Robert Ford, Weapons Inspector: The Rebellion Begins in Hama, Part 2

Robert Ford, Weapons Inspector
The Rebellion Begins in Hama, Part 2
July 26, 2015
(last edits (new section "And who is this?") July 30)

A Taunting Gesture

On July 5, 2011, the body of Ibrahim Qashoush was pulled from the Orontes river in Hama, after he disappeared early on July 3. His throat was cut and vocal cords removed. He was mourned loudly as the supposed "nightingale of the revolution," responsible for writing or singing a popular anti-Assad protest song. But it turns out he was someone else - probably a suspected informant killed for tattling on terrorist plans in Hama - see part 3.  

It was known by opposition activists on the 5th that Qashoush had been killed, by regime thugs, the day before. It wasn't the same day, nor any time on the 3rd. It was on July 4th, which is of course independence day in the United States. Were the killers talking independence to an American audience as they slaughtered him and hatched their inspiring myth? It was the next day, Wednesday July 6 - or possibly the day after - that U.S. Ambassador Robert Stephen Ford made a rare appearance in the same city of Hama.

US Ambassador to Syria (center, behind windshield),
demanding the fall of the Syrian government

As reported, the ambassador visited local activists and patients at a hospital, wounded in earlier incidents. Ford's visit happened to coincide with a visit from France's ambassador (sources are clear this wasn't planned out). He also, unavoidably to hear the State Department, wound up with his official SUV rolling amidst a crowd of protesters chanting “The people want the fall of the regime,” and “We will only kneel to God,” as Rania Abouzeid  wrote in a July 8 article in TIME. Here's a working copy of a Reuters video (still at right). Notice how the protesters are waving olive branches and no visible rifles or swords in this demonstration. This was smart.

As Rania Abouzaid wrote for TIME:

After weeks of cautious, careful U.S. criticism of Assad, Ford’s physical presence in the city that has now defied both Assads — the father and former President Hafez, and his son Bashar — was a hugely symbolic, indeed taunting, gesture, one soon mimicked by the French ambassador. But will it do more harm than good?

(The Hafez reference is to the alleged 1982 "Hama Massacre," which accompanied a Muslim Brotherhood-led uprising that was similar to the one happening now, except it was soundly crushed. Officially, it was just an Alawi dictator massacring Sunnis, as it allegedly is today - like father, like son.)

Damascus was not happy with this stunt. Syrian officials and official media said Ford went beyond his mandate in Hama and met with "saboteurs," in a move "aimed at obstructing dialogue and political solutions." A useful report from The Guardian passes on these concerns in some detail. Presidential adviser Bouthaina Shaaban, for example, called the visit "an escalation on the part of the U.S. ambassador," coming as it did at a moment when, she said, "a meeting is prepared between the residents, mosque imams and the civil authorities in the city aimed at finding a solution to the problem." In that context, Ford's display "gives us a message that the U.S. says 'No' to dialogue," She said.

Shaaban is being keen here; other evidence suggest the U.S. always wanted regime change, not negotiations towards stability. The opposition Local Coordinating Committees, from the start insistent on regime change, had just said no to this dialogue, and it seems Washington agreed. And their chosen voice was derailing it by marching in solidarity with the anti-government activists who spoke not of dialogue, but of a collapsing government. "Saboteurs" seems a fair term.

There's some confusion (on my end anyway) about the timeline of and approval for the visit; The state-run Syrian media allegedly claimed Ford had no permission to be in Hama at all, but they might mean just beyond the first day (hoping to avoid a Friday of Ford rally). The State Department points out he was waved through checkpoints after arranging authorization with the foreign and/or  defense ministries.  Ford arrived on either Wednesday or Thursday, by different reports, and announced he would stay 'til Friday (Guardian), but left before the day's protests so as “not to become the story himself.” Some reports suggest the march seen on video was on Thursday the 7th, not the proper Friday one (Al-Arabiya)  but the Reuters video says that was Friday after all and he only left before Friday prayers.

