Violence in Syria shows difficulty in uniting the armed forces

The new president in Syria often talked about the urgency of the integration of the numerous armed groups that fought to bring down the powerful man Bashar al -Assad into a unified national army.

But the cramping of the violence that broke out this month in northwestern Syria, which killed hundreds of civilians, showed the extent of the survival of this goal. Experts said that instead showed that the government was not controlled by the nominal forces under its leadership and its inability to the police of other armed groups.

The explosions began when the rebels linked to dictatorship attacked Assad, the interruption of government forces, on March 6, in various locations through two coastal provinces, the heart of the Ilite minority in Syria. The government responded with wide mobilization of its security forces, which were joined by other armed groups and armed civilians, according to witnesses, human rights groups and analysts who followed violence.

Rights groups said that groups of these fighters – some of them under the control of the government and others – were launched through the governorates of Tartus and Latakia, killing the suspected rebels who oppose the new authorities. But they also recorded residential neighborhoods, burned houses and looted them and conducted the sectarian -based killings of higher civilians, according to rights groups.

The leaders of the new government and fighters now in its security forces are an overwhelming majority of the Syrian Islamic majority in Syria, while the civilian victims of this wave of violence were enveloped by an overwhelming majority, a minority sect linked to Shiite Islam. The Assad family is Alawite, and during its five decades the ruling Syria, it has often prioritized the members of the minority community in security and military functions, which means that many Sunnis link flags to the old regime and its brutal attacks on their societies during the 13 -year civil war in the country.

A clearer image of events will take place, given their geographical spread, the number of fighters and victims concerned and the difficulty of identifying them and their affiliation. But violence on the coast is a few days in Syria since Mr. Alasad prolonged in December, when chaos was shown among armed groups in the country.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights, which is monitoring conflicts, said in a report last week that the foreign militias and fighters in the new government, but were not integrated into that, were mainly responsible for sectarian mass killings and revenge this month.

The report said that the government’s weak control of its forces and affiliated fighters and the failure of these forces to follow the legal regulations was “major factors in the scope of increasing violations against civilians.” Violence also escalated, adding that “some of these operations quickly turned into large -scale reprisers, accompanied by mass killing and looting carried out by unreasonable armed groups.”

Saturday, network Arise The number of killings that have been documented since March 6 for more than 1,000 people, and many of them are civilians. Another group of war control, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, put on Friday the number of total death in 1500, most of them civilians.

There was no direct evidence to link the atrocities to senior officials in the new government, led by Temporary President Ahmed Al -Sharra. The government said it had created a fact -finding committee to investigate violence and pledged to keep anyone who committed violations against civilians.

“Syria is a legal case,” Mr. Al -Sharra said in an interview with Reuters, which was published last week. “The law will take its path to everyone.”

He accused the rebels associated with the Assad family and supported by a foreign force whose name was not revealed to end the violence, but he acknowledged that “many parties entered the Syrian coast, and many violations occurred.” He said that the fighting became a “opportunity for revenge” after the long and bitter civil war.

During that war, which killed more than half a million people, according to most estimates, many rebel factions were formed to fight Mr. Assad. Some of them meet with the group of Islamic rebels for Mr. Sharra in the final battle that overthrew the dictator.

Then in late January, a group of rebel leaders Al -Sayed Al -Sharra was appointed as presidentSince then, he has pledged to dissolve former rebel groups in the country to one national army. But he was a little more than a month when the turmoil erupted in coastal provinces.

“The unit of weapons and its monopoly by the state is not a luxury but a duty and a commitment.”

But he faces tremendous challenges in unifying the different rebel groups in Syria.

Many fought strongly during the civil war to spread the exclusion that they were hesitating to surrender. The conflict destroyed the Syrian economy, and Mr. Al -Sharra inherited a bankrupt state with a little money to build an army. The international economic sanctions imposed on the previous regime remain in effect, making efforts to request external aid.

So the efforts made to integrate armed groups It has made little concrete progress.

“Monotheism is all the fluff. Raif, an assistant professor at the University of Lancaster in England, who studies armed groups in Syria, said it is not real.” There is a weak leadership structure in its place. “

Experts said that the core of the new security forces are former fighters from Haya Tarr al -Sham, the Sunni Islamic rebel faction led by Mr. Al -Sharra for years. They have a coherent leadership structure supervised by Mr. Sharra, but lacks the workforce needed to secure the entire country.

Large parts of Syria are still controlled by strong factions that have not yet been combined into the national security forces, such as the Kurdish militia that dominates the northeastern militias and lessons that control the southeast of the capital, Damascus.

Other rebel groups allied with Mr. Shara officially agreed to integrate into the new national force, but they did not actually do so. Dr. Al -Khali said that most of them did not receive any training or salaries from the government and remain loyal to their leaders.

Other armed groups also remain unrelated to the government, as well as the civilians who armed them to protect themselves during the war.

“There was not much effort to improve discipline or even the structures of those armed factions,” said Hyde Hyde, a consultant colleague studying Syria in Chatham House, a research center in London. “What we have seen is an example of the fragmentation of these destructive and weak forces.”

When the turmoil erupted on March 6, the fighters rushed to many of these groups to join, with a variety of motives. Some wanted to put the rebellion, while others sought revenge for the violations committed during the civil war.

Many violence had a deep sectarian crew.

In the videos posted on the Internet, many fighters have distorted the family and struck them as a reactions.

“This is revenge,” says an unidentified man in a joint video clip on the Internet showing groups of fighters looting and burning homes believed to belong to Alawites. The video was checked by the New York Times.

In recent days, the government announced the arrest of fighters who see violence against civilians in the videos published on the Internet. Mr. Hyde said this was a positive step towards accountability, but he wondered whether the government would track down and punish the fighters whose crimes were not arrested on the camera.

“The military forces do not seem to have internal mechanisms to determine what to do during these operations and take appropriate measures,” he said.