Robert Fisk in Damascus: Assad's troops may be winning this war in Syria's capital - untouched by Obama's threats
Dispatch from Damascus: The killing fields remain, and truth is as rare as hope
And so the war goes on. Missile alerts may be over but the killing fields remain, untouched by
Obama’s
pale threats or Sergei Lavrov’s earnestness. The Syrian army fights on
in the rubble and the shells fly over Damascus and the road from Lebanon
is still littered with checkpoints. Only when you reach the city do you
notice how many people have now built iron guard doors before their
homes and iron gates on car parks. The claim that 40-50,000 rebels
surround the capital is probably untrue but there are up to 80,000
security men and soldiers inside Damascus and, on this battlefront, they
may well be winning.
It’s a campaign that started long before the
use of sarin gas on 21 August and continued long afterwards. But on
that fateful night, the Syrian army did mount one of its fiercest
bombardments of rebel areas. In 12 separate attacks, it tried to put
special forces men inside the insurgent enclaves, backed up by artillery
fire. These included the suburbs of Harasta, and Arbin.
I was
chatting yesterday to an old Syrian friend, a journalist who used to be
in the country’s special forces and he – quite by chance – said he was
embedded with Syrian government troops on the night of 21 August. These
were men of the Fourth Division – in which the President’s brother Maher
commands a brigade – and my friend was in the suburb of Moadamiyeh –
the site of one of the chemical attacks. He recalls the tremendous
artillery bombardment but saw no
evidence of gas
being used. This was one of the areas from which the army was
attempting to insert bridgeheads into rebel territory. What he does
remember is the concern of government troops when they saw the first
images of gas victims on television – fearing that they themselves would
have to fight amid the poisonous fumes.
Frontline Syrian forces
do carry gas masks but none was seen wearing any. “The problem,” my
friend said, “is that after Libya there are so many Russian weapons and
artillery pieces smuggled into Syria that you don’t know what anybody’s
got any more. The Libyans can’t produce enough of their oil but they
sure can export all Gaddafi’s equipment.” But that doesn’t necessarily
include sarin gas. Nor does it let the Syrian government off the hook.
The protocols on the use of gas and missiles are said to be very strict
in Syria so, of course, we come back to the old question: who ordered
those missiles fired during the awful night of 21 August?
The ancient Christian town of Maaloula, recaptured by regime forces (Getty)
Some
questions are familiar. Why use gas when so much more lethal weaponry
is being flung at rebel forces across the country? If the government
wanted to use gas, why not employ it north of Aleppo where not a single
government soldier or official exists? Why in Damascus? And why wasn’t
gas used on this scale in the previous two years? And why employ such a
dreadful weapon when the end result is that Syria – by giving up its
stocks of chemical weapons – has effectively lost one of its strategic
defences against an Israeli invasion? No wonder, another Syrian friend
of mine remarked last night, that the Syrian Foreign Minister Walid
Moallem had such a long and shocked face when he made his Moscow
announcement. Wasn’t Israel the real winner in all this?
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