I'm okay with staying a bit confused on that, because the point is the same - he moved along with the protesters in solidarity, as they peacefully demanded the fall of the same government Ford was ambassador to... and they did it right in the shadow of the forced collapse of Libya's government that was still ongoing, with full U.S. military support. They were clearly seeking a copy of the same here, and Ford was hinting they might get it, if the chaos and accusations got extreme enough (that's what did it in Libya, they probably understood). 

Ford Denies Armed Gangs

Another problem with claiming the ambassador was there clandestinely is that he also met members of Syria's military, who showed and told him things. Why take him to places if he's not supposed to be there?

This part is not explained in most reports, but seen in the photo below (from this Global Research piece, given as from his visit to Hama in July, but not easily traced to a source with original credits). He's not smiling but perhaps nodding, as an officer explains something related to the bullet holes in a wall he's being shown. It's probably to help explain the presence of armed groups in the city.  

A skeptical Ambassador Ford being shown evidence of armed rebels in Hama

The Army man with experience seems convinced of whatever he's saying, earnest, pleasant, and inquisitive as to whether Ford is paying attention. Ford seems aware of the camera too, and doesn't smile. But he is looking right at the evidence, and appears patiently skeptical. By his record of statements, Ford must have concluded the army faked those marks with their own guns.

That is, well ... consider what he said a few weeks later. ABC News, August 4:  U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford Calls Crackdown in Hama "Grotesque" and "Abhorrent" Interviewed by Christiane Amanpour about events in Hama, Ford referenced his visit there to say:

"The violence that the Syrian government is inflicting on Syrian protesters, from our point of view, is grotesque ... It's important to bear witness to what the Syrian government is doing. The Syrian government does not tell the truth. They said there were armed gangs in Hama. Well, the only weapon I saw was a slingshot."

Working inside Syria, in contact both with its government and opposition activists, and with his own information gathering capabilities, the U.S. ambassador to Syria should be a well-informed and credible source, able to see clearly into a murky situation. The public presumed he was, and Ford used that credibility to assure the world Damascus was lying. There were no gun-toting boogeymen; every bullet fired, every blade drawn in Hama, was necessarily done by the regime or its allies.

It's implied that Ford made at least some effort to find these gunmen, personally or otherwise, becoming a sort of weapons inspector. He must have  asked around, demanded and got total honesty from the activists he met that they and everyone else remained unarmed, made a check of nearby towns and possible hiding spots, looking for caches of AK-47s.

To the extent he didn't really do that, his observations are meaningless, or worse. And the extent is probably high.

Do such probably-meaningless words work better just amplified?  JJ Harder, the press attaché of the US embassy in Damascus, tried it immediately on July 31. Al-Jazeera reported 'Scores dead' as Syrian tanks storm Hama city. Upon news of 100 dead in Hama that day, and claims that armed rebels were involved, Harder said:

"The Syrian government is completely delusional. They are making up fanciful stories that no one believes. Our ambassador Robert Ford was in Hama earlier this month, and he saw with his own eyes the violence that they are talking about. There was none. He maybe saw one teenager with a stick at a checkpoint, and the government is going on with these absolute fabrications about armed gangs running the streets of Hama and elsewhere."

"Hama has shown itself to be a model of peaceful protest. That was why our ambassador chose to go there."

So Who is This?
These comments were all triggered by the events of July 31, with 109 or more killed - the deadliest day yet in Syria - as well as the ensuing week of crackdown. The day clearly led to the week, and that initial hundred includes over 2 dozen victims of the deadliest attack yet by anti-government forces in Hama. Records list at least 13 policemen killed, it seems in a synchronized prison mutiny and an attack on a police station in Hader district, at least. Furthermore, at least 13 military members were killed in fighting in the city and north of it, in an attack on an officer's club, and maybe in other attacks (see part 1). Some opposition sources even acknowledged this was done by extremists, al-Qaeda types, returning from the war in Iraq.

By July 3, Hama's "armed gangs" were apparently able and willing to slaughter an informant like Ibrahim Qashoush, for allegedly sharing their secrets. On Jul 7/8, they received a huge morale boost from ambassador Ford, who would keep helping them hide those same secrets. By July 31, the gangs were not just real, but the kind of evolved menace that could - and did - overrun and kill security forces, retrieve the bodies, and still make it back to their base with them overnight.

