As many as 73 Syrian military officers — including seven generals and 20 colonels — have crossed the border with their families "seeking refuge" in Turkey, the country's state-run news agency reported Friday.
The Anadolu Agency said the group — totaling 202 people — arrived in the border town of Reyhanli and were taken to a Turkish refugee camp that houses military officers who have defected from the Syrian army.
That's not the action of people convinced Assad is going to win the war. Generals and colonels usually aren't combat casualties, so personal survival wouldn't be an issue even in a victorious war effort.
People keep saying that Assad is winning the war. I think Assad has seized the initiative of late. But I don't think he can ride that to victory if the rebels keep fighting.
And with America finally weighing in on the war (quite possibly because it has taken us many months to set the logistics for arming and training rebels, and preparing limited direct assets just in case the rebels go south or chemical arsenals become unsecured), there is little reason to believe the majority Sunnis won't keep fighting the small Alawite minority and whatever Christian and Druze allies the Alawites can keep on board.
UPDATE: Ah, here we go:
The CIA is preparing to deliver arms to rebel groups in Syria through clandestine bases in Turkey and Jordan that were expanded over the past year in an effort to establish reliable supply routes into the country for nonlethal material, U.S. officials said.
The bases are expected to begin conveying limited shipments of weapons and ammunition within weeks, officials said[.] ...
“We have relationships today in Syria that we didn’t have six months ago,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, said during a White House briefing Friday. The United States is capable of delivering material “not only into the country,” Rhodes said, but “into the right hands.”
It may not be the case that President Obama didn't want to intervene, but that he didn't want to say we would intervene before we could make good on that decision. Good on him if that is the case.
UPDATE: On the question of winning:
Israel's defense minister suggested the pendulum could still swing the other way, despite the capture this month of Qusair, a former rebel stronghold near the Lebanese border.
"Bashar al-Assad's victory in Qusair was not a turning point in the Syrian civil war, and I do not believe that he has the momentum to win," said Moshe Yaalon, who is visiting Washington.
"He controls just 40 percent of the territory in Syria. Hezbollah is involved in the fighting in Syria and has suffered many casualties in the battles, and as far as we know, it is more than 1,000 casualties," Yaalon said in a statement.
"We should be prepared for a long civil war with ups and downs."
Huh. Hezbollah has endured over a thousand casualties already? That's gonna leave a mark.
UPDATE: Oh good grief. I give the president credit for making a decision and maybe he didn't?
What we know then from the administration’s public and on the record statements is this: the White House is going to do more than what it was doing before. But we don’t know if that includes weapons or just more non-lethal aid and equipment because the White House’s point man for strategic communications won’t say—he can’t inventory—what’s being sent. All of the reporting asserting that the administration is sending arms was sourced not to Rhodes’s public remarks but to officials who because they are unnamed have no reason to fear that their credibility is on the line should their information prove inaccurate or false.
I resume pounding my head in frustration against the wall. For 90,000+ casualties we've voted "present" in the Syria War. We still are, it seems.
