Hydrablog

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/07/world/middleeast/syrian-state-tv-reportedly-attacked-as-propaganda-war-unfolds.html
August 6, 2012
Prime Minister of Syria Is Said to Defect With Other Officials
By DAMIEN CAVE and HWAIDA SAAD [Syria] [somewhere between 10-12,000 deaths the UN and other organizations stopped announcing toll] [newspapers have stopped publishing same] [however, fighting has actually increased] [the protests of 2011 slowly turned into civil war of 2012] [use psci 350] [now the civil war continues] [followup] [another indicator of turmoil inside al Assad’s Allawite regime] [PM Riyad Farid Hijab has been removed] [*]
BEIRUT, Lebanon — President Bashar al-Assad fired his prime minister on Monday, Syria’s official media reported, as activists countered that he had defected with several officials and military commanders in what seemed a further indication of disarray among government loyalists following a series of high-level defections and a rebel bomb attack last month that killed four of the Syrian leader’s closest security aides.
Amid a rush of jubilation, opposition figures said Prime Minister Riyad Farid Hijab had defected to neighboring Jordan along with at least two ministers and three military officers — 10 families in all, opposition leaders said. Al Jazeera television carried what it said was a statement from a spokesman for Mr. Hijab saying he had “joined the ranks of the freedom and dignity revolution.”
Mr. Hijab appeared to be the highest ranking civilian official to defect since the conflict started 17 months ago. The announcement of his dismissal by Syria’s official media came hours after a bomb explosion was reported at the main state television building in Damascus, the capital, while fighting raged in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, and other parts of the country.
“We welcome the defection,” said Mohammed Sarmini, a spokesman for the Syrian National Council, the main opposition group, based in Turkey. “It’s not the only one and there will be more. This is proof that the regime is collapsing.
Mr. Hijab, who had been in office for less than two months, had fled with his family before the announcement of his dismissal was made, activists said, joining the growing numbers of high-ranking generals and others who have defected as the uprising turned to civil war.
He is a member of Syria’s majority Sunni Muslim community rather than the dominant Alawite minority surrounding and including Mr. Assad. The Damascus government has routinely placed non-Alawites in positions of limited authority, while real power is exercised by the closely-knit circle around the president. According to news reports, Mr. Hijab’s home area is the eastern town of Deir al-Zour, the scene of some intense fighting in recent months.
An activist who has fled Syria and who said he dealt frequently with Mr. Hijab when he was serving as governor of Latakia during the initial protests last year described him as a soft-spoken leader who, despite being close to Mr. Assad’s brother, seemed to sympathize early on with the opposition movement. “We met on the second day of the revolution at the Baath Party in Latakia,” said the activist, Rami, who did not want his full name used because he feared reprisals. He said that Mr. Hijab agreed to keep the military and the police away from the first protests, and later, after arrests were made at subsequent demonstrations, Mr. Hijab helped get 15 people released. “He’s a good man,” Rami said.
The defection came as Iran sought to move into the diplomatic vacuum created by the international deadlock over the crisis and the failure of peace efforts led by Kofi Annan, the United Nations and Arab League special envoy who last week said he would not renew his mandate at the end of August. According to the semiofficial Mehr news agency, Tehran will host a gathering of 12 regional foreign ministers on Thursday to discuss the crisis. Iran is by far Syria’s closest regional ally.
After Mr. Hijab’s departure, the authorities sought to project an impression of control by announcing his dismissal before the opposition said he had defected. But his departure — coupled with the attack on the television station — reinforced rebel suggestions that President Assad’s government was under severe strain as his adversaries seem to gain momentum in Damascus and Aleppo.
“This is someone who was very, very close and they couldn’t keep him,” said Paul Salem, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “It doesn’t necessarily affect the basic security apparatus and the army, which is still holding the country together. The impact is not cataclysmic but it’s a sign of advanced decrepitude. It’s a beginning of an end game sort of thing.”
The Syrian government immediately announced a replacement for him — Omar Ghalawanji, a longtime official with an engineering degree who had been deputy prime minister. Syria’s information minister also said the bombing at the television station, which did not knock the station off air, was insignificant.
“Nothing can silence the voice of Syria or the voice of the Syrian people,” said the minister, Omran al-Zoubi.
Still, the explosion near a busy traffic circle in central Damascus offered another sign of the rebels’ ability to breach state institutions.