A slaughtered policeman in Hama, being dumped

The corpses of 8 executed men, apparently police, were driven to a bridge over the Orontes river on the edge of Hama on the morning of August 1, then brazenly dumped into the river far below to shouts of "Allahu Akbar!" (details and explanation, again see part 1)

The lightly-armed, civilian-dress men bringing the bodies ask not to be filmed by the gathered crowd, but at least three people recorded the event. However, only the one video was released, that anyone's found. In that, the last body rolled over the railing is extra-bloody, with slices on his shoulder and a throat wound (see right). Someone says "this one, his throat’s cut" and someone else says "Good work, guys." 

Syrian authorities claim 13 bodies of policemen, murdered by "terrorists," were pulled from the river, that 17 total were killed, and that soldiers were killed as well in the fight against these gunmen.

To be fair, this was all obscured - depending on one's point of view - under an even larger record of dead civilians in Hama that day. As many as 87 were shot dead on July 31 by records, all men. That surely including rebel fighters shot in the clashes, but probably also many civilians. Those might be sniped at random, or picked out to murder. Why and by whom should be considered carefully. 

Armed rebels who were on the offensive in Hama that day denied they were, and their activist helpers blamed all killings there on "the regime." Half of that was a lie, so maybe the other half was too. But supportive news reports usually lumped the 80+ civilians and 20+ security forces into 100+ people killed in Hama, all implicitly by government forces. This trick was also apparently used by Robert Ford and the U.S. State Department.

If Damascus invited Ford to observe the policemen being fished out of the river, he didn't accept. He knew by then that would be a "sanitized" event he should avoid (see below).  But the ambassador, of all people, will surely have had this aspect of the violence clarified to him by the Syrian government he was tasked with liaising with. 

Ford would know about these killings, but no surprise, he's apparently never spoken about them, acting as if only protesters were killed. But if he had ever been pressed for a firm answer, Mr. Ford would have to say the cops and soldiers were killed by other government enforcers. Maybe it was for refusing orders, or maybe just to flesh out its fake narrative of armed terrorists. But five days after the event, he still insisted "The Syrian government does not tell the truth. They said there are armed gangs in Hama." 

And Who Is This?
(added later, from a last-minute part 4 that popped out as necessary) 

More relevant if smaller-scale is an apparent action of a rebel group in Hama, likely armed, during Ford's visit, on July 7. Rebel sources say two men were killed by "regime thugs," who ran them over with "heavy machinery" at a checkpoint of theirs, at al-Mazarb bridge. This area, shown at right, is on a highway near its intersection with another highway, about 3.5 km northeast of al-Assi square in central Hama, where Ford was sucked into the protest on either this or the following day.

It was rebels on motorcycles and shouting Allahu Akbar that scooped up the bodies, and made three videos of them. The videos show one man was shot in the feet, crushed or disemboweled, and apparently hacked across the eyes with a hatchet. At right, top, the van loaded with these victims drives towards the checkpoint from the murder site, rebel-controlled at the moment. An unusual character, on the lookout and with a possible rifle, is highlighted below.

Rebel sources reported at least one more murder at the bridge on July 9, and possibly one on the 8th (Friday). The former and last death in this unusual 3-day span was an elderly shopkeeper robbed of his money the checkpoint, the VDC heard. In this case and the one from the 8th, rebels also managed to retrieve the bodies and make propaganda videos at leisure in some safe house. Four killed, and it was rebels got all 4 bodies, and probably the cash too.

So it turns out J.J. Harder's "absolute fabrications about armed gangs running the streets of Hama" - if highways counts as streets - are actually proven by gang-supplied video evidence. And it's not just on the 31st, but at the time of Ford's witness-bearing.

Negroponte-Style Certainty and Semantics

As late as August 2011, it was still unclear to the public that any of the death and mayhem in Syria was caused by the unacknowledged armed groups. Ambassador Ford did more than his part in maintaining that picture as long as possible, acting as certain as anyone else there were no armed rebels in Hama, and as few as possible, maybe zero, in Syria at large. This means he was, by accident or design, as incorrect as anyone on that point. 

