Syria revolt hampered by disunity, supply failures

(Reuters) – Syrian activist Mahmoud Ali walked for two days across

rugged hills to Turkey to collect a satellite phone and video equipment promised by dissidents in exile, only to draw a

blank. The soft-spoken teacher, wanted by the Syrian authorities for membership of the grassroots Local Coordination

Committees (LCC), had dodged landmines, helicopters, army shelling and roadblocks in his home province of Idlib to reach the

border. “It has been all in vain,” he said. “Communications in most of Idlib have been cut for three months and we cannot get

a Thuraya (satellite) phone because of the incompetence, or corruption, of the opposition on the outside.”

Ali’s story encapsulates

the logistical shortcomings of a year-long popular uprising that has morphedn in places, into an insurgency against Syrian

President Bashar al-Assad, who derides his divided opponents as foreign-backed Islamist “terrorists”.

The 27-year-old

says he wants to show the world peaceful anti-Assad protests as well as tank and artillery bombardment of dozens of towns and

villages in Idlib province which are still under fire despite plans for a U.N.-backed ceasefire next week.

Assad has

agreed to U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan’s plan for Syrian troops to pull back from restive towns and cities by April 10

before a truce with rebels and a political dialogue, but the Syrian leader’s critics mistrust his

intentions.

Militarily, the outgunned insurgents are in disarray, but a year of bloodshed which the United Nations

says has cost more than 9,000 lives has failed to quell the anti-Assad rising.

It is the haphazard effort to aid the

struggle in Syria that angers Ali and others

exposed to Assad’s wrath – 40 out of 45 of his LCC comrades in central Idlib have been arrested or killed.

Ali was

told that the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) had sent $17,000 to an operative in the Turkish city of Antakya to buy

him cameras, satellite phones and internet video broadcasting equipment, but when he contacted the operative he was given a

run-around and returned empty-handed to Syria.

INTERNAL SQUABBLING

“The SNC are squabbling and drafting plans

for a post-Assad Syria while not getting simple logistical requirements right,” Ali fumed. “The regime cannot annihilate the

revolt, but the revolt will not be able to topple it without outside support.”

Prodded by Western and Arab powers

alarmed by opposition disunity, the SNC said last week it would close ranks with its critics and help the revolt in Syria,

where activists rage at woeful shortages of medical supplies and communications kit.

SNC head Burhan Ghalioun promised

efforts to arm and finance the rebel Syrian

Free Army, but said it was paramount to support those organizing peaceful protests at the heart of the revolt.

“The

opposition’s performance has been below expectations,” Ghalioun, a secular Paris-based academic, said of the fractious

council in which the Muslim Brotherhood has a strong presence.

Human rights lawyer Catherine al-Talli, who spent time

in jail after leading a protest in a Damascus suburb, said the SNC must loosen the Brotherhood’s grip on aid distribution,

accusing the Islamists of channeling supplies only to their supporters.

“Activists like Ali with no political

affiliation have no one to help them,” said Talli, who quit the SNC two months ago.

“Outside the SNC, you have

individuals giving aid to their own regions, instead of thinking of the homeland as a whole, which weakens the revolt and

costs more lives,” she complained.

Brotherhood sympathizers disagree with this portrayal of their role.

“A

Brotherhood official heads the SNCs relief committee but they do not monopolies it, and money is equally distributed to

activists’ groups on the inside,” said Islamist SNC member Abdelrahman al Haj. “We must not forget though that the

Brotherhood has its own relief and aid organization.”

None of this has eroded Ali’s adhesion to a cause he joined

early in the revolt against 42 years of Assad family rule.

“I shouted for freedom and it felt so good, although I was

afraid,” he said, acknowledging that once-daily protests were now limited to Fridays after prayers and funerals of

“martyrs”.

Ali recalled the humiliation he had felt as a conscript in 2007 when military intelligence had forced all

those in his battalion to “pierce our fingers and write yes with our blood to Bashar on ballot papers” in a presidential

referendum.

“CORRUPTION AND BLACKMAIL”

“Everything became riddled with corruption and blackmail. The lowest

security official could throw me out of my job and control my destiny,” he said of his $200 a month teaching post in Idlib

before he went on the run seven months ago.

Ali, who used to supplement his income with bee-keeping, would bribe

officials not to transfer him away from Idlib.

Idlib, along with the neighboring province of Hama, bore the brunt of

repression when Assad’s father, the late Hafez al-Assad crushed an armed Islamist uprising in the 1980s.

Syrians were

quiescent for decades after those bloody events, in which the military destroyed Hama’s Old City, but activists say they

will no longer stay silent.

Abdelbasset Othman, 17, a high school student who helped guide Ali across territory

riddled with Syrian tanks and snipers, said 15 tanks and armored vehicles had occupied his home village of Izmarin on the

border with Turkey this week.

“The mayor went around neighborhoods reading a statement by their commander that they

will paint over (anti-Assad) graffiti and will shell any building where it re-appears. We have nothing to resist with, but we

will not be subdued,” he said.

Nevertheless, hundreds of civilians are fleeing military assaults. Turkish officials

say more than 1,600 have crossed the border in the past two days. More than 3,000 Syrian refugees now occupy the white tents

of a new camp erected in farmland southwest of Antakya against a backdrop of snowcapped peaks.

Two veteran dissidents

who fled Syria to escape a wave of killings of human rights campaigners and protest leaders said the revolution would triumph

despite the lack of supplies.

“This is a popular revolution where three-quarters of the population is against the

regime. The army is having to storm cities and towns several times over and every time the revolt picks up,” said Fawaz

Tello, a leader of the 2001 “Damascus Spring” movement who spent five years as a political prisoner.

MORTAL

STRUGGLE

“The two sides are locked in a struggle to death and in the end one side will triumph. It will not be

Bashar.”

Tello said activists in Syria had to “hold on for a couple more months as the international position turns

against Bashar and the supply problem, civilian and otherwise, is solved”.

Fellow-dissident Mazen Adi said

poorly-armed rebels were focusing on guerrilla tactics and broadening the popular support base, rather than mistaken attempts

to hold urban strongholds which were then subjected to withering army bombardments.

“The rebels tried to fight open

battles with the army and hold on to cities in the hope of encouraging more army defectors but the regime simply shelled

these areas mercilessly and the civilian population suffered greatly,” Adi said.

(Editing by Alistair Lyon)