Syria: Insurgents Retreat From Homs But War Will Continue

May 7, 2014

As part of a complex deal of prisoner exchanges and access to food for some besieged areas the foreign supported insurgents are leaving Homs. The city was one of the early centers of their fight against the Syrian government and its people.

This is a great symbolic as well as physical loss for the insurgents. It comes as progress has also been made against insurgents east of Damascus. The additional weapons the U.S. send to the insurgents, mainly anti-tank missiles but also additional rocket artillery, proved to be not decisive. Ridiculous claims about the insurgents gaining ground are just that. Their renewed attempts to claim more of Aleppo were stopped by the Syrian army. Government forces now busy in Homs and east Damascus will soon join the fight in Aleppo and will attempt to free the city of insurgents. The insurgents are therefore clearly in retreat. Losses from infighting between the various Jihadi groups have weakened the insurgency and will negatively affect new recruiting.

That does not mean the the Syrian government has won. Far from it. The U.S. and its allies will do their best to keep the conflict going as long as it does not threaten to directly harm them. That point may come though as retreating insurgents will likely move to neighboring countries to look for new pasture.

Posted by b on May 7, 2014 at 16:21 UTC | Permalink

Comments

How many more false flag chemical attacks will the civilians of Syria be subjected to before this war is over?

Posted by: Crest | May 7 2014 16:27 utc | 1

Those new pastures could be in Jordan and hopefully Saudi Arabia, Jordanian Jihadists call for holy war against the regime. [the Jordanian regime] http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Jordanian-jihadists-call-for-jihad-against-regime-351468

Posted by: harry law | May 7 2014 16:43 utc | 2

Link to New Data Raise Further Doubt on Official View of August 21 Gas Attack in Syria
Demolishes the western disinformation. Along with showing HRW and “Brown Moses” were spreading disinformation as part of that western campaign of disinformation used to try and pin western crimes on the Syrian government. The article covers a lot.

Posted by: scalawag | May 7 2014 16:57 utc | 3

http://blogs.rediff.com/mkbhadrakumar/2014/05/07/obama-reopens-syria-file/
http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/rebels-occupying-libyan-oil-ports-refuse-deal-new-pm

Posted by: Mina | May 7 2014 17:03 utc | 4

I dont know much about what’s happening in the Syrian civil war,
but it seems that Syrian Government has initiated
2 new developments in the past few days
on the Diplomatic/Economic front
http://sana.sy/eng/24/2014/04/28/541495.htm
“Syria intends to join Shanghai Organisation, sign agreement with Eurasian customs union,,Apr 28, 2014”

Posted by: chris m | May 7 2014 17:25 utc | 5

This is (hopefully) a very encouraging sign, although it remains to be seen how it plays out over the coming weeks/months. Part of the dilemma for various Syrian rebels is that the prospect of life “post-defeat” unsurprisingly has been grim — with eventual government retribution, prosecution, etc. and/or life in exile seeming likely — making “fighting to the death” seem not unreasonable. If these fighters can temporarily lay down their arms and retreat without being slaughtered and if the residents of these towns can get back to normal, the credibility of Assad’s regime in negotiating a broader ceasefire/peace will be boosted enormously. There are crticial differences between the various rebel factions which will again come into distinct relief, as the foreign fighters and jihadists do not share the incentives of the “locals.”

Posted by: Susan Sunflower | May 7 2014 18:45 utc | 6

Assad – “On the next Martyrs’ Day we will meet, God willing, not only to celebrate the occasion, but also to celebrate victory over terrorists who have perpetrated the ugliest crimes against Syrian people”
http://www.almanar.com.lb/english/adetails.php?eid=150302&frid=23&seccatid=20&cid=23&fromval=1

Posted by: okie farmer | May 7 2014 18:49 utc | 7

Link to Odessa city: the truth that is to be hidden
The author pulls a lot of the details together into one narrative of the Odessa street fighting and later massacre at the Trade Union building. It’s in English.

Posted by: scalawag | May 7 2014 18:54 utc | 8

Wrong spot, should have been posted in the new Ukraine discussion.

Posted by: scalawag | May 7 2014 18:55 utc | 9

what is happening tot saudi arabia and the usa that they can’t continue with the ongoing shit storm in syria? did they have some sort of minor falling out finally? or is it that turkey decided they didn’t want to participate anymore? or is this just another temporary blip before the next false flag as crest points out @1?

Posted by: james | May 7 2014 19:36 utc | 10

Link to Militants break agreement, suspend evacuation of Homs

The evacuation of foreign-backed militants from the strategic Syrian Old City of Homs has been suspended after militants broke an agreement with Damascus.
The evacuation was suspended on Wednesday after the militants fired rockets into the Shia towns of Nubl and al-Zahraa, violating the agreement.

