Depending on the course of events in the showdown between the Assad regime and the opposition, US president Barack Obama may decide whether to put the Syrian president at the head of the US sanctions list or go further and denounce him by name as the man responsible for the massacre of hundreds of civilian protesters. In fact the stand taken by Obama might be critical in determining Assad's fate and the outcome of his brutal crackdown against the opposition.

Obama may announce sanctions against the Syrian president even before his May 19 speech on US relations with Middle East Muslim nations.

In fact by today, May 12, the harsh measures the Syrian ruler had ordered looked, as though they are beginning to take effect: The Syrian president is gaining ground against the insurrection and showing signs of weathering the storm.

Obama feared a second Libyan debacle in Syria

It appears the US president held back so far, because he feared a repetition of the Libyan fiasco, which caught Washington backing a lost Arab insurgency against a ruler capable of defying America and standing up to NATO.

On the other hand the way things stand today, if Obama continues to pussyfoot around Assad and fall back on sanctions, he will have enhanced the Syrian president's ability to stay in power and destroy his opponents.

Yesterday, May 11, Syrian personal presidential adviser Bouthaina Shaaban suggested that the regime could overcome such punishments as European sanctions, which listed 13 Syrian individuals without mentioning the ruler.

However, personally punishing Assad as Obama might be inclined to instigate, would be another matter.

On the other hand if the US administration would hit Assad really hard, he might be capable of venting his frustration by sending his army to fight Israel, Lebanon or Iraq.

The Syrian ruler was bucked up by the round of conferences he held with his political, military and intelligence chiefs at his palace in Damascus on Tuesday and Wednesday, May 9-10.

The general consensus was that the regime had been able to ride out the storm and was past its breaking-point.

This view was shared by Abdul Fatah Qudsiah, Director of Military Intelligence; Jamil Hasan, Head of Air Force Intelligence – both of whom are members of the ruling minority Alawite sect; Ali Malouk, Head of State Security, Deeb Zaitoun, Head of Political Security - the latter two belong to the Sunni majority; and Gen. Hisham Ikhtiyar, Chairman of the Syrian National Security Council.

They were all of the opinion that the back of the revolt was broken and only the last embers of resistance remained to be extinguished. It was therefore time to deal not only with the rebels but also any other persons who had showed disloyalty to the regime.

So if Assad does indeed clinch his victory, his hatchet men will be busy in the weeks ahead with mass arrests and ruthless punitive action on a national scale.

The security chiefs explained why they were sure the uprising was on its last legs: The numbers of protesters on the streets were dwindling day by day. At the end of April, hundreds of thousands were turning out, while in early May the figures had shrunk to tens of thousands and hundreds at most in the second week of the month. In very few places were demonstrators turning out in their thousands.

No military defections reported

Furthermore, they reported, predictions that Syrian officers and soldiers belonging to the Sunni community would defect en masse to the rebels did not materialize. Sensing which way the wind was blowing, most fell in behind their officers and obeyed orders.

The security chiefs lauded the Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt for the hand he lent the regime by directing Syrian Druze tribes to keep their distance from the uprising and Druze officers and men of the Syrian army to carry out their orders for storming the protesters.

Kurdish officers and soldiers were just as obedient.

Gen. Rustum Ghazale, at the head of units from the 1st and 5th Syrian divisions, was said to have finally quelled the unrest in the Horan region of southern Syria and its stormy epicenter the city of Daraa and was winding the operation down by going house to house to round up protesters.

Units fighting the uprising in the south were therefore freed to move into other parts of the country and cities this week.

Parts of special Syrian (commando) Divisions 8 and 11 were assigned to Homs and Hama; elements of the 14th Division to Banias, Latakia and Tartus; and the entire 4th Mechanized Division under the command of Gen. Maher Assad took up positions in the restive Damascus suburbs.

The conferences at the presidential palace ended with a decision for the Syrian army and security services to extend the Horan roundup and carry out house-to-house searches and loyalty tests in the rest of the country. This massive operation and the attendant purge of regime opponents are expected to take up most of this year.

The Saudi’s and Iran in Syria

Meanwhile Saudi National Security Adviser Prince Bandar bin Sultan is said to spend more time in Amman than Riyadh, because it is from the Jordanian capital that he is running the Saudi clandestine operation in support of the opposition inside Syria.

