

SOHR je jos i OK kakvih ima. Sana o ovome nije izvestila, ali jeste Itar Tass (ako racunamo pro-Asadovske izvore) preko izjave svedokaBEIRUT, 17 November. /ITAR-TASS /. A powerful bomb exploded on Sunday near the administerial office of the Syrian army in the capital's suburb of Haraszti. According to preliminary reports, there were killed and wounded among the military and civilians. As eyewitnesses told ITAR-TASS, the terrorists managed to place explosives in underground utilities.

[Prospero]

Sa Stratfora, FWIW:

Syria: Renewed Aggression Exposes Cracks in the RebellionNovember 19, 2013 | 1049 GMTThe long anticipated Qalamoun offensive is believed to have begun, with forces loyal to Bashar al Assad making a decisive move on the strategic town of Qara. A withering artillery bombardment commenced Nov. 16 and was followed by a coordinated tank and infantry attack. Although Qara remains in rebel hands for now, loyalist forces hold a dominant position around the town.The mountainous Qalamoun region, bordering Lebanon and overlooking the critical M5 highway, remains highly problematic for the regime as it attempts to sustain a continuous and secure supply line from Damascus to the north. With a steady buildup of rebel forces in the area, rumors have persisted for months that the regime, with massive Hezbollah involvement, would launch a new offensive to drive back opposition in the area, potentially causing the largest spillover of violence into Lebanon since the start of the Syrian civil war. AnalysisThe Qalamoun operation is not the only offensive in which the regime is currently engaged. In previous weeks, loyalist forces have tried to open a path to Aleppo city and have concentrated their efforts to retake a number of suburbs south of Damascus. The rebels have been plagued by serious infighting and distracted by an ultimately wasteful fight against Kurdish forces in the northeast. They have also been short of weapons and ammunition as Turkey has clamped down on the shared border in its efforts to quell the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant jihadist group (also known as Islamic State of Iraq and Sham). As a result, the rebels have been unable to adequately marshal their forces to meet the new loyalist onslaught.Meanwhile, the regime has greatly benefited from an influx of aid from Iran, Russia and Shiite militias in Lebanon and Iraq. This aid has greatly bolstered regime forces, which effectively reversed several rebel gains earlier this year. Iran has been a considerable provider of lines of credit, training and weaponry. Russia has continued to be a critical source of arms and diplomatic cover and Shiite fighters from Iraq and Lebanon have streamed into Syria, just as thousands of Sunni fighters have joined the rebel side.Hezbollah is poised to play its biggest role yet in the Syrian civil war, with thousands of fighters allegedly being mobilized for the Qalamoun offensive. The southern, western and northern sectors of the battlefront have reportedly been assigned to Hezbollah operational control. On Nov. 14, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah pledged that his group's fighters are committed to the battle in Syria.As the regime command launches a number of offensives across Syria, the rebels find themselves under mounting pressure. Rebel-held Aleppo has not faced a threat of this significance since the regime counteroffensive against the city in mid-2012. As recently as Aug. 2013, rebels seized Khanassir in Aleppo province, encircling regime forces. The fact that the regime has been able to punch through rebel lines and reach Aleppo in a matter of weeks not only shows that they have been revived, but also indicates serious fractures in the unity of the rebels and their ability to consolidate or even maintain their position.Despite a succession of loyalist victories over the previous month, it is important to note that the rebels are not out of the fight. They continue to score important victories over the regime, such as the capture of Tafas, Daraa province, in late October. They also overran one of the largest arms depots in Syria last week near Mahin in Homs province. For the rebels to have any chance of placing the regime on the back foot, however, they would have to stop fighting with one another. Continued fracturing and infighting among rebel units will distract from the primary fight, leading to more battlefield setbacks and, if left unchecked, possibly undoing the rebellion in the long term.

