Gunning for Damascus: When no one was watching, the Syrian rebels started winning.
Gunning for Damascus - by Michael Weiss
Mideast conflicts have a nasty habit of occurring all at once. And while all eyes have been on Gaza and Israel this past week, several major diplomatic and military developments have occurred on the Syrian front — some of which may prove decisive to the end game of a 20-month old crisis.
The rebels are winning. The insurgents on the ground in Syria appear to be winning more and more territory and confiscating more and more high-grade materiel from President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Just as Operation Pillar of Defense was kicking off over Gaza on Nov. 14, the Free Syrian Army took the entire city of al-Bukamal along the Iraqi border, where they also sacked two major airbases, giving the opposition a strong military foothold in Syria’s easternmost province, a vital smuggling route for weapons.
The rebels then claimed a massive victory on the night of Nov. 18, sacking the Syrian Army’s 46th Regiment, 15 miles west of Aleppo, after a 50 day-long siege. The real score, though, was in confiscated materiel: Rebels made off with tanks, armored vehicles, Type-63 multiple rocket launchers, artillery shells, howitzers, mortars, and even SA-16 surface-to-air missiles. Gen. Ahmed al-Faj of the Joint Command, a consortium of different rebel battalions, told the Associated Press: “There has never been a battle before with this much booty.” (For a seemingly comprehensive video accounting of the rebel haul, check out Brown Moses’s blog.)
The gains have only continued in the past week. On Nov. 20, rebels hit the Syrian Information Ministry in Damascus with two mortar rounds and stormed an air defense base at Sheikh Suleiman, about 11 miles from the Turkish border, where they seized stocks of explosives before withdrawing to elude retaliatory air strikes. “Assad’s forces use the base to shell many villages and towns in the countryside,” one rebel said. “It is now neutralized.”