TablerTestimony20110712-2.pdf
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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
©2011 The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
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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 Ifound 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 withcamouflage, 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. Theyshowed 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
©2011 The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
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the Western press in the weeks running up to my visit that cannon fire had been used aroundDeraa, 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 securityforces 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 tome 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 theassault, 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 allowingreporters into the camps. Journalists have been able to reach
refugees stranded in the border zonebetween 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 thewrath of the Asad regime’s security forces. Turkey is
now preparing to receive more refugees asthe 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 supportersattacked 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.
©2011 The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
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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 andcurrency 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’sheavy crude.
Pressuring foreign energy company divestment. Next, the Obama administration, together with
the European Union, could pressure Western multinational energy companies involved inproduction 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
©2011 The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
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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 banksdirectly to stop doing business with the CBS—it could effectively
close off the way the regimeprocesses its money.
Sanctioning tanker traffic shipping Syrian oil. In the past, the United States has targetedshipping 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 bywhich 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 isheavily 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’strading families to cut ties with the regime. But such targeting
used too soon could end up hittingthe 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 UnitedArab 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 theSyrian 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 onIran 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
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in Syria is always a challenge, and I learned from my sojourn in Syria that nothing beats being onthe ground to weigh out the evidence. His response on
Facebook to the attack by Syrianprotestors 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.
©2011 The Washington Institute for Near East Policy