Perhaps it was always going to be Mission: Impossible. The Arab League Task Force assigned to monitor compliance with Syrias an agreement to end the countrys 10-month crisis is only a week into his month-long mission, but it has already been declared a failure of activists and politicians. On Tuesday morning, a gas pipeline near the disputed city of Homs apparently blown up as a result of an attack accused, both the regime and opposition to each other, like a plot to distract the monitors. It was an unfortunate turn in a mission that is already filled with self-doubt. In fact, the Arab League has a meeting for next Saturday to discuss whether the monitors were withdrawn announced.
All this comes in the wake of a weekend declaration Arab Parliament, a 88-member body that advises the Arab League, its parent organization. In a strongly worded statement, urged Ali al-Salem al-Dekbas, the Speaker of Parliament, the immediate withdrawal of the small group of Arab League monitored in Syria, saying their presence was essentially the purchase President Bashar al-Assad time to continue to kill his people. At least 150 protesters have been killed since the mission began in Syria on 26 In December, according to some activists. Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian-American dissident who creates the following events in his home through a vast network of sources, the number is much higher at 315th "For this to happen in the presence has aroused the ire of Arab monitors the Arab peoples and negates the purpose of sending a fact-finding mission," said Dekbas. "This is the Syrian regime, an Arab cover for the continuation of his inhuman acts under the eyes and ears of the Arab League."
Although the Arab Parliament always as toothless as its parent company, it was recommended, the first body suspension Syria to join the Arab League, a decision later in a sharp blow to Damascus, which has long proclaimed itself as a self-heart believed proud of pan- Arab nationalism. Dekbas urged Arab League Secretary General Nabil al-Araby call for a meeting of Arab foreign ministers to adopt a resolution to immediately pull the monitors. On the occasion of the League headquarters in Cairo on Monday, said Nabil al-Araby, the Organization of the Secretary-General that the regime sharpshooters still on the streets, although their heavy weapons were withdrawn from the cities and some 3,500 prisoners have been freed. The number of released prisoners is considerably higher than the 755, the Syrian state news agency reported recently.
The observer mission has been plagued by questions of credibility from the start. The League of choice of the Sudanese General Mohamed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi, at the head of the civil rights group outraged that, if a senior employee was fit by a regime with its own checkered human rights, Syria asked to evaluate measures. Dabi, a Sudanese military and intelligence officer, has joined the alleged war crimes in Darfur by rights organizations. Syrian opposition groups called for his removal, something that the Arab League is unlikely to do.
Dabi stirred controversy by the media that he had "nothing frightening" on a previous trip to Homs, Syrian city that has seen much of the brunt of the anger borne Assad. On weekends, he did it again, bycontradicting videotaped comments by an unidentified, alleged observers in the southern city of Dara'a, where the uprising began in mid-March. The Observer - dressed in a fluorescent orange vest with the Arab League logo and speaks Arabic, which sounds like a North African accent - clearly says that his team snipers saw "with my own eyes." He appealed to the Syrian government to remove them within 24 hours otherwise "there are other measures are taken." The footage was filmed on Friday. At one point, a voice-over questions of the observer comments, after which respond to the angry man? "We saw them with my own eyes Are you trying to tell me that I do not see snipers can see for myself!"
Dabi later told the BBC that the man was purely hypothetical. "This man said that if he did - by his own eyes - the sniper immediately report it," the BBC said Dabi. "But he did not see [snipers]." Dabi not deny that the man with the camera was an observer.
All this reflects poorly on the credibility of the observer mission and the Arab League itself. It is determined to an "Arab solution" to the Syrian crisis, but if the monitor mission has not, in fact, this may be unlikely.
The mission is to cut through the propaganda of both regime and opposition to ensure that Assad has withdrawn his military service from the land of cities and towns, more violence, released all political prisoners and began seriously trying to negotiate with the opposition. Instead, the death toll has risen further.
Assad has played a sly dance with the Arab League, was tempted by repeatedly missing deadlines, and then make small gestures to show how the release of a few hundred prisoners, his good will and cooperation. The Syrian president, only finally agreed to let the monitors into the country after the Arab League threatened to refer the case to the Security Council of the United Nations instead. Some observers say that (with Sudan had some Syrian League votes to Damascus sided censoring) the appointment of the league, the Sudanese general calm, and the dilution of the mission to Syria and numbers indicate bias were not his. The mission was to include 500 monitors, but that number was whittled to about 150. Less than 100 are on the ground in Syria.
No one wants to know what are the likely consequences of the failure of the mission: a severe form of intervention, at the diplomatic and / or military level.Syria is not Libya, Egypt, Tunisia or Yemen or Bahrain. It is much more dangerous and more important in many ways than anything else. The conflict, which is increasingly sectarian encroachment, risks fragile neighboring countries such as Lebanon and Iraq - and even Israel, shares a common border with Syria.
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