True to the tune of their western masters, the terrorists break the agreement right after they agree to it.

Posted by: scalawag | May 7 2014 19:48 utc | 11

Who the fuck is “the US” “not to be harmed” by the islamic terrorist? Are you suggesting that the fascist/nazi/satanic oligarchy regime behind most of the violent US foreign policy cares about protecting the US population from the terrorist threat? Are you serious? Ever heard about the 9/11 ?

Posted by: ProPeace | May 7 2014 19:55 utc | 12

Obama is frustrated and furious at the fall of Homs and the consecutive victories of the Syrian army. He is appalled that the man “whose days in power were a matter or weeks” may be re-elected for a few more years. His ally, the Saudis wants Obama to proof by real actions that the assurances of eternal friendship he gave the King are nor just words. Obama has to please the Saudis so they can swallow the Iranian nuclear deal.
Therefore he is making theatrical attempts to revamp what is left of the ‘moderate opposition’ lead by the “charismaric” Jarba with several moves that most analysts still consider as purely symbolic.
– He allowed the moribund opposition to open ‘foreign missions’. He shied off opening opposition “Syrian embassies” as France, Qatar and the UK did in their country more than a year ago.
– He invited the ‘elected’ leader Jarba to come to the US to beg again for weapons. Let’s see what he’ll get this time.
– He is allowing the spreading of rumors that the rebels have received US heavy weapons.
On the ground, the moves of the Syrian Army seems well calculated and it seems that Aleppo is next to freed from rebels.
The remainders of the FSA and their friends Al Nusra and Al Qaeda are been harassed and pushed back toward Turkey and Iraq where they will probably be fought by the Turkish and Iraq army.
It seems that soon all the large cities of Syria, Damas, Homs, Aleppo, Lattaquia will be under the Syrian government control.
No wonder Obama, Hollande and Cameron feel bad. Three years after, their prediction appear to be still wrong.

But the upgrade in diplomatic standing is primarily symbolic – it does ease some banking and outreach efforts – and analysts of the Syrian conflict warned that it is little more than window dressing, with no major policy shift in the offing from the Obama administration.
Moreover, they noted, the opposition coalition remains made up of the same figures whose infighting and political divisions have infuriated American officials and Syrian constituents for years _ the same faces with the same ideological, religious and personal rifts among them.
“The problems, essentially, can’t be solved because they’re part of the very fabric of this body,” said Faysal Itani, who follows the Syrian conflict closely as a fellow with the Washington-based Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2014/05/05/6380527/once-again-us-takes-stab-at-promoting.html#storylink=cpy

Posted by: Virgile | May 7 2014 20:23 utc | 13

Been following this closely (along with all other Syrian news). Think it is a great achievement, both militarily and symbolically. Not only was Homs “the heart of the revolution” but it is also the third largest city in Syria. The securing of it will mean the thousands of soldiers that were needed to conduct the siege will be freed up to move elsewhere.
This following the Qalamoun victory a few weeks ago is the beginning of the end for the rebels in the South. In the East along the Iraq border Deir Ezzor has seen intense fighting between Al Nusra/Ahrar Al Sham and ISIS. 3,000 rebels were killed in the infighting by March so its likely 5-6 thousand by now.
Aleppo is the only front where the rebels are still a threat, but word is with Homs and Damascus secured by the summer, 10’s of thousands more soldiers will be able to be redeployed to the Aleppo front.

Posted by: Colm O’ Toole | May 7 2014 21:00 utc | 14

The Saudi’s just busted a 62 man terrorist cell

He [Maj. Gen. Mansour Al-Turki, spokesman of the Ministry of Interior,] said an investigation into social media postings led security forces “after months of hard work” to pinpoint the suspicious activities of certain individuals. The investigators finally discovered the terrorist organization, which had been communicating with Al-Qaeda members in Yemen and Syria. Members of the cell had also communicated with deviant groups in the Kingdom, he said.
Al-Turki said the cell had links with the hard-line Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a powerful force in Syria’s war and an anti-government combat group in turbulent Iraq. The Kingdom recently banned the ISIL.
He said the group had about SR900,000 in cash that was to be used for smuggling weapons across the Yemeni border.

It’s always so difficult to know what anything coming out of KSA “means” — particularly since there’s so often zero followup and/or the original story gets scrubbed, however, this sounds like a formidable operation which is really quite remarkable, given their draconian laws, high alert state and low tolerance for dissidence.
Arab News: 62-member terror ring dismantled.

