Max Marder

For months, Syria has been locked in a relative stalemate. Syrian protesters have made it clear that they won’t stop demonstrating until Bashar al-Assad and his cronies surrender power. The regime has made it clear that “reform” is a red-herring, and it will continue to fight until the very end.

Just to clarify, the Syrian conflict will not end for months. But a few developments have occurred recently that might shake the conflict from the unbreakable pattern of peaceful protests and harsh government repression of recent months that have left almost 3000 dead. However, the transition from the summer’s status quo will surely make Syria bloodier in the coming weeks. It might be a case of one step backwards to take two steps forward.

The first big development has been the unification of disparate opposition movements within Syria. One of the biggest criticism of the Syrian opposition to date has been its lack of organization and contradictory aspirations. Countless meetings hosted by the Turks have made little progress to date. But this week, it seems that the three biggest opposition groups have decided to put their differences aside (for the moment) and concentrate on toppling their common enemy—the regime. Under the aegis of the Syrian national Council, many have gathered including the long-banned Muslim Brotherhood and groups representing the Kurdish and Assyrian minorities. Perhaps most importantly, the unification brings the bottom-up Local Coordination Committees, which have organized activists and protests at the grass-roots level under the umbrella of the top-down oriented SNC. 

The SNC was first announced in August but has only begun to pool together broad support this week. Burhan Ghalioun, a Paris-based Syrian academic, is the Chairmen of the group. At the SNC meeting in Istanbul on October 2nd, as reported by the Beirut Daily Star, Ghalioun said “the council was ‘open to all Syrians. It is an independent group personifying the sovereignty of the Syrian people in their struggle for liberty. The council rejects any outside interference that undermines the sovereignty of the Syrian people.’”

Divisions still exist, however. As previously seen in Libya, where the National Transitional Council brought together different elements of the Libyan opposition to fight Muammar Qaddafi, the SNC is made up of liberals and conservatives, seculars and ‘Islamists.’ According to al-Arabiya, “Renowned Damascus-based opposition figure Michel Kilo, from the National Committee for Democratic Change (NCDC), said his group would not join the SNC because of its openness to the idea of a foreign intervention.”

Despite the SNC’s desire to remain peaceful, the other big development has been the opposition’s increased willingness to turn the struggle into a violent one. The opposition violence has mostly come from independent militias and brigades of defected soldiers. The cities of Rastan and Homs are increasingly taking on the character of isolated civil wars that will inevitably spread. Ghalioun’s niece was kidnapped in Homs. It was widely reported that Syria forces arrested 3000 over the weekend in Rastan. In Homs, there have been assassinations carried out by both sides of key figures, including surgeons, religious leaders and academics who were supporting either the regime or the opposition. Violence along sectarian lines, as portended by President Assad, is increasingly looking like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I’ve talked to Israelis and Palestinians here in Israel about Syria. Some of my friends here, who have bold opinions and commentary on just about anything political, admit they have no idea what’s coming next in Syria. “Syrians don’t know what’s going to happen in Syria,” one friend told me. While speaking with a colleague, he told me, “it’s very difficult, you can’t get reliable information from there.”

Syria is not Libya. President Assad is just as brutal, if not more so, than Col. Qaddafi, but foreign intervention is not supported by the majority of Syrians, much less the Russians or Chinese, who scuttled even basic plans to put UN Security Council sanctions on the Syrian regime. Syrians are distrustful of western motives, which is understandable after decades of French colonialism.

But as Louay Hussein, a writer and Syrian dissident was quoted as saying in the Guardian, “We have to distinguish between foreign intervention and foreign pressure. We oppose foreign intervention but we would like to have foreign pressure based on support for human rights, not the support of a particular party against the other according to their own self-interest.”

So what happens next? As the Syrian mystery gets set to become clearer, with the unification of the opposition and the increased desire of the protesters to fire back live rounds at Syrian security forces, international actors must keep a close watch on the situation. The United States must cooperate closely with Turkey, the Syrian regime’s neighbor, former-ally and current biggest critic, which has already moved to sanction the Assad regime itself.  The US would do well to connect with the SNC, and ratchet up its diplomatic statements against the Assad regime, which has long since passed the point of no-return.

The SNC is not for foreign intervention at the moment, but has already begun to look more favorably upon a no-fly zone, a la Libya, while rejecting “boots on the ground.” It’s important to note, that given the upsurge in violent resistence in recent days, and the steadfastness of the Syrian regime to crackdown brutally, the Syrian opposition and it’s Arab and Muslim (read: Turkish) neighbors might not oppose intervention forever. The whole world condemns President Assad (including, perversely, ally and Iranian President Ahmadinejad), but only with words—not actions. Surely, if President Assad massacres 20,000 of his own people like his father did in 1982 in Hama, attitudes in Syria and around the world will change dramatically. The West must be ready to act, but only if the Syrians themselves want them to.