“On the eve of a meeting with the Syrian opposition, Secretary of State John Kerry said that the Obama administration was weighing ‘stepped-up’ efforts to support the rebel fighters, and that such proposals had been ‘front and center’ in administration discussions over the past week,” The New York Times reports:

Mr. Kerry said that the Obama administration still favored a diplomatic solution in which President Bashar al-Assad would hand over power to a transitional government, but that additional pressure on the Syrian leader was needed.

“The problem is you can’t get there if President Assad is unwilling to decide that he should transfer that authority, and that’s the current situation,” Mr. Kerry said. “So we are left with no choice but to try to find ways to get him to think differently about what lies in the future.”

But while Islamist sources in the Gulf provide weaponry and generous funding to jihadist opposition groups, many Syrian democracy advocates despair of receiving any meaningful assistance from the West.

“You feel as if there is too much responsibility on your shoulder and you have nothing to offer the Syrian people; just the promises from the international community that materialise to nothing,”said Dr Radwan Ziadeh* (left), director of the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies, who recently resigned from the main opposition coalition.

Washington is acting contrary to its own interests by refusing to provide military assistance to opposition combatants rather than “dealing with the symptoms” of the conflict, a leading analyst told Al Arabiya.

“U.S. policy does not deal with the disease itself, Bashar al-Assad’s rule, and his minority rule over a majority Sunni population inside Syria. Instead staying out of it just deals with the symptoms, with the refugees and the outflow,” said Andrew Tabler from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy:

The U.S. policy toward war-torn Syria involves the supply of “non-lethal” technology for opposition fighters and humanitarian aid for Syrian refugees, in a vastly different approach to the one it pursued in Libya. But it was in the interests of the United States to provide more assistance to the opposition fighters, said Tabler, who expects the conflict to continue for up to a decade.

“It is open knowledge that this conflict will go on, in one shape or form, for 5 to perhaps 10 years. It is not even debated,” he said.

 “Providing military assistance to the opposition in Syria will help the United States influence those groups and to try and bring about a post-Assad Syria in liberated areas, which is more in keeping with U.S. interests,” Tabler said.

“In truth this is why our policy has failed until now,” he added.

Despite the Obama administration’s expressed concern about Islamist extremists, neither U.S. officials nor regional allies have taken action to stem the flow of jihadists, McClatchy reports:

The foreign fighters would be hard to miss for Turkish and Western intelligence operatives – they stay at established safe houses, openly recruit comrades and often stand out with distinctive appearances and habits – yet there’s been no overt effort to crack down on their presence in frontier towns.

“Even with this growing jihadist threat, there’s a reluctance to do anything more proactive on Syria,” said Elizabeth O’Bagy, an analyst with the Institute for the Study of War who recently spent two weeks with rebels in Syria, where she encountered Tunisian, Moroccan and Algerian fighters. “The pipelines are still open and fighters are coming in quite freely,” she said.

Some observers suggest that realpolitik is driving external actors’ strategies rather than any concern to end the conflict or advance a democratic transition.

Whether by design or not, external players are indeed doing just enough to maintain a state of stalemate,” says liberal activist Ammar Abdulhamid (right), the founder of the Tharwa Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to democracy promotion.

“Syrians will not be allowed to solve their problems until these players solve theirs,” he contends.

“Islamists, loyalists, secularists, Alawites, tribalists, even nonviolence activists, all now are but instruments of implementation of agendas that they do not control or even want,” he writes.

The fracturing of the opposition within Syria is as pronounced as the sectarian divisions in exiled ranks, experts suggest.

The Syria Liberation Front (jabhat tahrir souriya), is not just a broad alliance, but “pretty much the new mainstream face of the insurgency,” writes analyst Aron Lund:

It’s certainly more important than any of the rival leaderships of the Free Syrian Army (Riad el-Asaad, Mustafa el-Sheikh, Qasem Saadeddine, etc), although given the media focus, one could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. The problem is that while the FSA factions have leaders but no fighters, the Syria Liberation Front has a lot of fighters but no real leadership. It seems to be more of a political platform than an actual alliance, and the member factions go about their business much as they did before joining it.

The recently created Syrian Islamic Front is the thing currently most worth watching. Unlike the Liberation Front, they’ve managed to agree on a clearly defined ideology, and some member factions are already merging their forces and leaderships, as opposed to merely conducting joint operations. On the other hand, the Liberation Front factions may win out because of superior backing, if they receive Western and Gulf aid in a way that the Islamic Front doesn’t. The Brotherhood is also aligned with the Gulf- and Western-backed Antalya military command, like the Liberation Front. It’s a disciplined group, and much more pragmatic and sophisticated than any of the salafi formations, but they still suffer from a pretty thin presence on the ground.

Lund is currently completing a long report on militant salafism and the Syrian Islamic Front for the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, as a follow-up to an August 2012 report on Islamist and jihadi factions.

*Radwan Ziadeh is a former Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.

The United States today pledged a further $60 million in aid to Syrian opposition forces, including food and medical supplies directly to armed rebels for the first time but rejected demands for weapons.

The additional assistance would help “the legitimate voice of the Syrian people” striving to topple President Bashar Assad, who had “long ago lost his legitimacy…and must be out of power,” said Secretary of State John Kerry.

“The stakes are really high, and we can’t risk letting this country, in the heart of the Middle East, being destroyed by vicious autocrats or hijacked by the extremists,” he said.

Assad is “out of time and must be out of power,” said Kerry.

The aid is unlikely to shift the balance of power within the opposition in favor of moderate elements which have been losing out to generously-supplied Islamist factions, say analysts.

Secular activists complain that Salafists are hijacking the revolt, a view endorsed by independent analysts.

“The role of Salafists in general, publicly, has skyrocketed,” says Andrew Tabler of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “They have a donor base, they are organized, and they’ve been able to carve out a niche in parts of Syria.”

According to the New York Times: There has been speculation that the Obama administration might expand its program of support to the Free Syrian Army to include nonlethal equipment if rebel fighters use the initial assistance effectively and do not allow any of it to fall into the hands of extremists. But Mr. Kerry provided no indication that such a phased expansion of nonlethal support was being planned ….Britain is planning to provide more substantial nonlethal aid, which could include vehicles, bulletproof vests and night vision equipment, according to an American official. British officials have been consulting with their European counterparts about what sort of nonlethal aid might be allowed under the terms of European Union decisions and plans to announce its steps soon.

Some members of the Syria opposition said they were disappointed by the results of the Rome session.

“It is obvious that the real support is absent,” said Dr. Walid al-Bunni, a member of the anti-Assad coalition. “What we want is to stop the Scuds launched on Aleppo, to stop the warplanes that are bombing our town and villages.”

The White House reportedly vetoed a joint proposal from the Pentagon, State Department and CIA to provide lethal assistance and training to moderate rebel groups.

Syrian Opposition Council leader Moaz al-Khatib criticized Washington for its refusal to provide lethal assistance.

The former imam of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus said Western media was “obsessed” with the length of fighters’ beards.

“We are Muslim fighters,” he said. “The Islam, as we see it, wants the best for everybody.” Closing with a plea for cooperation, al-Khatib said, “we are all descended from Adam,” so people should “cooperate, not kill each other.”