Posted by: Susan Sunflower | May 7 2014 21:29 utc | 15

“It’s clear that the administration wants to show it has a policy even though it doesn’t in the sense of anything comprehensive with well-defined goals that is in any way realistic in terms of giving the resistance a real leg up on governments,” he told IPS.
“So far as I can tell, Obama isn’t going to change his policy, and [the opposition] isn’t going to get lots of money or arms from Washington,” said Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma and publisher of syriacomment.com, a widely read blog.
“I think this is a way for [Secretary of State John] Kerry, who’s been much more aggressive on Syria than Obama, to show he has a policy after the failure of [the] Geneva II [peace talks between the regime and the opposition],” he told IPS.
“It’s possible that Obama has allowed three percent more aggressiveness in the policy to show Assad that he’s not going to reward him, show the opposition that he’s still on their side, and reassure the Saudis who threatened to ‘go it alone’ after September when Obama failed to attack” Syria after it crossed his “red line” by allegedly using chemical weapons.
According to Paul Pillar, a Georgetown University professor and retired career CIA veteran who served as Washington’s top Middle East intelligence analyst from 2000 to 2005, the latest steps by Obama are motivated by several considerations.
“(I)t is not an all-or-nothing proposition in the administration’s eyes, and there are several reasons to make at last modest gestures in the direction of greater involvement and support for the opposition,” he told IPS.
“One of the motives is the domestic political one of having to be seen to do something in response to the incessant charges of the administration being adrift or weak or feckless. Its relationship with its Gulf allies is another one, and this does figure into relations with the Saudis particularly.”
“In addition to that, the administration probably sees some advantage in not letting the Assad regime experience an increasingly one-sided battlefield victory. [Given] how the tide of battle on the ground has been mostly in the regime’s favour in the last few months, it makes policy sense to keep limited pressure on the regime …so it doesn’t get too comfortable and to thus continue to see some necessity for negotiation and political change in Syria that would take greater account of the interests represented by the opposition,” he said.
Both Landis and White agreed that the administration’s concerns about Saudi Arabia, which aggressively promoted Jarba’s candidacy for SOC chief last year and has repeatedly threatened to provide the rebels with SAMs and other advanced weaponry that Washington wanted to curb, have been a major consideration.
Growing tensions between the two nations over Syria and possible détente between the U.S. and Riyadh’s regional arch-rival, Iran, prompted a summit between Obama and King Abdullah in Riyadh at the end of March. Since then, it appears that the two sides have co-operated more closely in support of the opposition.
“In order to keep Saudi Arabia from giving too much to the rebels, we’re okaying the minimum,” according to Landis. “We can’t afford to let them go off the reservation.”
Saudi Arabia was not alone in pressing for stronger support to the rebels, noted White. “The Israelis, speaking more sotto voce, also considered our policy anaemic. And the Turks and Jordan are both beleaguered by the refugees, and we certainly don’t want Jordan destabilised. That is of great concern to both us and the Israelis,” he said.
New Gestures to Opposition Unlikely to Change U.S. Syria Policy
http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/05/new-gestures-opposition-unlikely-change-u-s-syria-policy/

Posted by: Virgile | May 8 2014 2:20 utc | 16

Related to US interference in elections and declaring some leaders legitimate and others illegitimate, there was this little bit from yesterday’s State presser, right after a question about Syria, about the activities of America’s ambassador to Lebanon:

QUESTION: Yeah. The U.S. ambassador to Lebanon has visited Saudi Arabia lately to discuss the presidential elections there. Do you have any readout for his visit, and how do you view the presidential elections?
MS. PSAKI: In —
QUESTION: Lebanon.
MS. PSAKI: In Lebanon? I don’t have anything new for you. I can see with our team if we have anything new to —
QUESTION: (Inaudible) presidential elections in Saudi Arabia?
MS. PSAKI: I didn’t know what he was referring to. (Laughter.) That would be a short conversation.
I don’t have anything new on Lebanon or a readout of that visit. You said it’s – can you repeat to me? It’s the – our U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon —
QUESTION: Has visited Saudi Arabia to discuss the Lebanese —
MS. PSAKI: The Lebanese elections.
QUESTION: It’s a little bit, yeah, strange, but —
MS. PSAKI: Okay. So – and what – I’m sorry. What were you specifically asking for?
QUESTION: To see if you have any readout for his visit and why he visited Saudi Arabia to discuss the Lebanese presidential elections, and if you have any readout.
MS. PSAKI: Okay. Let me check with our team and see if there’s anything to communicate on that front.

President? in Saudi Arabia? Oh, ha ha, our buddy is a tyrant. And, ha, ha, our ambassador is consulting with him about Saudi and American interference in upcoming Lebanese elections. Could we get back to calling President Assad a brutal dictator whose upcoming June 3 election has no legitimacy or why, not only the May 25th election in Ukraine will be legitimate, but the interim coup leadership is legitimate?

