The Syria Analysis Thread

10 posts

Fitz
Ahrar al-Sham claims assassination of general

BEIRUT: The Islamist militia Ahrar al-Sham released a video Monday purporting to show the assassination of a Syrian general in Damascus via an explosive device in his car. The one-minute video appears to be taken from across the street from the explosion, in the eastern neighborhood of Bab Touma. The general, identified in news reports as Ali Darwish, is accompanied by two other men in uniform and the video shows them walk a short distance and get into a SUV, which explodes in a fireball, apparently without injuring anyone in the vicinity. Assassinations of military officers in the capital have been rare during the course of the four-year-old war. Pro-regime Internet media news outlets also reported the incident.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/VHzXqJHcwck
Fitz
Bruising week for Syria’s Assad as troops suffer losses

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FILE - In this Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2015 file photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA, Syrian President Bashar Assad gestures during an interview with the BBC, in Damascus, Syria. (SANA, File/Associated Press)

By Bassem Mroue and Zeina Karam | AP April 2 at 3:52 PM

BEIRUT — It was a bruising week for Syria’s Bashar Assad. The rapid collapse of his forces on two fronts in the north and south brought the opposition its biggest victories in two years, raising serious questions about the president’s ability to fend off increasingly sophisticated rebel campaigns.

After losing the capital of Idlib province in northwestern Syria this week, government forces on Thursday lost major ground in the south, where rebels captured the only functioning border crossing with Jordan, a crucial gateway for Syria’s government.

For some observers, the successive losses represent a shift in Syria’s four-year civil war — suggesting Assad’s forces were overstretched and pointing to a new unity and assertiveness by opposition forces, which had long been plagued by divisions.

The opposition drive is being led largely by al-Qaida’s branch in Syria, the Nusra Front. The group has long been among the strongest opposition forces, and in the recent moves it has shown greater coordination with other rebel factions. All told, the Nusra Front and its rival, the Islamic State group, now control roughly half of Syria, raising concerns about the country’s future.

On Wednesday, Islamic State militants made their deepest foray yet toward Damascus, briefly seizing parts of a Palestinian refugee camp on the edge of the Syrian capital.

While they do not yet threaten Assad’s hold on power, the rebel gains are likely to raise further questions among frustrated supporters about his ability to end the war.

“The apparent collapse of government defenses in Idlib has punched a gaping hole in the government’s narrative of approaching victory and boosted the opposition politically as well as militarily, spelling trouble for Bashar Assad,” wrote Syria expert Aron Lund in an article published on the Syria Comment blog.

On Thursday, plumes of smoke billowed from the Syrian side of the border with Jordan, as Syrian warplanes and helicopters bombed the areas, trying to slow down the advances by rebels who seized the Nasib border crossing.

Nasib is an important route for Damascus to get essentials and for merchants and businessmen as a way to export to the Gulf. A prolonged closure will increase the stranglehold on an economy ravaged by four years of war. Last week, rebels captured the strategic nearby town of Busra Sham, posing in front of its historic citadel and Roman theater in another punch to government supporters.

The biggest blow to the government however, came from the north with the rebel capture of the city of Idlib last weekend after a four-day assault.

The government had held the mainly Sunni city since Syria’s conflict began four years ago even as most of the surrounding countryside fell into rebel hands. Damascus had often boasted of keeping hold of all the provincial capitals with the exception of Raqqa, in the east, which fell in 2013 and is now the de facto capital of the Islamic State group.

The Idlib attack was led by a coalition of rebel forces led by Nusra, along with the hard-line Ahrar al-Sham and Jund al-Aqsa groups, believed to be largely backed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In an audio statement Wednesday, Nusra’s leader Abu Muhammed al-Golani said Idlib would be ruled by Islamic Shariah law but vowed that his group would not seek to monopolize power in the city, urging rebels to remain united.

According to some activists, the groups have received an infusion of new weapons and logistical support meant to pressure Assad and his Iranian backers as part of the Sunni-Shiite proxy war playing out in the region, with Yemen as its latest arena.

“There is no question that we live in an interactive region,” said Hilal Khashan, political science professor at the American University of Beirut, adding that the Saudis were pushing via Jordan for the rebel offensive in southern Syria.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said Tuesday that Arabs and other states should work to establish “a military balance on the ground to force the butcher of Damascus to respond to a peaceful solution at a time he is insisting on military victory.”

