Uneasy Truces: Syrian Regime Exploits Rebel Despair

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Uneasy Truces: Syrian Regime Exploits Rebel Despair
Some Pacts Unravel, Fuel Unease; Government Is Biggest Winner

MOADHAMIYA, Syria—The Syrian regime is slowly solidifying control of the ring of restive suburbs around Damascus by making deals with men like Ahmed Arnous, a 40-year-old former rebel and father of four.

Mr. Arnous was one of the protesters who rose up three years ago against President Bashar al-Assad in this town southwest of Damascus. He took up arms and joined the rebel Free Syrian Army. He survived an eight-month siege by pro-regime forces that reduced people to eating foliage. He lived through a chemical weapons assault in August that killed about 80 people in Moadhamiya and more than 1,300 in another rebel-held suburb.

But earlier this year, Mr. Arnous was among the first group of men in Moadhamiya to surrender their weapons as part of a process labeled "national reconciliation" by the Syrian government. A deeply creased piece of paper stamped by the Air Force Intelligence Directorate, one of the country's most dreaded security agencies, is proof of his change of heart. The document says Mr. Arnous has applied to "regularize his status" as a noncombatant.

"People have limits, and we reached ours," says the haggard-looking and chain-smoking Mr. Arnous. "We were ready to cling on to anything to get food for us and the children."

Since the beginning of 2014, the Syrian government has been trying to build on a series of cease fires—pacts reached between military and security forces and rebel factions in several districts and towns around the capital. Government officials and state media call them national reconciliations; for now they are shaky and uneasy truces born largely out of the desperation of civilians as well as some former rebels like Mr. Arnous.

Many people from Moadhamiya and elsewhere were forced to flee their homes at the start of the conflict to relatively safer parts of Damascus or neighboring countries. The misery of displacement pushed many to their breaking point.

Residents hope the truces will at least ease the suffering, even though some deals have already been compromised or shattered and are seen by many Syrians as mere lulls in the fighting—or even a political smoke screen.

Moadhamiya natives speak in hushed tones about some women in Damascus and neighboring Lebanon who begged town elders and rebel leaders to accept the government's truce terms. Some had been forced to work as prostitutes just to feed their children, they say. Families that stayed had to cope with almost daily bombardment and shelling and a siege by pro-regime forces intended to starve rebels and their civilian sympathizers into submission.

"The starvation was not a big deal for me," says a woman who gives her name as Umm Emad, which means "mother of Emad." The elderly widow and mother of 10 says she remained in Moadhamiya the entire time. "It was the injustice and the suffering we had to endure with our children," she says.

Her home, she says, was leveled by regime forces because several of her sons are rebel fighters and activists. Two of them, she says, were killed in the second half of December—days before terms of the truce were completed. Her eyes well up as she pulls out a photograph of one of her dead sons from her leather handbag.


As a part of its truce efforts, Syrian forces are relaxing rules for some residents of Moadhamiya, mostly women and elderly men. They are permitting them, for example, to leave the town to bring back food and medicine—although the outings are subject to searches at checkpoints as witnessed by a reporter last week. Anyone requiring surgery is taken to a government hospital.

The new privileges were granted after rebels pledged to cease hostilities, hand over some of their weapons and raise the Syrian flag at the municipal building, according to military officers, rebels and residents interviewed.

Rebels control most of the town including its center. Government forces, meanwhile, are restricted to the eastern and northern sections which are inhabited mainly by regime loyalists from the Alawite minority. Most rebels fighting the regime belong to Syria's Sunni majority.

For now, the government is the big winner in these deals. Officials involved say they have improved security along vital roads and highways and near strategic facilities ringing Damascus. The changes also free up overstretched military resources to tackle other hot spots. Violence has diminished in some areas as the government prepares for summer presidential elections in which Mr. Assad plans to run for another term.

Perhaps most importantly, though, the deals permit the government to show the world that it can forge peace inside Syria and doesn't need to sit down with the Western-backed opposition as happened in Geneva earlier this year. Core supporters tend to portray the agreements as acts of surrender by rebels.

Rebels reject the notion that they have surrendered but concede they're under tremendous pressure from civilians to agree to these truces.

Government officials insist the pacts are viable and part of a comprehensive process of national reconciliation and deny the siege imposed on these communities played any role.

"It is war and conditions during war are very, very bad," said Ali Haidar, minister for reconciliation affairs, in an interview.

But privately, some officials in Mr. Haidar's ministry are skeptical. Violations, uncertainty and mistrust beset many of these pacts. Some on both sides see them as tactical pauses more than any lasting resolution.

"We have reservations; we do not see it as reconciliation, just a cessation of hostilities as weapons remain with both sides," says an official with the Ministry of Reconciliation Affairs which was created in 2012, referring to rebels and loyalists who have joined pro-regime militias.

