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Ordering More Airstrikes, Syria Calls French Recognition of Rebels ‘Immoral’
Syria Orders More Airstrikes and Calls French Recognition of Rebels ‘Immoral’
(about 7 hours later)
PARIS — Syrian authorities ordered airstrikes for a third consecutive day close to the tense Turkish border on Wednesday, and said a French decision to recognize and consider arming a newly formed Syrian rebel coalition was an “immoral” act “encouraging the destruction of Syria.”
PARIS — The Syrian authorities on Wednesday ordered airstrikes close to the tense Turkish border for the third consecutive day, and said a French decision to recognize and consider arming a newly formed coalition of Syrian government opponents was an “immoral” act “encouraging the destruction of Syria.”
The French move was depicted by analysts as an attempt to inject momentum into a broad Western and Arab effort to build a viable and effective opposition to hasten the end of a stalemated civil war which has further destabilized the Middle East. For its part, the United States on Wednesday signaled a reluctance to go beyond its characterization of the rebel alliance as a legitimate representative of the Syrian people, rather than as their sole representative.
“This is an immoral position because it allows the killing of Syrians,” Faisal al-Miqdad, Syria’s deputy foreign minister, told Agence France-Presse. “They are supporting killers, terrorists, and they are encouraging the destruction of Syria.”
Speaking in Perth, Australia, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Washington first wanted to see the coalition influencing events on the ground.
On Tuesday, France became the first Western nation to fully embrace the new umbrella organization, the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, which came together last weekend under Western pressure after days of difficult negotiations in Doha, Qatar.
“As the Syrian opposition takes these steps and demonstrates its effectiveness in advancing the cause of a unified, democratic, pluralistic Syria, we will be prepared to work with them to deliver assistance to the Syrian people,” news reports quoted her saying.
On Wednesday, President François Hollande of France invited the leader of the group, Sheikh Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib, to Paris for talks, Reuters reported.
At the same time, she announced $30 million in American humanitarian aid to feed people affected by the civil war, bringing the total American assistance to almost $200 million.
Mr. Miqdad was harshly critical of the coalition, saying its plans for Syria amounted to a declaration of war. He faulted the group for rejecting dialogue and the mechanisms of the United Nations to solve the problem.
The airstrikes on Wednesday underscored the urgency of the diplomatic maneuvers. Journalists along the 550-mile border between Turkey and Syria near the Turkish border town of Ceylanpinar said they witnessed a Syrian airstrike in the adjacent Syrian town of Ras al-Ain, where rebels say they have ousted troops loyal to Mr. Assad. It was the third such strike there in as many days.
The Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, has said he is committed to a United Nations’ cease-fire plan, but his forces have violated it repeatedly.
In response, Reuters reported, Turkey scrambled fighter jets to its southeastern border with Syria, recalling Turkey’s insistence that it will not refrain from a tougher reaction against Syria.
The six Arab countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, including the opposition supporters Qatar and Saudi Arabia, recognized the rebel coalition on Monday as the legitimate Syrian government.
The official SANA news agency in Syria made no direct reference to the Western moves. But the deputy foreign minister, Faisal Muqdad, told the Agence France-Presse news agency that the establishment of the opposition coalition in Doha, Qatar, was a “ declaration of war.” "We read the Doha document and they reject any dialogue with the government."
The United States, however, has withheld that level of recognition.
Referring to the French recognition of the alliance, he said: “Allow me to use the word, this is an immoral position. They are supporting killers, terrorists and they are encouraging the destruction of Syria.”The announcement by President François Hollande on Tuesday made France the first Western country to fully embrace the new coalition, which came together this past weekend under Western pressure after days of difficult negotiations in Doha, Qatar.
In a news conference on Wednesday, President Obama said, “I’m encouraged to see that the Syrian opposition created an umbrella group that may have more cohesion than they’ve had in the past.”