In the Idlib offensive, the Syrian government accused Turkey of opening the way for thousands of rebels to reach the battle zone.

An estimated 4,000 to 5,000 rebels are believed to have taken part in the attack under a unified command known as Jaysh al-Fateh, or Conquest Army, storming the city from three sides. They were supported by heavy weaponry seized from defeated government forces and reportedly used U.S.-made advanced TOW missiles seized from moderate rebels in earlier clashes.

Pro-government media said Turkish forces jammed Syrian army telecommunication systems in Idlib, contributing to the collapse in defenses.

Within four days, the militants were in control of the city of 165,000 people, as thousands of its residents fled for safety in government-held areas.

“It was a real war,” said a pro-government Sunni resident who fled shortly before Idlib fell. He described hundreds of “bearded men” — a reference to Islamic militants — arriving in the city.

“I left in the last moment when I realized my end will be death. We did not want to die this way,” he said by phone, asking that his name not be made public for fear militants might harm relatives still in Idlib.

The fighters who moved in were organized and refrained from flagrant acts of provocation, though several residents reported that militants entered Idlib’s Saint Mary Orthodox church, made the Islamic call for prayers and detained and humiliated a local priest.

Strategically, the capture of Idlib helps open the way for rebels to put more pressure on government forces in the nearby province of Aleppo, as well as the coastal Latakia province that includes Assad’s hometown.

The rebel wins in part reflect the back-and-forth nature of the war from the start.

Still, it is definitely a change from not long ago when Assad’s forces had momentum and seemed unbeatable. The battle for Idlib also underscored how deeply the government relies on Shiite militiamen and Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas. They were not present in the battle to back up Assad’s forces in the city.

“The battle was an important test of the regime’s ability to execute its military strategy, and the test failed,” wrote Jeffrey White, an analyst with The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

A Middle East-based Western diplomat said Assad is being challenged internally by growing dissatisfaction among the government’s own support groups because of his unwillingness to enter into a political settlement, the downward economic situation and high death toll, particularly among his own Alawite constituency.

Still, the diplomat said there is nothing to suggest that would shake the government’s “either us or nothing” line when it comes to a political settlement. He spoke on condition of anonymity as he wasn’t authorized to brief journalists.

Lund said Assad’s forces have been taken down a notch.

“It seems that Assad is still trying to bite off more of Syria than he can swallow,” he wrote. The Idlib defeat “underlines how dangerously overstretched his regime has become.”
Fitz
In Syria's war, Alawites pay heavy price for loyalty to Bashar al-Assad

The Alawites, the Assad family's sect, have seen up to a third of their young men killed in the Syrian conflict and mothers are now refusing to send their sons to war.

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A rebel fighter shoulders a weapon as he moves with others towards their positions in the Selma region of the Jabal al-Akrad area in Syria's northwestern Latakia province Photo: REUTERS

By Ruth Sherlock , Beirut

7:00AM BST 07 Apr 2015

In the Assad regime's heartland, dead officers are sent home in ambulances, while the corpses of ordinary soldiers are returned in undecorated pick-up trucks.

Then come the press gangs: military recruiters raid houses to find replacements by force for the dwindling ranks of Syria 's military.

Sharing their sect with President Bashar al-Assad , Alawites have long been the core constituency for the Syrian regime . As the civil war drags into its fifth year , the minority sect is seen by opposition rebels as remaining unwaveringly loyal.

But from inside the community, the picture looks very different: as their sons die in droves on the front lines, and economic privileges – subsidies and patronage – cease, Alawites increasingly feel they are tools and not the beneficiaries of the regime.

In a series of exclusive interviews, Alawites from the coastal province of Latakia, the sect's heartland, have told the Telegraph of how they are now trapped between jihadists who consider them apostates, and a remote and corrupt regime that told them the war would be easy to win.

"Most don't have salaries now, and some don't even have food to eat," said Ammar, a businessman in Latakia. "My friends ask me: 'Mr Ammar what shall we do? The regime wants to take us as soldiers. We will die. But we don't have the money to get out'."

