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| Daily News Brief January 30, 2013 |
Top of the Agenda: Envoy Decries Syria's 'Horrors'
International uproar heightened on Tuesday as the bodies of more than seventy Syrian men and teenagers were found on the banks of a river (BBC)
in Aleppo's rebel-held western district, with indications they were
executed summarily. U.N.-Arab League mediator Lakhdar Brahimi, whose
tenure ends in February, criticized (al-Arabiya)
the UN Security Council's Geneva Declaration for being too vague,
saying the conflict has reached "unprecedented levels of horror." More
than $1.1 billion has been pledged to aid civilians in the conflict that
has so far seen 700,000 refugees (Reuters) flee to neighboring countries.
Analysis
"Moscow, then, ultimately sees the West and Russia as having similar interests in preserving the status quo in Syria
.
Sadly, it has been the pusillanimous Western—and especially
American—reaction to the popular uprising against the Assad regime that
has contributed to this Russian misperception," writes Mark Katz for Syria Deeply.
"Washington
had gone wobbly on chemical weapons. With the deterrent value of the
president's remarks in question – and one unconfirmed report that Syria
used a chemical agent in Homs on December 23 – the chemical specter
remains. This raises the key question:
Would Obama really stand by if the Syrian government gassed thousands of its citizens?" writes Bennett Ramberg for Reuters.
"In some ways, Washington's overt – and covert – support for the rebels is playing into President Bashar al-Assad's hands, allowing him to claim
he is fighting foreign intervention rather than domestic dissent, while
also giving him space to fight back as brutally as he wants with no
immediate threat of military involvement by the US, NATO, or other
western powers," writes al-Jazeera.
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