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Rebels Claim They Seized Air Bases and a Dam in Syria
Rebels Claim They Seized Air Bases and a Dam in Syria
(about 9 hours later)
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Fresh from declaring that they had seized an important military airport and an air defense base just outside Damascus, Syrian rebels on Monday said they overran a hydroelectric dam in the north of the country, adding to a monthlong string of tactical successes — capturing bases, disrupting supply routes and seizing weaponry — that demonstrate their ability to erode the government’s dominance in the face of withering aerial attacks.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — At a hydroelectric dam on the Euphrates River on Monday, Syrian rebels relaxed in the operations room, checking a computer screen, sipping tea and projecting confidence after driving off government forces and seizing crates of rocket-propelled grenades. All of this was proudly recorded and quickly uploaded for the world to see.
The battlefield advances coincided with fresh claims of bloody events on the ground, with rebels saying a government airstrike on Sunday killed several schoolchildren in a playground. Video from the playground, which activists said was taken in the village of Dayr al-Asafir close to the Marj al-Sultan air base, showed at least half a dozen children who were dead or wounded from what activists said was a cluster bomb. The asphalt was pockmarked and littered with bomb casings.
Swarming the heavily guarded dam was the latest in a monthlong string of tactical successes in which rebels have raided government installations, including numerous air bases, from northern Syria to the suburbs of Damascus. The raids allowed the rebels to boast of their growing effectiveness, undercut the morale of government forces and reinforce their arsenals.
On the ground lay two children: a young girl, identified as Anoud Mohammed, in a purple sweatsuit, and a child who appeared to be a toddler in a red sweater, their eyes open and staring. Around them people were carrying the limp bodies of other children whose bare feet were smeared with blood, as a woman knelt beside Anoud and screamed at the sky. In a later video, Anoud lay dead in a hospital.
But what they are not necessarily seeking is to hold the bases they hit. Instead, rebels have shifted tactics, fighters and analysts say, seizing outposts, then often abandoning them, to deny government air power a target for retaliation. Rebels say they have learned from recent mistakes, after seizing neighborhoods only to draw devastating airstrikes that killed civilians and alienated supporters. Now, they focus less on conquering territory than on turning a war of attrition to their advantage, forcing the state to bleed.
“What’s her fault, this child?” a man’s voice shouted. “What’s her fault, Bashar, this little girl?”
In the past month, fighters have overrun a half-dozen bases around Damascus, Syria’s capital; two in the country’s eastern oil-producing area; and the largest military installation near the country’s largest city, Aleppo. They have focused on challenging air power, their deadliest foe, by harassing some air bases, ransacking others and seizing antiaircraft weapons.
On Monday, the conflict was reported once again to have spilled beyond Syria’s border, drawing in Turkish antiaircraft gunners who were said by the insurgents to have opened fire on a government warplane that appeared to have entered Turkish airspace as it attacked rebel positions in the Syrian town of Atma, just across the 550-mile Turkish-Syrian border.
They are continuing to fight even in areas crucial for the government, like the ring of suburbs around Damascus and the commercial hub of Aleppo and its supply routes.
According to two antigovernment Syrian opposition groups — the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordinating Committees — and a fighter on the ground, who gave his name only as Saado, the Turkish fire deterred an attack on an area that includes a rebel headquarters and a camp for internally displaced Syrians. But there was no confirmation of the episode from Turkey, and the Syrian state news agency did not refer to the rebels’ claims.
“Rebels are learning,” said Ahmad Kadour, an activist in Idlib, reached through Skype. When they capture a base, he said, “they take the machinery and the weapons and leave right away, because the regime is always shelling the places it used to control.”
Government warplanes also attacked the Bab al-Hawa border crossing at the Turkish border, an area where rebels have enjoyed control for several months, according to an antigovernment activist in Turkey. Many internally displaced Syrians have taken refuge in the area and fled in terror from the fighting, said the activist, who gave his name as Abu Zaki. The strike showed the government’s ability to strike at will from the air even in rebel-held territory where it has no control on the ground.
Yet the tactical gains appear unlikely to lead to a sudden shift that collapses the government, analysts say. Rather, they say, a de facto split of Syria is hardening with the government slowly shrinking the area it tries to fully control a swath running from Damascus north along the more-populated western half of the country to Latakia, the ancestral province of President Bashar al-Assad.