The scale of the sect's losses is staggering: with a population of around two million, a tenth of Syria's population, the Alawites boast perhaps 250,000 men of fighting age. Today as many as one third are dead, local residents and Western diplomats say.

[​IMG] Rebel fighters run to avoid snipers from the forces of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in the Selma region of the Jabal al-Akrad area in Syria's northwestern Latakia province (REUTERS)

Many Alawite villages nestled in the hills of their ancestral Latakia province are all but devoid of young men. The women dress only in mourning black.

"Every day there at least 30 men returned from the front lines in coffins," said Ammar, who spoke to the Telegraph using a pseudonym to protect himself and his family.

"In the beginning of the war their deaths were celebrated with big funerals. Now they are quietly dumped in the back of pick-up trucks."

The Syrian government has not published official figures on its war dead . Syrian state television mostly fails to broadcast news of Alawite soldiers killed, instead playing up the deaths of their Sunni comrades, in a bid to shore up Sunni support.

A report by the opposition Syrian Network for Human Rights published at the end of last year found that pro-government fighting groups have suffered the greatest proportion of casualties , with over 22,000 soldiers and militiamen killed in 2014 alone.

A disproportionate number of those are Alawites: "In battles with Sunni armed groups, the government doesn't trust their Sunni soldiers not to defect," said one Alawite resident, a former soldier, who asked not to be named. "So the Alawites are sent forward."

The loss of life is causing a quiet rebellion among many in the sect: vilified by the increasingly extremist rebel opposition, most still feel they have little choice but to remain wedded to the regime. But it is an alliance tinged with hatred.

A female resident in Latakia city, also speaking anonymously, said: "Mothers are caring for their children more than for Bashar, and have started trying to hide them away."

[​IMG] Rebel fighters from the Ansar al-Sham brigade hold a position on a ridge overlooking the Mediterranean sea (Ali Nasser/AFP/Getty Images)

Pushed to breaking point, and inspired by the instinct to protect, residents recounted cases where women set up "road blocks" at the entrances to some of the mountain villages to prevent the army from forcibly taking their sons to the military draft.

"They told the military commanders: 'Go and bring the sons of the big shots to war and after that we will give you our children'," said Ammar, citing one such protest where he was present.

The community is also the focus of the rebel movement, which is now dominated by Sunni jihadists who regard the Alawites as non-believers. They openly boast of their desire to "purge" what they describe as "dangerous filth'" from the country.

Alawites, who split from the Shia branch of the Islamic faith in the ninth century, believe prayers are not necessary and do not fast or perform pilgrimages. Many of the key tenets of the faith are secret, adding to their mystique but also fuelling the myths peddled by their opponents.

A tough, mountain race who were originally considered something of an underclass, the Alawites rose to power after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, when Syria's French rulers needed soldiers willing to defend the regime from a Sunni uprising. They found willing recruits in the Alawites, who were only too happy to fight their Sunni "oppressors".

Their growing strength in the military led Hafez al-Assad , a general, to seize power, which he then handed to his son, Bashar. Since then the Assad regime has enriched individuals within the sect, disproportionately appointing its men to senior political, military and financial positions.

The majority of Alawites, however, are still extremely poor.

[​IMG] Assad regime's forces air and land attack on the area to regain control over it after Syrian opposition forces seized Latakia's Kasab town (Emin Sansar/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

"Assad didn't improve our salaries during his reign," said one Alawite resident. "In my village there are only a few villas dotted among hundreds of basic houses."

As the war continues with no clear end in sight, the collapse of the Syrian economy is forcing the poor into destitution.

The regime has cut subsidies that were keeping many families afloat. Electricity is intermittent in Latakia city and often cut off in the mountains. Fuel for transport and heating is expensive and hard to come by.

Local war lords are growing increasingly powerful, as men join their ranks, refusing to be sent with the military to fight in areas of the country where Alawites have almost no presence.

In their fiefdoms, the war lords are increasingly independent. The militia leaders feel able to refuse orders from commanders sent from Damascus, according to Joshua Landis, a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma who has regular contact with Syrian members of the sect.

Several members of the Assad family, once too powerful to touch, have died in Latakia in murky circumstances, that some have interpreted as a competition by others for money and local power.