Posted by: Rusty Pipes | May 8 2014 2:35 utc | 17

Rather interesting article on Jordan’s response to returning Jordanian fighters from Syria — there’s now a near zero-tolerance policy — in that they are arrested, tried, sentenced to a couple years in prison and kept in tightly control prison cells for the duration. Still these veterans seem poised to cause trouble to “the Kingdom” in the future … Jerusalem Post: Jordanian jihadis returning from Syrian war rattle Hashemite kingdom.
They have also amended their anti-terror law and appear to have instituted what may be a shoot first, ask questions later about people found “infiltrating” into Jordan (how they can tell Jordanian returnees from “bad guys” I’m uncertain, but it all seems “designed” to make the militants more miltant) Jordan amends anti-terror law

Posted by: Susan Sunflower | May 8 2014 2:52 utc | 18

After the huge explosion in Idlib yesterday, someone on SyrPer guessed the same would happen to Aleppo
Instead of underlining the madness of the people who built these tunnels and stuffed them with explosives, Le Monde has a cynical title “Large explosion in the sky of Idlib”, which is understood after the first two lines of the articles as an explosion that killed 30 Syrian soldiers (ostracized as “loyalists” by Le Monde)
http://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/video/2014/05/06/gigantesque-explosion-dans-le-ciel-syrien_4412514_3218.html
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-27323790
The Carlton hotel was built by the German and stands right in front of the Aleppo citadel. One can surmiss that the citadel has been damaged too.

Posted by: Mina | May 8 2014 8:17 utc | 19

@Rusty Pipes #17 :: thanks for the Psaki shout-out, great stuff.
Of course Saudi Arabia has no interests in Lebanon, where to start?
○ Obama Meddling in Lebanon Politics – 2009
○ The Saudi-Israeli Alliance and Piggy-back Coup of 2005

Posted by: Oui | May 8 2014 10:20 utc | 20

@17 agree w oui, great catch. the nudge nudge wink over the appalling Saudi dictatorship is par for the course.

Posted by: guest77 | May 8 2014 12:12 utc | 21

Unless you mention Hariri’s family and unknown mother, you don’t say much about KSA and Lebanese presidential elections…

Posted by: Mina | May 8 2014 12:38 utc | 22

An interesting piece by Arash Karamiat Al Monitor yesterday.
General Hussein Hamedani a former Revolutionary Guards commander
“…said that Iran has been instrumental in helping the Syrian government develop strategies in its fight against armed groups. He added that a “domestic mobilization” consisting of 42 groups, 128 battalions and 70,000 Alawite, Sunni and Shiite fighters has been formed.
“According to Hamedani, before the United States was to attack Syria, it was warned by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that rather than “weakening Hezbollah and cutting off Iran’s hand, Iran has formed a second Hezbollah in Syria.
“On the foreign fighters supporting the Syrian government, Hamedani said that while the Syrian army is “loyal,” the dangers of relying solely on the army had been seen in Egypt when the army withdrew its support from deposed President Hosni Mubarak. He said that there are currently 130,000 trained Basijis ready to enter Syria…”
I have no idea how reliable this informant is.

Posted by: bevin | May 8 2014 14:10 utc | 23

Just wanted to memorialize this story: Consortium News: UN Syria-Sarin Investigator Voices Doubts
Unsurprisingly, questions whether many of the people who claimed and were reported to have been exposed to sarin actually came into touch with sarin — that there are other causes for their symptoms in a battlefield and that many (many!) did not actually exhibit tell-tale sarin associated symptoms.
I’m uncertain at this point, also about how well the death toll is holding up. Wikipedia sez: “”Estimates of the death toll range from ‘at least 281’ to 1,729 fatalities, not less than 51 of whom were rebel fighters.”” Which is a suspiciously high discrepancy for deaths which did not involve dismemberment or alleged “tractor mass burials” (a common accusation to support much higher than investigation sanctioned death tolls). Even in a war ravaged country, burials are held and recorded, deaths are registered and records of emergency room visits/hospital deaths can be studied.

Posted by: Susan Sunflower | May 8 2014 17:25 utc | 24

Videos of the cavemen leaving Homs’ rubbles yesterday and today. All of them claim they will return and conquer the “city” “God willing”.
http://freehalab.wordpress.com/2014/05/08/and-when-i-leave-homs/

Posted by: Mina | May 8 2014 18:22 utc | 25

Very good info here. Thank you all.
Free counters!

Posted by: Tommy Long | May 12 2014 21:03 utc | 26

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