ANKARA: Turkey urged the UN to protect displaced Syrians inside their country yesterday as President Bashar Assad, waging a fierce war which has uprooted hundreds of thousands of people, dismissed talk of a buffer zone.
Assad said in an interview broadcast Wednesday was unrelenting in his resolve to crush the opposition, but admitted that his armed forces will need time to defeat the rebels.
Syrian refugees also faced another pressure after Jordanian Prime Minister Fayez Tarawneh said Wednesday that those responsible for violence in a camp near the kingdom's border with Syria border will be deported.
Thousands of Syrians have been fleeing their homes over the past weeks as fighting between Assad's forces and the opposition intensified.
Opposition activists on Wednesday said air and ground bombardment killed at least 27 people in eastern neighborhoods of Damascus, prompting thousands of people to flee the area.
Many more were killed when troops briefly entered several districts after the shelling and air strikes, carrying out summary executions before withdrawing, the activists said.
Ankara fears a mass influx such as the flight of half a million Iraqi Kurds into Turkey after the 1991 Gulf War, and has floated the idea of a “safe zone” under foreign protection within Syria for civilians fleeing intensifying violence.
“We expect the UN to engage on the topic of protecting refugees inside Syria and if possible sheltering them in camps there,” Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said.
France supports Turkey’s call for a safe zone in Syria, and pressure for action increased after the UN refugee agency said that Syria’s exodus was accelerating. Up to 200,000 people could settle in Turkey if the conflict worsens, the UNHCR said.
Davutoglu said refugee flows in the hundreds of thousands constituted a dangerous international problem.
Turkey already hosts more than 80,000 refugees and the UNHCR said up to 5,000 people a day had arrived there in the last two weeks. The refugee flow to Jordan has also doubled, it said.
Davutoglu spoke ahead of a UN Security Council meeting of foreign ministers expected to focus on Ankara’s proposal.
“We are studying the issue of buffer zones,” said French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who will chair today’s meeting in New York, acknowledging the issue was “complicated.”
Trouble at Jordan desert camp
In announcing his government's plan to expel troublesome refugees, Jordanian Prime Minister Tarawneh said: “We will be firm in the face of those who break the law and we will send people arrested for attacking police officers back to where they came from.”
He did not say how many refugees will be expelled, but a security official said there are 150 Syrian refugees in police custody, including an unspecified number of rioters as well as others who want to return home.
About 200 refugees went on a rampage late Tuesday at Zaatari Camp, a desert tent city that houses 21,000 refugees, to protest conditions there. Police said 28 officers were wounded in the riot, one of them with a fractured skull.
Many of the refugees have said they find the harsh environment in the camp — set on a parched, treeless stretch of land — a struggle, citing the constant dust storms, snakes and scorpions.
The security official said the suspected Syrian rioters will be sent back across the border, but away from Syria’s state control out of concern that they will be prosecuted. He did not say when and spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not allowed to make press statements.
The rioting followed a similar incident in the camp Saturday night, when 200 refugees threw stones at Jordanian security guards, wounding several. The refugees were protesting conditions at the camp then as well.
Information Minister Sameeh Maaytah said that Jordan “will not tolerate” any such revolts in the future.
On Tuesday, dozens of protesters outside the UN refugee agency in Amman demanded the closure of the Zaatari tent camp due to its harsh desert conditions.
UNHCR representative to Jordan Andrew Harper acknowledged the situation at Zaatari was “difficult and tense” following the riot, but said it has calmed down. Harper called hosting the displaced Syrians an “increasing challenge” as their numbers rapidly grow and the capacity to assist them increases, creating logistical challenges.
“We have to focus on enhancing the delivery of services and support to the camp,” he said.
Jordan hosts about 180,000 refugees from the civil war in Syria, the largest number in the region. Nearly 4,600 crossed the border in the past 24 hours, as fighting raged between rebels and forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad, Maaytah said.
Jordan is racing to open a second refugee camp to handle the influx. Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh said the United Arab Emirates was helping to fund the camp in the nearby hamlet of Ribaa Sarhan, which is expected to host 20,000 Syrians.