Mystery surrounds the death of Muhammad al-Assad last month, a well known second cousin of President Assad, and once a feared member of the shabiha, a smuggling mafia that emerged from the Assad family in rural Latakia in the 1980s.

Nonetheless, most of the Alawite community still believes that any actions that would seriously weaken the regime could result in their villages being overrun by an opposition hell-bent on sectarian revenge.

So, they keep their heads down, suffering in silence as their sons return in body bags.

Mohammed, the taxi driver said: "No one is smiling in Latakia now: every family has lost someone," he said. "The angel of death is working well."
SixtusVIth

One third of the young men dead? They won't recover.

napoleonparttwo
The Political Geography of Syria’s War: An Interview With Fabrice Balanche

Posted by: ARON LUND

FRIDAY, JANUARY 30, 2015 2 Groupe de Recherches et d’Etudes sur la Méditerranée et le Moyen-Orient , or GREMMO, he frequently appears in French media, where his early opposition to the idea that Syria could have a peaceful transition or that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was about to fall raised some hackles.

His research is increasingly finding its way into English, but most of it is in French—so francophone readers are encouraged to have a look at his recent work and to follow him on Twitter . Today, Fabrice Balanche has kindly agreed to be interviewed by Syria in Crisis to explain his methods of mapping the Syrian war and to present his views of the situation.

La région alaouite et le pouvoir syrien . During this period, I lived in Syria for six years. I described the sect-based clientelism that structured Syrian society, and my conclusion was that at the time of former Syrian president Hafez al-Assad’s death in June 2000, Syria found itself in the same situation as Yugoslavia at the death of its president, Josip Broz Tito, and that it was therefore at risk of suffering the same fate.

In the December 2011 edition of Outre-Terre , a French geopolitical journal, you wrote an article entitled “ Géographie de la révolte syrienne .” It described a Syrian conflict predetermined by social and sectarian factors, with an armed opposition almost entirely rooted in the Sunni Arab majority population—particularly among disaffected social groups such as the rural poor—whereas minority and upper- and middle-class areas either remained passive or actively supported the president. It was one of the first comprehensive studies of the sectarian and socioeconomic dimensions of the conflict, published long before such arguments became commonplace in the media, at a time when both sides were still in complete denial about Syria’s sectarian problem. How did you arrive at these conclusions?

I wasn’t surprised by the outbreak of crisis in Syria. Rather, I found it surprising that the country hadn’t exploded a few years earlier, given that its socioeconomic indicators were all in the red. There were social tensions related to poverty, territorial tension between the center and the periphery, and sectarian tension—and they all overlapped.

The 1991 Infitah , or economic opening, and the accelerated liberalizing reforms under President Bashar al-Assad created a social inequality that proved impossible to manage for Syria’s rigid bureaucracy, while simultaneously increasing sectarian frustrations, notably against the Alawites. The old Baathist system had by then been exhausted. Syria’s economy was in urgent need of some breathing space, but the young president could not turn Syria into a “ tiger economy .” It would have challenged the entire system of power that had been methodically constructed by his father.

We therefore moved into a civil war that would quickly shatter Syria’s fragile sectarian coexistence, which had in the preceding years relied more and more on repression and less and less on the redistribution of Syria’s national wealth.

But why didn’t the mainstream media and political debate in the West pick up on these problems until much later?

The media refused to see the Syrian revolt as anything other than the continuation of revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, at a time of enthusiasm over the Arab Spring. Journalists didn’t understand the sectarian subtleties in Syria, or perhaps they didn’t want to understand; I was censored many times.

Syrian intellectuals in the opposition, many of whom had been in exile for decades, had a discourse similar to that of the Iraqi opposition during the U.S. invasion of 2003. Some of them honestly confused their own hopes for a nonsectarian society with reality, but others—such as the Muslim Brotherhood—tried to obfuscate reality in order to gain the support of Western countries.

In 2011–2012, we suffered a type of intellectual McCarthyism on the Syrian question: if you said that Assad was not about to fall within three months, you would be suspected of being paid by the Syrian regime. Members of the exile opposition’s Syrian National Council went on TV , one after the other, to assure us that the rare sectarian mishaps were all the work of Assad’s intelligence services, that the situation was under control, and that the Syrian National Council had a plan that would avert any risk of civil war. And with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs having taken up the cause of the Syrian opposition, it would have been in bad taste to contradict its communiqués. As Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot note in their new book, Les chemins de Damas : “it’s better to be as wrong as everyone else than to be right alone.”

