DEVELOPMENTS
— The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency warned Lebanese officials last week that al-Qaida-linked groups are planning a campaign of bombings that will target Beirut’s Hezbollah-dominated southern suburbs as well as other political targets associated with the group or its allies in Syria, Lebanese officials said Monday.
— Syrian government troops pounded rebel-held villages around the northern city of Idlib with rockets, artillery and airstrikes, killing at least 29 people, including six children, Britain-based Observatory for Human Rights said Monday.
— In central Syria, a car bomb exploded outside a police headquarters in the town of Deir Atiyeh, some 50 miles north of Damascus, killing 13 people, including 10 policemen. One child was among the dead, the Observatory said.
— News services
On Syria’s front lines, al-Qaida fighters and more mainstream Syrian rebels have turned against each other in a power struggle that has undermined the effort to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad.
After violent clashes and the assassination of two rival commanders, one of whom was beheaded, more moderate factions are publicly accusing the extremists of trying to seize control of the rebellion.
The rivalries — along with the efforts by extremist foreign fighters to impose their strict interpretation of Islam in areas they control — are chipping away at the movement’s popularity in Syria at a time when the regime is making significant advances on the ground.
“The rebels’ focus has shifted from toppling the regime to governing and power struggles,” said a 29-year-old woman from the contested city of Homs. “I feel that the lack of true leadership is and has always been their biggest problem.” She spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation from the fighters and the regime.
The infighting, which exploded into the open in the country’s rebel-held north in recent days, is contributing to a sense across many parts of Syria that the revolution has faltered. It threatens to fracture an opposition movement that has been plagued by divisions from the start.
The moderates once valued the expertise and resources that their uneasy allies brought to the battlefield, but now question whether such military assets are worth the trouble — not to mention the added difficulty in persuading the West to arm them.
“We don’t want foreign fighters. We have enough men and we want them out of Syria,” said Brig. Gen. Salim Idris, head of the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army, an umbrella group for dozens of brigades.
In strikingly blunt comments in an interview with Al-Arabiya on Monday, Idris, a secular-minded army defector who has the backing of foreign powers, accused members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant of being regime agents and “criminals.”
That group, formed in April and made up of al-Qaida’s branches in Iraq and Syria, has taken on an increasingly dominant role in the Syrian civil war. Many of its fighters are north Africans, Iraqis, Afghans and Europeans who have flocked to Syria to join the overwhelmingly Sunni uprising against Assad.
Gunmen from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant were behind the killings of the two rebel commanders, the highest-profile casualties of the growing tensions between jihadi fighters and Western-supported rebels.
The rebels are a disparate mix of ordinary citizens who took up weapons, army defectors, moderates and hard-liners, and increasingly, jihadists who have trekked to Syria from all over the world. A shortage of weapons and the inability of external players to interfere in the conflict to tip the balance in favor of one side or another has worked against the rebels.
Some Free Syrian Army commanders are trying to tamp down the dispute with the al-Qaida militants, mindful of the damage the infighting has done to their cause.
“Their actions are despicable, but we will not be drawn into a fight with them,” said one commander, who declined to be named so as not to aggravate the situation.
FSA spokesman Loay al-Mikdad was less delicate.
“I think they should come out in public and tell the Syrian people why they are in Syria. Is it to fight Bashar Assad or to impose a specific agenda on the Syrian people?” he asked.
“We never see them on the battlefield anymore,” he said of the al-Qaida militants. “We only see them in liberated areas either next to oil wells or trying to impose specific agendas on territories.”
About the Author
