Sunday, June 2, 2013 at 10:53 | Scott Lucas in EA Live, EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran A spokesman for insurgents tours the besieged city of Qusayr
Claimed Footage of Scud Strike in Kafar Hamra Section of Aleppo
Saturday, June 1, 2013 at 6:43 | Scott Lucas in EA Live, EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran Head of Free Syrian Army, Salim Idriss, appealing for foreign help for the besieged town of Qusayr
Insurgent Projects in the North
A 12-minute video from the insurgent group Ahrar al-Sham, boasting of water supply to 50 villages in Raqqa Province:
Qusayr, Salim Idriss, Syria Friday, May 31, 2013 at 14:57 | Scott Lucas in EA Live, EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran See also Syria Analysis: A 5-Point Guide to Assad Interview --- Is He Right To Declare Victory?
Iran Today: IRGC Commander Says Syrian Government, Nation "Modeled Itself On Iran"
Syria Audio Analysis: The Real Importance of the "Russian Missiles to Syria" Story
Syria Video & Transcript: President Assad's Interview with Al-Manar TV
Thursday's Syria Today: Last Chance for Opposition "Unity" in Istanbul Talks
Lebanese Parliament Delays Elections to November 2014
Lebanon's Parliament has voted to extend its mandate and delay elections scheduled for June after failing to adopt a new electoral law.
The motion for a 17-month extension was passed unanimously by the 98 members of the 128-seat house who attended on Friday. It said the delay was due to "the security situation in several Lebanese regions that gives rise to political escalation and division which often take on confessional forms".
Fuad Siniora, the opposition head in parliament, said: "We were forced to vote on this bad project to avoid a vacuum and after unrest in several regions and the serious negative development" of Hezbollah's involvement in the Syria conflict.
Amid the months-long delay over a new electoral law, Prime Minister Tamman Salam, who was named on 6 April, has been unable to form a new Government because of divisions over Syria.
Ramped-up foreign intervention is likely to tip the military balance against the Assad regime. But it faces a political question: is the aim merely to pressure and contain the President or to topple him?
And that question in turn leads to others: is there an effective political group, given the tensions and fragementing within the opposition, that can replace Assad? Will the "extremists", rather than the "moderates", win? Will the fall of the regime send destabilising ripples across the Middle East?
Assad is betting that all these questions can be turned into doubts to block further intervention for the opposition. Last night's declarations were his chips to support that bet.
On Monocle 24's The Daily on Thursday night, I discussed the latest rumours and claims over the Russian shipment of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Syria to get to the real significance of the story.
Listen from the 7:41 mark on The Daily's homepage or in a pop-out window
The take-away line? "The S-300 story is more important as a political game --- with the "West" trying to put Russia in a corner and Moscow standing firm --- than as a military development."
Thursday, May 30, 2013 at 14:23 | Scott Lucas in EA Live, EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran 
Opposition Representatives at This Week's Talks Oppositions Appeals for Help in Besieged Qusayr and Damascus Suburb
Insurgent commanders in the besieged town of Qusayr, near the Lebanese border, have appealed for help and warned of dire consequences if it does not arrive:
If all rebel fronts do not move to stop this crime being led by Hezbollah and Assad's traitorous army of dogs...we will soon be saying that there was once a city called Qusayr.
Malek Ammar, an opposition activist in Qusayr, said, "The town is surrounded and there's no way to bring in medical aid."
Ammar said about 100 of 700 wounded needed oxygen: "What we need [insurgent units] to do is come to the outskirts of the city and attack the checkpoints so we can get routes in and out of the city."
Qusayr has been under sustained shelling and attacks for almost two weeks. On Wednesday, the Syrian military captured the nearby airbase of Dabba, cutting off the town on all sides and bolstering their positions.
Elsewhere, insurgents blockaded in the eastern Ghouta, east of Damascus, appealed for help on Facebook, claiming Assad's forces were "preparing to commit more massacres".