Was the Syrian conflict influenced by sectarianism from the beginning or did the sectarian issues emerge later?

From the beginning, the Syrian conflict was sectarian, social, and political . These three factors were interrelated, because sectarian divides are everywhere in Syria. The revolt started in an attempt to get rid of Assad, the state bureaucracy, the Baath Party, the intelligence services, and the general staff of the Syrian Arab Army. But all of these bodies are packed with Alawites, over 90 percent of whom work for the state.

You could follow the sectarian patterns across the map. In mixed Alawite-Sunni areas, the protests only took place in the Sunni areas. In Latakia, Banias, and Homs, the demonstrators clashed with Alawite counterdemonstrators. This pro-Assad mobilization was not simply organized by the government. Rather, it was part of the phenomenon of urban asabiyya (communal solidarity) that has been so well described by Michel Seurat in the case of Tripoli . In the Daraa Province, the population is almost exclusively Sunni and the demonstrations naturally spread—but they stopped right at the border of the Druze-populated Sweida Province, which did not sympathize with them at all. In Aleppo, the divisions were mainly social, between the well-to-do and poorer people, and between indigenous city dwellers and new arrivals from the countryside who lived in the slums. But the sectarian factor was present in Aleppo too, with Christians remaining staunchly pro-regime and the Kurds playing their own game, as we have seen with the autonomous cantons in Afrin, Ein al-Arab (Kobane), and Qamishli.

In the end, sectarianism began to overshadow the other parameters of the Syrian crisis.

In the October 2013 issue of the French online journal OrientXXI , you published an essay on how the divided political space of Syria is being represented on maps: “ L’insurrection syrienne et la guerre des cartes .” There, you provided rough estimates for the share of Syria’s territory and population held by each of the major politico-military camps. At the time, you had calculated that 50–60 percent of the population inside Syria—but somewhat less of the physical territory—remained under the control of Assad and his allies, while the various Sunni Arab insurgent groups controlled 15–20 of the population and the Kurds had perhaps 5–10 percent. The remainder consisted of people residing in contested areas. Could you please briefly explain how you arrived at these figures?

From the start of my time in Syria, I was struck by the absence of reliable statistical and cartographic sources. Researchers and experts would simply extrapolate from local case studies or from generalized province-level data. So I began by giving myself the task of constructing a geographic information system based on Syrian censuses and topographic maps.

Now, I have a database of population statistics in 6,000 Syrian localities, as well as neighborhood-level databases for the ten major cities. This allows me to quantify the percentage of the population that is under the control of the rebels, the Kurds, and the government, although it will be in the form of rough estimates, because we have so little information on the geographic origin of refugees and internally displaced persons.

The Orient XXI figures were based on the military situation in early summer 2013 and much has happened since. Could you give us your best estimates of how much territory and population is under the control of the different parties today?

First of all, there has been a great refugee exodus out of Syria. The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) currently puts the number of Syrian refugees at around 3.7 million , but we can probably add one million others who have not been listed as refugees, because they’re wealthy enough to avoid it or because they have crossed the border clandestinely.

In Syria, there now remain around 18 million inhabitants who have not perished in the war or fled the country. They are distributed thus: 3–6 million in rebel-held areas, 10–13 million in government-held areas, and 1–2 million in the Kurdish region.

The disparity is related to internal displacement. Internally displaced persons now number at least 6.5 million according to UNHCR, although we know that this figure is underestimated by all sides for the purpose of obtaining more humanitarian aid. The origins of refugees outside Syria is easier to determine, because they are registered by UNHCR, but it is difficult with the internally displaced. However, it seems clear that most of the population movement inside the country is headed away from insecure and impoverished rebel-held territory toward more stable and economically functioning government-controlled areas.

It is easier to give a percentage figure for the amount of territory held by the different camps, but note that this doesn’t give a good understanding of military realities, because a vast rural area is less strategically relevant than the major cities or the principal axes of communication.

