In Brazen TV Raid, Syria and Rebels Differ Over Attackers
SANA, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The attack on the pro-government al-Ikhbaria satellite broadcaster began before dawn on Wednesday near Damascus.
By ROD NORDLAND, NICK CUMMING-BRUCE and ALAN COWELL
Published: June 27, 2012
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syria
said Wednesday that rebels stormed a pro-government television station
in a Damascus suburb, killing employees and blowing up the station in an
audacious predawn assault, but rebels said the attackers were defectors
from the elite Republican Guard, considered to be the most loyal core
defenders of President Bashar al-Assad.
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If the rebel claim is confirmed, the attack would constitute a
significant breach of security for the inner circle of President Assad,
who said on Tuesday that Syria was now in a state of war — a markedly
different description of a conflict he had previously characterized as a
crime wave by foreign-backed terrorists. The attack on the television
station also came against the backdrop of increasingly bold and
organized rebel assaults in the Damascus area and an increased pace of
high-level military defections.
It also came as Kofi Annan, the special envoy to Syria from the United Nations
and the Arab League whose peace plan has been paralyzed since he
announced it more than two months ago, said he would convene a
ministerial-level meeting on Saturday in Geneva representing what he has
called countries of influence in the conflict, including the five
permanent members of the Security Council and representatives from the
Arab League and Turkey. But the list of invitees conspicuously omitted
Iran, Syria’s most important regional ally, which Mr. Annan had wanted
to include. The United States had expressed strong objections to Iran’s
participation, contending that it has aided and abetted the Syrian
leader’s harsh repression in the 16-month-old conflict.
Mr. Annan said in a statement
that the group’s objectives would be to find ways to implement his
peace plan and “agree on guidelines and principles for a Syrian-led
political transition that meets the legitimate aspirations of the Syrian
people.”
The conflicting accounts of who carried out the assault on the
television station, the al-Ikhbaria satellite broadcaster, reflected the
difficulties that outsiders face in ascertaining the true course of
events in the Syrian conflict, from which independent reporters and most
international relief and monitoring officials are effectively barred.
Those difficulties also were illustrated Wednesday in findings by a
panel from the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, which is
investigating rights violations in Syria. The panel said it was unable
to determine conclusively who was responsible for the May 25 massacre of 108 civilians in the western region of Houla, but “considers that forces loyal to the government may have been responsible for many of the deaths.”
While the investigators accused government forces of committing
violations on “an alarming scale” in recent months, they also found that
both sides had carried out summary executions. And they determined that
the nature of the conflict had changed, escalating dramatically despite
Mr. Annan’s peace entreaties.
“The situation on the ground has dramatically changed in the last three
months as the hostilities by antigovernment armed groups each day take
on more clearly the contours of an insurrection,” the investigators
said. “As a result of the estimated flow of new weapons and ammunitions,
both to the government forces and to the antigovernment armed groups,
the situation risks becoming more aggravated in the coming months.”
The attack on al-Ikhbaria began before dawn when assailants “planted
explosive devices in the headquarters of al-Ikhbaria following their
ransacking and destroying of the satellite channel studios, including
the newsroom studio, which was entirely destroyed,” the official Syrian
news agency, SANA, reported.
The news agency referred to the assailants as terrorists — the usual
official language to denote armed opponents of Mr. Assad’s government.
While initial reports from SANA said three employees were killed, a
subsequent official estimate put the death toll at seven.
The station, privately owned but strongly supportive of the government,
is in the town of Drousha, around 14 miles south of Damascus.
The Associated Press quoted one of its photographers who visited the
compound as saying five portable buildings used for offices and studios
had collapsed, with blood on the floor and wooden partitions still on
fire. Some walls had bullet holes, the photographer said.
Hours later, The A.P. said, the station was able to broadcast a rally in
Damascus’s main square against the attack on its premises.
Col. Malik Kurdi, a spokesman in Turkey for a rebel commander, Riad
al-Assad of the Free Syrian Army, said the attack was the result of the
defection of a group of Republican Guards who had decided to change
sides and attacked other guards at the station who had remained loyal.
If confirmed, his assertion would be another sign of unraveling control
in Damascus, where violence has increased markedly, including an attack
on the Republican Guard base near the presidential palace on Monday. There was no way to independently verify Colonel Kurdi’s claim.
He was interviewed by telephone from a refugee camp in southern Turkey.
The contradictory versions of events flowed partly from the information
war between Mr. Assad’s government and its adversaries.
The government’s opponents have proven adept at offering their narrative
of the uprising through video clips showing the fighting between
government and opposition forces and the bloody aftermath. In recent
months, Syrian state media outlets have sought to use similar imagery —
sometimes identical — to bolster the government’s accusations against
the rebels.
On its Web site,
SANA showed photographs of what it said were wrecked studios at
al-Ikhbaria and quoted the Syrian information minister, Omran al-Zoubi,
as saying the attackers perpetrated “the worst massacre against
journalism and the freedom of media when they executed the Syria media
figures in cold blood.”
The mounting violence offered a telling backdrop to remarks on Tuesday
by President Assad to his cabinet, reported by SANA, in which he said,
“We live in a state of war.”
As such, he said, “all our policies, directives and all sectors will be directed in order to gain victory in this war.”
In its report to the Human Rights Council on Wednesday, the United
Nations investigators’ panel said, “Human rights violations are
occurring across the country on an alarming scale during military
operations against locations believed to be hosting defectors and/or
those perceived as affiliated with antigovernment armed groups.”
Paulo Pinheiro, the Brazilian chairman of the panel, said, “Gross human
rights violations are occurring regularly in the context of increasingly
militarized fighting.”
Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Faisal Khabbaz
Hamoui, said the panel had “fallen into the trap of prejudice” and
warned that Syria would withdraw its cooperation from United Nations
human rights bodies. He then walked out of the council chamber.
The panel warned that killings were increasingly driven by sectarian as
opposed to political motives. “Where previously victims were targeted on
the basis of their being pro- or antigovernment,” it said, the
investigators had “recorded a growing number of incidents where victims
appear to have been targeted because of their religious affiliation.”
The panel was appointed last year and was giving its third update on
developments in Syria. It said it had received reports of summary
executions by government forces, sometimes targeting named individuals
and family members linked to the opposition, as well as large-scale
executions of scores of people living in areas under attack by
government forces.
The commission said it had also received many reports of summary
executions by antigovernment rebels, foreign fighters and people
suspected of being informers or collaborators.
A Free Syrian Army soldier told the panel that captured soldiers from
the Alawite sect, from which President Assad draws strong support, are
usually executed immediately, while soldiers from other sects are given
the option of joining the opposition.
The commission drew attention to the plight of children caught in the
conflict and the use of sexual violence against men, women and children,
particularly by pro-government forces. It cited reports that boys over
the age of 14 had been targeted as members of antigovernment groups in
areas where Assad loyalists hold sway and that children as young as 10
had reported being tortured during interrogation by security forces to
admit that older relatives supported resistance to the government. It
expressed particular concern that opposition forces were using children
as medical porters and messengers, “exposing them to risk of death and
injury.”
The commission found that crimes of sexual violence occurred mainly when
government forces entered villages and urban neighborhoods searching
for rebels or during interrogation in detention. Fear of rape and sexual
assault is discouraging girls from attending schools in some areas, the
commission reported, also noting, “Many of the women interviewed who
had sought refuge in neighboring countries had done so because they
feared sexual assault.”
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