Syria and Turkey have exchanged mortar fire on numerous occasions in recent months, and Turkey, a NATO member, has requested that the alliance provide it with Patriot antimissile batteries, a possible step toward creating a de facto no-fly zone in northern Syria to protect rebels from Syrian government air attacks. Turkey has come under criticism from Russia and others for the request.
The government is still strong in core areas, analysts say, and even when it cedes control of the ground to rebels, as in parts of northern Syria and growing areas of the thinly populated east, it retains, the power to strike from the air. And, analysts warn, even if the army abandons some areas, that could simply open the way to fighting among sectarian and political factions.
On Monday, Turkey’s military insisted that the Patriot missiles would be used only to defend Turkish territory. “Deployment of air and missile defense systems is a measure solely against potential air and missile threats that might come from Syria,” said a statement posted on the Turkish Army’s Web site. “It is out of question for it to be used either for a ‘no fly zone’ or an offensive operation.”
Yezid Sayigh, an analyst of Arab military affairs at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, said that the loss of bases near Damascus, like the helicopter base that rebels seized on Sunday, is more significant than losses in the rebel-dominated north and isolated northeast, where the army has partly melted away, leaving the reduced forces vulnerable. The government’s main focus is holding Damascus and a corridor northward through the cities of Homs and Hama to coastal Latakia, analysts said.
A group of NATO experts was expected to start assessing Turkey’s 550-mile southern border with Syria to identify sites for possible bases, and determine staffing and other technical details. The foreign troops that would accompany the Patriot systems would be subject to a special agreement, the statement said.
“By contracting the core areas they seek to defend, regime forces can extend their ability to fight,” Mr. Sayigh said. “And regime forces have not yet lost their ability to escalate the level of violence.”
On Monday, amateur video, which could not be verified, showed what was purported to be rebel soldiers ransacking boxes of captured weapons, including hand grenades and rocket-propelled grenades at the Tishreen Dam near the town of Menbej. “Here are your spoils, Bashar,” a voice can be heard saying, referring to President Bashar al-Assad. “Here are your weapons, Bashar. God is great,” a rebel exclaims as two men are filmed carrying off a trunk of munitions.
Still, rebel actions are imperfectly coordinated, and it was unclear whether they planned to hold the Tishreen Dam near Aleppo. It is an important source of electric power and one of two major crossings between Aleppo and the eastern provinces.
Rebel forces had been besieging the dam’s defenses on the Euphrates River for days.
Even as they celebrated its capture, there came a reminder of the risks of victory: warplanes bombed the Bab al-Hawa border crossing into Turkey, an area the rebels have controlled since July. The strikes scattered people who had taken shelter there after fleeing their homes elsewhere in Syria, said a fighter in the area who goes by the nickname Abu Zaki.
The footage seemed to have been recorded in darkness. The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which compiles its reports from militants on the ground, said the rebels overran the facility before dawn. The dam supplies electricity to several parts of Syria, the activists said, and lies on an axis between the northern provinces of Raqa and Aleppo, apparently broadening the rebels’ potential supply lines in northern Syria.
Tactics have often shifted throughout the conflict, which is approaching the two-year mark. It began as a peaceful protest movement. After security forces fired on demonstrators, sporadic insurgent attacks began. The government pursued pockets of rebels across the country, only to have them pop up again elsewhere. Last summer, the government withdrew to strong points, increasingly relying on air power and artillery to smash areas that rebels had seized.
Another clip, posted on the Internet and apparently recorded later when the sun had risen, showed several rebel fighters relaxing in the dam’s control room, while one of them checks a computer and another man serves tea.
The rebels have changed their tactics, too. Col. Qassem Saadeddine, the head of the military council of the loose-knit Free Syrian Army rebel umbrella group in Homs, said there was a concerted strategy to attack key bases and withdraw with weaponry. But, he said, where possible, rebels leave guards to prevent troops from using the bases again.
While the rebels called the reported capture of the dam a strategic victory, it was not clear whether they were able to operate it or to withstand a government counterattack.
“They just control the areas the tanks stand on,” he said in an interview from Turkey. “The regime is pulling out its forces from the provinces to the capital.”
