Testimony prepared for delivery to the. Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. U.S. House of Representatives. Tuesday, July 12, 2011

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1 Testimony prepared for delivery to the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission U.S. House of Representatives Tuesday, July 12, 2011 By Andrew J. Tabler, Next Generation Fellow, Program on Arab Politics, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy

2 Page 2 of 6 Mr. Chairman, Thank you for the opportunity to testify before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission on the Asad regime s brutal four-month crackdown on Syria s pro-democracy protestors. Throughout my seven-year career as a journalist and analyst based in Damascus, I followed Tom Lantos s often-critical words on the Asad regime s policies with great interest. It is good to know this body continues to carry on his good work. The Asad regime s response to the protests in Syria has been one of the iron fist in a velvet glove. On the one hand, the regime continues to use live fire to gun down protestors, whose death toll has numbered about 1,500 thus far, and has arbitrarily arrested over 12,000 more. Widespread reports of beatings and torture abound, many of which have been verified by human rights activists on the ground in Syria. Internet videos show the horrific torture of some of those arrested and killed under torture, including thirteen-year-old Hamza Ali al-khatib, whose neck was broken and genitals cut off. On the other hand, the Asad regime continues to offer dialogue with what it calls legitimate protestors, but blames most of the unrest on armed gangs roaming the Syrian countryside. The Syrian opposition isn t buying it, with most if not all boycotting the dialogue until the regime withdraws its security forces from major cities and towns and agrees to a process whereby President Asad launches a transition to true democratic rule. Recently, I journeyed to Lebanon s Wadi Khaled to visit with Syrian refugees who fled from the Sunni Muslim village of Tal Kalakh, which is surrounded by a constellation of villages dominated by Alawites the heterodox offshoot of Shia Islam from which the Asad regime hails. What I found was appalling: a people traumatized by roving gangs predominantly made up of Alawites called the shabbiha or ghosts, who threatened to kill or assault protestors in the Syrian countryside and around the coastal cities. Sporting shaved heads and black outfits mixed with camouflage, these groups are believed to report directly to members of the Asad family. This wasn t the first group of refugees I had interviewed, but they were the first to have video footage on cell phone cameras where moving images speak a million or more words. They showed me clips of the shabbiha s handiwork, including the ransacking and burning of Tal Kalakh villagers houses and farms. They showed footage of snipers shooting at them as they crossed the Great Southern River (which is nothing more than a small stream in American terms) into the Wadi Khaled pocket. They also told me of the Syrian regime s use of cannon fire against their village the previous week, a fact confirmed for me by Western correspondents who were in Wadi Khaled at the same time and heard the assault firsthand. This followed similar stories found in

3 Page 3 of 6 the Western press in the weeks running up to my visit that cannon fire had been used around Deraa, the southern Syrian city where the protests essentially began on March 18. The refugees from Tal Kalakh are afraid to return home, as they are sure that regime security forces will quickly arrest them and usher them away for questioning and torture. For Syrian Sunnis, this conjures memories of the trauma of the 1982 Hama Massacre, where the regime used artillery to level large parts of Syria s fourth-largest city. At the same time, the regime used the assault on Hama to justify sweeping arrests of any political opponents. Many of those arrested were never heard from again, which today make up the country s disappeared. As I drove along the perimeter of the Wadi Khaled pocket adjacent the Syrian border, the sight of Syrian security forces mingling with shabbiha gangs clearly justified the refugees fears. And it was also clear to me that the Asad regime s use of the shabbiha was provoking the sectarian war that it publicly said it wants to avoid at all costs. Since then, similar assaults have taken place in Idlib governorate, located in northwestern Syria along its border with Turkey. Peaceful protestors in the city of Jisr al-shughour calling for the fall of the Asad regime were assaulted by regime security and military forces. In the face of the assault, some in Jisr al-shughour fought back. Given the sectarian tensions stirred by the regime in the area, this should not come as a surprise. In addition, all of Syria s border zones are smugglers dens where residents are often armed. The ensuing fighting in Jisr al-shughour and neighboring villages has sent over 12,000 Syrian refugees into Turkey. Ankara has thus far welcomed the refugees with open arms and good facilities, but has shied away from allowing reporters into the camps. Journalists have been able to reach refugees stranded in the border zone between the two countries, however. While the exact details of what happened in Jisr al- Shughour are still unclear, what is clear is that the refugees fear returning home and incurring the wrath of the Asad regime s security forces. Turkey is now preparing to receive more refugees as the protests grow in size and strength. Ankara is also now rumored to be considering establishing a buffer zone inside of Syria to better deal with the refugee issue. U.S. Response To date, the United States has made it clear that it supports freedom of speech and freedom of assembly in Syria, and that it clearly condemns assaults on peaceful demonstrations, renewed arrest sweeps, failures to fulfill promises to release the thousands still held in deplorable conditions in jail for political reasons, as well as the unleashing of thugs against civilian protesters and foreign embassies the latest episode taking place on July 11, when ten pro-asad supporters attacked the American and French embassies in Damascus. As the Asad regime s panicked and ruthless iron fist in velvet glove approach to the uprising continues to fail, all eyes are focused on the August 1 start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, when the minority Alawite regime s slaughter of predominately Sunni protestors could transform the uprising into the sectarian bloodbath many are predicting.

