His comments reflect continued disagreement among President Bashar Assad’s opponents over whether to resort to force to seek his overthrow or try to maintain peaceful protests. Such divisions have made Western powers wary of backing them openly.
Kilo, a writer who spent six years in jail for opposing Syria’s leadership, also told Le Figaro newspaper that Assad had become “desperate” and was trying to regionalize the conflict.
The most senior commander to abandon the Syrian military during the 10-month uprising against Assad, General Mostafa Ahmad Al-Sheikh, has created a military council to coordinate the attacks of the Free Syrian Army.
“He wants to attack 400,000 people with just a few thousand soldiers that don’t make up an army,” Kilo said. “He is going to send the country into chaos without end. It’s madness.”
Army deserters and other rebels have taken up arms against security forces dominated by Assad’s minority Alawite sect, pushing Syria closer to civil war.
Syria’s state news agency SANA reported on Tuesday that what it called terrorists had fired rockets, killing an officer and five of his men at a rural checkpoint near Damascus. Seven others were wounded in the incident, a day after gunmen assassinated a brigadier general near the capital.
UN officials say that more than 5,000 people have been killed in the violence across Syria, where pro-Assad forces are trying to crush peaceful protests and armed rebels.
Kilo, part of the National Committee for Democratic Change, said the situation on the ground had now reached an impasse with neither protesters nor the government able to back down.
He said Assad’s pledge on the one hand to use an iron fist to crush “terrorists,” while also issuing an amnesty for criminal acts committed during the uprising, showed he had become a “desperate man.”
“All that he is promising is a war against terrorism in which he thinks he’ll get the support of the West or scare it, but this is a false premise,” Kilo said.
“In Homs, at the heart of the rebellion, there are no Islamists in the coordinating committee. I believe Assad wants to regionalize the conflict and draw in Iran, Hezbollah, Iraq and to threaten Gulf countries with a long war.”