Over the past month, rebels have seized or damaged major military bases around the country, making off with armored vehicles, antiaircraft weapons and other equipment they desperately need to break the stalemate in the grinding conflict, which has taken more than 30,000 lives. But they have not tried to hold all of the bases, as they become easy targets for government airstrikes.
The rebel victories create opportunities, and dangers, as well.
The capture of the air base near Damascus, Marj al-Sultan, on Sunday could be significant because it was one of the principal bases used by the Syrian Air Force’s fleet of Mi-8 helicopters, said Joseph Holliday, a senior analyst covering Syria for the Institute for the Study of War in Washington. The government relies on the aircraft to resupply army units and to carry out bomb and rocket attacks, especially in the north, where government forces are increasingly isolated and air power is the main way to harass the rebels.
After they took Base 46, a large base outside Aleppo, rebels won a political victory by restoring power that had been cut in pro-rebel areas. “The heater or the Internet or the TV? — I’m running around confused,” said Najid, an activist in Binnish in Idlib Province. “I wish I could save electricity in boxes or containers, like water.”
Still, despite videos of rebels seizing weapons caches, analysts said the recent successes appeared unlikely to produce a sudden shift in the balance of power, since the government seems to be consolidating its forces to defend core areas.
But when rebels took over oil fields in the eastern province of Deir al-Zour, chaos ensued, with residents siphoning oil without safety precautions and selling it for far less than its value, said an activist there, reached by Skype.
Mr. Holliday said the events of recent weeks underscored the arc of the conflict since late spring: The rebels have been gaining strength and becoming more organized, he said, and the government forces have been slowly contracting under pressure.
Majed, an activist in Aleppo, was angry that rebels had captured the dam. He doubted they would be able to pay the foreign experts and technicians running it, and feared large regions would lose electricity. Worse, he said, the government might shell it, drowning villages.
The government’s continued loss of bases, however, raises questions about how long it will be able to operate in the northern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo.
“The regime destroyed have the country,” he said. “They won’t stop at a dam.”
“The real question,” Mr. Holliday said, “is when the regime will start to pull out of the north.”
Hwaida
Saad and Hania Mourtada contributed reporting from Beirut, and Hala Droubi from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Rebels have assaulted Taftanaz air base in Idlib, and captured two major bases and an oil field in the eastern province of Deir al-Zour and a large base outside Aleppo, Syria’s largest city.
Striking at government air power is militarily and psychologically important for the rebels, for whom aircraft pose a significant threat because of their firepower and unlimited reach. Yet the rebels have so far been unable, because of international reluctance and opposition disunity, to obtain significant amounts of antiaircraft weaponry that could help them turn the tide in the conflict, which began as a protest movement and gradually turned into a civil war after soldiers fired on demonstrators.
On Monday, France said it had allocated $1.5 million in emergency aid for the new umbrella group for the opposition, the Syrian National Coalition.
“The humanitarian situation in Syria is deteriorating," the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said in a statement, according to Agence France-Presse. “It is imperative that the international community act France, which was first to recognize the coalition as the sole legitimate representative of the Syrian people, now wants to help it come to the aid of its countrymen in distress."
The battle for the air base on Sunday was part of a day of intense military activity that showed the level of chaos that has come to be expected even near the heart of President Bashar al-Assad’s government.
By day’s end, rebels claimed to have seized three military installations, including the Marj al-Sultan airfield, and 11 mobile antiaircraft guns,.
On Sunday evening, according to antigovernment activists and videos, rebels took over the base of the Rahbeh air defense battalion in Deir al-Suleimen, which housed antiaircraft weapons. In a video said to have been shot there, the voice of a man off camera trembled with excitement as he showed a row of armored vehicles, which he said were Russian-made “Shilka” antiaircraft weapons. In the dark it was unclear if the weapons were what the rebels claimed or whether they could use them.
Rebels also seized a training facility in nearby Douma that belonged to a pro-Assad Palestinian group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, whose members have clashed recently with rebels, according to an activist reached in Douma and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The activist said that government security troops and Palestinians inside the facility were released after turning over their weapons.
The rebel claims were impossible to verify because of the Syrian government’s restrictions on journalists.
Anne Barnard reported from Beirut, C.J. Chivers from the United States, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Reporting was contributed by Hwaida Saad, Hania Mourtada and Hala Droubi from Beirut
