LAST WARNING FOR SYRIA BEFORE ATTACK FROM NATO AND TURKEY
AUG 10 2011
Less than 24 hours after Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet
Davutoglu handed Bashar Assad in Damascus "a final
warning," to stop the bloodshed or else, Assad demonstrated coolly that
he is not scared by the prospect of military
intervention or deterred by Ankara's caution that he risks the
same fate as Muammar Qaddafi – i.e. NATO attack.
The day after his Turkish guest departed, Wednesday, Aug. 10, he launched
military assaults on three towns in the Turkish border region.
Tanks, armored vehicles and motorized infantry units pushed into Taftanaz and
Sermin in Idlib province, less than 30 kilometers from the border, while
troops entered Binnish, a town squarely on the border.
This exercise was also Assad's reply to the Obama
administration's leaked report of Tuesday night that within the coming hours
Washington would for the first time explicitly call on Bashar Assad to step
down, like the marching orders the US gave the Egyptian President
Hosni Mubarak and Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi.
This strategy is so far in the red, with only one down (Mubarak) and two
(Qaddafi and Yemeni President Abdullah Ali Saleh) still to go. Assad expects
to join the latter group after outdoing them all in brutal repression.
He not only brushed aside the Davutoglu's demand on behalf of Turkey as a NATO
member to cut down on his military operations against civilians, he expanded
them Wednesday in the most provocative manner.
The five-month conflict between the Syrian army and rebels is now in its
bloodiest week, raging on three fronts: In the north from Wednesday on the
Turkish border, in the east, where Syrian tanks and artillery forces are
knocking over the towns of Deir al-Zour and Abu Kamal near the Iraqi border
and in two protests centers in the Damascus suburbs of Duma and Kharasta.
Assad was cheered on, DEBKAfile's military and intelligence sources report, by
the apparent weakness he noticed in the Turkish foreign minister when they
conversed Tuesday. The Syrian ruler gained the impression that Turkish Prime
Minister Tayyip Erdogan is still wavering over whether to order his army to
cross the border into Syria and he therefore decided to strike while the iron
was hot.
By concentrating units so close to the Turkish border, Assad also gained an
advantage in the event of Erdogan deciding to invade.
Assad found another sign of weakness in Erdogan's report that his foreign
minister had obtained in Damascus a promise of political reforms and seen for
himself that Syrian tanks had pulled out of Hama. There was no mention of the
number of civilians killed before that or the public executions in the city's
main square. The Turkish prime minister seemed to have forgotten that all
Assad's past promises of reforms had proved hollow.
According to our sources, the Syrian president received
new Iranian guarantees Tuesday night of a missile shield in the event of an
attack by Turkey or NATO forces. This is tantamount to a promise that Iranian
missiles would target Middle East air bases from which the assault planes took
off and send troops to the aid of the Syrian army.
Assad therefore feels safe in discounting the new sanctions the US slapped
down Wednesday night, Aug. 10 on Syria's biggest commercial bank, the
Commercial Bank of Syria, and its Lebanon-based subsidiary, under a
presidential executive order that targets proliferators of weapons of mass
destruction and their supporters. A separate order designated Syriatel, the
country's largest mobile phone operator, for supporting human rights abuses in
Syria.
He was not bothered by his increasing isolation in the Arab world after Saudi
Arabia led the Gulf States in recalling their ambassadors from Damascus in
protest against the unbridled blood-letting any more than he moved by a
possible NATO strike.
He views NATO as having failed in its six-month air Libyan campaign either to
dislodge Qaddafi or destroy his army. It had the reverse effect of
strengthening his regime. As for Western aid to Syrian rebels, government
forces have managed to seize most of the weapons and logistical aid shipments
they shipped into Syria.
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