An undercover Al Jazeera correspondent takes us inside the lives of Syria’s anti-government demonstrators.
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I have not posted the past four weeks. In the meantime, the Assad’s army entered Homs, and then Idlib as FSA withdrew from both cities, massacres have taken place Car bombs have returned to the picture, just as Annan is expected to send a team of experts. However, the new car bombs have targeted areas with Christian majorities including today’s explosion in Aleppo’s sleimanyeh quarter. This is consistent with warnings signs that came out last week regarding the regime’s intent to wrap up its perceived victory by increasingly forcing Syria’s Christians to take a sectarian side.
Here are a few comments on specific issues.
Batta 
Batta (Duck), a befitting address by a “modern” wife and by an admiring young woman to a man whose army assisted by vile militia gangs is terrorizing and murdering Syrians ever since some of these Syrians declared that they have had enough of his family’s totalitarian control over their lives and are no longer willing to take it.
Oddly enough, absent (to-date) from the leaked emails are indications of any involvement by senior government officials, business partners, religious figures, or even social climbers’ in the narrow circle the boy-king has surrounded himself with. What we notice is the critical role of two intern-level women (Shehrazad Gaafari and Hadeel Al-Ali) along with the notorious Luna Al-Shible in proposing media campaigns and passing information and summaries to the boy-king who is occupying his busy time with state affairs in parallel with trivia such as downloading teens songs from I-tune and playing harry potter games among other life occupations.
The men in the email are different. They are security oriented. One passes advises (or commands) from key Iranian and HA contacts, still through the interns. Another (Khaled Al-Ahmad) seems to be the personal envoy-spook of the boy king traveling throughout the country’s hot-spots and making observations and recommendations while connecting with regime-friendly Lebanese tycoons. The father in law remains heavily engaged as well, putting to rest claims of his family’s distance from the murderous regime and placing himself at risk of being the first member of the regime to be successfully tried in the west for abetting and aiding crimes against humanity. He may be followed by his daughter, who may now be tried in the UK for violating sanctions, independent of what trivial, yet expensive items she seems obsessed with purchasing.
What comes out drives a dagger at the heart of the loyalists and regime-made opposition claims that they oppose the revolution because it threatens to destroy the institutions of the state. It also obliterates the loyalists frantic efforts to retain the fraudulent image of a “normal” president and state. Clearly, when a young, albeit seasoned diplomat such as Jihad Maqdisi has to rely on a intern level advisors to pass his opinions to the head of state, one must wonder the extent at which the Assads believe in these institutions. Needless to say, pro-freedom thinkers and intellectuals have argued from day one that under the Assads, there are no institutions or state, as all are simply overshadowed by a cancerous criminal-security apparatus and mafia family.
Some of us will get busy trying to decipher the interpersonal relationships of the boy-king now sarcastically known as Batta in attempts to demonstrate the increasingly isolated family. However, the presence of these intern-senior-advisors and their impacts on the actions taken by the regime can not and should not be trivialized by sarcasm. Information provided to the boy-king by these people were acted upon and may have resulted in deaths, including those of journalists in Homs. And if anything they indicate that the boy-king is in control and has directed actions either by transferring the information to his henchmen, or by directly ordering actions. These advisors are not merely providing media advise, but far more sinister advises, even if the emails do not reveal direct orders from the boy-king to his high ranking officers and henchmen. The compartmentalization of connections only illustrates his lack of trust in the state and its institutions not to mention his derogative description of his own fraudulent reform laws. It is no wonder that regime apologists on Syria Comment are now blasting Joshua Landis for publishing the little he did of these emails. The little that has been leaked exposes their own moral degeneration.
In the aftermath of the continuing leaks, Nir Rosen seems to be in the hot seat now. On at least two occasions, he was described by both the intern and the in law as being “helpful” to the regime. Although it is more than possible that in both cases, the two “inner-circle” members have interpreted any critique of the opposition as favorable to the regime, and thus bestowed the “helpful” title on Rosen, critiques of Rosen seem to focus on the implication that he may have divulged information that was used to help the regime’s aggression against homs. Rosen himself has written a post protesting his innocence. I will now from opinion on his response and would leave it to the readers to decide.