The Syrian government currently controls around 50 percent of the territory, but it rules between 55 and 72 percent of the population left inside Syria. The rebels control 45 percent of the territory and 17–34 percent of the population, while the Kurds control no more than 5 percent of the territory with 5–10 percent of the population.

Because both UNHCR reports and other data show that a large majority of refugees and internally displaced persons come from the rebel-held zones, we may refine our figures a bit and conclude that more than two-thirds of the Syrian population still left in the country resides in government-held territory and less than one-quarter in the rebel-held zone. But it is difficult to be any more exact than that.

If we take a closer look at those 45 percent of Syria’s territory and 17–34 percent of the population under Sunni rebel control, we know that there are hundreds of different groups operating in these areas. Could you provide some detail on this? For example, the so-called Islamic State is now at war with most of the rest of the rebellion and it has emerged as an entirely separate fighting force. So how much of Syria does the Islamic State actually control?

It is difficult to know which territories are controlled by rebel groups like Ahrar al-Sham, the Nusra Front, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), or other such factions. The Islamic State is easier, because it is the sole group in its territory. It currently controls around 30 percent of Syria’s territory, although this includes vast desert areas. The population under the Islamic State’s rule can be estimated at between 2 million and 3.5 million people, which translates into something like 10–20 percent of Syria’s current population.

By adding up groups like Ahrar al-Sham, the Nusra Front, the Islam Army, and the various FSA factions, we arrive at perhaps 15 percent of the territory and between 1 million and 2.5 million people, although political control remains divided among or shared by many different groups. Again, the population density differs considerably between different areas. For example, the Islam Army controls a very small territory in the East Ghouta region outside Damascus, which represents less than 0.1 percent of Syria’s surface territory. But this area is densely inhabited and contains perhaps 350,000–500,000 people, meaning that the Islam Army controls 2–3 percent of the Syrian population.

http://carnegieendowment.org/syriaincrisis/?fa=58875&reloadFlag=1


Already linked in the article, but for any fellow French speakers here is Prof. Balanche's work. It's pretty well done.

https://mom.academia.edu/FabriceBalanche
Fitz
Frantic Message as Palmyra, Syria, Fell: ‘We’re Finished’

By ANNE BARNARD and HWAIDA SAADMAY 21, 2015

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BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Syrian Army soldier had long served in Palmyra, but he was on leave when he heard that Islamic State militants had attacked a village northeast of the desert city, killing dozens of his comrades. He sent frantic text messages, trying to reach them. No one answered.

He shared his anguish last week in a series of texts as he slowly pieced together bits of the story from survivors of the massacre. Soldiers told him they had run out of ammunition. One officer radioed to headquarters, “We’re finished.” Worst of all, the soldier said, was the photograph he was shown of the decapitated body of a friend, the 19-year-old daughter of a Syrian general.

Within a matter of days this week, the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL, seized with apparent ease the cities of Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria , in both cases seemingly coming out of nowhere to rout government forces. On Thursday, the militants were digging in, consolidating their grip and executing people with ties to the old order.

Yet a closer look at the two battles shows the group following a longer-term strategy, in both cases biding its time, taking territory mainly from other insurgent groups. Then, after years of war, attrition and corruption had left the government forces demoralized and, particularly in Syria , hollowed out, it attacked, overrunning them.

Palmyra was a place where tensions had long simmered, a mainly Sunni tribal city where a local rebellion was put down early in the war, and where relations between residents and security forces were complex. A young officer serving there from the Alawite heartland had confessed a year earlier that he felt no connection to the population and feared residents would kill him the first chance they had.

Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, Iraq’s Sunni heartland, was also divided in its loyalties.

Those problems were on display in Palmyra before and during Wednesday’s rout. Residents were caught between the latest Islamic State onslaught and what sometimes seemed like a haphazard government response. The scenes of chaos that unfolded belied the Syrian state news media’s claim that government forces had withdrawn only after taking families to safety.

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Residents — supporters and opponents of President Bashar al-Assad — described officers fleeing, leaving civilians and lowly conscript soldiers to fend for themselves. One business owner said he watched pro-government militiamen run helter-skelter into orchards, not sure where to retreat. “Treason,” he called it.