But many Western states fear that weapons supplied to the opposition will fall into the hands of extremist Islamist factions.

“The Syrian conflict is going to be as big, if not bigger, than Afghanistan was in the 1980s in terms of mobilizing jihadi fighters,” said Aaron Zelin, an expert on jihadist groups at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy:

The U.S. and others in the Friends of Syria will now have a harder time bolstering moderates, analysts said.

“Because it has dithered in backing the opposition thus far, the administration now faces a steeper challenge in securing U.S. interests in Syria,” Mr. Zelin wrote this month.

Syrians, analysts and diplomats are divided about the lasting influence of groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra.

“They are the best fighters, and probably the most organized. They scream the loudest,” a Western diplomat said. “But I think when the dust settles, they won’t have the majority of people on their side.”

An additional problem is that aid channeled through the opposition coalition’s Supreme Military Council will not reach the most effective armed rebels.

“The problem is the Supreme Military Council does not have tentacles on the ground,” said the Washington Institute’s Tabler. “If you provide a bunch of bandages and body armor to them, it may not matter much.”

Still, Mr. Tabler said the administration’s decision to take this step was a welcome sign that its policy of steering clear of any military involvement in the conflict was no longer tenable.

“They’re still reluctant, so they’re moving incrementally,” he said. “But the Obama administration has to look at one reality: what they have done isn’t working.”

The problem with U.S. policy is that Russia and Iran, Syria’s patrons, “are directly helping Assad to stay alive in a fight to the death,” writes Michael Doran, an analyst at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy:

The Russians did their level best to embarrass Kerry. They responded to his meeting in Rome by announcing their continued lethal support for Assad’s military. … The Russians are, of course, not the only ones providing such assistance. The Iranian regime sends regular weapons shipments to Assad, while also helping him to stand up a new Alawite-based militia. Hezbollah, in effect an arm of the Iranian Qods Force, is fighting on the ground in Syria…

Meanwhile, Washington produces happy talk about teaming up with the Russians to broker an agreement between this murderous regime and its opposition. This policy of seeking a peaceful transition is a fantasy, a snare, and a delusion. It is a fig leaf and a placeholder. It is, in short, a non-policy. The only way to get to a post-Assad Syria is to topple Assad. Until his regime is destroyed, the killing will continue.

Meanwhile, other Syrian democracy advocates are preparing for the post-Assad transition.

“Syria needs to establish a new culture of legitimacy and overcome the legacy of the past by engaging in a national reconciliation carried out through social reconstruction, the establishment of truth commissions, compensation for victims, and the reform of the State’s institutions, especially the security services and the police,” said the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

The strategies for transcending a 40-year legacy of authoritarian repression were the subject of a recent conference on ‘Transitional Justice in Syria: Accountability and Reconciliation,’ held by the Washington D.C.-based SCPSS.

The conference discussed justice centered on institutional reform, fact-finding and democracy-building, and concluded with the establishment of the National Preparatory Committee for Transitional Justice, writes Stephanie Dunning writes on Your Middle East:

‘Transitional justice for the past and institution-building for the future,’ was how Dr. Radwan Ziadeh, co-founder and Director of SCPSS, phrased his views on Syria’s transition. He went further by saying a main priority is to open an investigation into war crimes committed recently as well as over the 40-year period. This is indicative of a society in need of a truth-seeking transitional justice mechanism, such as a fact-finding commission or a historical committee, in order to ensure accountability is enforced and post-conflict citizens remain involved and supportive.  …..Ziadeh prefers an international justice approach, which will inevitably open the door to further debate in terms of sovereignty, especially when examining parallel examples, such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

“Since Syria is a divided society it is much better to go on an international level because at least that will ease the preparation for reconciliation in the future,” says Ziadeh, executive director of the Syrian Center for Political & Strategic Studies, and a former Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.

Democratic dissidents like Riad Seif are ‘being marginalized’

Syrian opposition leader Moaz Alkhatib today urged President Bashar al-Assad to enter a dialogue to end the violent conflict and help “the regime leave peacefully,” Reuters reports:

The moderate Islamist preacher announced last week he was prepared to talk to Assad’s representatives. Although he set several conditions, the move broke a taboo on contacts with authorities and dismayed many in opposition ranks who insist on Assad’s departure as a precondition for negotiation.

After meeting senior Russian, U.S. and Iranian officials at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend, Alkahtib said none had a plan to end the civil war.

“The big powers have no vision … Only the Syrian people can decide on the solution,” the Syrian National Coalition leader told Al Jazeera Television.

Alkhatib said it was not “treachery” to seek dialogue to end a conflict in which more than 60,000 people have been killed, 700,000 have been driven from their country and millions more are homeless and hungry.

“The regime must take a clear stand (on dialogue) and we say we will extend our hand for the interest of people and to help the regime leave peacefully,” he told the Qatar-based channel. “It is now in the hands of the regime.”

“We will find a solution, there are many keys,” he said. “If the regime wants to solve (the crisis), it can take part in it. If it wants to get out and get the people out of this crisis, we will all work together for the interest of the people and the departure of the regime.”

The formation of a transitional authority is under consideration, Alkhatib said, but opposition factions and international powers disagree over whether Assad could remain a player.

Walid al-Bunni, a member of the Coalition’s 12-member politburo, dismissed Alkhatib’s meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi.

“It was unsuccessful. The Iranians are unprepared to do anything that could help the causes of the Syrian Revolution,” Bunni, a former political prisoner, told Reuters.

The establishment of a transitional government or government in exile should be priority for the opposition, says Radwan Ziadeh, executive director of the Syrian Center for Political & Strategic Studies, and a former Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.

A transitional authority should be formed via a national conference held in Syria, comprising local revolutionary councils and coordinating committees, the organized opposition, and independent brigades, he recently argued on Foreign Policy:

These opposition forces should make up the majority of the newly-formed government and their role should be to determine the structure of the government during the transitional period. This would address many of the ongoing problems that the international community has perceived with the Syrian opposition, and accelerate the desperately needed process toward the end of the Assad regime and the creation of a new, free Syria.

But the new Syrian opposition coalition is neither willing to negotiate with the regime, “nor is it remotely prepared to assume power,” according to former State Department official Ramzy Mardini.

“It is facing the prospect of defections and, worse, disintegration,” he argues. “Narrow interests are taking precedence; Islamists are overpowering secularists; exiles are eclipsing insiders; and very few members seem to have credibility on the ground back home.”

“The U.S. is empowering the Ahmad Chalabis of Syria,” argued one prominent dissident.

The opposition coalition’s president al-Khatib is only “a symbolic figurehead” who “lacks the experience to play the jarring game of opposition politics,” says Mardini, is a Middle East analyst at the Jamestown Foundation:

Riad Seif [above], a key American ally and longstanding dissident in Syria, is being marginalized. Both leaders have been sidelined by the expatriate businessman Mustafa Sabbagh, whose moneyed Syrian Business Forum is suspected of being a Qatari front group. Mr. Sabbagh is virtually unknown to most Syrians because he has long been based outside Syria and lacks the respect of veteran dissidents.