[Bane5]

November 22, 2013by Basma AtassiSeven major Islamist rebel groups battling President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria have announced a merger to form an “Islamic Front” and pledged to build an Islamic state in a post-Assad Syria.Friday’s merger is dubbed as the largest between different groupings and blocs. The new front represents “a full fusion” of groups and not merely a coordination body, rebels told Al Jazeera."The Islamic Front is an independent military and social force that is aimed at bringing down Assad’s regime in Syria and at replacing it with a just Islamic state,” the groups said in a statement, published on Friday.The factions joining the merger are Aleppo’s biggest fighting force Liwa al-Tawhid, the Salafist Ahrar al-Sham, the Idlib-based Soqour al-Sham, the Homs-based al-Haq Brigades, Ansar al-Sham, and the Damascus-based Army of Islam. The Kurdish Islamic Front also joined the front.One of the major obstacles we faced was the lust for power by some leaders. But eventually everyone made concessions in order to make this project happen.These names “will disappear and the groups will now melt into the new merger”, a member of Liwa al-Tawhid told Al Jazeera, adding his group would be dissolved."There will be no such thing as Liwa al-Tawhid."Amad Essa al-Sheikh, the head of the Consultative Council of the new Islamic Front, told Al Jazeera the goal of integrating the factions was to bring about “a paradigm shift in the armed rebellion by closing ranks and mobilising them to become the real alternative to the dying regime”.'No to foreign agendas'Al-Sheikh said the Front would cooperate with all “loyal fighters” in Syria and that it would work with the Free Syrian Army (FSA) .The FSA, set up with the backing of Western and regional powers in an attempt to unite the different armed groups and isolate what were seen as extremist elements, is the military arm of the Syrian National Coalition, the country’s main political opposition bloc.The SNC has been heavily criticised by activists and rebels inside Syria, who saw it as implementing a western agenda and accused it of being out of touch with the people on the ground.Ahmad Musa, a member the Islamic Front’s political bureau, told Al Jazeera he hoped the SNC would welcome the announcement of the new front and would cooperate with “what the Syrian people want”.“They want a revolution and not politics and foreign agendas,” he told Al Jazeera.The creation of the joint force follows major regime advances on key battlegrounds around Damascus and Aleppo in northern Syria over the past few weeks.The armed opposition has been crippled by infighting and disunity, undermining the rebels in their efforts to remove Assad.'Lust for power'The announcement of the merger came days after the death of Liwa al-Tawhid’s military leader, Abdel Qader Saleh, who is believed be one of the merger’s masterminds.Saleh died from his wounds last week after an air strike hit the building in Aleppo where he and other leaders were meeting.Adil Fistok, a member of Liwa al-Tawhid, said it took seven month to work on the merger before it was announced.“One of the major obstacles we faced was the lust for power by some leaders. But eventually everyone made concessions in order to make this project happen,” he told Al Jazeera from Aleppo.He said the main challenge facing the newly-formed group is a lack of enough cash and weapons.The announcement is seen by activists as a blow to the Assad regime but also to the al-Qaeda affiliated Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which has accused some opposition groups of apostasy and clashed with them in opposition-held areas.

