To the cheers and surprise of the people on the street, two truckloads of Syrian soldiers defied orders and joined the demonstrators in northern Syria this week — a mass defection that reveals the key weakness of the Assad regime.
After weeks of being ordered to fire into crowds — more and more soliders don’t want to shoot anymore. Many are defecting and fleeing into Turkey –including a Syrian soldier who spoke with CBS News Wednesday near a refugee camp.
He was ordered, he says, to confront a group of armed protestors outside the strategic town of Dara but found an unarmed crowd full of women and children.
“I didn’t want to fire,” he says, “so I aimed my gun in the air. Some of the other behind me, they did fire.”
Amateur video taped near Dara three weeks ago matches the soldier’s story — with peaceful protestors falling to an army attack and survivors racing to take shelter in an olive grove.
The Syrian soldier told us most of the men in his unit felt betrayed and used by the regime.
“I felt so bad these were women and children,” he says,” I thought I’d shoot myself before I shot them.”
Meanwhile the Assad regime is trying to claim all is well — staging a rally in support of Assad in Damascus — and sending an envoy to Turkey to insist all those frightened refugees will soon be welcomed home.
“Soon they will be returning. We have prepared everything for them, they have started returning,” said a Syrian envoy.
Meanwhile, eyewitnesses tell us skirmishes are still being fought in Syria roughly 20 miles south of where we are — and that the Syrian army is massed around several other key towns here in the north but has not moved in.
It’s likely that none of the refugees will be going home anytime soon. CBS News traveled 30 miles north of the border where the Turkish government is making arrangements to receive thousands of more refugees. And crowds are gathering on the Syrian side of the border.
via Defecting Syrian soldiers join refugees in Turkey – CBS News.
ISTANBUL—Syrian refugees streamed into Turkey on Monday, fleeing a crackdown in the country’s north, as Turkey’s foreign ministry convened a high-level meeting on its neighbor with members of Turkey’s intelligences service.
The Syrian military, meanwhile, said it had retaken control the town of Jisr al-Shoghour, where 120 soldiers were killed last week in an apparent mutiny.
On Monday, as the number of Syrians who have fled across the border reached close to 7,000 since last week, according to Turkey’s state news agency Anadolu Ajansi, the Turkish government dismissed media reports that Turkey was planning to create a military buffer zone just inside Syria.
“There are no such plans yet,” said Ibrahim Kalin, foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “If the number [of refugees] really goes up, then we are prepared for everything, but we have no plans to create a buffer zone.”
The Turkish foreign ministry meeting on Syria, which also included its ambassadors to Damascus and Beirut, was reported by Anadolu Ajansi.
Unrest in Syria
Despite the rising death toll from weeks of unrest, people across Syria continue to protest the government of President Bashar al-Assad. See events by day.
Turkey has been one of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s strongest supporters, but appeared to lose patience as Syrian forces triggered a refugee crisis on Turkey’s border in the lead-up to elections on Sunday, which Mr. Erdogan’s party won.
Hundreds of Syrians huddled under trees and makeshift camps in harsh rain and wind on Monday evening, said Mohammed Abdelwahab, a resident of Jisr al-Shoghour who is helping drive families from neighboring villages to the border. “We’re afraid the security forces will attack us at the border any minute,” he said. He estimated there were as many as 15,000 Syrians now waiting in makeshift camps at the Syrian side of the border.
“It poured rain and got chilly and it became a problem—the women were trying to take care of crying children, the men trying to get food,” said Mr. Abdelwahab. He said snipers patrolled villages near the border from which families were fleeing, with one man who went to get bread for the refugees suspected detained or killed.
People at the border said the flow of mini-bus traffic crossing into Turkey increased Sunday night, as thunderstorms set in and Syrian forces swept villages in the border area, although there was no sense of chaos.
In apparent anticipation of more refugees, workers of the Turkish Red Crescent, the equivalent of the Red Cross, began building a fourth tent camp Monday near the border, the Associated Press reported
Syria on Monday said the army “restored peace and safety” to Jisr al-Shughour after a military operation hunted down what the government said were terrorist gangs, and discovered a mass grave of 12 bodies of security force members. Two gunmen were killed and many others arrested in clashes on Sunday, the state news agency said.
Residents of Jisr al-Shughour on Sunday said some 160 tanks shelled the town for most of the day as an attack helicopter sprayed machine gun fire. The town had emptied out of most residents in the days leading to Sunday as it braced for the military attack.
Local residents and government opponents say the deaths of the 120 soldiers last week were caused not by terrorists, as the government claims, but by other government forces when the soldiers mutinied.