“Early mistakes in transitions tend to have enduring effects. But the solution is not to form more umbrella groups, adding layers of vested interests that favor competition over cooperation,” Mardini writes in The New York Times:

The United States must make recognition of the opposition strictly conditional on the coalition being genuinely representative of the Syrian people, with clear punishment for noncompliance. And contact between the American government and opposition leaders must not be limited to the ambassador and his staffers; Americans often seem oblivious to the power that personal relationships can have across the Arab world. Finally, America must empower secular, moderate and independent political forces that promote compromise and moderation.

Two ideas emerged at the Munich Security Conference that could entice Moscow to play a more constructive role in solving “the world’s most intractable and dangerous problem,” writes The Washington Post’s David Ignatius:

• Vice President Joe Biden proposed that Russia and the US collaborate to secure control of Syria’s chemical weapons, in the event that Assad’s government falls:

This idea of Russian-American cooperation to prevent proliferation of weapons of mass destruction echoes one of the most positive joint efforts after the end of the Cold War….In the case of Syria, a joint effort to secure chemical weapons would reassure Russia that it will have a role in future security and stability in Syria and the region. It would also reduce the danger that these weapons might fall into the hands of the jihadist groups, such as al-Nusra Front that’s linked to al-Qaeda.

• Sheik Mouaz al-Khatib’s expressed willingness to meet with the Assad regime, despite being “blasted for it by other, more hawkish members of the opposition” was another positive sign, Ignatius adds, and welcomed by Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. special representative for Syria.

Brahimi is eager to see “a transitional government formed with ‘full executive powers’ (this, he explained, is diplomatic speak for Assad having ‘no role in the transition),” notes Roger Cohen in The New York Times:

The government would be the fruit of negotiations outside Syria between opposition representatives and a “strong civilian-military” government delegation. It would then oversee a democratic transition including elections and constitutional reform.

“This sounds good but will not fly. …. Syria, with its mosaic of faiths and ethnicities, requires political compromise to survive. That is the endgame,” says Cohen:

“The Obama administration has refrained from directly intervening or supporting Syria’s increasingly armed opposition, based on an argument that neither would make the situation better,” writes Andrew J. Tabler, a senior fellow in the Program on Arab Politics at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy:

But allowing the conflict to continue and simply offering humanitarian and project assistance treats merely the symptoms while failing to shape a political settlement that would help cure the disease: a brutal Assad regime that was unable to reform trying to shoot one of the youngest populations in the Middle East into submission.

The White House reportedly vetoed a joint initiative by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and CIA Director David Petraeus last summer to train and supply lethal assistance to moderate Syrian rebel groups, in large part because the administration does not want to find itself “in the business of helping Islamist extremists inherit a Syrian vacuum,” while the “opposition coalition is divided and lacks credibility,” notes Cohen.

Nevertheless, “an inflection point has been reached,” he contends:

Inaction spurs the progressive radicalization of Syria, the further disintegration of the state, the intensification of Assad’s mass killings, and the chances of the conflict spilling out of Syria in sectarian mayhem. It squanders an opportunity to weaken Iran. This is not in the West’s interest…

It is time to alter the Syrian balance of power enough to give political compromise a chance and Assad no option but departure. That means an aggressive program to train and arm the Free Syrian Army. 

A plausible scenario facing Syria is one of “incremental, phased collapse,” says Steven Heydemann, the USIP Special Adviser for Middle East Initiatives:

Fearing retribution, many of Syria’s Alawites are backing the regime with the zeal of people who believe that their backs are against the wall. Such a phased collapse could prolong the country’s vicious civil war for a significant, if unknown, period of time; Heydemann calls it “the $64,000 question.” How long it lasts would in part depend on the truncated regime’s military resources and on the support it receives from allies in Iran and Lebanon, as well as from Russia.

“Fundamental questions could be opened up,” said Heydemann. “Such a collapse could reopen the issue of the post-Ottoman state system in the Levant.”

With the demise of the Ottoman Empire in World War II, the victorious powers led by Great Britain and France won mandates to govern—and draw the borders of—what would later become Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. The post-Ottoman lines politically separated traditional ethnic and religious groups, particularly the Kurds, into different entities.

“Despite frequent claims about the fragility and artificiality of the state system in the Middle East,” Heydemann noted, “modern Syria is the result of a political settlement that has held for nearly 100 years.  Reopening this post-Ottoman settlement now would have huge spillover effects, potentially threatening the integrity of Iraq and sparking conflicts between Kurds and Turkey.”

Syria’s people are victims of international politics, says Radwan Ziadeh

Syria’s disparate opposition has reportedly “been intensifying its efforts to form an interim government ‘in the upcoming period’” in the hope of securing defecting Prime Minister Riad Hijab as the country’s post-Assad  president.

It’s the latest of a series of initiatives designed to address the question: What would a Syrian-led transition ‘look like?

“Soon after his installation as president, Bashar al-Assad dismissed the idea of civil society..[but] the Syrian uprising, even as it threatens to consume itself, stands as a historic refutation of his view,” says a prominent observer.

“Those taking a hand in charting Syria’s future could start by paying attention to the authentic voice of the Syrian majority,” says Geoffrey Aronson, a veteran participant in Track II diplomatic efforts on Middle East issues:

The Syrian Dialogue Project, an initiative by a group of Syrians from inside and outside Syria, including Nidal Alkhoudari, Nabil Beitinjaneh, Sami Bentinjane, Mazen Bilal and Camille Otrakji. They have constructed a “virtual dialogue” among a cross section of Syrians at home and abroad, and who have not taken up arms for one side or another, in an effort to answer the following questions: What do Syrians believe is important to Syrians today, and how can they best shape their future?

“Putting an immediate end to violence and finding political solutions so as to reach a comprehensive peaceful democratic change is the demand of the majority of Syrian people,” the Dialogue concludes:

What is needed now from all parties is the transition to rationality, to start thinking about settlements and compromises for the sake of the country. All conflicts end by sitting around the dialogue or negotiation table. Everyone has blood on their hands, and everyone has committed serious mistakes. Dialogue, agreement on a transitional period and a national unity government, and consideration of the other side’s fears would ease tension and put Syria’s interest above all.

But a leading rights activist believes the current violence will not end without outside intervention.

“The Syrian people, in an effort to claim their human rights and dignity, have become victims of international politics, writes Radwan Ziadeh (above), a spokesperson of the Syrian National Council and executive director of the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies:

Russia is counting on strategically holding onto an ally in the region, and waits for Assad to end the violence. This is simply unrealistic, and the longer the international community fails to intervene, the more irreparable the damage will be to the entire region. This revolution is real, and it is not going away. It is in the strategic interests of the U.S. and the international community to support in an inclusive manner the plan for a positive way forward that the SNC has mapped out for Syria.

RTWT on the Fikra Forum.

Radwan Ziadeh is a former Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.

The United States is expected to officially recognize a new Syrian rebel coalition this week in” a further attempt to bolster moderates and marginalize extremists in the opposition.”

But rebel activists in Syria are opposing a move by the United States to designate the radical Islamist al-Nusra Front as a terrorist entity linked to al Qaeda.

“All rebels are fighting to topple the regime of Bashar al-Assad, and before we designate anybody or accuse anyone of being a terrorist we should tell what they have done to terrorize others,” the Free Syrian Army military command’s Brigadier General Salim Idris, told al-Jazeera television. “Not everyone wearing a beard is an extremist.”

Externally-based activists also criticized the move.