Za one koji slabo prate desavanja u Siriji (sem u trenucima kad se pominjalo bombardovanje koje se nije desilo), ovu grupaciju sam svojevremeno u jednom svom postu naglasio kao bitan faktor u pobunjenickim redovima (popunjavaju prostor izmedju manje-vise sekularnih sa jedne i radiklanih dzihadista sa druge strane).Bukvalno sve navedene frakcije su poznate po tome sto su svaka na svojim prostorima delovanja prosle jako teske trenutke u borbi protiv Asadovih snaga i njegovih saveznika kao i po tome sto su izbegavali medjusobne borbe sa drugim frakcijama pobunjenika (ukljucujuci dzihadiste).Ukoliko zazivi kao formacija, IF ce postati najjaca pobunjenicka snaga i takodje u zavisnosti od te snage moze da postane najozbiljija alternativa svima umesanim u ovaj rat. Edited November 22, 2013 by Bane5

[Prospero]

Hm

Online only; 8 December 2013Whose sarin? Seymour M. HershBarack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the months before the attack, the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order – a planning document that precedes a ground invasion – citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.In his nationally televised speech about Syria on 10 September, Obama laid the blame for the nerve gas attack on the rebel-held suburb of Eastern Ghouta firmly on Assad’s government, and made it clear he was prepared to back up his earlier public warnings that any use of chemical weapons would cross a ‘red line’: ‘Assad’s government gassed to death over a thousand people,’ he said. ‘We know the Assad regime was responsible … And that is why, after careful deliberation, I determined that it is in the national security interests of the United States to respond to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons through a targeted military strike.’ Obama was going to war to back up a public threat, but he was doing so without knowing for sure who did what in the early morning of 21 August.He cited a list of what appeared to be hard-won evidence of Assad’s culpability: ‘In the days leading up to August 21st, we know that Assad’s chemical weapons personnel prepared for an attack near an area where they mix sarin gas. They distributed gas masks to their troops. Then they fired rockets from a regime-controlled area into 11 neighbourhoods that the regime has been trying to wipe clear of opposition forces.’ Obama’s certainty was echoed at the time by Denis McDonough, his chief of staff, who told the New York Times: ‘No one with whom I’ve spoken doubts the intelligence’ directly linking Assad and his regime to the sarin attacks.But in recent interviews with intelligence and military officers and consultants past and present, I found intense concern, and on occasion anger, over what was repeatedly seen as the deliberate manipulation of intelligence. One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the administration’s assurances of Assad’s responsibility a ‘ruse’. The attack ‘was not the result of the current regime’, he wrote. A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening. The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: ‘The guys are throwing their hands in the air and saying, “How can we help this guy” – Obama – “when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?”’

The complaints focus on what Washington did not have: any advance warning from the assumed source of the attack. The military intelligence community has for years produced a highly classified early morning intelligence summary, known as the Morning Report, for the secretary of defence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; a copy also goes to the national security adviser and the director of national intelligence. The Morning Report includes no political or economic information, but provides a summary of important military events around the world, with all available intelligence about them. A senior intelligence consultant told me that some time after the attack he reviewed the reports for 20 August through 23 August. For two days – 20 and 21 August – there was no mention of Syria. On 22 August the lead item in the Morning Report dealt with Egypt; a subsequent item discussed an internal change in the command structure of one of the rebel groups in Syria. Nothing was noted about the use of nerve gas in Damascus that day. It was not until 23 August that the use of sarin became a dominant issue, although hundreds of photographs and videos of the massacre had gone viral within hours on YouTube, Facebook and other social media sites. At this point, the administration knew no more than the public.Obama left Washington early on 21 August for a hectic two-day speaking tour in New York and Pennsylvania; according to the White House press office, he was briefed later that day on the attack, and the growing public and media furore. The lack of any immediate inside intelligence was made clear on 22 August, when Jen Psaki, a spokesperson for the State Department, told reporters: ‘We are unable to conclusively determine [chemical weapons] use. But we are focused every minute of every day since these events happened … on doing everything possible within our power to nail down the facts.’ The administration’s tone had hardened by 27 August, when Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary, told reporters – without providing any specific information – that any suggestions that the Syrian government was not responsible ‘are as preposterous as suggestions that the attack itself didn’t occur’.The absence of immediate alarm inside the American intelligence community demonstrates that there was no intelligence about Syrian intentions in the days before the attack. And there are at least two ways the US could have known about it in advance: both were touched on in one of the top secret American intelligence documents that have been made public in recent months by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor.On 29 August, the Washington Post published excerpts from the annual budget for all national intelligence programmes, agency by agency, provided by Snowden. In consultation with the Obama administration, the newspaper chose to publish only a slim portion of the 178-page document, which has a classification higher than top secret, but it summarised and published a section dealing with problem areas. One problem area was the gap in coverage targeting Assad’s office. The document said that the NSA’s worldwide electronic eavesdropping facilities had been ‘able to monitor unencrypted communications among senior military officials at the outset of the civil war there’. But it was ‘a vulnerability that President Bashar al-Assad’s forces apparently later recognised’. In other words, the NSA no longer had access to the conversations of the top military leadership in Syria, which would have included crucial communications from Assad, such as orders for a nerve gas attack. (In its public statements since 21 August, the Obama administration has never claimed to have specific information connecting Assad himself to the attack.)The Post report also provided the first indication of a secret sensor system inside Syria, designed to provide early warning of any change in status of the regime’s chemical weapons arsenal. The sensors are monitored by the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that controls all US intelligence satellites in orbit. According to the Post summary, the NRO is also assigned ‘to extract data from sensors placed on the ground’ inside Syria. The former senior intelligence official, who had direct knowledge of the programme, told me that NRO sensors have been implanted near all known chemical warfare sites in Syria. They are designed to provide constant monitoring of the movement of chemical warheads stored by the military. But far more important, in terms of early warning, is the sensors’ ability to alert US and Israeli intelligence when warheads are being loaded with sarin. (As a neighbouring country, Israel has always been on the alert for changes in the Syrian chemical arsenal, and works closely with American intelligence on early warnings.) A chemical warhead, once loaded with sarin, has a shelf life of a few days or less – the nerve agent begins eroding the rocket almost immediately: it’s a use-it-or-lose-it mass killer. ‘The Syrian army doesn’t have three days to prepare for a chemical attack,’ the former senior intelligence official told me. ‘We created the sensor system for immediate reaction, like an air raid warning or a fire alarm. You can’t have a warning over three days because everyone involved would be dead. It is either right now or you’re history. You do not spend three days getting ready to fire nerve gas.’ The sensors detected no movement in the months and days before 21 August, the former official said. It is of course possible that sarin had been supplied to the Syrian army by other means, but the lack of warning meant that Washington was unable to monitor the events in Eastern Ghouta as they unfolded.The sensors had worked in the past, as the Syrian leadership knew all too well. Last December the sensor system picked up signs of what seemed to be sarin production at a chemical weapons depot. It was not immediately clear whether the Syrian army was simulating sarin production as part of an exercise (all militaries constantly carry out such exercises) or actually preparing an attack. At the time, Obama publicly warned Syria that using sarin was ‘totally unacceptable’; a similar message was also passed by diplomatic means. The event was later determined to be part of a series of exercises, according to the former senior intelligence official: ‘If what the sensors saw last December was so important that the president had to call and say, “Knock it off,” why didn’t the president issue the same warning three days before the gas attack in August?’The NSA would of course monitor Assad’s office around the clock if it could, the former official said. Other communications – from various army units in combat throughout Syria – would be far less important, and not analysed in real time. ‘There are literally thousands of tactical radio frequencies used by field units in Syria for mundane routine communications,’ he said, ‘and it would take a huge number of NSA cryptological technicians to listen in – and the useful return would be zilch.’ But the ‘chatter’ is routinely stored on computers. Once the scale of events on 21 August was understood, the NSA mounted a comprehensive effort to search for any links to the attack, sorting through the full archive of stored communications. A keyword or two would be selected and a filter would be employed to find relevant conversations. ‘What happened here is that the NSA intelligence weenies started with an event – the use of sarin – and reached to find chatter that might relate,’ the former official said. ‘This does not lead to a high confidence assessment, unless you start with high confidence that Bashar Assad ordered it, and began looking for anything that supports that belief.’ The cherry-picking was similar to the process used to justify the Iraq war.*The White House needed nine days to assemble its case against the Syrian government. On 30 August it invited a select group of Washington journalists (at least one often critical reporter, Jonathan Landay, the national security correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers, was not invited), and handed them a document carefully labelled as a ‘government assessment’, rather than as an assessment by the intelligence community. The document laid out what was essentially a political argument to bolster the administration’s case against the Assad government. It was, however, more specific than Obama would be later, in his speech on 10 September: American intelligence, it stated, knew that Syria had begun ‘preparing chemical munitions’ three days before the attack. In an aggressive speech later that day, John Kerry provided more details. He said that Syria’s ‘chemical weapons personnel were on the ground, in the area, making preparations’ by 18 August. ‘We know that the Syrian regime elements were told to prepare for the attack by putting on gas masks and taking precautions associated with chemical weapons.’ The government assessment and Kerry’s comments made it seem as if the administration had been tracking the sarin attack as it happened. It is this version of events, untrue but unchallenged, that was widely reported at the time.An unforseen reaction came in the form of complaints from the Free Syrian Army’s leadership and others about the lack of warning. ‘It’s unbelievable they did nothing to warn people or try to stop the regime before the crime,’ Razan Zaitouneh, an opposition member who lived in one of the towns struck by sarin, told Foreign Policy. The Daily Mail was more blunt: ‘Intelligence report says US officials knew about nerve-gas attack in Syria three days before it killed over 1400 people – including more than 400 children.’ (The number of deaths attributable to the attack varied widely, from at least 1429, as initially claimed by the Obama administration, to many fewer. A Syrian human rights group reported 502 deaths; Médicins sans Frontières put it at 355; and a French report listed 281 known fatalities. The strikingly precise US total was later reported by the Wall Street Journal to have been based not on an actual body count, but on an extrapolation by CIA analysts, who scanned more than a hundred YouTube videos from Eastern Ghouta into a computer system and looked for images of the dead. In other words, it was little more than a guess.)Five days later, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence responded to the complaints. A statement to the Associated Press said that the intelligence behind the earlier administration assertions was not known at the time of the attack, but recovered only subsequently: ‘Let’s be clear, the United States did not watch, in real time, as this horrible attack took place. The intelligence community was able to gather and analyse information after the fact and determine that elements of the Assad regime had in fact taken steps to prepare prior to using chemical weapons.’ But since the American press corps had their story, the retraction received scant attention. On 31 August the Washington Post, relying on the government assessment, had vividly reported on its front page that American intelligence was able to record ‘each step’ of the Syrian army attack in real time, ‘from the extensive preparations to the launching of rockets to the after-action assessments by Syrian officials’. It did not publish the AP corrective, and the White House maintained control of the narrative.So when Obama said on 10 September that his administration knew Assad’s chemical weapons personnel had prepared the attack in advance, he was basing the statement not on an intercept caught as it happened, but on communications analysed days after 21 August. The former senior intelligence official explained that the hunt for relevant chatter went back to the exercise detected the previous December, in which, as Obama later said to the public, the Syrian army mobilised chemical weapons personnel and distributed gas masks to its troops. The White House’s government assessment and Obama’s speech were not descriptions of the specific events leading up to the 21 August attack, but an account of the sequence the Syrian military would have followed for any chemical attack. ‘They put together a back story,’ the former official said, ‘and there are lots of different pieces and parts. The template they used was the template that goes back to December.’ It is possible, of course, that Obama was unaware that this account was obtained from an analysis of Syrian army protocol for conducting a gas attack, rather than from direct evidence. Either way he had come to a hasty judgment.The press would follow suit. The UN report on 16 September confirming the use of sarin was careful to note that its investigators’ access to the attack sites, which came five days after the gassing, had been controlled by rebel forces. ‘As with other sites,’ the report warned, ‘the locations have been well travelled by other individuals prior to the arrival of the mission … During the time spent at these locations, individuals arrived carrying other suspected munitions indicating that such potential evidence is being moved and possibly manipulated.’ Still, the New York Times seized on the report, as did American and British officials, and claimed that it provided crucial evidence backing up the administration’s assertions. An annex to the UN report reproduced YouTube photographs of some recovered munitions, including a rocket that ‘indicatively matches’ the specifics of a 330mm calibre artillery rocket. The New York Times wrote that the existence of the rockets essentially proved that the Syrian government was responsible for the attack ‘because the weapons in question had not been previously documented or reported to be in possession of the insurgency’.Theodore Postol, a professor of technology and national security at MIT, reviewed the UN photos with a group of his colleagues and concluded that the large calibre rocket was an improvised munition that was very likely manufactured locally. He told me that it was ‘something you could produce in a modestly capable machine shop’. The rocket in the photos, he added, fails to match the specifications of a similar but smaller rocket known to be in the Syrian arsenal. The New York Times, again relying on data in the UN report, also analysed the flight path of two of the spent rockets that were believed to have carried sarin, and concluded that the angle of descent ‘pointed directly’ to their being fired from a Syrian army base more than nine kilometres from the landing zone. Postol, who has served as the scientific adviser to the chief of naval operations in the Pentagon, said that the assertions in the Times and elsewhere ‘were not based on actual observations’. He concluded that the flight path analyses in particular were, as he put it in an email, ‘totally nuts’ because a thorough study demonstrated that the range of the improvised rockets was ‘unlikely’ to be more than two kilometres. Postol and a colleague, Richard M. Lloyd, published an analysis two weeks after 21 August in which they correctly assessed that the rockets involved carried a far greater payload of sarin than previously estimated. The Times reported on that analysis at length, describing Postol and Lloyd as ‘leading weapons experts’. The pair’s later study about the rockets’ flight paths and range, which contradicted previous Times reporting, was emailed to the newspaper last week; it has so far gone unreported.*The White House’s misrepresentation of what it knew about the attack, and when, was matched by its readiness to ignore intelligence that could undermine the narrative. That information concerned al-Nusra, the Islamist rebel group designated by the US and the UN as a terrorist organisation. Al-Nusra is known to have carried out scores of suicide bombings against Christians and other non-Sunni Muslim sects inside Syria, and to have attacked its nominal ally in the civil war, the secular Free Syrian Army (FSA). Its stated goal is to overthrow the Assad regime and establish sharia law. (On 25 September al-Nusra joined several other Islamist rebel groups in repudiating the FSA and another secular faction, the Syrian National Coalition.)The flurry of American interest in al-Nusra and sarin stemmed from a series of small-scale chemical weapons attacks in March and April; at the time, the Syrian government and the rebels each insisted the other was responsible. The UN eventually concluded that four chemical attacks had been carried out, but did not assign responsibility. A White House official told the press in late April that the intelligence community had assessed ‘with varying degrees of confidence’ that the Syrian government was responsible for the attacks. Assad had crossed Obama’s ‘red line’. The April assessment made headlines, but some significant caveats were lost in translation. The unnamed official conducting the briefing acknowledged that intelligence community assessments ‘are not alone sufficient’. ‘We want,’ he said, ‘to investigate above and beyond those intelligence assessments to gather facts so that we can establish a credible and corroborated set of information that can then inform our decision-making.’ In other words, the White House had no direct evidence of Syrian army or government involvement, a fact that was only occasionally noted in the press coverage. Obama’s tough talk played well with the public and Congress, who view Assad as a ruthless murderer.Two months later, a White House statement announced a change in the assessment of Syrian culpability and declared that the intelligence community now had ‘high confidence’ that the Assad government was responsible for as many as 150 deaths from attacks with sarin. More headlines were generated and the press was told that Obama, in response to the new intelligence, had ordered an increase in non-lethal aid to the Syrian opposition. But once again there were significant caveats. The new intelligence included a report that Syrian officials had planned and executed the attacks. No specifics were provided, nor were those who provided the reports identified. The White House statement said that laboratory analysis had confirmed the use of sarin, but also that a positive finding of the nerve agent ‘does not tell us how or where the individuals were exposed or who was responsible for the dissemination’. The White House further declared: ‘We have no reliable corroborated reporting to indicate that the opposition in Syria has acquired or used chemical weapons.’ The statement contradicted evidence that at the time was streaming into US intelligence agencies.Already by late May, the senior intelligence consultant told me, the CIA had briefed the Obama administration on al-Nusra and its work with sarin, and had sent alarming reports that another Sunni fundamentalist group active in Syria, al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), also understood the science of producing sarin. At the time, al-Nusra was operating in areas close to Damascus, including Eastern Ghouta. An intelligence document issued in mid-summer dealt extensively with Ziyaad Tariq Ahmed, a chemical weapons expert formerly of the Iraqi military, who was said to have moved into Syria and to be operating in Eastern Ghouta. The consultant told me that Tariq had been identified ‘as an al-Nusra guy with a track record of making mustard gas in Iraq and someone who is implicated in making and using sarin’. He is regarded as a high-profile target by the American military.On 20 June a four-page top secret cable summarising what had been learned about al-Nusra’s nerve gas capabilities was forwarded to David R. Shedd, deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. ‘What Shedd was briefed on was extensive and comprehensive,’ the consultant said. ‘It was not a bunch of “we believes”.’ He told me that the cable made no assessment as to whether the rebels or the Syrian army had initiated the attacks in March and April, but it did confirm previous reports that al-Nusra had the ability to acquire and use sarin. A sample of the sarin that had been used was also recovered – with the help of an Israeli agent – but, according to the consultant, no further reporting about the sample showed up in cable traffic.Independently of these assessments, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assuming that US troops might be ordered into Syria to seize the government’s stockpile of chemical agents, called for an all-source analysis of the potential threat. ‘The Op Order provides the basis of execution of a military mission, if so ordered,’ the former senior intelligence official explained. ‘This includes the possible need to send American soldiers to a Syrian chemical site to defend it against rebel seizure. If the jihadist rebels were going to overrun the site, the assumption is that Assad would not fight us because we were protecting the chemical from the rebels. All Op Orders contain an intelligence threat component. We had technical analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, weapons people, and I & W [indications and warnings] people working on the problem … They concluded that the rebel forces were capable of attacking an American force with sarin because they were able to produce the lethal gas. The examination relied on signals and human intelligence, as well as the expressed intention and technical capability of the rebels.’There is evidence that during the summer some members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were troubled by the prospect of a ground invasion of Syria as well as by Obama’s professed desire to give rebel factions non-lethal support. In July, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, provided a gloomy assessment, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee in public testimony that ‘thousands of special operations forces and other ground forces’ would be needed to seize Syria’s widely dispersed chemical warfare arsenal, along with ‘hundreds of aircraft, ships, submarines and other enablers’. Pentagon estimates put the number of troops at seventy thousand, in part because US forces would also have to guard the Syrian rocket fleet: accessing large volumes of the chemicals that create sarin without the means to deliver it would be of little value to a rebel force. In a letter to Senator Carl Levin, Dempsey cautioned that a decision to grab the Syrian arsenal could have unintended consequences: ‘We have learned from the past ten years, however, that it is not enough to simply alter the balance of military power without careful consideration of what is necessary in order to preserve a functioning state … Should the regime’s institutions collapse in the absence of a viable opposition, we could inadvertently empower extremists or unleash the very chemical weapons we seek to control.’The CIA declined to comment for this article. Spokesmen for the DIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence said they were not aware of the report to Shedd and, when provided with specific cable markings for the document, said they were unable to find it. Shawn Turner, head of public affairs for the ODNI, said that no American intelligence agency, including the DIA, ‘assesses that the al-Nusra Front has succeeded in developing a capacity to manufacture sarin’.The administration’s public affairs officials are not as concerned about al-Nusra’s military potential as Shedd has been in his public statements. In late July, he gave an alarming account of al-Nusra’s strength at the annual Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. ‘I count no less than 1200 disparate groups in the opposition,’ Shedd said, according to a recording of his presentation. ‘And within the opposition, the al-Nusra Front is … most effective and is gaining in strength.’ This, he said, ‘is of serious concern to us. If left unchecked, I am very concerned that the most radical elements’ – he also cited al-Qaida in Iraq – ‘will take over.’ The civil war, he went on, ‘will only grow worse over time … Unfathomable violence is yet to come.’ Shedd made no mention of chemical weapons in his talk, but he was not allowed to: the reports his office received were highly classified.*A series of secret dispatches from Syria over the summer reported that members of the FSA were complaining to American intelligence operatives about repeated attacks on their forces by al-Nusra and al-Qaida fighters. The reports, according to the senior intelligence consultant who read them, provided evidence that the FSA is ‘more worried about the crazies than it is about Assad’. The FSA is largely composed of defectors from the Syrian army. The Obama administration, committed to the end of the Assad regime and continued support for the rebels, has sought in its public statements since the attack to downplay the influence of Salafist and Wahhabist factions. In early September, John Kerry dumbfounded a Congressional hearing with a sudden claim that al-Nusra and other Islamist groups were minority players in the Syrian opposition. He later withdrew the claim.In both its public and private briefings after 21 August, the administration disregarded the available intelligence about al-Nusra’s potential access to sarin and continued to claim that the Assad government was in sole possession of chemical weapons. This was the message conveyed in the various secret briefings that members of Congress received in the days after the attack, when Obama was seeking support for his planned missile offensive against Syrian military installations. One legislator with more than two decades of experience in military affairs told me that he came away from one such briefing persuaded that ‘only the Assad government had sarin and the rebels did not.’ Similarly, following the release of the UN report on 16 September confirming that sarin was used on 21 August, Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, told a press conference: ‘It’s very important to note that only the [Assad] regime possesses sarin, and we have no evidence that the opposition possesses sarin.’It is not known whether the highly classified reporting on al-Nusra was made available to Power’s office, but her comment was a reflection of the attitude that swept through the administration. ‘The immediate assumption was that Assad had done it,’ the former senior intelligence official told me. ‘The new director of the CIA, [John] Brennan, jumped to that conclusion … drives to the White House and says: “Look at what I’ve got!” It was all verbal; they just waved the bloody shirt. There was a lot of political pressure to bring Obama to the table to help the rebels, and there was wishful thinking that this [tying Assad to the sarin attack] would force Obama’s hand: “This is the Zimmermann telegram of the Syrian rebellion and now Obama can react.” Wishful thinking by the Samantha Power wing within the administration. Unfortunately, some members of the Joint Chiefs who were alerted that he was going to attack weren’t so sure it was a good thing.’The proposed American missile attack on Syria never won public support and Obama turned quickly to the UN and the Russian proposal for dismantling the Syrian chemical warfare complex. Any possibility of military action was definitively averted on 26 September when the administration joined Russia in approving a draft UN resolution calling on the Assad government to get rid of its chemical arsenal. Obama’s retreat brought relief to many senior military officers. (One high-level special operations adviser told me that the ill-conceived American missile attack on Syrian military airfields and missile emplacements, as initially envisaged by the White House, would have been ‘like providing close air support for al-Nusra’.)The administration’s distortion of the facts surrounding the sarin attack raises an unavoidable question: do we have the whole story of Obama’s willingness to walk away from his ‘red line’ threat to bomb Syria? He had claimed to have an iron-clad case but suddenly agreed to take the issue to Congress, and later to accept Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical weapons. It appears possible that at some point he was directly confronted with contradictory information: evidence strong enough to persuade him to cancel his attack plan, and take the criticism sure to come from Republicans.The UN resolution, which was adopted on 27 September by the Security Council, dealt indirectly with the notion that rebel forces such as al-Nusra would also be obliged to disarm: ‘no party in Syria should use, develop, produce, acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer [chemical] weapons.’ The resolution also calls for the immediate notification of the Security Council in the event that any ‘non-state actors’ acquire chemical weapons. No group was cited by name. While the Syrian regime continues the process of eliminating its chemical arsenal, the irony is that, after Assad’s stockpile of precursor agents is destroyed, al-Nusra and its Islamist allies could end up as the only faction inside Syria with access to the ingredients that can create sarin, a strategic weapon that would be unlike any other in the war zone. There may be more to negotiate.

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