The fighters said they held the opposition Syrian National Coalition, whose members have spent a week arguing in Istanbul over the orgnaisation of the leadership, responsible for their plight.George Sabra, the acting head of the opposition Syrian National Coalition, has confirmed that the group will not attend any international "peace" conference.
However, whereas the Coalition's formal declaration on Wednesday emphasised its demand that President Assad step down as part of any transitional government, Sabra's statement said the condition was the international community's intervention to end the Syrian military's siege of Qusayr, near the Lebanese border.
Then Sabra declared, "The National Coalition will not take part in any international conference or any such efforts so long as the militias of Iran and Hezbollah continue their invasion of Syria."
Wednesday, May 29, 2013 at 8:48 | Scott Lucas in EA Live, EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran 
Bashar al-Assad & Vladimir Putin
Syrian National Coalition: No Part in Conference Without Assad Exit
The opposition Syrian National Coalition has officially confirmed that it will not participate in a proposed international "peace" conference in Geneva next month without a guarantee that President Assad will leave power.
The committee adopted a declaration amid a week-long meeting in Turkey, "The participation of the Syrians in any conference is tied to the presentation of a deadline for a solution and giving the necessary binding international guarantees."
Russia answered the Western pressure with the clear signal that it will continue to provide weapons to the "legitimate" authority in Syria. In so doing, it was sending another message: if you want to have an international "peace" conference, that "legitimate" regime will have to be allowed at the table with no pre-conditions on its participation.
Yet, at the same time, Moscow was not going to wear the villain's mantle designed for it by the "West", but was going to maintain plausible deniability. Th message:
Maybe we are supplying S-300s under an old contract, maybe we are not --- you keep trying to figure it out.
Meanwhile, your move, Washington. Your move, London. Are you really going to pour in more weapons to the insurgency, even as you criticise us for supplying our own to the "legitimate" leaders of Syria?
Tuesday, May 28, 2013 at 14:48 | James Miller in EA Live, EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran Head of Free Syria Army Threatens Attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon
The Free Syrian Army's Chief of Staff, General Salim Idriss, has warned, "If the attacks of Hezbollah against Syrian territory do not stop within 24 hours, we will take all measures to hunt Hezbollah, even in hell."
Idriss continued with the threat to intervene in Lebanon, where Hezbollah is based, "I will no longer be bound by any commitments I made, if a decision to stop the attacks...is not taken and implemented," said Idriss.
Idriss said, "We are being subjected to a genocide conducted by Hezbollah," and, without giving details of specific operations said he hoped "that everyone will excuse the Free [Syrian] Army" for retaliating.
The principle sticking point involves voting. Existing members of the coalition insist that the inclusion of new members must be based on balloting by existing members only. But this would change little in a monopoly that was made possible by interference from regional countries to begin with, rather than based on consensus among Syrian opposition. The existing members were not chosen by the people to decide whether certain opposition figures should be members or not.
The second issue is the "blocking third", or the veto power held by a third of the members. This idea was advanced by the coalition's secretary general, Mustafa Al Sabbagh, and was clearly meant to maintain the monopoly of the current core group within the coalition.
Hassan argues that this stalemate may cripple the group, and will only fuel the stalemate seen on Syria's battlefields.
On the other hand, The Atlantic's Shadi Hamid argues that the political stalemate can only be solved by progress on the battlefield, and that progress has not happened because the international community is waiting for a unified leadership that will likely never occur:
As European Union foreign ministers met today to discuss the lifting of the arms embargo on the Syrian insurgency, I spoke with Monocle 24's The Briefing about the immediate situation and longer-term prospects.
Listen to discussion from the 6-minute mark on The Briefing's homepage or in a pop-out window
1. What is the current position among Western countries --- the US, Britain, France, and other European countries --- regarding arming of the insurgents?
2. What effect does fear of "extremism" have on the arming of the opposition?
3. What is the objective of increased armaments --- pressuring President Assad or overthrowing him?
4. What impact would the EU's lifting of the embargo have?