“Many groups labeled by the administration as al Qaeda are actually not,” said Radwan Ziadeh (left), the executive director of the Washington-based Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “What is the reason the U.S. administration is considering it [Nusra] al Qaeda? All of our focus is on getting rid of the Assad mafia. We welcome anyone in the fight against Assad.”

“The Obama administration is taking a calculated risk that embracing chosen leaders of Syria’s fragmented rebels will speed the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, moving this week to recognize a slate of opposition figures whose pledges of democracy Washington can do little to enforce,” The Washington Post reports

The action is part of fast-moving diplomacy to try to guard against chaos and collapse in Syria if rebel forces succeed in ousting or killing Assad. International efforts to support moderates as successors to Assad have taken on new urgency as rebels gain ground militarily.

“The United States decided to single out the Nusra Front because of their recent rejection to the political opposition front and (because) they have a different approach to post-Assad’s Syria,” Rami Abdelrahman, an official with the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told CNN.

Some analysts believe the move to embrace the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces (right) has come too late to affect the political dynamics within the opposition.

“People don’t really care how it happens, but they just want to be done with the regime,” said Aaron Zelin, who researches the Nusra Front and other Syrian militant groups at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“Once that happens, the policy may be more effective because the goals of the different factions won’t be in line and there will be fissures between the secular and more moderate groups, and the Islamists.”

Other observers believe that “blacklisting the Nusra Front could backfire” and feed conspiracy theories about US intentions:

It would pit the United States against some of the best fighters in the insurgency that it aims to support. While some Syrian rebels fear the group’s growing power, others work closely with it and admire it — or, at least, its military achievements — and are loath to end their cooperation.

Leaders of the Free Syrian Army, the loose-knit rebel umbrella group that the United States seeks to bolster, expressed exasperation that the United States, which has refused to provide weapons throughout the conflict that has killed more than 40,000 people, is now opposing a group they see as a vital ally.

The Nusra Front “defends civilians in Syria, whereas America didn’t do anything,” said Mosaab Abu Qatada, a rebel spokesman. “They stand by and watch; they look at the blood and the crimes and brag. Then they say that Nusra Front are terrorists.”

He added, “America just wants a pretext to intervene in Syrian affairs after the revolution.”

“It’s being seen as something where the U.S. is more concerned with counter-terrorism issues than the plight of the Syrian people,” said Andrew Tabler, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“On Facebook, on blogs, people are very angry.”

The new opposition coalition is expected to improve relations and communications between exiled political figures and rebel combatants within Syria.

“They are trying to build a leadership of credible ground forces, and I think that is a huge distinction,” said Elizabeth O’Bagy, an expert on the Syrian rebel groups at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington. “A lot of the people who are part of the new military leadership are influential and important leaders on the ground.”

But the US initiative to embrace the National Council is unlikely to resolve sectarian tensions within the opposition.

“Some leaders of the rebel Free Syrian Army complained that they were not included in the new grouping, reports suggest, “which they charged was dominated by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and would divide rather than unify the rebel fighters.”

Many analysts express concern that funding for radical Islamist groups from the Gulf may have shifted the balance power against democratic and moderate forces.

“The scariest thing about Syria, from the West’s point of view, may be the gap between the hair-raising scenarios senior officials are discussing about what may happen next and their limp strategies for preventing it,” writes analyst Jackson Diehl:

Inside the Obama administration, Syria is now likened by some to a second Somalia — only at the heart of the Middle East, and with the world’s third-largest stockpile of chemical weapons.  … The United States and France, along with a few Arab and European allies..are hoping to bolster the opposition political coalition they strung together last month, known as the Syrian National Coalition.

 The coalition is getting money from France and a couple of other governments, but the State Department’s lawyers have ruled that the United States cannot directly fund rebel organizations. Al-Qaeda’s units are meanwhile flush with contributions from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

Prominent voices in favor of a more forceful US and Western intervention include former State Department policy planning chief Anne-Marie Slaughter,  a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group. 

“The longer the Syrian civil war drags on, the more likely it becomes that Mr Assad’s departure will only open a wider, more sectarian, civil conflict with unsettling ramifications for several neighboring states,” says James Dobbins, director of the Rand Corporation’s International Security and Defense Policy Center.

But any decision to intervene must pass three tests, he suggests. “First, is such an intervention morally and legally justified? Second, is it militarily and politically feasible? Third, would it significantly advance an acceptable resolution to the conflict?”

The moral case is perhaps the most straightforward. In Syria, as in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya before, a national uprising is seeking to overthrow a long-running dictatorship. In response, the regime is using extreme violence to hang on to power. ….

There are several possible legal bases for a military intervention. The most clear cut, if least likely at the moment given Russia’s position, would be a UN Security Council resolution. Western powers may alternatively recognise an insurgent authority as the legitimate government of Syria, and then respond positively to a request for assistance from it..

The most feasible and efficacious external intervention would be one designed to prevent Mr Assad from bombing his own cities. … Depriving the regime of its air force would significantly alter the military balance on the ground and expedite a rebel victory – one which is likely to emerge eventually, but may otherwise be a long time coming.

The political prerequisites for such an attack are, first, a clear request for such by the Syrian rebel authorities; second, an endorsement by most if not all of the Arab League; third, leadership by regional states, .. and finally, the participation in the operation by Nato allies, even if the bulk of the assets are to be supplied by the US.

“Expediting the fall of the Assad regime is not a sufficient condition for bringing an end to Syria’s civil war, but it is a necessary one,” argues Dobbins, , a former US assistant Secretary of State.

“The longer this war drags on, the more radicalized become the insurgents, the more brutalized the population, the more inflamed the sectarian passions, and the more destabilized neighboring societies. The post-Assad situation will be truly messy, but the longer his fall is delayed the more unmanageable its aftermath will become,”

RTWT

External actors could play a decisive role in bringing Syria’s 20-month-old uprising to an end, says a prominent analyst, amid growing signs that the Assad regime is losing ground diplomatically and militarily.

The duration of the conflict “depends to an extent on what the external actors in this drama now do,” says David Gardner, a Beirut-based analyst:

“The regime is cornered,” judges one top Arab security official. Even officials in Russia, Syria’s most important international ally, have started murmuring that they see no way out for President Assad.

“But there is little sign of intermediate measures – between embracing the [new opposition] National Council [left] and threatening an assault on loyalist forces – that could hasten the implosion of a regime that is offering tantalising glimpses of decomposition,” Gardner suggests.

In a potential sign that Russia’s support of embattled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad may be softening, Moscow’s top diplomat will meet jointly Thursday with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the U.N. envoy for Syria, a senior State Department official said. Russia has been the main international defender of the Assad regime, a military and trade partner, and the chief obstacle to tougher U.N. action to pressure Assad to end a 20-month civil war.

“I think that the Russians at the moment are realizing that they are going to have to deal with a new Syria,” says Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “It’s going to be hard to deal with a new Syria when they are harboring, or possibly harboring the former president.”

Russia’s apparent equivocation is the latest sign that the endgame may be approaching, say observers.

“It is bloody and long,” a French official said. “But my feeling is there has been an acceleration of dynamics in the last few weeks, an erosion of the regime while the morale of the activists is higher and higher. I believe it is now possible the regime will fall soon. Whether that is weeks or months, I don’t know.”