Residents videotaped airstrikes coming close to the town’s medieval citadel and wondered why the militants had not been bombed earlier — by the government or, for that matter, by the United States-led coalition waging a parallel air war against them — while they were traversing miles of open desert roads.

But most of all, they said, they had lost any sense that the government could provide safety even to its loyalists. On Thursday, after the militants had taken over the city and begun executing people they deemed close to the government, many residents cowered in their houses and basements, terrified of militants in the streets and of government shelling and airstrikes from the sky.

Some found it ominous that the state news media had incorrectly declared that most civilians had been evacuated, perhaps an excuse to increase airstrikes.

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A vehicle left behind as the Islamic State took Palmyra from Syrian government forces. Credit Reuters

“I can foresee the regime bombarding the town massively, especially after the huge loss among its soldiers,” said Khaled al-Homsi, a member of the committee that organized anti-government protests in Palmyra in 2011, before anyone imagined full-blown civil war, let alone a group like the Islamic State.

“The civilians are terrified,” he said. “The only bakery is controlled by ISIS . The army is bombing randomly.”

Mr. Homsi, 32, a former hotel worker who uses a nom de guerre for safety, said he was nervous that the militants would seek revenge against him and other activists who oppose them and the government.

“I’m happy that Palmyra was liberated from the regime, but not happy it fell under Daesh control,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “In my view, as an activist, it is not a liberation.”

In a rare wartime visit to Palmyra a year ago, New York Times reporters met a range of people, who have kept in touch. In recent days, they provided a play-by-play view of the chaos, emotion and uncertainty there as the militants rolled in.

Khalil al-Hariri, an archaeologist who keeps his hair dyed shoe-polish black, fled his house on the northern edge of the city, which had become the front line, while his colleagues scurried to cart away ancient artifacts from the museum. On Palmyra’s few shopping streets, metal gates rolled down, shuttering businesses like the Zenobia Café, named for a legendary queen of ancient Palmyra. Omar, a fellow activist of Mr. Homsi’s, began erasing computer files that he thought the militants would find incriminating. Mr. Homsi said he had nothing to hide. Poking fun at the Islamic State’s ban on smoking, he said, “I’ll hide my cigarettes.”

Ahmed, who owns an antiquities shop near the museum, said on Wednesday that his family had packed their bags to leave town. But, he said, “The government is not allowing us.”

Expecting to head to Palmyra with reinforcements, the soldier, who is 27 and comes from a Sunni family, sent a photograph — maybe his last, he warned. But the roads were blocked. A cousin serving in Palmyra told him: “Stay where you are. God loves you.” The soldier asked not to be further identified out of fears for the safety of he and his family.

After the militants took control, Mr. Hariri, the archaeologist, reached again by phone, said that he had left with about four people. Nevertheless, he said, “most of the civilians are still there.” He paused. “What can I say? The situation is really bad.”

Another business owner spluttered in anger, “This is the army’s fault.” He was out of town when the assault came, but was unable to get his parents out.

He said his parents had reported militants’ issuing a call from the minarets for people to hand over any soldiers or government workers. Yet, at the same time, the militants were fanning out through the city to offer services. “They are even handing out bread, god forbid,” he said.

By Thursday night, several dozen people had been publicly executed, residents said.

For Mr. Homsi, the day’s events had presented him with a new power to revolt against. “We will face and confront the destruction of the town’s history and heritage,” he said. “The revolution was and will remain my life. We won’t accept oppression from anyone.”

As for the soldier, he had lived through bloody battles, but none had shaken him like the deaths of his comrades. (Thirty-five soldiers were buried in the provincial capital of Homs on Thursday alone, a resident who lives near the hospital there said.)

“I wish I were not a soldier, but a civilian living normal life, married with children,” he confessed on Wednesday. His situation, he said, reminded him of a line from the beloved damascene poet Nizar Qabbani: “Love me... away from the lands of oppression and repression, away from our city which has had its fill of death.”

Then he headed off to try once more to reach the front. He has not texted since.
Niccolo and Donkey
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Hezbollah Fighter in Syria
Niccolo and Donkey
America's worst nightmare: Assad too big to fail

Niccolo and Donkey
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Niccolo and Donkey
Turkey plans to invade Syria, but to stop the Kurds, not ISIS