The goal was to make an opposition leadership — both inside and outside the country — representative of the array of Syrian groups pressing for the downfall of President Bashar al-Assad. Although Mr. Assad is increasingly isolated as his country descends further into mayhem and despair after 20 months of conflict, he has survived partly because of the disagreements and lack of unity among his opponents. Throughout the conflict, the West has taken half measures and been reluctant to back an aggressive effort to oust Mr. Assad. This appears to be the first time that Western nations, with Arab allies, are determined to build a viable opposition leadership that can ultimately function as a government. Whether it can succeed remains unclear.
“We consider them a legitimate representative of the aspirations of the Syrian people,” he added. “We’re not yet prepared to recognize them as some sort of government in exile, but we do think that it is a broad-based representative group.”
Mr. Hollande went beyond other Western pledges of support for the new Syrian umbrella rebel group, which calls itself the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. But Mr. Hollande’s announcement clearly signaled expectations that if the group can establish political legitimacy and an operational structure inside Syria, creating an alternative to the Assad family’s four decades in power, it will be rewarded with further recognition, money and possibly weapons.
He said that two crucial issues for the United States were “making sure that that opposition is committed to a democratic Syria, an inclusive Syria, a moderate Syria,” and keeping any flow of arms from reaching extremist elements “who would do Americans harm, or do Israelis harm, or otherwise engage in actions that are detrimental to our national security.”
“I announce that France recognizes the Syrian National Coalition as the sole representative of the Syrian people and thus as the future provisional government of a democratic Syria and to bring an end to Bashar al-Assad’s regime,” said Mr. Hollande, who has been one of the Syrian president’s harshest critics.
In Perth, Australia, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced $30 million in American humanitarian aid to feed Syrians affected by the civil war, bringing the total American assistance to almost $200 million.
As for weapons, Mr. Hollande said, France had not supported arming the rebels up to now, but “with the coalition, as soon as it is a legitimate government of Syria, this question will be looked at by France, but also by all countries that recognize this government.”
The airstrikes on Wednesday underscored the urgency of diplomatic maneuvers. Journalists near the Turkish border town of Ceylanpinar said they had witnessed a Syrian airstrike in the adjacent Syrian town of Ras al-Ain, where rebels say they have ousted troops loyal to Mr. Assad. It was the third such strike there in the last three days.
The six Arab countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, including key opposition supporters Qatar and Saudi Arabia, recognized the rebel coalition on Monday as the legitimate Syrian government. Political analysts called Mr. Hollande’s announcement an important moment in the Syrian conflict, which began as a peaceful Arab Spring uprising in March 2011. It was harshly suppressed by Mr. Assad, turned into a civil war and has left nearly 40,000 Syrians dead, displaced about 2.5 million and forced more than 400,000 to flee to neighboring countries, according to international relief agencies.
In response, Reuters reported, Turkey scrambled fighter jets to its southeastern border with Syria, underlining Turkey’s insistence that it will not refrain from a tougher reaction.
“It’s certainly another page of the story,” Augustus Richard Norton, a professor of international relations at Boston University and an expert on Middle East political history, said of the French announcement. “I think it’s important. But it will be much more important if other countries follow suit. I don’t think we’re quite there yet.”
The fighting has also pressed against the Israeli border, near the Golan Heights. Israel has fired twice into Syria in recent days after taking Syrian mortar fire, claiming a direct hit on Syrian artillery units on Monday.
Some drew an analogy to France’s leading role in the early days of the Libyan uprising when it helped funnel aid, and later military support, to the rebels who had firmly established themselves in eastern Libya and would later topple Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. But in Syria, rebels have not been as organized and have no hold on significant amounts of territory — at least not enough to create a provisional government that could resist Mr. Assad’s military assaults. The West has also refused, so far, to impose a no-fly zone over Syria, which was critical to the success of the Libyan uprising.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak of Israel visited the Golan Heights, according to The Associated Press, and Mr. Barak said most of the Syrian villages near the border were under rebel control. “The Syrian Army is displaying ever-diminishing efficiency,” The A.P. quoted Mr. Barak as saying.
