Pressure Valve Off in Al-Assad’s Syria
globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com
Over the past sixteen months of bloody conflict in Syria, observers have been waiting for one key development: top-level defections from within President Bashar al-Assad’s inner circle. Suddenly, it seems a pressure valve has gone off. Pilots, ambassadors, and even one general have defected. What does it mean?
The general is Manaf Tlas, a childhood friend of Assad, and an officer in the elite Republican Guard.
Tlas’s father was chief of staff and then minister of defense, for 30 years, under Bashar’s father Hafez al-Assad. This is as close to the top of the Syrian regime as you might get. That’s why Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took special note of Tlas.
“If people like him, and like the generals and colonels and others who have recently defected to Turkey are any indication, regime insiders and the military establishment are starting to vote with their feet,” she said.
But there are some crucial caveats. Tlas hadn’t been a member of al-Assad’s inner circle for a while - he had actually been under house arrest for more than a year.
Also, he was high ranking, but he wasn’t an Alawite.