Untangling Syria’s messy civil war
It’s one hell of an intray: just get into Syria to where the fighting is, ensure that the plan to de-militarise these areas is carried out. Oh, and while you’re at it, please make sure all those prisoners are released and the shooting stops.
So the Arab League’s fifty or so politicians, human rights workers and observers led by a Sudanese general, certainly have their work cut out.
Not least, the fact that this is essentially civil war in areas like the frontier town of Homs to where the delegation has headed. That means that the Assad regime claims that it is dealing with “armed terrorists” are, in some senses, quite right.
Insofar as President Assad’s army is being fired upon. All of which makes the Arab League observers’ job even harder. A simple matter of a regime opening fire on unarmed protesters with tanks would be a straightforward afffair compared to the unfolding reality. But Syria’s moved beyond that, not least because of army defections to the rebels – weapons and all.
As one Homs resident told Reuters only today: “The violence is definitely two-sided, I’ve been seeing ambulances filled with wounded soldiers passing by my window in the past days. They’re getting shot somehow.”
More from Channel 4 News: Inside Syria
But credit where it is due. The Arab League observers have only been in Syria since late on Monday and already they’ve made good on their promise to try and move around freely and get to the obvious places – none more obvious than Homs where around 30 people may have been killed in thelast 24 hours. It is to be hoped they can do a great deal more than simly visit the city’s governor and they show every intention of trying to do so.
Like visiting the district of Baba Amr where residents say a four-day tank assault has been mounted by the regime. Graphic YouTube imagery shows people screaming for international help close to the bodies of their loved ones.
Once again the Assad regime has made public show of pulling its tanks out of the city. Though how far and for how long is open to questions judging on the conduct of recent months. And how unfettered the movement of the observers will be around this battered city and other flashpoints, is only really being tested now.
Reporters being banned from the country in any meaningful way, we have little to go on but the grainy offerings surfacing on YouTube and elsewhere depicting a one-sided story of tanks attacking civilians.
The head of the Arab League, Nabil al-Arabi, has said it will take about a week to judge whether Syria really is complying with the agreement it signed, under which the observers are to monitor a complete halt to the violence, the withdrawal of armed forces, and the release of all detainees, of whom there are many thousands.
In advance of the observers’ arrival, activists accused the authorities of moving detainees onto military bases – where the observers are not allowed to go – and also of removing hundreds of bodies from the mortuary at Homs.
For months that has been in important part of the story, the violence unleashed by Damascus is the greater part of the story. But it is not the whole story. The Free Syrian Army means exactly what it says – an army, fighting a war of liberation against the regime in Damascus, as it sees it. Untangling all this will be extremely difficult for any external or internal observers.
War is messy. Civil war messiest of all.
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