Write to Marc Champion at marc.champion@wsj.com and Nour Malas at nour.malas@dowjones.com
KHIRBIT EL JOUS, Syria — Hundreds of Syrians displaced by a ferocious crackdown on the uprising here fled to the Turkish border by tractor, truck and foot on Tuesday, some huddling in muddy olive groves without shelter and food, residents said.
A Syrian refugee in a school in Ain al-Baida, Syria, on Tuesday. The school has sheltered about 100 Syrians who have fled the violence in their towns.
The scenes on both sides of the border, a 520-mile frontier that Syrians can cross without visas, brought yet another dimension to the three-month rebellion against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. The repressive force of the state unfolded Tuesday, with the military expanding its deployment to restive regions in the north and east and security forces making more arrests, along with the consequences of thousands of lives uprooted.
In wrenching scenes, occasionally playing out under rare but torrential summer rains, some of the Syrians here spoke of the pain of flight in a region where land — as well as the attachment to it — stands as one of the most visceral notions of belonging.
“They think we are refugees, but we are not,” said a man who refused to give his name, holding a bag of bread and seeking shelter on the Syrian side of the border. “We have everything — our houses, properties and memories there. What would happen if we enter Turkey now and, when it’s time to return, find everything gone in our absence?”
The humanitarian crisis, along with the relentlessness of the crackdown, has drawn growing international condemnation, thrusting Syria’s leadership into some of its starkest isolation in its four decades in power. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, a friend of Mr. Assad’s, urged him yet again to end the crackdown in a telephone call on Tuesday.
But so far, the Syrian government, led by Mr. Assad and a tight-knit, opaque circle, has signaled its intention to repress by force what it describes as an armed, religiously motivated uprising and what activists describe as a largely peaceful protest against the withering oppression of one of the Arab world’s most authoritarian states.
Residents in northern Syria said the military had deployed thousands of soldiers and hundreds of tanks, armored vehicles and jeeps in and around Jisr al-Shoughour, where insurgents, military defectors or a combination of both fought Syrian security forces earlier this month. The government retook the town on Sunday, prompting the exodus.
Reports from the town were contradictory, underlining the difficulty of reporting with authority in a country where foreign journalists are mostly barred. One resident, a 31-year-old government employee who gave his first name as Muhanna, said the town was relatively quiet on Tuesday, with some residents returning and electricity restored.
“The army received us and offered us bread and water,” he said.
But a driver from a nearby town who gave his name as Abu Khaled said Jisr al-Shoughour remained largely deserted, though the military had set up a base in the town’s hospital to direct operations in the conservative, predominantly Sunni Muslim region.
Activists and residents said tanks and soldiers were also moving east toward Deir al-Zour and Abu Kamal, a region near the Iraqi border dominated by extended clans. Video taken by residents showed a handful of tanks on a main highway, but some activists said the numbers of armored vehicles were larger, perhaps in the dozens.
Protests have gathered almost daily in Deir al-Zour, and clashes have erupted in Abu Kamal, a town inhabited by families that span the border with Iraq and Syria. One 27-year-old protester who gave his name as Abdullah said demonstrators hurled epithets as the tanks approached Abu Kamal, asking why the Syrian military was fighting its own people and not Israel, which seized the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 war.
“Are you going to the Golan to liberate it?” he quoted them as shouting.
One local leader, Nawaf el-Bashir, said Syrian military forces had yet to enter Deir al-Zour, while Abdullah said they had already taken up positions inside the town.
Opposition activists have sought to rally Syria’s extended clans to their side, particularly the groups living in eastern Syria. Some activists speculated that the military’s deployment toward the region was meant as a show of force for a government that, at least momentarily, appeared to lose control of Jisr al-Shoughour and its hinterland.
“I think they want to signal strength to the tribes,” said Wissam Tarif, executive director of Insan, a Syrian human rights group. “But it’s not an easy environment, and the people there don’t like anyone to intrude in their territory.”
via Fleeing Syrians Take Refuge Along Border With Turkey – NYTimes.com.
Near Kherbet Al-Jouz, Syria (CNN) — As the Syrian military on Tuesday continued its relentless advance against protesters, citizens who had fled their homes for safety related “horror story upon horror story” to a reporter who managed to enter the country.
Despite the Syrian government’s consistent refusal to give CNN and other international news organizations permission to enter the country, a CNN reporter crossed the Turkish border into northwestern Syria for a few hours Tuesday.
She spoke to people at a makeshift campsite near Kherbet al-Jouz, where tarpaulins strung between trees provided the only shelter from the elements for the hundreds of Syrians encamped there. One family said they had spent an entire night standing rather than lie in the mud. One man tried to protect himself from the rain with branches and a piece of tarpaulin.
