The horror in Syria reminds us of the way the lust for power brings out the worst in humankind

"In this kind of war, it's not about winning hearts and minds. This is old-school: you don't try to win over your enemies and their family members, you kill them."

-- Jon Lee Anderson, in his newyorker.com blogpost
today, "The War Against Syria's Civilians"

by Ken

The New Yorker's Jon Lee Anderson has been reporting regularly from Syria for quite a while now, mostly online but occasionally creeping into the print edition. For months now the reports have been increasingly grim, but today's post, "The War Against Syria's Civilians," is an unmitigated stomach-churner.

It reminds me of the horror I feel when I read or hear, notably in the ongoing battle for the country's largest city, Aleppo, about aerial bombardments unleashed by the Assad regime on its own cities. It's not even necessarily the most destructive or destabilizing form of war the regime is waging as it presses its death struggle to hold on to power, but still, there's something about a government bombing its own people.

"It's becoming increasingly clear in Syria," the new post begins, "that the Assad regime has adopted a strategy of total war to stave off its collapse."

If the claims made by opposition activists are true, last weekend's mass executions of as many as four hundred suspected rebels and civilians, including children, by regime forces in the town of Daraya near Damascus, was the single largest atrocity yet committed in the eighteen-month-old conflict. There is no reason to believe that it will be the last.

At this point Anderson continues with the quote I've put at the top of this post: "In this kind of war, it's not about winning hearts and minds. This is old-school: you don't try to win over your enemies and their family members, you kill them."

Anderson underscores "the exponential quality" of "everything about Syria's carnage," including a death toll rapidly approaching 21,000. "Around two hundred people, mostly civilians, are reportedly dying every day now, twice as many as in June."

Until Daraya, the hallmark horror was the May 25th massacre of a hundred and eight civilians in the town of Houla. The new standard is four times that.

What happened in Daraya follows a pattern that is becoming chillingly routine. Last Saturday, after a withering five-day bombardment, Syrian Army forces entered Daraya and conducted a "mopping-up" operation. What occurred there can only be imagined, but the results are visible in YouTube videos that have been uploaded by activists in the days since then: hundreds of bodies piled up inside houses, in basements, and in a mosque. Many of the bodies were those of young men of fighting age, but there were also children there, and at least one toddler. Many of the victims, as in so many other body-dumps showing up in the environs of Damascus in recent weeks, bore the telltale signs of bullets to the head, fired close-up, execution-style.

Increasingly, Anderson reports, the regime no longer counts on low-tech military hardware like howitzers and tanks to isolate rebel strongholds and leave the inhabitants to the mercies of the shabiha, "its paramilitary thugs," who he says "carried out the Houla massacre" along with Army units.

[D]uring the spring, and the hemorrhaging chaos of the long Homs siege -- and assaults on Hama and other cities too -- the regime began what has become a steady escalation of the conflict by introducing to the battlefield its Russian-made helicopter gunships. Though this was sure to mean a rapid increase in the civilian death toll, it did not represent a red line for the hand-wringing policymakers in Western capitals, who had allowed the futile diplomatic efforts of Kofi Annan to stand in place of any concerted action by their governments. Nor did the killings in Houla.

So the regime felt free to begin another escalation after the spectacular July 18th rebel bombing of an intelligence building in Damascus, in which four of Assad's top security advisors were killed. That strike -- which was accompanied by audacious rebel assaults into the heart of Damascus and Aleppo, where fighting has continued ever since -- has been countered by the introduction of the regime's jet fighters into the conflict. The initial appearance of a sole MiG over Aleppo in the last week of July has been followed up by daily air strikes against rebel positions, and civilian targets: hospitals where the wounded are being treated, bakeries where Syrians queue up for their morning bread, and civilian neighborhoods where the families of rebels live.

It is a cruel tactic, as old as war itself, to target the homes of enemy warriors so as to weaken them on the battlefield. But the surging numbers of civilian refugees fleeing into neighboring Turkey since the air strikes began with a vengeance two weeks ago are a testament to its brutal efficacy, especially when modernized, as it has been here, with unbridled combat air power.

Where the regime still has sufficient ground forces and the ability to deploy them as killing squads into target neighborhoods, it is doing so, usually after withering bombing and shelling assaults. This appears to be what happened in Daraya, which had been perceived as a rebel stronghold, and was taught a lesson for its stubborn resistance. The leaflets now being dropped on other Damascus neighborhoods are printed with messages urging rebels to give up or face "inevitable death." What happened in Daraya is not mentioned on the leaflets; there is no need.

It seems clear that poor Kofi Annan came to understand that he was being cruelly used by, well, everyone involved in the situation, or not involved and wanting to keep it that way, as a lightning rod sparing them from having to think further about what to do, what to do.

The situation is mind-numbingly complex, with so many religious and political factions in crazy-quilt patchworks of alliances and hostilities on all "sides." At the moment "sides" tend to reduce to "for the regime" and "against the regime," but that masks an endless pattern of seemingly irreconcilable factions with the "sides." There's still no reason to believe that a realistic alternative to the Assad regime can be assembled to replace it.

But it's not hard to understand why the regime has dug in, and isn't likely to have second thoughts about the strategy. And I doubt that it has much to do with Assad himself, who may not be much more than a figurehead for the people around him, who have been clinging to power since the days of Bashar Assad's father, Hafez. (Bashar has, however, almost surely earned his place in history as its most violent, ruthless, destructive, and murderous ophthalmologist.) The Alawite faction behind the Assad dynasty represents such a limited minority of the country's population, and has dealt so ruthlessly with its enemies for so long in the history of the Assad dynasty that those people have every reason to be confident of equally brutal payback if they lose their hold on power.

Is it any wonder that growingh hordes of Syrians are doing everything in their power to flee the country, even if it means trying to squeeze into countries they know really, really don't want them? As the Assad regime enters its end-game stage, there's less and less reason to believe there will be much in the way of pieces left to pick up.

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