Ford's certainty of the untrue is in fact reminiscent of that shown by his mentor John Negroponte 30 years before, as US ambassador to Honduras. Then a US-backed right wing military regime, the military of Gustavo Adolfo Álvarez Martínez he worked with hosted the formation of the infamous Contras, terrorizing supporters of Nicaragua's elected leftist government, as well as leftist activists in Honduras and elsewhere. But Negroponte was quite sure Martinez' machine was not killing, torturing, and disappearing its people in 1982 - the same year Syria allegedly was doing that, in Hama (interesting coincidence).

In a 1982 letter to The Economist, Negroponte wrote that it was “simply untrue to state that death squads have made their appearance in Honduras.” The Country Report on Human Rights Practices that his embassy sent to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took the same line, insisting that there were “no political prisoners in Honduras” and that the “Honduran government neither condones nor knowingly permits killings of a political or nonpolitical nature.”

But of course the best evidence eventually proved the US-backed regime was doing all that, it seems with Negroponte's oversight. By 'it's not happening' he meant 'we're making sure it happens' - it's an issue of semantics. As Sourcewatch reported in 2008 Negroponte helped mercenaries re-supply the military when congress imposed sanctions,  and he "supervised the construction of the El Aguacate air base" where Contras were trained and allegedly ran "a secret detention and torture center." 185 corpses of the disappeared were dug up there in 2001.

Negroponte had some kind of experience that had him chosen by President George W. Bush to again be be a US ambassador in 2001. First he was sent to the UN following the 9/11 attacks, where he lobbied for support for regime change in Iraq. Then following the US-led invasion, he was made ambassador to Iraq (June 2004 to April 2005). He allegedly worked there with sectarian Shi'ite death squads against the largely Sunni and largely Baath party opposition, as it first was - and these death squads' daily murders drove the Sunni insurgency further, as it's generally understood (I'm not read-up on this but skeptical, considering claims of Alawite death squads vs. Sunni extremists in Syria, being the same ones largely who were in Iraq - but this was a different context.)
---
further reading for myself or others:
http://ww4report.com/node/379
http://www.oilempire.us/negroponte.html
https://consortiumnews.com/2013/04/07/reagans-death-squad-tactics-in-iraq/
http://iraqi-death-squads.blogspot.com/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-salvador-option-for-syria-us-nato-sponsored-death-squads-integrate-opposition-forces/31096
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/06/pentagon-iraqi-torture-centres-link
http://www.globalresearch.ca/who-is-ambassador-robert-stephen-ford-the-architect-of-us-sponsored-terrorism-in-syria/5385973 
---
Whatever the ambassador did in Iraq, he did it with Arabic-speaker Robert Ford as his top aide for the duration. As Michel Chossudovsky wrote in 2014, Ford was first the U.S. representative to the Shia city of Najaf, main base of the Mahdi army, as of January 2004. In June he was promoted to “Number Two Man” (Minister Counsellor for Political Affairs) at the US embassy in Baghdad, first under ambassador Negroponte then ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. In this position, Chossudovsky wrote, Robert Ford "played a central role" in "the covert support to death squads and paramilitary groups in Iraq with a view to fomenting sectarian violence and weakening the resistance movement." Negroponte described his "number two" at this time as “one of these very tireless people … who didn’t mind putting on his flak jacket and helmet and going out of the Green Zone to meet contacts.”

And here was that same connector making connections in Syria, insisting he had no hand in the violent de-stablization of the final Baath party government. He was sent to Damascus on a temporary basis, pending confirmation, and was there no later than January 27, 2011, when he met with president Assad (see here). This of course was just as Egypt's and Tunisia's U.S.-supported "Arab Spring" protests were beginning, and as Libya's and Yemen's were set to. As if to soften the connection, it would be more like six weeks before the same would begin unfolding in Syria. Officially, Ford would know nothing about prior arrangements or conspiracies surrounding that. 

Considering ambassador Ford's past in Iraq and actions in Syria, John Negroponte's intelligence activities in Iraq are relevant to consider. A 2005 article by Bill Van Auken cites Stratfor for revealing how "Negroponte ran his own "parallel intelligence service" in Iraq, because he did not trust the CIA's Baghdad station chief." The latter, Auken wrote, "filed an end-of-the year report giving a bleak assessment of the US occupation and warning that resistance could spiral out of control." But the ambassador filed his own contradictory report "painting a far rosier picture of what is widely seen as a debacle," but helping to briefly keep the true picture less clear than it could have been.

