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BEIRUT, Lebanon — The death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi reverberated across Syria on Friday, reviving protests that had begun to stall and focusing attention on a newly organized, unarmed opposition group seeking to challenge the Assad family’s four decades of rule.
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Times Topic: Syria — Protests (2011)
With an ordinary name and ambitious task, the Syrian National Council, announced in Istanbul this month, has begun trying to emulate the success of Libya’s opposition leadership, closing ranks in the most concerted attempt yet to forge an alternative to President Bashar al-Assad and courting international support that proved so crucial in Libya.
“The focus of the world will now turn to Syria,” Samir Nachar, an activist from Aleppo and leader of the group, said Friday. “It’s Syria’s turn to receive attention.”
But the challenges before this effort remain vast, many of them the same issues that have beset the uprising in Syria since it began seven months ago. A gulf still separates the opposition in exile and at home, and rivalries and ideological disputes compromise their work. As important, Europe and the United States have proven reluctant to give the council the recognition that they quickly provided the opposition in Libya.
Perhaps most challenging is a debate that has overshadowed many of its discussions — what kind of international intervention it will seek, as unlikely as the prospect may be now, in trying to end Mr. Assad’s rule. Not even activists these days believe that protests alone, however big, are enough to topple the government.
“Libya’s model will be tempting,” said Louay Hussein, a prominent opposition figure in Damascus, though a critic of the council itself.
Protests erupted across Syria on Friday, and at least anecdotally, activists called them bigger than in past weeks, and just as bloody. Security forces killed at least 24 people. Colonel Qaddafi’s death offered a bloody lesson in an autocrat’s fate, and became a theme on Facebook pages, Twitter and in the demonstrations themselves. “Qaddafi is gone, your turn is coming, Bashar,” one banner read.
“Let us be next,” went a chant.
One slogan played on a song of Um Kalthoum, an Egyptian diva of another era: “Qaddafi sings to Bashar: I’m getting bored as I wait for you.”
“Today we are walking on the same path as Libya,” said a 25-year-old protester in Barzah, near Damascus, who gave his name as Basil. He called for “armed resistance.”
But the protesters face a government that acts emboldened today, touting the prospect of a victory to its supporters. Until Friday, protests had waned, not least because so many protesters are in jail. Even the most ardent critics of Mr. Assad now talk of a struggle of months, and perhaps years, when they had once predicted weeks.
Last week, with a mass pro-government rally in Damascus, the leadership underlined its support in Syria’s largest cities and among minorities that seem more fearful than ever of Mr. Assad’s fall. In a bit of bluster, Syria’s foreign minister warned of retaliation against any country that recognized the opposition, though leaving imprecise what it could do.
The protest movement itself has become more complicated, with an armed rebellion emerging forcefully in central Syria and some peaceful protesters acknowledging they have lost momentum and morale. Several council leaders suggested that the push to close ranks came as much from abroad as inside Syria, where complaints had grown over what some demonstrators saw as endless bickering abroad.
“The revolution on the ground clearly reached a critical point whereby it had given everything it could give in terms of results through peaceful means,” said Bassma Koudmani, a prominent Syrian dissident and a key figure on the council. The opposition group, she added, was the antidote to “the impossibility of any breakthrough.”
Even critics are impressed by the group’s ability over more than three months of negotiations to band together disparate constituencies across a landscape where the Assad family has so extinguished politics that not even the ruling Baath Party really has a much of a say. The council was announced in Istanbul on Oct. 2, after what Yaser Tabbara, an lawyer in Chicago and council member, called “incredibly intense negotiations.”