Families bathed in a muddy stream, where they also washed the few clothes they had brought with them.
Thousands of Syrians head to Turkey
Illness has already begun to spread, said Mohammed Merri, a pharmacist who carried supplies with him as he fled, then set up something of a field hospital once he arrived at the camp. “My biggest problem is the children and people with heart disease,” he said. “I don’t have the medicine for that.”
Most of the refugees here are from the region that includes the nearby city of Jisr al-Shugur, which government forces entered Sunday.
A number of people said they had witnessed bombings around the city as they fled. One man said soldiers shot at him, and a woman said she witnessed death.
The Security Council has failed, so far, to react on Syria, which I think is extraordinary and disappointing
–Carne Ross, former U.N. diplomat
Syria’s turmoil through amateur video
UN takes no action on Syria
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“They set our fields on fire, destroyed our homes,” said a woman who added that she was planning to try to cross into Turkey for protection. But others said they would remain in Syria, some hoping to find loved ones lost in the chaos, others hoping against hope to return to their homes.
Mousa, 26, said he tried to do just that a few days ago, but didn’t succeed. “I was on my friend’s motorcycle and suddenly I saw the military advancing through the olive groves,” he said. “And they started shooting at me.”
Jisr al-Shugur is not the only town in the area that was occupied by the military. On Sunday, the army also entered Dair Alzour and set up a presence in four areas of the town, an activist said. They arrived aboard tanks and pickup trucks carrying heavy weaponry, the activist said.
But protests were continuing in defiance of the military, the activist said. Since such protests started in Dair Alzour a month ago, four people have been killed and about 200 wounded, some of them seriously, the activist said. In addition, some 1,500 people have been arrested.
But on Tuesday, about 16 tanks were leaving Dair Alzour heading toward Albu Kamal, on the border with Iraq, the activist said. Residents of the tribal area have strong connections with tribes in eastern Iraq.
As of Monday, 6,817 Syrian refugees had crossed into Turkey, said Metin Corabatir of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees office in Ankara.
Amnesty International said last week it believes more than 1,100 people — including 82 children — have been killed in Syria since the crackdown started in mid-March.
As a result of such reports and the distribution on social media platforms of chilling videos depicting violence, Syria’s government has drawn international condemnation — albeit no response from the U.N. Security Council.
“The Security Council has failed, so far, to react on Syria, which I think is extraordinary and disappointing,” said Carne Ross, a former U.N. diplomat.
The United States has imposed sanctions on President Bashar al-Assad and other senior Syrian officials because of human rights abuses, freezing any assets held in the country.
The four European members of the Security Council — Britain, France, Germany and Portugal — have said the council must act. But ambassadors from China and Russia disagree, stating that U.N. action would risk further destabilizing the key Middle Eastern nation.
“China and Russia are concerned that if the U.N. Security Council feels empowered to address the major human rights violations occurring around the world, eventually the Security Council will focus on issues within China and in the neighborhood of Russia,” said Jamie Metzl, executive vice president of the Asia Society.
“The failure of the U.N. Security Council to act is a tragedy,” he said.
Some countries’ reluctance to act may be traceable to the Security Council’s resolution aimed at protecting civilians in Libya. Russia and others quickly signed off on the resolution, but — nearly three months later — efforts by NATO forces appear caught in a stalemate.
As for Jisr al-Shugur, the Syrian military seized control of the town over the weekend, a network of human rights activists said Monday.
The Syrian government gave a similar assessment. “Army units on Monday restored security and tranquility to the city of Jisr al-Shugur,” state-run news agency SANA reported.
The Syrian government insists it is stopping “armed terrorist groups” who carried out a “massacre” in the city; opposition activists say the government’s claims are a ruse to justify a crackdown on demonstrators demanding government reform, in keeping with the wave of political protests across the Middle East and North Africa this year.
Throughout Syria’s uprising, its government has described activist leaders as terrorists looking to destabilize the country. This month, the government said 120 members of the security forces had been killed by “armed groups” in Jisr al-Shugur.
But Syrian refugees who have fled to Turkey said some Syrian soldiers rebelled after being ordered to fire on unarmed protesters and instead started fighting among themselves.
Syrian opposition members, including human rights activist Wissam Tarif, also said the deaths likely stemmed from a rift within security forces.
Because of the restrictions on journalists’ entry into Syria, CNN has been unable to independently confirm the accounts.
CNN’s Richard Roth, Salma Abdelaziz and Saad Abedine contributed to this report.