"And if the reconciliation process is incomplete then this is a time bomb that will take us back to square one," added the official.

The official speaks from experience. He says he has been personally involved in at least five tentative "reconciliation attempts" between the government and rebels in the districts of Al Hameh and Qudssaya, northwest of the city, since November 2012.

The latest truce deal in these areas, reached toward the end of last year, collapsed in February after rebels shot and killed an army officer and his son. The incident has triggered intermittent siege and bombardment by government forces since then, according to residents and officials.

The government has been sending more upbeat messages about the progress of truce efforts.

Last month, local government officials and security chiefs in suburban Damascus held a carnival-like celebration. It was broadcast live on state television to mark the "reconciliation" reached in the towns of Babila, Beit Sahem and Yalda, southeast of the city off the highway to the airport.

Heavily bearded rebels from the Sunni majority were shown joking with and hugging Alawites from the National Defense Force, a pro-regime militia.

For two days residents say they were allowed to move in and out of their towns freely and bring in as much food as they wanted—a stark change after a siege by government forces that lasted almost a year and prevented food, medicine and humanitarian aid from going in.

But residents say the blockade was quickly reinstated after militant Islamist rebels in these towns and in adjacent areas like the Yarmouk Camp and the sprawling Eastern Ghouta fired mortars at government checkpoints—demonstrating their opposition to the truce.

On a recent morning more than a dozen women with bags of clothing and other belongings waited anxiously near a checkpoint at the entrance of Babila hoping they would be allowed back in. Some say they were separated from family members after they went out to get food.

"It's the same each day," says a business owner close to the checkpoint. "The women will cry, a soldier at the checkpoint will pity them and allow some to sneak in late at night."

The dynamic is markedly different in Barzeh, a district northeast of Damascus, where a truce has been in place since early January. It was forged by officers from the presidential Republican Guard—and Mr. Assad himself. The government and security forces here appear more inclined to make some concessions to the rebels. Last month 36 Barzeh opposition activists and fighters imprisoned by the regime were released after rebels threatened to call off the truce, according to a security official.

In Barzeh, the fighting was particularly ferocious, making the current lull seem more of a stalemate.

Gutted and heavily damaged apartment blocks and flattened homes attest to the heavy bombardment and shelling since late 2012 that largely failed to dislodge the rebels who took refuge in an intricate network of underground tunnels. Also sniping, kidnapping and gruesome killings between rebels and militiamen from an adjacent Alawite enclave called Esh al Warwar shaped much of the battle here.

"They want their own state," muses a government security official as he watches fighters from the other side, some of them teenagers, stand guard at all entrances leading into the main rebel-held area known as Barzeh al Balad.

Not everyone is happy with the state of affairs. Shiite families who used to live inside say they were told by Barzeh rebels that they need special permission from the local self-styled Islamic court to return home or even take out their belongings.

A Shiite Barzeh resident now displaced elsewhere in Damascus says her home is now occupied by Sunnis from the district who lost their home in the war and that all her personal belongings were thrown away.

"Everything is gone, the reconciliation has made us worse off," she says asking that her name not be used for fear of retribution from rebels.

Similar bitterness prevails among residents of the Alawite sections of Moadhamiya.

"Why are you helping them, we gave martyrs and they gave gunmen," said an Alawite woman addressing an army officer as other women from the rebel side of town waited nearby under a tent with a large portrait of Mr. Assad to receive government food rations.

The officer, who identifies himself as Col. Bashir, says he was hopeful that the truce in Moadhamiya could lead to a real reconciliation if the U.N. and countries backing the rebels like Saudi Arabia and the U.S. don't interfere.

He says this is why he has prevented U.N. aid convoys from going into Moadhamiya twice last week. Instead, he has insisted that they drop off their load in the government controlled section of town and for people to walk from the rebel side to pick it up. The U.N. has refused.

U.N. officials have welcomed the truces around Damascus seeing them as lifesavers for civilians.

But they say they have yet to lead to unhindered aid access to these communities as demanded by a Security Council resolution passed one month ago.

One man, who identifies himself as a member of the Moadhamiya "reconciliation committee," says the truce in his town will collapse if the detainees, including five of his brothers, aren't released. Since late December, security and military officials in charge of Moadhamiya said they would free some of the nearly 700 natives detained since the start of the conflict three years ago. That promise is a major sticking point in the truce deals.

Mr. Arnous, the rebel who was among the first to surrender, is hopeful that everything will be done to uphold the truce. This is because most Moadhamiya residents have grown weary of the conflict and feel betrayed by both the international community and the bitterly divided opposition.

Like himself, he suspects they've had enough.