4 Page 4 of 6 To help end the bloodshed, Washington will need to be equally ruthless. If the United States and its European allies really seek to force the Asad regime to lead a democratic transition and facilitate Asad s eventual exit from the political scene, they will need to target Syrian energy to deprive the regime of vital foreign exchange earnings and curtail economic bailouts from Arab Gulf monarchies that historically have prevented the regime from instituting genuine change. Opportunity: Target Syrian Energy Syrian oil production has been in steady decline since the mid-1990s and is now around 390,000 barrels per day. Of that, Syria exports around 148,000 bpd, with revenues accruing directly to the state. According to International Monetary Fund and U.S. government estimates, oil sales account for around a third of state revenue, with the remainder increasingly made up through corporate and public-sector employee taxes. As the protests have hit the Syrian economy and currency hard and are expected to substantially decrease tax receipts, Damascus is likely to become increasingly reliant on oil revenue, forcing the regime to tap its $17 billion in reserves. This in turn would constrain the regime s ability to fund the security services and the army (which have been the primary bodies responsible for the brutal crackdown), maintain market subsidies (e.g., for diesel fuel), and deliver payoffs to patronage networks. It would also force the regime to resort to more deficit spending, essentially forcing it to borrow more from the Damascene and Aleppine business elite that support it, which in turn could lead to elite defections as the cost and risk of doing business with the Asad regime dramatically increases. This, in turn, could either reinforce a pacted transition to a new political order or simply help spur the regime s collapse. The primary instruments at Washington s disposal concern depriving the Asad regime of critical foreign exchange earnings. These include: Pressuring purchasers of Syrian oil. The Obama administration could prod the chief buyers of Syrian oil companies in Germany, Italy, France, and Holland to stop purchasing the regime s heavy crude. Pressuring foreign energy company divestment. Next, the Obama administration, together with the European Union, could pressure Western multinational energy companies involved in production in Syria Royal Dutch Shell, Total, Croatia s INA Nafta, and Petro-Canada to divest their Syrian operations. In particular it should ask Britain to halt the operations of Gulfsands Petroleum, the one-time Houston-based company that moved to Britain in 2008 to avoid U.S. sanctions on Rami Makhlouf, Asad s cousin and Gulfsands Syrian business partner. Interrupting tanker payment/clearance mechanisms. Syrian oil sales are largely handled by the state-owned Commercial Bank of Syria, Syria s largest bank by far in terms of assets. Washington sanctioned the CBS in 2004 for insufficient money laundering procedures, forcing the bank to

5 Page 5 of 6 close its correspondent accounts in the United States. Many European banks closed their correspondent accounts with CBS as well to protect themselves against possible sanctions violations, but a number of other European banks have not. If the Obama administration could press the European Union to sanction the CBS or just persuade individual European banks directly to stop doing business with the CBS it could effectively close off the way the regime processes its money. Sanctioning tanker traffic shipping Syrian oil. In the past, the United States has targeted shipping vessels as part of a strengthening of sanctions on its adversaries, including the Helms- Burton Act on Cuba. Washington, together with the European Union, could issue a decision by which any ship hauling Syrian oil would be banned from any future business in the United States or EU. Other energy-related measures could include: Targeting imported refined gasoline and diesel products. Diesel is Syria s Achilles heel in terms of energy; everything from irrigation pumps to home furnaces and trucks burn diesel, which is heavily subsidized by the state. But Syria s upper and middle classes rely much more heavily on gasoline, primarily to fuel automobiles. While targeting either fuel is a blunt instrument, it could be used at a critical time, especially as part of any attempt to pressure Damascus and Aleppo s trading families to cut ties with the regime. But such targeting used too soon could end up hitting the Syrian population as a whole, thereby playing into the regime s repeated pattern of blaming the uprising on a U.S. conspiracy, which it did last week in response to U.S. ambassador Robert Ford s recent overnight visit to Hama. Pressuring Syria s neighbors to hold back oil bailouts. Syria often turns to regional states for crude oil or oil revenue charity when it s in a bind, most notably Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran. In the face of the regime s increasingly brutal crackdown, the United States should persuade Baghdad, Riyadh, and Doha to withhold oil or petrodollar support for the Syrian regime. Conclusion Targeting Syrian energy as part of a coordinated unilateral and multilateral political and diplomatic strategy would help force the Syrian regime to institute the kind of political reforms necessary to lead the country toward a democratic transition. Thus far, European allies have voiced some sanctions fatigue as a result of Washington s earlier effort to impose measures on Iran to change is behavior a process that thus far has had mixed results. To overcome European reticence, the United States should start with as pinpointed measures as possible, widening the measures in tandem with the scope of the Asad regime s crackdown on its own population. Last, but not least, I would like to commend U.S. ambassador to Syria Robert Ford s recent efforts to put the Syrian regime s human rights abuses in the spotlight. Reading what is going on

6 Page 6 of 6 in Syria is always a challenge, and I learned from my sojourn in Syria that nothing beats being on the ground to weigh out the evidence. His response on Facebook to the attack by Syrian protestors on the U.S. embassy in Damascus on July 11 demonstrated a deep understanding of the situation and sharp sense of humor that I expect will continue to be a thorn in the side of Bashar al-asad s regime as the crisis in Syria unfolds.

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