Where to ?
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By ROBERT MACKEY
President Bashar al-Assad and his wife, Asma, appeared on Syrian state television last month, casting their ballots in a referendum on long-promised “reforms.”
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Updated | 5:43 p.m. As Syrians mark the first anniversary of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad on Thursday — with government-orchestrated rallies of support broadcast live on state television and furtive messages promising continued defiance posted on YouTube — exiles trying to make sense of the conflict from afar have been eagerly reading a cache of e-mails, said to be the private correspondence of the regime’s first couple, provided to The Guardian by opposition activists.
While The Guardian remains open to the possibility that some of the e-mails intercepted by the activists are fake, Britain’s former ambassador to Syria confirmed that two messages from him were genuine. The newspaper adds: “The cache of 3,000 e-mails passed on by a source in the Syrian opposition reveals a wealth of private information — including family photographs and videos, a scan of the president’s identity card and a birth certificate belonging to a family member — that would be difficult for even the best resourced hoaxer or intelligence agency to gather or fabricate.”
If the e-mails are genuine, there are potentially serious revelations in the trove, including what appears to be evidence that the president took advice from Iran on how to handle the crackdown on dissent. Even so, activists, bloggers and journalists scouring the messages published by The Guardian so far have largely focused on the trivial nature of the messages — the links tofunny YouTube clips, the songs purchased from iTunes — which seem to reveal that, even in the middle of a bloody campaign to crush a protest movement, the president and his wife are still, at heart, a British-educated doctor who was never supposed to lead his country, and the British-born former investment banker he married.
• Messages show Bashar al-Assad took advice from Iran
• Leader made light of promised reforms
• Wife spent thousands on jewellery and furniture
Bashar al-Assad apparently made light of reforms he had promised in an attempt to defuse the Syrian crisis. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Bashar al-Assad took advice from Iran on how to handle the uprising against his rule, according to a cache of what appear to be several thousand emails received and sent by the Syrian leader and his wife.
The Syrian leader was also briefed in detail about the presence of western journalists in the Baba Amr district of Homs and urged to “tighten the security grip” on the opposition-held city in November.
The revelations are contained in more than 3,000 documents that activists say are emails downloaded from private accounts belonging to Assad and his wife, Asma.
The messages, which have been obtained by the Guardian, are said to have been intercepted by members of the opposition Supreme Council of the Revolution group between June and early February.
The documents, which emerge on the first anniversary of the rebellion that has seen more than 8,000 Syrians killed, paint a portrait of a first family remarkably insulated from the mounting crisis and continuing to enjoy a luxurious lifestyle.
They appear to show the president’s wife spending thousands of dollars over the internet for designer goods while he swaps entertaining internet links on his iPad and downloads music from iTunes.
As the world watched in horror at the brutal suppression of protests across the country and many Syrians faced food shortages and other hardships, Mrs Assad spent more than £10,000 on candlesticks, tables and chandeliers from Paris and instructed an aide to order a fondue set from Amazon.
The Guardian has made extensive efforts to authenticate the emails by checking their contents against established facts and contacting 10 individuals whose correspondence appears in the cache. These checks suggest the messages are genuine, but it has not been possible to verify every one.
The emails also appear to show that:
• Assad established a network of trusted aides who reported directly to him through his “private” email account – bypassing both his powerful clan and the country’s security apparatus.
• Assad made light of reforms he had promised in an attempt to defuse the crisis, referring to “rubbish laws of parties, elections, media”.
• A daughter of the emir of Qatar, Hamid bin Khalifa al-Thani, this year advised Mr and Mrs Assad to leave Syria and suggested Doha may offer them exile.
• Assad sidestepped extensive US sanctions against him by using a third party with a US address to make purchases of music and apps from Apple’s iTunes.
• A Dubai-based company, al-Shahba, with a registered office in London is used as a key conduit for Syrian government business and private purchases by the Syrian first lady.
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