After a Year, Deep Divisions Hobble Syria’s Opposition
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
NYT
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syria’s downward spiral into more hellish conflict in cities like Homs has provoked a new surge of outrage around the world, with Arab and many Western countries searching for new ways to support protesters and activist groups coming under the government’s increasingly lethal assault.
But as diplomats from about 80 countries converge on Tunisia on Friday in search of a strategy to provide aid to Syria’s beleaguered citizens, they will find their efforts compromised even before they begin by the lack of a cohesive opposition leadership.
Nearly a year after the uprising began, the opposition remains a fractious collection of political groups, longtime exiles, grass-roots organizers and armed militants, all deeply divided along ideological, ethnic or sectarian lines, and too disjointed to agree on even the rudiments of a strategy to topple President Bashar al-Assad’s government.
The need to build a united opposition will be the focus of intense discussions at what has been billed as the inaugural meeting of the Friends of Syria. Fostering some semblance of a unified protest movement, possibly under the umbrella of an exile alliance called the Syrian National Council, will be a theme hovering in the background.
(More here.)
NYT
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syria’s downward spiral into more hellish conflict in cities like Homs has provoked a new surge of outrage around the world, with Arab and many Western countries searching for new ways to support protesters and activist groups coming under the government’s increasingly lethal assault.
But as diplomats from about 80 countries converge on Tunisia on Friday in search of a strategy to provide aid to Syria’s beleaguered citizens, they will find their efforts compromised even before they begin by the lack of a cohesive opposition leadership.
Nearly a year after the uprising began, the opposition remains a fractious collection of political groups, longtime exiles, grass-roots organizers and armed militants, all deeply divided along ideological, ethnic or sectarian lines, and too disjointed to agree on even the rudiments of a strategy to topple President Bashar al-Assad’s government.
The need to build a united opposition will be the focus of intense discussions at what has been billed as the inaugural meeting of the Friends of Syria. Fostering some semblance of a unified protest movement, possibly under the umbrella of an exile alliance called the Syrian National Council, will be a theme hovering in the background.
(More here.)
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