The growth of extremist factions within the rebel ranks has increased the urgency of developing a political alternative to match opposition military gains, according to the French official and others, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing diplomatic talks.

“This is a real concern for the United States, for France and for the Syrians themselves,” the French official said. “The quicker the fall of the regime and the stronger the political alternative, the more you empower it .?.?. the more likely that Syrians themselves will be able to resist radicalization.”

The jihadist groups’ increasingly visible role has alienated potential opposition allies from within Syria’s minorities, say analysts.

“The Syrian opposition, in which Sunnis in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular dominate, has not done enough to convince the Alawites, and other minorities such as the Christians, the Druze and the Kurds, that their future is assured in a plural Syria without the Assads,” says the FT ‘s Gardner:

Part of the reason Syria’s minorities are fearful is that they see Islamist forces gaining influence in rebel ranks. While western powers hold back, Qatar is arming and financing the Muslim Brotherhood, while the Saudis are aiding more radical jihadist groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra, the spearhead behind several recent rebel gains.

The strength of radical takfiri groups linked to al-Qaida is “growing in intensity,” says Washington Institute analyst Tabler, who recently returned from the Syrian border region.

“And the reason why these groups became more prominent and why actually the opposition’s worried about it is that they received the weapons when Syrians were in their hour of need from Saudi Arabia and from other donors in the region,” says Tabler, author of the book In the Lion’s Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington’s Battle with Syria:

The problem is, is that the Assad regime was in systemic failure, so the regime’s weapons fell into the wrong people’s hands anyway. If we had intervened earlier, we would’ve had a hope of saving the state and securing those weapons. Frankly, in parts of Syria, we’re going to be dealing with people we’ve never dealt with before. …It’s going to be like Libya but with more people, more affects, more different kinds of problems than we’ve ever seen right smack in the middle of a very strategically important part of the world. So I don’t really see how the United States doesn’t get involved there.

But some opposition activists dismiss fears of radical jihadists groups exercising disproportionate influence at the expense of relatively moderate democratic factions.

“Many groups labeled by the administration as al Qaeda are actually not,” said Radwan Ziadeh, the executive director of the Washington-based Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “What is the reason the U.S. administration is considering it [Nusra] al Qaeda? All of our focus is on getting rid of the Assad mafia. We welcome anyone in the fight against Assad.”

Engaging Russia could be a vital factor in facilitating a transition, observers contend.

“You need everybody who is part of the problem to be dragged into the solution,” observes one European foreign minister. “Otherwise they’ll be spoilers.”

Thursday’s meeting comes ahead of a gathering of the Western-backed Friends of Syria group in Morocco next week, The Washington Post reports, at which the United States is expected to recognize a reorganized Syrian political opposition as the legitimate successor to Assad.

The US should recognize and support the newly-formed National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, says Joshua Landis, the director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma:

The United States has spent the last 21 months insisting on unity in what turns out to be a very fragmented Syrian opposition. This group is as good as it is going to get. It is filled with elite Syrians, who are educated, relatively pro-American, not too anti-Israel and not too Islamist — many of whom have gone to jail for their beliefs. The problem is that events on the ground in Syria have largely overtaken this effort at statecraft. ….They tend to look at the coalition as a foreign concoction, selected by unknown hands, and representing only itself.

“The Syrians fighting in the militias come from a very different background than those placed at the head of the coalition… Salafism is the ideology of the day, taking root with growing speed,” says Landis, who writes Syria Comment, a daily newsletter on Syrian politics.

The National Coalition might be more legitimate than its predecessor, the Syrian National Council, “but its rank and file are dominated by the same tired figures,” says Ammar Abdulhamid, an exiled Syrian dissident living in Washington, D.C. “Worse, the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence on the group’s decisions is even more pronounced, as the Brotherhood has reportedly gained more power within the coalition, far in excess of its actual support on the ground.”

The question before us is .. how the U.S. can recognize what is essentially an Islamist opposition that refuses to provide any real guarantees on the future of the country, even as it lobbies for the provision of arms and international support.

There is more to acquiring recognition than providing a new facade. The U.S. should recognize the coalition only after it provides credible guarantees that it will match majority rule with minority rights, and address the concerns of the secular components of the opposition and the Syrian society at large.

“The leaders of the opposition must realize that, in order to successfully lead a nation through the difficult transition ahead, they will have to represent the concerns and aspirations of all Syrians, irrespective of where they fall now on the political spectrum,” argues Abdulhamid, a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who writes the Syrian Revolution Digest blog.

But US support is too little, too late, says Syrian writer Rime Allaf.

“If the U.S. were counting on eventually playing a leading role at this late stage, it should have factored in Syrians’ current reactions,” she argues. “Whether by design or by mistake, the Obama administration has diminished any influence over Syrians it once had.”

By failing to intervene, the US is “betraying yet again what America claims to stand for,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, the U.S. State Department’s former head of policy planning. She called for “decisive action to save tens of thousands of Syrian lives and possibly tip the balance of the conflict.”

But the administration’s reluctance to arm Syria’s opposition was informed by its experience in Libya, where Western arms found their way into the hands of extremist elements, The New York Times reveals:

The Qatari assistance to fighters viewed as hostile by the United States demonstrates the Obama administration’s continuing struggles in dealing with the Arab Spring uprisings, as it tries to support popular protest movements while avoiding  American military entanglements. Relying on surrogates allows the United States to keep its fingerprints off operations, but also means they may play out in ways that conflict with American interests. 

“To do this right, you have to have on-the-ground intelligence and you have to have experience,” said Vali Nasr, a former State Department adviser who is now dean of Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, part of Johns Hopkins University. “If you rely on a country that doesn’t have those things, you are really flying blind. When you have an intermediary, you are going to lose control.”

Washington’s recognition of the new coalition does not imply military assistance, but does entail “bolstering the political stature of the new coalition.,” writes Ed Husain,  a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations:

Britain, France, Turkey and the Gulf Coordination Council have already committed to the coalition, but where this decision falls in terms of military support for the rebels who are still fighting on the frontline remains unclear. Because of this risk of making matters worse, the United States should continue to stay one removed and allow for its allies to lead.

“That way, success of the Syrian rebels will not be tainted as yet another American military intervention in a Muslim country and thus fuel anti-Americanism,” he claims.

*Anne-Marie Slaughter is a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group. 

President Bashar al-Assad today insisted he would “live and die” in Syria and threatened that any foreign intervention would have catastrophic repercussions for region and beyond.

His comments, a clear riposte to this week’s proposal by British Premier David Cameron that Assad could be allowed a safe exit and exile, coincided with a Doha meeting of Syria’s opposition at which the Syrian National Council reportedly vetoed a Western-backed initiative to restructure and re-launch the movement.

“I am not a puppet. I was not made by the West to go to the West or to any other country,” he told Russia Today TV. “I am Syrian; I was made in Syria. I have to live in Syria and die in Syria.”

The SNC claims to have killed a U.S.-backed proposal from veteran Syrian dissident Riad Seif for a more representative, inclusive and broadly-based opposition movement. Its move has raised concerns that the opposition to Assad’s regime is falling apart.

