View Photo Gallery — In this image made from video broadcast on Al Arabiya TV on Dec. 25, 2012, Syrian Maj. Gen. Abdul-Aziz Jassem al-Shallal makes remarks saying he is joining “the people’s revolution.” Syrian airstrikes continue: The Syrian military continues its aerial bombardment, inflicting deadly results on civilians.
By Babak Dehghanpisheh, Wednesday, December 26, 12:39 PM
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The destruction of Aleppo: The city that used to be the commercial capital of Syria is now a site of ruin as the civil war takes its toll.
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Timeline: Major events in the country’s tumultuous uprising that began in March 2011.
The spokesman for the Syrian Foreign Ministry, Jihad Makdissi, also left the country in early December under circumstances that the government characterized as a leave of absence but that opposition activists said was a defection.
In the video, Shallal is wearing his military uniform and appears calm, saying he had left the military because of “the diversion of the army from its basic mission of protecting the country to become gangs of murder and destruction.”
In a phone interview with the al-Arabiya satellite network, Shallal said that numerous senior government officials would like to defect but are not able to because of close monitoring by the Syrian security forces.
“Many figures of high rank in the government want to defect, but the situation is not allowing them to,” he said.
Getting Shallal out of Syria into Turkey was a complicated and dangerous operation that was planned and coordinated by the Free Syrian Army, a rebel official said. Loay Mokdad, a logistics officer and spokesman with the rebel force, said that the trip took four days and involved the use of motorcycles and horses, as well as a long trek through the mountains along the border between the two countries.
“We welcome all defections and are ready to help, because there is no reason be afraid of regime retaliation anymore,” Mokdad said, adding that the regime will “end in a few weeks.”
Shallal’s defection coincides with a string of attacks across the country by the Syrian military that have left at least 100 people dead, according to the Local Coordination Committees activist network.
At least 20 people were killed Wednesday in the village of Qahtaniya, in northern Syria, when the military hammered the area with artillery shells, opposition groups said. A gruesome video posted online showed several bloody bodies, including those of children, laid out on a floor.
Despite the apparent unwillingness of both sides to lay down their arms, U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi arrived in Damascus on Sunday in the latest effort to negotiate a political solution to the conflict. Brahimi met with several opposition figures in Damascus on Tuesday and is scheduled to travel to Russia, one of the Syrian government’s staunchest backers, on Saturday.
Ahmed Ramadan and Suzan Haidamous contributed to this report.