These are the capabilities an ambassador has to find valuable information and distort it strategically. He can learn there are death squads and torture centers, and use that fact as a reason to insist there are not. One could do the same with armed opposition groups in Syria.

What we see above is perhaps an advanced, but ultimately transparent, semantic system. Exactly where Ford needs a certain effect, he conjures the right words, even when those words are the most opposite of true.

As soon as he saw clear evidence in the July 31 attacks that the violent insurrection in Hama was really underway, he needed all the cover he could find to help the seeds take root. So as soon as there were armed gangs running streets and bridges in Hama, he became more vocal than ever about this being a regime lie, by definition.

I've noticed at least one later example of the same thing; the May, 2012 Houla Massacre, as we know, was unusually ambiguous. It appeared evident to seasoned journalists and possible even to the UN's investigators in New York that it was a rebel crime. Later, our work at ACLOS showed how the video records proves rebels must have done it, as they took over the town right before it happened. It's one of the most ambiguous massacres to occur so far. But it was also of course the most infamous massacre of children at the time, the most important yet to pin on the one side and not on the other. So ambassador Ford pulled out this as soon as he could: Houla was “the most unambiguous indictment of the regime to date.” (see here) His proof it was the regime, despite all the contrary evidence? Satellite photos (see same link) of a mass grave ... in a shot-up and suddenly rebel-held town. What could be clearer?

A Less-Heralded Visit, Sanitized

To support his view of no armed rebels in Hama, Ford cited his field visit to the city, so widely-heralded for its blow to the "Assad regime." Less-praised and barely mentioned is another field trip he went on a few weeks earlier. On June 20, the ambassador was part of an entourage taken to the northwestern city of Jisr al-Shughour, in Idlib province, near the Turkish border. The government also claimed armed gangs were running the streets and killing soldiers there, but he was given a chance to see some facts for himself. He could have cited both visits to argue against the government's lies, but chose to highlight just the Hama visit. Why?

Exhumation of a mass grave in Jisr al-Shughour, June 12

The events of June in Jisr al-Shughour present quite a story, traced out in large part on the ACLOS page, summary article forthcoming - armed protesters in a funeral procession attacked the post office and massacred workers there on June 3, allegedly after snipers there shot at them.

A group of fighters then besieged and took over the military security building, capturing over 70 soldiers by June 5. The government said around 120 soldiers and state workers were killed, with at least 49 and perhaps over 100 bodies found after order was restored. Some victims showed signs of torture, including eyes gouged out, and many were executed, some by beheading.

The Opposition (LCC, etc.) claimed that soldiers were ordered to kill Sunnis, but refused and weakly mutinied, and were then massacred by their Alawi commanding officers. But this sectarian rubbish was barely believed anywhere outside the Arabian peninsula. Syria expert Joshua Landis decided "there is little evidence of wide-scale mutiny of Syrian soldiers," and instead "some evidence that the young men of Jisr set a trap for Syrian soldiers" and then executed them. Even the BBC acknowledged the first opposition claims were untrue, and the attack "showed that the government was facing an armed uprising rather than mass peaceful protests."Also, it was clearly a twisted, sectarian, and deceitful uprising.

Landis also cited an unnamed source who was on the same officially-sponsored visit to the city as Ford, saw what the ambassador would see, and decided the government story made the most sense. As he was told "the Syrian Military Intelligence (SMI) garrison was attacked ... The detachment, about 72 people, was overrun when they ran out of ammo," and then they were massacred and buried where he saw them dug up. Seeing the scene and thinking about it, he reported "I think the event happened, more or less."

The unit of defectors activists talked about existed, but it seems they did the killing, not the dying. They escaped the Army re-conquest, and made it to their handlers in Turkey with their leader, disaffected salafist Hussein Harmoush. They were supposed to report back, get re-equipped, and return to protest some more. But Harmoush was kidnapped by his own MIT case officer upon hearing the horrifying details (he bragged of having 138 people executed, more than reported), and shipped the scum back to Syria to stand trial, angering the Turkish leadership. The case officer was imprisoned for treason but escaped with help of awesome Turks. Harmoush was likely executed, but it's not clear, and rumors persist (one that's false). This may sound too dramatic to be true, but it all seems to be true.