“It’s being asked to reduce itself in size, which means not take a leading role as the political opposition inside Syria,” said Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center. “And it’s being asked to do that with no real guarantees that more support will be forthcoming.”

Key opposition factions with strong followings inside the country pulled out of the plan, which was due to be presented at a conference in Doha, Qatar, today. Three of the dissident bodies seen as integral to the U.S.-backed initiative said yesterday that they had refused to attend, diplomats and opposition figures told The Daily Telegraph.

“There are too many people against this initiative for it to work now,” said a Western diplomatic source.

The SNC leadership came under fire in Doha from female activists after elections failed to promote a single woman to its 41-member decision-making executive.

“Women were active in the uprising from the start,” AP reports:

Last year, human rights lawyer Razan Zaytouni (left), who went into hiding shortly after the revolt began, was awarded the Anna Politkovskaya Award for risking her life by breaking through the government’s media blackout to report on the brutal crackdown in Syria. The award, named after the slain Russian journalist, is given annually to a woman human rights defender standing up for victims in a conflict zone.

SNC members “harangued” Seif at the Doha meeting, “with some accusing him of pushing a U.S. agenda to sideline the Islamist-dominated SNC,” Reuters reports:

“Seif was not at all convincing yesterday. He told the council he was going ahead with the initiative with or without them,” an SNC source said.

Opposition sources said many thought Seif’s offer of 24 out of 60 seats would leave the SNC underrepresented in a proposed rebel assembly, which would later choose an interim government and coordinate with armed rebels to usher in a post-Assad era. But the sources also said the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, the most influential group within the SNC, had signaled its support.

“There are tensions and fears inside the SNC that they will cease to be relevant if they agree to the initiative. They want guarantees,” one SNC source said. 

Countries including Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia who have helped to arm rebels, as well as the United States and other Western powers, have lost patience with the fractious SNC and told it to make room for what U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called those “in the front lines fighting and dying”.

The SNC’s four-day conference is an effort to overhaul its structure and rebut charges that it is unrepresentative of the broader opposition. US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that the group can no longer be considered to be the opposition’s “visible leader” and that the administration had “recommended names and organizations which we believe should be included in any leadership structure.”

The “Seif-Ford” initiative, after Robert Ford, the US special envoy, has led to accusations of foreign interference in the opposition’s internal affairs.

“Some are calling this the Robert Ford plan or an American plan,” said the SNC’s Radwan Ziadeh, executive director of the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “This is just promises from the Americans that no one is believing. They don’t need Seif to come with a plan. This is unrealistic.”

In a meeting held late last night, SNC members reportedly interrogated Mr Seif on the initiative, and the list of names proposed to lead it. “We asked him why some of the names were on the list and he said he didn’t know. The West pushed this on him. How can you endorse a plan when you can’t defend it?” said an SNC member who had been at the meetings.

“Everyone feels that this initiative is imposed. They’ve weaved the cloth, but now there is no one to wear it,” said Ahmed Zaidan, the deputy head of the Revolutionary Council, a body that coordinates with armed groups inside Syria.

The opposition meeting will go ahead, but any leadership body is likely to have a majority from the SNC, which has little influence on the ground. “It may secure more funding but [the conflict] is about winning the support of the street to regain control. And the street does not support them,” said a diplomatic source.

Seif believes his Syrian National Initiative would help incorporate locally-based groups and rebel fighters into a more inclusive structure.

His proposal is the first concerted attempt to merge opposition forces to help end a 19-month-old conflict that has killed over 32,000 people, devastated swathes of Syria, and threatens to widen into a regional sectarian conflagration. The Initiative would also create a Supreme Military Council, a Judicial Committee and a transitional government-in-waiting of technocrats – along the lines of Libya’s Transitional National Council, which managed to galvanize international support for its successful battle to topple Muammar Gaddafi.

The SNC’s veto is unlikely to smooth relations between internally-based and exiled groups, say observers.

“It’s difficult to see how rebels doing the fighting would be happy taking orders from Syrians sitting in five-star hotels,” said an analyst in Doha.

SNC figures in Doha played down the role of hardline Islamists, or Salafis, including former al Qaeda fighters in Iraq and other jihadis from abroad for whom Syria is the latest cause celebre. They are accused of beheading soldiers and others seen as pro-Assad and committing other abuses.

“The issue is not the Salafis, the problem is Bashar al- Assad. If we have the capacity to support the (rebel) Free Syrian Army, the extremist element will diminish,” said former SNC president Burhan Ghalioun. “We need arms and until now we haven’t had what we need. We need new arms, anti-aircraft arms. From the international community, we’ve seen many promises. But we wait and see.”

But other Syrian activists are expressing concern at the growing influence of extremist groups, the increasingly sectarian thrust of the conflict and an uptick in anti-Americanism.  

“Presently, each community in Syria, including the Alawite community, is having a minor civil war of its own pitting pro- and anti-Assad groups against each other, write Ammar Abdulhamid and Khawla Yusuf, citing infighting amongst Palestinians, Kurds and even the Alawites. 

“Border crossings with Turkey are controlled by Islamist groups, even though some tend to succeed in covering up their identity giving an impression of moderation, and even secularity,” they note. “Aid going to the rebels across the Turkish border, therefore, is being filtered through Jihadi elements. It’s no wonder that most of it end up with more extremist groups.”

Anti-Americanism is rife in all quarters. But while some rebels are pinning their hopes on a new more robust American policy of support following the upcoming elections, a policy that does not go beyond supplying rebels with arms, and that is not based on a serious understanding of the continually changing dynamics on the ground is bound to bring much disenchantment, feeding rather than alleviating anti-American tendencies.

The SNC’s move may jeopardize any new U.S. initiative to provide arms to the Syrian opposition, a move the Obama administration has hitherto resisted.

“I believe President Obama in his second term will be more assertive, perhaps from the first day after the election, not waiting for inauguration, to increase the lethality and the amount of weaponry going to the opposition in Syria,” said Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

But SNC head Abdelbaset Sieda said that his group does not believe international assistance linked to restructuring the opposition will be forthcoming.

“We faced this situation before, when we formed the SNC (last year),” he told The Associated Press. “There were promises like that, but the international community in fact did not give us the support needed for the SNC to do its job.”

A leading Syrian opposition group has “broadened its ranks to accommodate more activists and political groups from inside the country,” AP reports, “in an apparent nod to international demands for a more representative and cohesive leadership.”

U.S.-based Syrian academic Radwan Ziadeh* proposed convening a 300-member national conference in rebel-controlled Syrian territory close to Turkey (above). The conference, representing SNC members, military commanders, technocrats and local council leaders in equal measure, would form a transitional government to administer the rebel-run areas, he said.

The SNC has received significant support from the Gulf states, but the bulk of assistance has come from a more surprising source.

“The top financier of the Syrian opposition is no Arabian Peninsula oil kingdom or cloak-and-dagger western spy outfit, but struggling, war-ravaged Libya, which is itself recovering from a devastating civil conflict,” writes the FT’s Borzou Daragahi:

According to a budget released by the Syrian National Council and posted to its website late on Sunday, the Libyan government contributed $20.3m of the $40.4m that the opposition umbrella group has amassed since its creation in August 2011.