Andrew J. Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that the new coalition would have to create a secure zone in Syria to be successful, and that such a step would require support from the United States, which was instrumental in the negotiations that led to the group’s creation but has not yet committed to giving it full recognition.
The Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, met in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, with his counterparts from the six Gulf Cooperation Council nations, but failed to agree on an approach to end the violence. Russia has blocked repeated Security Council efforts to pressure the Syrian government to halt its bloody crackdown as a conflict that began peacefully in early 2011 has devolved into civil war, with a death toll of roughly 40,000.
What the French have done, Mr. Tabler said, is significant because they have started the process of broader recognition, putting pressure on the group to succeed. “They’ve decided to back this umbrella organization and hope that it has some kind of political legitimacy and keep it from going to extremists,” he said. “It’s a gamble. The gamble is that it will stiffen the backs of the opposition.”
At a news conference in Riyadh, Mr. Lavrov condemned the bloodshed as “outrageous,” Reuters reported, but criticized the new opposition coalition as failing to include the opposition within the country. “Without attracting the internal opposition,” Reuters quoted him as saying, “ it is hard to believe that this process is inclusive.”
France’s statement also was a clear reflection of frustration with the growing death toll and military stalemate in Syria. It came a week after the re-election of President Obama, who had clearly been unwilling to consider any military policy that could hurt his prospects.
Neil
MacFarquhar contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.
Mr. Hollande’s announcement came as the rebel coalition’s newly chosen leader, Sheik Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib, a former imam of the historic Umayyad Mosque in Damascus and a respected figure in Syria, made a broad appeal to Western and Arab countries for recognition and military aid. Foreign ministers of the Arab League, while approving the new group as the “legitimate representative of the Syrian opposition,” have not agreed on recognizing it as a provisional government to replace Mr. Assad.
France, the former colonial power in Syria, has been pressing for a more committed international effort to help the anti-Assad movement. It has pushed the United Nations Security Council and the United States to act more decisively and has promoted economic and oil sanctions against Syria, both in the United Nations and more successfully in the European Union, which had been a top consumer of Syrian oil.
Under the previous center-right presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, France played the leading role in organizing an armed intervention in Libya to save the opposition from Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. Working with the British, Mr. Sarkozy brought Washington along and helped secure a Security Council mandate that was interpreted as covering military intervention in Libya.
Russia and China have said they felt deceived, however, and both have opposed a similar Council resolution on Syria. In addition, the Obama administration has been firmly against any military intervention in Syria on behalf of a more chaotic opposition with a larger, more visible presence of radical Islamic fighters from other countries.
Still, Secretary of State Clinton has been important in pressing for a newly constituted, broader Syrian transitional council of the kind established in Qatar on Sunday.
The French have also been helping with civilian projects in areas of Syria held by opposition forces, working with locals to repair food and milk factories and to provide medical supplies and assistance. The idea, French officials have said, is to help the opposition govern and build credibility in so-called liberated areas.
International relief agencies warned that the humanitarian crisis in Syria had worsened in the past few weeks.
“People are really on the run, hiding,” said Melissa Fleming, the spokeswoman for the United Nations refugee agency in Geneva. “They are difficult to count and difficult to access.”
As Syrian aircraft were bombing for the town along the border with Turkey in the past several days, tensions remained high on the armistice line between Syria and Israel in the Golan Heights area controlled by Israel since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Israeli tank gunners blasted a Syrian mobile artillery vehicle there on Monday in response to repeated instances of errant mortar shells landing on the Israeli side.
There were also new indications that the Syrian rebels were obtaining more sophisticated weapons without Western help. The Brown Moses blog, considered an authoritative source on arms used in the conflict, reported new images showing insurgents armed with SA-16 and SA-24 shoulder-fired heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles, apparently captured from the Syrian military. Both systems are newer generations of weapons than rebels have been seen carrying before, and pose a new threat to Syrian military aircraft.
Steven Erlanger and Alan Cowell reported from Paris, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Reporting was contributed by Neil MacFarquhar and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon, and Nick Cumming-Bruce from Geneva.