More immediately after the massacre, the Syrian government reclaimed the city on June 12 and 13, after being beaten back when they first tried on the 5th. They found three mass graves of perhaps 109 bodies or more, on June 12th, 15th, and prior to the 20th, when the last one was exhumed during the press visit by Ford, Landis' source, and others.

CNN reported on this under the most boring headline ever - "2 killed in fighting in Syrian city" - and said as little as possible:

Robert Ford, the U.S. ambassador to Syria, traveled north with ambassadors and members of the media, all of whom appeared to be local, an American diplomat said. 

Two sites said to be mass graves were shown to the group. It was not possible to tell how many bodies were present, but the stench was strong." 

This photo credited to Bassem Tellawi/AP and captioned Ambassador Robert Ford, the U.S. diplomatic representative to Syria, covers his nose from the smell of dead bodies during a government-organized tour to a mass grave with other foreign diplomats in Jisr al-Shughour, Syria, June 20, 2011.

Ford at Jisr al-Shughour mass grave, June 20:
Why do "Sanitized" Visits Smell the Worst?

Otherwise, the only mainstream press this visit received was criticism; the ambassador to a nation listened to that nation's government as it tried to explain its problems, on a tour it arranged. Apparently someone was angry and pushed for an explanation. Associated Press writer Bradley Klapper (Salon, CBS News) voiced their concerns:

The Obama administration is struggling to explain why its ambassador to Syria participated in a sanitized trip to the country's restive north that President Bashar Assad's regime used to attempt to justify its military crackdown.

The big problem here was how the evidence of the attack could be used as virtual proof of the outside-backed terrorists Damascus claimed it was up against. But the State Department apparently bought the now-discredited mutiny story. Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland could say in defense of the visit only that it allowed Ford to "see for himself the results of the Syrian government's brutality." Klapper countered "yet it was unclear how Ford would have gathered such evidence on the government-sponsored tour. ... It was sponsored by Syria's foreign ministry and military." The answer, in some minds, is that the ministries drove Ford right to the malodorous evidence of their own crime.

Consider the photo above of our detective, after seeing the decayed and mutilated human evidence: behind those glasses, ambassador Ford may be forming the same kind of notions he would later adopt in Hama, and maintain against all evidence. The mass graves of Jisr al-Shughour were "being used" to illustrate the existence of Syrian rebel death squads, but Ford surely had to see how it proved the regime was slaughtering its own soldiers already. But again, while he could have cited both visits to argue against the regime's brutality and lies, he and the State Department chose to highlight just the Hama visit. Why? 

A Lasting Legacy of Heroic Truth-Telling
Ambassador Ford was called back to Washington, not recalled, in October 2011 over fears someone was trying to have him killed, besides increasing attacks by mobs of Syrian citizens who were growing to hate him. This pull-out came as the U.S. accused Syria's ambassador of illegal surveillance of Syrian dissidents in America.

Ford was later confirmed and sent back, but then the US embassy was closed in February, 2012, and Syria's ambassador kicked out in May, after the rebels committed and lied about the Houla Massacre (with Ford's assistance). He continued working along the same anti-Assad lines, mainly off-site and on-line, until he formally resigned in February 2014. That was over disagreements with Obama's Syria policy that made it so, as he put it, "the regime of President Bashar al-Assad can drop barrel bombs on civilians and hold sham elections in parts of Damascus, but it can’t rid Syria of the terrorist groups now implanted in the ungoverned regions of eastern and central Syria.” 

This was cited in an op-ed for the Washington Post that called Ford "a hero in the Syria debacle" who "served honorably," "reported honestly about the goings-on there," then "resigned and now is telling inconvenient truths to the administration and the public." That op-ed was penned by by Jenifer Rubin, a controversial neo-con war-hawk with little regard for truth.