Assad needs more time
Assad's comments broadcast Wednesday amounted to an acknowledgment that even though the opposition lacks the government’s tanks and airplanes, their tenacity and tactical creativity — combined with the military’s struggle to fight on multiple fronts — have yielded a stalemate that could prolong the civil war with many more dead.
Over the past few months, Syria’s military has increasingly been stretched thin fighting on multiple fronts against rebels seeking to oust Assad. His forces have been unable to quell the rebellion as it spread to the capital, Damascus, with significant clashes that began in July and to Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, a few weeks later. At the same time, the military is fighting smaller scale battles in a string of other cities and towns around the country.
With neither side making significant advances, the conflict is looking more like a war of attrition that could be very drawn out.
“We are fighting a regional and global war, so time is needed to win it,” Assad said in an interview with the pro-regime private TV station Dunya. “We are moving forward. The situation is practically better but it has not been decided yet. That takes time,” he told the station, which is majority owned by Rami Makhlouf, a cousin of Assad and one of Syria’s wealthiest men.
“If the armed forces wanted to use the entire range of its firepower, it can wipe out many areas. But this will be unacceptable,” said Assad.
Assad also appeared to make light of the significant number of defections, some of them senior military and political officials, including the prime minister.
“Defections are a positive process. Generally, it is self-cleansing of the state and the nation,” said Assad. “If there is a Syrian citizen who knows of someone who wishes to flee but is hesitant to do so he should encourage him,” he said with a smile. “Whoever flees is either weak or bad. A patriotic or a good person does not flee.”
Assad claimed there were cases when authorities knew in advance of officials who wanted to flee and allowed them to do so unhindered. But he did not provide any specifics to back up the claim.
Taken together with his comments to a visiting Iranian official over the weekend, Assad shows willingness for an even more prolonged conflict, even with more than 20,000 estimated dead in more than 17 months of fighting.
His regime, he told the senior Iranian official, would continue the fight against the rebels “whatever the price.”
Some analysts saw the interview as a counter-attack by the regime to burnish its image in the face of recent military gains by the rebels.
Analysts and rights activists say the military has been unable to defeat the rebels in large part because of the tactics of its enemy — a rag-tag army of civilians-turned-fighters and defected soldiers without a clear chain of command.
“It is extremely difficult to stop an insurrection that has spread so widely, even with far superior firepower, as demonstrated by the US experience in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Christopher Chivvis, a senior analyst with the Rand Corporation. “The task becomes even harder when there are neighboring countries that support the insurrection“
The insurgents do not have to hold territory and can take advantage of the fact that the military cannot fight as easily on multiple fronts, said Michael W. Hanna, a Middle East expert who monitors the Syrian conflict for the Century foundation in New York.
Hanna also picked up on Assad’s claim that the military is holding back on using its full power.
“If the Syrian military wants to retake territory it can do so but will be forced to use disproportionate force,” he said. “Such actions run the perennial risk of alienating civilians and creating new motivations for anti-government actions.”
Hisham Jaber, a retired Lebanese army general who heads a Beirut-based think tank, argues that Assad’s military cannot employ overwhelming force to put down the fighting in Damascus and Aleppo, the country’s two largest cities with major political and economic importance.
“Assad may be ready to destroy Homs and Hama (cities in central Syria) but he cannot do that in Aleppo, for example, and does want heavy casualties among civilians,” he said. “At the end, a regular army is not suited for guerrilla warfare.”
Syrian activists speak of the limitations faced by the regime in using everyone in uniform. Assad’s Alawite-led regime, they explain, is unable to trust military personnel from the majority Sunni Muslim sect to fight mostly Sunni rebels.
Other activists speculate that Sunni pilots have been grounded out of fear they would defect with their warplanes.
On the other hand, they say the rebels are taking advantage of growing logistical and moral support from the civilian population in many areas, while the military was being increasingly seen as an oppressive force that kills with impunity.
Rights groups monitoring the violence now report the deaths of up to 250 or more Syrians on daily basis, though the figures are impossible to independently verify. The fighting has been intense enough to force hundreds of thousands to flee their homes, seeking refuge elsewhere in the country or in neighboring nations.
— With input from agencies