Qatar gave $15m while the United Arab Emirates contributed $5m, according to the document. Unlike Qatar and the UAE, which are absolute monarchies, Libya has embarked on a rocky path towards democracy and shares an ideological vision with Syrian revolutionaries.

The SNC began a four-day conference in Qatar on Sunday in an effort to overhaul its structure and rebut charges that it is unrepresentative of the broader opposition. US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that the U.S. no longer considered the group to be the opposition’s “visible leader” and said the administration had “recommended names and organizations which we believe should be included in any leadership structure.”

“The SNC is in an existential struggle right now,” said Salman Shaikh, a Doha-based Brookings analyst. The group is striving to come up with an alternative to a US-backed initiative from the celebrated dissident Riad Seif:

“The initiative is not a substitute for the Syrian National Council, but the S.N.C. should be an important part of it,” Seif told reporters. “To bring down the regime, we need 1,000 national councils.”

Many Syrian opposition figures and foreign governments have grown disenchanted with the Syrian National Council. They say that its leaders have been consumed by infighting rather than forging a strategy to topple the government, that military commanders fighting on the ground have made it irrelevant, and that it is basically a tool of the Muslim Brotherhood. …..The main initial aim of the Americans and others who back the change is to create a stronger link between the commanders leading the fight in Syria and the exile groups. There is growing concern in Western capitals that as the fighting drags into its 20th month, radical jihadists are hijacking what started as a peaceful protest movement.

Members of the S.N.C. counter that Western powers are at fault because the jihadists’ Persian Gulf Arab backers provide the kind of money and weapons that Western countries have refused to offer to the opposition.

The new body is not a vehicle for his personal ambitions, Seif said.

“I will stick to helping form a political leadership which will satisfy the Syrian people and the world,” he said.

“The demise of the SNC is a result of self-inflicted wounds,” says Randa Slim, an analyst with the New America Foundation. Syrians are “fed up” with the SNC… “Their intuitive reaction is mistrust.”

A veteran dissident and proponent of the pro-democracy Damascus Declaration, Seif appreciates that a new generation of activists has wrested the political initiative and credibility from the largely older exiles associated with the SNC.

“He realizes that the young people are dominant,” says Andrew Tabler, with the Washington Institute of Near East Policy. “He’s an inside guy who has street cred.”

Tabler believes that activists from the provincial and revolutionary councils in Syria should have been given leadership positions a long time ago. Tabler also cautions that opposition politics are splintered in Syria and that won’t change any time soon. …..The U.S. has been giving non-lethal aid to the opposition, including training programs conducted in Istanbul and in southern Turkey, a $6 million program geared for activists coming out of Syria.

The first group included 36 activists, members of revolutionary councils from the northern province of Aleppo. Later groups came from Idlib, in the northwest and Deir el Zour, a rebel held area near the Iraqi border. The intense course work focused on helping the Syrian opposition set up administrations in towns and villages. For the first time, U.S. officials met face-to-face with young activists creating grass-roots representative bodies that provide humanitarian services and a fledgling judiciary. The French government has gone even further by directly distributing cash to revolutionary councils under rebel control.

The Qatar forum is unrepresentative of the rebels on the ground within Syria, says Tabler.  ”That’s an important thing that’s missing,” he says. “The big problem in this is not engaging armed groups directly. Those taking the shots will be calling the shots, at least in the interim.”

The publication of the SNC’s budget was “aimed at boosting its credibility by being transparent over its financing,” writes the FT’s Daragahi:

According to the document, the SNC still has about $10.7m in the bank. The report breaks down expenditures by both category and geography. According to the six-page document, 11 per cent of the money collected has been spent on overheads, with the rest devoted to aiding Syrians inside the country or refugees in neighbouring states.

Roughly 7 per cent of the funds, or about $2.8m, has been allocated to the Free Syrian Army. About $290,000 has been spent on hotels for SNC representatives during travels abroad. The organisation spent about $160,000 on relief efforts for the two mostly ethnic Kurdish provinces of northwest Syria.

The political maneuvering within opposition ranks should not distract energy and resources from the need to secure a breakthrough in the 20-month long struggle against the Baathist regime of President Bashar Assad, say activists.

“You need a game changer, either military or political, and hope it will break the stalemate,” says Amr Azm, a Syrian-born professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio.

*A former Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.

Riad Seif’s plan aims to form the nucleus of a transitional government of technocrats

A U.S.-led initiative to restructure and unify Syria’s opposition has drawn an angry response from an exiled umbrella group.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the U.S. no longer considered the Syrian National Council to be the opposition’s “visible leader” and said the administration had “recommended names and organizations which we believe should be included in any leadership structure.”

SNC officials accused Washington of interfering in internal opposition politics while refusing to intervene in support of their struggle against Bashar al-Assad’s Baathist regime.

The U.S. move was “very, very bad, very stupid,” said SNC spokesman Mohammed Sarmini. “This may be an American project, but it is very offensive to the Syrian people. You should support us on the ground, not get into our politics,” he told a McClatchy correspondent.

Washington is reportedly pushing a proposal by the respected dissident Riad Seif (above), to create a new 51-member council, representing the opposition’s diverse political and ethnic faction that would form the nucleus for a subsequent transitional – and largely technocratic – government. The body would reportedly include former Prime Minister Riad Hijab, who defected from the regime in August, representatives from grass roots revolutionary councils within Syria, and exiled groups, including the SNC.

Other opposition sources say leadership of the proposed body, provisionally called the National Initiative Council, is uncertain at this stage.

One said:

It is not clear yet who will lead. There are a few names. Riad Seif doesn’t want to burn his bridges – while everything is murky and chaotic. But he is presidential calibre. He could be president of a new born republic, but he doesn’t want to become a political football.

The Seif proposal will be on the agenda of a forthcoming opposition forum in Qatar that one analyst believes could turn into an “unholy scrap.”

“There’s a lot of factions in the SNC who are not willing to let go,” said Salman Shaikh, director of the Doha Brookings Center think-tank.

The forum is likely to witness an SNC backlash against US efforts to help unify the opposition, judging by the reaction of a prominent spokesman for the group.

“I think that no country . . . can interfere or can impose the leaders on the Syrian opposition,” said the SNC’s Radwan Ziadeh, director of the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “I call on the international community to back and support the Syrian opposition groups so they can organize themselves, not to interfere in the different groups.”

The Seif plan’s proposed restructuring lacks legitimacy with both internal and exiled opposition groups, he says.

“Even if Clinton wants to back it, it won’t work if it has no inside support,” said Ziadeh, who backs a rival initiative. “After a year and a half you can’t appoint people, the initiative has to come from the bottom up, the people inside Syria have to feel they are part of initiative.”

Some observers believe the Qatar meeting will demonstrate the limitations of a “top down approach to managing a revolution” and is unlikely to be representative of the internal opposition.

“Whatever the outcome of the meeting, it’s still going to be a largely exiled opposition force…. and there will inevitably be a disconnect between this organization and the organic protest movement,” says Elizabeth O’Bagy, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War.

“I can already think of a number of very important and influential leaders, both rebel and political, who have been left out. Thus, there is already an element of the US ‘picking’ the leaders, rather than letting the Syrians do it themselves.”

Even senior figures within the SNC concede that the organization, which has been riven by sectarian factionalism, has not been representative of the broader opposition.

