Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Basin Ozeti
îieralbâi^i^SribuTic saturday-sunday, march 2-3, 2013
A rebel commander fights
on many fronts
ANTAKYA, TURKEY
BY NEIL MACFARQUHAR
Gen. Salim Idris, convinced that the last
stand of the Syrian Army in the long,
grisly fight to control Aleppo will take
place soon at the Academy of Military
Engineering, dreads the moment.
It is notjust the 2,000 or so well-armed
soldiers already holed up there, inside
the square-kilometer campus on
Aleppo's eastern outskirts. Nor is it the
reinforced concrete bunkers built under
every building to withstand an Israeli
airraid.
The toughest part for him is his fond¬
ness for both the officers in charge and
the campus itself. When he defected in
July 2012, General Idris, now chiefofstaff
of the rebel forces, was a brigadier in the
Syrian Army and dean of the academy
after teaching there for 20 years.
"I cannot imagine that we will attack
the academy," General Idris said in a
wide-ranging interview in a hotel cafe.
"All the officers inside the academy are
my colleagues. I don't want to fight
against them; I don't want to see them
killed or injured. I hope they leave be¬
fore we attack."
General Idris, 55, a stocky figure with
à neatly trimmed mustache who was
wearing a dark suit and tie, said he
planned to deploy outside the academy
when the fight begins, to make one last-
ditch attempt to persuade his old col¬
leagues to defect.
"We cannot do anything about it if
they don't," he said with a shrug.
Much of Syria's future rests on Gener¬
al Idris's success on the battlefield. Crit¬
ics say the newly unified command
structure he presides over lacks both
the ground presence and the heavy
weapons that are so desperately
needed. Without both, they say, it will be
impossible for him to forge a cohesive
force from the thousands of fractious,
fiercely independent rebel brigades ar¬
rayed against the still formidable mili¬
tary of President Bashar al-Assad.
Under intense pressure from Western
and Arab backers, hundreds of Free Syr¬
ian Army commanders gathered in Tur¬
key last December to select a 30-mem-
ber Supreme Military Council, which in
turn chose General Idris as chief of staff.
Theyunified, grudgingly, because they
were promised heavy weapons, they
said, in particular antiaircraft and anti¬
tank weapons, and other, nonlethal aid.
Some has materialized, although not
f
DANIEL ETTER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Gen. Salim Idris said much of the aid promised to his forces had notmaterialized.
With an unsteady supply
of weapons, the new head
of anti-government forces
faces a credibility gap.
nearly enough to transform the rebel ef¬
fort, General Idris said. He spoke before
Secretary of State John Kerry pledged
$60 million in additional nonlethal aid
and training this week.
Previous American aid seemed to
amount to a trickle of small, odd lots.
The Americans gave him nine ordinary
black and gray Toyota pickup trucks, for
example. General Idris kept three to
move around with his staff and turned
over the rest to field commanders. The
communications equipment provided is
too weak to reach across the country, he
said, so he uses Skype. There were
enough fatigues from the United States
The communications
equipment provided is too
weak to reach across Syria,
he said, so he uses Skype.
for 10,000 soldiers, which were nowhere
near enough, given the roughly 300,000
rebel fighters, he said.
In addition to planned training efforts
by the Americans, General Idris is urg¬
ing Washington to train handpicked
commando teams to help secure Syria's
suspected stock of chemical weapons if
the government teeters. As for financial
support, General Idris said very little
had been forthcoming.
"We were promised a lot," he said,
"but when the moment of truth arrives,
they think a lot and give very little."
General Idris and various aides say
that some 70 percent to 80 percent of the
field commanders are loyal to the joint
military command, but other opposition
leaders and rebel commanders say the
number shrinks continuously because
of the credibility gap created by the lack
of a reliable Weapons supply.
"He is excellent, well respected and
well liked he has a clean past," said
Emad ad-Din al-Rashid, an opposition
leader in Istanbul. "But the problem is
that the Supreme Military Council is not
a good representative of the battalions
on the ground."
There is also no shortage of field com¬
manders who say the council leaders are
too identified with the Assad government
and have too little battlefield experience.
"He is a professor, not a soldier, " said
Abu Abdelrahman al-Suri, the pseud¬
onym of a commander of Ahrar al-
Sham, ajihadi fighting movement.
General Idris and his officers bristle
at such criticism, rattling off their years
ofmilitary training and pointing out that
they defected at great personal risk.
Like many Syrian officers, General
Idris joined the military to escape rural
poverty. He was one of nine children
raised by a farmer who grew grain in a
hamlet called ail-Mubarakiyah, near
Qattinah Lake just south of Horns.
He left in 1977, eventually spending
six years training in East Germany,
where in 1990 he earned a Ph.D. in wire¬
less communicatipns. At the academy,
he taught digital electronic design. He
married and had five children, but
planned to retire to his village.
An attack in May 2012 on al-
Mubarakiyah pushed him to defect. He
called the generals he knew in the area,