But even to more credible voices in the corporate-owned and controlled media, Robert Ford remained the guru with all the answers on how to fix the death and instability now wracking Syria. He spoke to Christiane Amanpour upon his resignation, arguing for more support for "moderate rebels." He challenged the notion that America and its allies no longer know who the opposition really is, saying “We've identified them quite well now.  ... We've worked with them for years. Over the past two years," from about Feb. 2012, not anytime in 2011, he said, "I met fighters from the Free Syrian Army many times. These men were not angels: Many were former regime officers; ... but they made clear that they did not accept Al Qaeda’s philosophy." In July, 2011 rebels had "made it clear" to him they only had one slingshot between them to fight with.

Ford rightly notes one problem in the way of a non-genocidal solution for Syria is the trust problems between the Sunni insurgents he must always support, and citizens of the Alawi ("Alawite") faith of president Assad (it is, or was, about 12-15% of the country). Of course the same issue exists with other Shia, Chritians, Druze, Atheists, and Sunnis who are secular, sane, and/or pro-government. Combined, it's a solid majority of Syrians that have opposed any kind of rebel victory from 2011 onward. But referring just to the one most-hated segment facing real genocide, the Alawi, Ford told Amanpour that almost three years in, finally...

“I think many of them are ready to jump if they had something to jump onto. But if the opposition doesn’t put anything forward, then they have nothing to jump onto, and they’re just kind of stuck. They’re terrified. They don’t want the Islamic State to take over Syria ... So I wouldn’t increase assistance to the moderate opposition..." 

The Alawi and other Syrians have been murdered by non-ISIS "moderate" rebels from the start. This is his solution, and he even acknowledges the same rebels he's talking about don't try or want to reach out to the Alawi (and unstated others...) “I haven’t seen the opposition put forward any of this stuff ... I think because they believe deep down, a lot of them believe that there’s just no use negotiating with the Alawis."

In fact they used to openly chant "Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the Grave," with no verse about negotiating on that. Some among them were blamed, with Ford's assistance, for a growing string of barbaric crimes, for which the whole community was becoming unwelcome or even fit for murder, in the minds of many sectarian "activists." And as he insists they need more help and more weapons, Ford knows even these "moderates" can't be allowed to win outright; "Deep down, a lot of them still hope for enough American military intervention that they can win a military victory" and do as they like. But he thinks aid should be leveraged so as "to get elements of the regime to the table and negotiating seriously," which all credible "elements" from both sides have generally refused. It's not a good situation for compromise, with the demonic crimes and blood libel allegation on such a horrendous scale. But this fantasy is his solution, and his assessment of the people "we've worked with for years." All they need to pull it off is more guns sent in.

Ford acknowledges ISIS alone as the problem, but non-ISIS Sunni sectarian killers have plagued Syria from the first days - lurking in the shadows or even at the center of the first armed groups Ford denied. Considering the extra degree of religious hatred for Alawites among the extremist vanguard, it's little surprise how often their murders are done in classical and cruel ways, with blades and the gamut of dehumanizing abuses at the disposal of terrorists trying to terrorize. Just from this article:  
- the policeman in Hama with his throat cut on July 31 - that's quite possibly because he was Alawi.
- the four soldiers out of 10 in the first Jisr al-Shughour mass grave that were beheaded or hacked in the head:  were these the Alawi soldiers?


And going back a bit further, consider the city of Baniyas on their first bloody April 10, 2011 - along with nine soldiers killed in an ambush, Nidal Jannoud, an Alawi farmer, was the only civilian killed.

The horrible photo at right shows part of the mob assault that took his life. Were those Assad-aligned ISIS thugs that gashed his face and chased him with rocks and pistols before they murdered him? Is this a "slide into sectarian violence" caused by "Assad's brutality" and Shabiha massacres? This was the first civilian to be killed by anyone in Baniyas.

Robert Ford's solution is to tell the rebels, basically, "reach out to the Alawites, forgive them for killing thousands of your Sunni babies. They don't hate you, they're just scared because of Assad's sectarian lies." If they say they're prepared to negotiate with people who don't exist, he would urge the selected fighters get more guns, to lose or take with them as they defect to Daesh or Jabhat al-Nusra. They do this often, but it's okay - "we know them quite well. We've worked with them for years." And for the first portion of that, officially, they didn't exist.