His proximity to the action means that Syria's protesters are not short of a petrodollar or two for organizing demonstrations. Funds relayed from Amman to Iraq and Lebanon also pay for the weapons smuggled into Syria for their use.

The Saudi prince has provided the Syrian uprising with a well-oiled propaganda machine. While foreign correspondents are barred by the Syrian authorities, Bandar's video cameras record the brutalities they perpetrate and the film is smuggled back to Amman and Beirut whence they reach broadcasting studios worldwide.

In March and April, Syrian President Bashar Assad and his military and intelligence advisers were at a loss over how to deal with the Saudi assistance rendered to the rebels. They feared that once demonstrators starting using the smuggled arms to shoot back at Syrian security forces and troops, they would touch off a wave of desertions and the army on which the regime depends for its survival would fall apart.

They finally resorted to live fire into crowds of demonstrators from tanks, artillery, commandos and snipers.

As a result, at least 1,000 civilians have been killed since the uprising began. This tops the numbers killed in the unrest in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and the ongoing revolt in Yemen and comes close to the civilian death toll in Libya's civil war.

Gen. Suleimani advised the Syrian president to invite Brig. Gen. Ahmad Reza Radan, Deputy Chief of Iran's Police force who led the suppression of the mass demonstrations in Tehran which rocked the regime in June and July 2009. He said Brig. Radan and his staff would work alongside the heads of the Syrian military and security services and instruct them in methods for dispersing armed protesters at a lower cost in life.

Assad agreed and on May 1, an Iranian military plane landed Radan and his staff in Damascus.

The Iranian brigadier is notorious for his extreme brutality toward political prisoners but also for his efficiency. He did not just sit in an office and dish out advice; he and his staff donned the uniforms of Syrian officers and worked the field.

Our intelligence sources report that in the last ten days, the Iranian police chief has been spotted in almost every Syrian hotspot, from Daraa in the south, to the Damascus suburbs in the center and Banias on the coast. Western intelligence sources monitoring the unrest in Syria began to notice that wherever he turned up, less protesters were killed, the total falling from 80-100 per day, and the scale of armed clashes was reduced by the effective dispersal of demonstrators.

That the uprising was beginning to fade, partly due to the Iranian officer's efforts, was evident in the small numbers which turned out in the streets of Homs yesterday, May 11.

I see the probability paramilitary rebels will seize areas of northwestern Syria including an increased potential for mutiny in the Syrian armed forces and that as a result that Assad's security machine is creaking badly.

It should be stressed however that so far the majority of demonstrations, in spite of the extremely violent reactions of the Syrian regime, have peaceful intentions.

The ringleaders had expected this city of one million and its outlying towns of 2 million to field mass demonstrations and were prepared for head-on, deadly clashes with Syrian armored forces. In the event, only a few thousand demonstrators showed up. The number killed by military fire was less than ten, the lowest since the army was deployed against the rebellion.

Yemen

Meanwhile Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan and Iran's Maj. Gen. Suleimani are also running into one another at opposite ends of more Middle East battlefields than Syria. Yemen is currently the most active. But there, the roles are reversed.

In Yemen Bandar has kept Yemeni President Abdullah Ali Saleh in power despite a reconciliation accord negotiated with the opposition by the Gulf Cooperation-GCC states that would have obliged him to step down within 30 days.

After two weeks of nagging, the prince managed to persuade Saudi King Abdullah to have the reconciliation accord set aside by a simple device. Ali Saleh was instructed to refuse to come to Riyadh and sign it and to stay put in the presidential palace in Sanaa.

The Saudi prince wanted him there because he considers Ali Saleh the only ruler capable of stopping Al Qaeda's advance in Yemen and of containing the spread of Iranian influence in his country.

Tuesday, May 10, the GCC heads of state gathered in Riyadh with King Abdullah in the chair to review the Yemen situation amid a fresh upsurge of violence. The meeting issued the following statement: The GCC ambassadors in Sanaa are on the ground engaging all the Yemeni factions in talks, including the ruling party and the opposition groups.

This was diplomatic-speak for the scrapping of the unsigned accord and a decision to negotiate a new agreement and new terms for Ali Saleh's resignation.

Iran is pouring out funds and weapons to keep the opposition fighting for the president's removal and so defeat Bandar's gambit for keeping him in power.

In the violent clashes which flared afresh this week between government and opposition forces in Sanaa tens of people are losing their lives every day and hundreds are injured.

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