On July 18, a bomb at the state security headquarters in Damascus killed four of Syria’s top military and security officials. In late June, gunmen stormed a pro-government television station in a suburb near Damascus, killing seven employees and destroying its studios with explosives, Syrian officials said at the time.
The latest attack, two days after rebels nearly gained control of the main television station in Aleppo, suggested that rebels are prioritizing control of information in their effort to topple the government and gain international recognition.
Independent journalists face a barrage of restrictions and other hurdles in covering the 17-month-old revolt, in which both sides have sought from the beginning to seize the narrative.
The propaganda contest has pitted Soviet-style state media — mainly a television broadcast with a gray-haired host delivering upbeat pronouncements about the war against “terrorists” -- against young rebels and activists using the Internet to broadcast a steady flow of shaky, amateur videos whose provenance is sometimes unclear, but whose goal is clear: to show the havoc caused by the Syrian government and to showcase the strength of the rebel forces.
The two sides frequently offer directly opposing versions of the same events. On Sunday, for instances, videos uploaded by the opposition showed fighting in a neighborhood that the government said had been “cleaned.”
Also on Sunday, a group of rebels took responsibility for the kidnapping of 48 Iranians in Damascus a day earlier, but the rebels insisted that their captives were members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, not pilgrims as Iran’s official news agency had reported.
“They are Iranian thugs who were in Damascus for a field reconnaissance mission,” said a rebel leader, in a video that the rebels said showed the captives sitting calmly behind armed Syrian fighters. In the video, the rebels flipped through what they said were Iranian identification cards and certificates for carrying weapons, proving, the rebels said, that the hostages were not pilgrims.
The identities and motives of the captives could not be independently verified, and some rebel groups have not embraced the kidnapping or the theory laid out by the fighters in the video. Col. Malik al-Kurdi, a deputy commander of the Free Syrian Army — one of several competing umbrella groups involved in the fighting — said the brigade taking responsibility for the kidnapping appeared to have been acting on its own and did not tell the Free Syrian Army about the operation.
Iranian officials denied that any of the captives were members of the Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s Arabic-language channel Al Alam reported Sunday, quoting an unnamed government spokesman. On Saturday, Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, contacted the Syrian and Turkish foreign ministries, asking them to secure the release of the 48 Iranians.
In a statement, the Iranian Embassy in Damascus said that the abducted Iranians had traveled to Syria using a “private” tour company for a pilgrimage to the Shiite shrine of Sayyida Zeinab in the southeastern suburbs of Damascus, a mile or two from where fierce fighting has been raging in the neighborhood of Tadamon. While the video clip of the abducted Iranians showed only men, Iranian state news media said that women and children were also among those being held.
For the rebels, the hostages offered an opportunity to broadcast their belief that the government of President Assad was on its way out and to argue that Iran and other foreign supporters of the Syrian government should reconsider their allegiances.
The rebels also warned that Iranians who helped the Assad government would face the same fate: they will end up “dead or as hostages.”
The kidnapping and the intensified fighting on Sunday in both Damascus and Aleppo, where rebels and reporters inside the city said that Syrian jets were dropping bombs, were further indications of what analysts described as a widening war.
Underscoring the worsening security and diplomatic impasse, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced Sunday that Mrs. Clinton would travel to Turkey this week for previously unscheduled meetings with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other Turkish leaders to discuss the situation in Syria. Mrs. Clinton, who is in the middle of a multination trip in Africa, is also expected to meet Syrian opposition leaders as part of international efforts to intensify pressure on Mr. Assad’s government.
Also, the leader of Syria’s main political opposition group, Abdelbasset Sida of the Syrian National Council, said that he would negotiate with government officials whose hands were not “stained with blood” after Mr. Assad and his government were out of power.
His comments appeared in an interview published Sunday in Asharq al-Awsat, a pan-Arab newspaper, less than a week after Mr. Annan resigned because of a lack of diplomatic progress.
Turkey’s state-run news agency reported another defection Sunday, of Syria’s first man in space. Mohammad Ahmad Faris, 61, an air force pilot, was part of the three-man crew of a Soviet space mission in 1987, the news agency said, according to The Associated Press. He has fled to Turkey and joined the opposition, the report said.
Reporting was contributed by an employee of The New York Times from Aleppo, Syria, Thomas Erdbrink from Tehran, Steven Lee Myers from Washington, Dalal Mawad from Beirut, and Alan Cowell from London.