“It’s a true statement that the SNC should have been more inclusive,” said Molham al Droubi, an SNC representative of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been accused of covertly controlling the group. “We welcome the more effective contribution of the international community and the US for the Syrian cause.”

The SNC had previously undertaken ‘makeovers’ and leadership changes to little effect, and some believe the proposed reorganization may be too little too late.

“The opposition Secretary Clinton is trying to unify has become largely irrelevant, even infusing it with elements from inside may not be sufficient,” says Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian exile with the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Syria’s current fragmentation necessitates working with local groups, that is, the rebels and whatever political forces are coalescing around them.”

In announcing it the way she did, Clinton also alienated one of the few friends the U.S. has amongst the Syrian opposition, the SNC, which announced it would hold its own meeting just prior to the Doha gathering as a snub to the U.S.

“The SNC will fight for its survival, many opportunists will fight for inclusion, seeing a window in Clinton’s announcement,” Abdulhamid says. “It’s going to be a free for all and a freakshow in Doha. The U.S. should have worked on this quietly.”

But the initiative has drawn praise from independent analysts.

The proposed restructuring “reflects the growing chasm between those inside Syria waging the civil war and those outside, who will eventually finance its rebuilding,” reports suggest.

Furthermore, the FT reports:

Seif’s initiative has some advantages over previous attempts to create a workable opposition body, which is seen as an increasingly urgent task as the security situation on the ground deteriorates at an alarming rate.

Mr Seif is one of the more credible figures in the opposition, and his proposal has found support in Washington, perhaps because it came at a time when the US was looking for ways to increase its engagement with the Syrian opposition amid widespread dissatisfaction with the SNC.

Even Qatar itself, a staunch supporter of the SNC, is believed to have accepted the idea that its influence will have to be diluted in a broader-based body.

“It’s a good move because it favors the internal opposition –the ones actively taking down Assad,” says Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “We’ve been talking to Tansiqiyat — LCCs — inside, and now we are working directly with local and revolutionary councils. SNC plays a role but not lead.”

Members of Syrian opposition groups met this week in Istanbul. Credit: AP/philly.com

The United States is withdrawing its support for a leading Syrian dissident group in an attempt to forge a more to a more representative, inclusive and effective opposition coalition.

The Istanbul-based Syrian National Council is too dominated by exiles and expatriates, while endemic factionalism has undermined its credibility, administration officials suggest.

“We’ve made it clear that the SNC can no longer be viewed as the visible leader of the opposition,” said US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “They can be part of a larger opposition. But that opposition must include people from inside Syria and others who have a legitimate voice that needs to be heard.”

Washington wants to see a more cohesive opposition movement that better represents the country’s diverse ethnic and confessional groups and includes more of the rebel combatants confronting President Bashar al-Assad’s forces on the ground.

“This cannot be an opposition represented by people who have many good attributes but have, in many instances, not been in Syria for 20, 30, 40 years,” said Clinton. “There has to be a representation of those who are on the front lines fighting and dying today to obtain their freedom.”

Analysts believe that the Obama administration is “laying the groundwork for international recognition of an opposition government,” The Washington Post reports:

But a senior U.S. official said that “we’re still quite a ways from that.” Instead, the official said, the new group will have a “political outreach function,” to build “basic credibility” among Syrian fence-sitters and regime supporters, and an “administrative function,” including the provision of services such as electricity, organized with U.S. and other outside help.

Some might say that “it is too late in coming,” the senior U.S. official said. “A lot of people have been killed, and it’s tragic. But the Syrian revolution itself is changing,” as territory has been overtaken by rebels, indigenous local leadership has developed, and opposition has grown against “a regime that has decided to shoot at unarmed civilians and now uses indiscriminate air power.”

“Would it have been nice if the opposition was more organized four or five months ago? Yes,” the official said. “But what’s going to stem the violence is when those in Syria who still support the Assad regime tell it this isn’t working and it has to go.”

Administration disenchantment with the SNC grew in the summer, the official said, when it became clear that the exile-dominated group was more interested in its own leadership squabbles than in building support inside Syria.

A strategic reorganization may benefit those moderate opposition factions who are at risk of being marginalized by Salafist and violent takfiri elements, according to an analyst who attended a recent Istanbul conference on “Managing the Transition in Syria,” which was attended by more than 80 rebel commanders and in-country civil society activists, and sponsored by the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a think tank headed by activist-intellectual Radwan Ziadeh (above, far left).*

“Developments in the coming week may, I repeat may, finally produce a leadership council composed largely of internal activists that could overtake the SNC and be recognized internationally as a transitional government,” writes Trudy Rubin,  who recently returned from the meeting.

Following this weekend’s SNC forum in Doha, Qatar, a further meeting will include delegates from revolutionary councils and coordinating committees in liberated areas, she notes, while expressing concern that pro-democracy factions are losing ground to radical Islamist elements as a consequence of Western democracies’ reluctance to provide more substantial assistance to the opposition:

“If the Americans and the West won’t help us with humanitarian aid, medicine, and setting up new institutions, the Salafis and al-Qaeda will be shored up,” I was told by Ali Badran, a lawyer and human-rights activist from Tal Rifaat, a suburb of Aleppo that has been bombed and shelled by the Assad government. “The Salafis have money and provide services,” he continued, “so the Syrian people will be sympathetic, and this will be a very big threat.”

The U.S administration’s fresh attempt to engage provincial and community opposition leaders within Syria is “a big step that they should have been doing a long time ago,” Andrew J. Tabler of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, tells the Post:

But he and others said they remained skeptical that the still-fractured Syrian opposition could work in unity.

Another “big question,” Tabler said, is whether military and political opposition factions inside Syria have melded to the point that they can no longer be separated to conform with U.S. policy needs. Rebel military leaders are not invited to the Qatar gathering.

“They are drawing a distinction between unarmed and armed opposition,” Tabler said, “and it’s harder to draw that distinction any longer.”

Other members of the Friends of Syria group, including Qatar and Turkey, will continue to recognize and support the SNC as the leading opposition group, while Washington’s initiative has come under fire from SNC officials:

SNC foreign policy spokesman Radwan Ziadeh, who heads the Washington-based Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies, called it a “wrong initiative” and said the “United States is systematically trying to undermine the SNC.”

Leaders at the SNC-supported meeting, said Ziadeh, in a telephone interview from Turkey, agreed Wednesday to hold a “national assembly” within two months inside Syria. He said the SNC was still debating whether to support, or even attend, the U.S.-backed gathering in Qatar.

“The lack of a [US] commitment to military intervention – such as a no-fly zone or airstrikes, but not foreign boots on Syrian soil – is maddening to pro-intervention Syrian opposition figures such as Ammar Abdulhamid, a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies,” McClatchy reports:

While Abdulhamid said the Obama administration’s involvement in the Arab protests was “overall a positive one,” Syria is “a nightmare scenario” that was facilitated by government officials’ “lack of resolve, leadership and vision.” Syria, he and other activists say, could end up as a stain on the administration’s otherwise sensible response to the Arab uprisings.

“If they make it through this coming election, I just hope they have plans to give this tragedy the time and resources it requires to be brought to resolution in a manner commensurate with the aspirations of the pro-democracy activists who started this whole thing and were, in effect, betrayed,” Abdulhamid said.

*A former Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.