Kudos to Iraqi Kurdistan

Hussain Abdul-Hussain
NOW Lebanon

In a region consumed by violence, uncertainty and despair, Iraqi Kurdistan stands out as an oasis of stability, economic growth and a relatively acceptable level of political freedom.

Envious of their success, many Arabs have accused Iraqi Kurds of selling out to America. And while it is true that the Kurds enjoy excellent ties with Washington, Arabs should keep in mind that the Kurds had to break with their painful past in order to make themselves an indispensible ally for the United States in the region.

In Kurdish collective memory, America let them down in 1975 during their fight against Saddam Hussein. Saddam had reached out to Iran's Shah Reza Pahlavi. As relations between the two improved, the Shah, and eventually Washington, abandoned the Iraqi Kurds while Saddam shut down the operation of Iranian opposition leader Imam Ruhollah Khomeini in Najaf and sent him into exile in France.

Today's Kurdish leadership understands that in the game of nations, there is no place for grudges. As such, Iraq's Kurds have not only made friends with America, but have also reached out to historic enemies like Turkey, where they found a like-minded government in Ankara that has tailored its foreign policy to fit its economic interests. Annual trade between Iraqi Kurdistan and Turkey stands at $4 billion and is expected to grow.

Domestically, Iraqi Kurdish rulers succeeded in transforming their leadership from one based on patronage networks to one based on winning the hearts and minds of their constituents through economic growth and prosperity.

And because prosperity requires good governance, the Kurdish leadership tapped native talent. Kurdish graduates from the world's finest colleges were lured back home, their experience put to government use.

Some Kurdish officials still channel public funds into their personal accounts and use the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) bureaucracy to reward their loyalists. But these same leaders have also kept such corruption to a minimum. They also cut on red tape and made the Kurdish region's environment competitively attractive to the world's biggest investors.

Security, good governance and a percentage of the revenue of 170,000 oil barrels produced in the region every day have paid off. Government expenditure is set to jump from $10 billion this year to $13 billion in 2013. Back in 2002, the region’s embryonic government had a budget of only $100 million.

The economy of the landlocked region has been growing at a rate of 12 percent, year-on-year. According to the Financial Times, per capita income has risen from $375 in 2002 to $5,500 in 2011. Electricity runs 22 hours a day. In the rest of Iraq, especially in the similarly oil-rich south, shortages are so acute that most cities only receive four hours a day.

Kurdistan's Arbil and Sulaymaniyah have also opened airports with flights to cities such as Vienna and Frankfurt and daily services to Istanbul, Dubai and Amman. In Iraq's predominantly Shia south, airports have flights mainly to Iranian cities, and service mostly religious tourism.

While Iraqi Kurdistan is still not the perfect democracy everyone aspires for, it is certainly a rising star. In 2009, Nashirvan Mustafa, a longtime lieutenant of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, broke ranks with "Mam Jalal's" Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and created his own group, Goran, or “Change.” Mustafa's faction won considerable seats in the 2009 elections as his bloc emerged as the leading opposition group inside the Kurdish parliament. In the Iraqi elections in 2010, Goran also won seats, even though it still caucuses with the bigger Barzani-Talabani bloc.

Showing maturity, the ruling Kurdish duality of Barzani and Talabani did not try to kill Mustafa or Goran, even though his growing popularity came at the expense of the two, both regionally and nationally. Instead, the Kurdish establishment expressed its respect for diversity and free speech. In September, Iraqi Kurdistan's president, Massoud Barzani, visited Mustafa for the first time.

Unlike Arab politicians, Kurdish leaders are showing a sense of purpose, pragmatism and an understanding that times have changed.

If compared to retrograde and narcissistic leaders like Iran's Ali Khaminei, Iraq's Nouri Maliki and Lebanon’s Hassan Nasrallah—who are stuck in their old ways of killing opponents, employing populist anti-Western slogans and driving their countries into the political and economic abyss—Iraqi Kurdish politicians, despite their unwarranted long tenures, look like leaders worthy of their people's respect.

Perhaps that's why pillars of the Lebanese oligarchy have taken their business to Iraqi Kurdistan. After lawmaker Walid Jumblatt and former President Amin Gemayel, Samir Geagea made a show in Arbil. Unable to convince Lebanon's de facto ruler Hassan Nasrallah of the worthiness of dropping his outdated anti-Western ideological rhetoric in favor of a pragmatic one, these Lebanese leaders seem to pin their hopes on Kurdistan. After all, in politics, it's never personal. It is only business.

Hussain Abdul-Hussain is the Washington Bureau Chief of Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Rai

When the pro-Hezbollah Agenda makes it to Stanford and the New York Times

The piece below by Elias Muhanna in The New York Times' Latitude looks balanced. I'm not sure if Latitude pieces are fact-checked by the newspaper or not, but judging by its style, I would say the piece was not copy-edited by the newspaper's staff.

Muhanna wants to come across as a non-sectarian Lebanese academic who supports a proportional system for the coming elections. Fair enough. But why did he keep Hezbollah out of the sectarian titans that would lose on their turf if such a system is endorsed? Aren't there any minor Shia figures who would threaten Hezbollah, in its districts, under a proportional representation laws?

While this might be a simple slip of the mind, I would argue that it can also be more than that. First, the Visiting Fellowship at Stanford, which Muhanna currently occupies, is funded by Lebanese Finance Minister Mohamed Safadi, a Sunni from northern Lebanon.

Safadi and Sunni Prime Minister Najib Mikati were elected to parliament in 2009 on the ticket of former Prime Minister Saad Hariri, whom because of Hezbollah's thugs occupying the streets of Beirut, was forced to quit. Safadi and Mikati quickly turned coat and agreed to join Hezbollah's parliamentary coalition to make it a majority, and to become the Sunni leading figures of the Hezbollah-controlled cabinet.

But joining Shia Hezbollah against Sunni Hariri undermined both Mikati and Safadi among Lebanon's Sunnis, especially those in their electoral district of Tripoli. To hide their Hezbollah affiliation, Mikati and Safadi now pretend that they belong to a "center" coalition under the leadership of Maronite President Michel Suleiman, one of the weakest political figures in the history of Lebanon.

Realizing that under the current electoral law, Hariri can give both Mikati and Safadi the boot and keep them out of parliament in 2013, they endorsed Suleiman's proporsal for proportional representation hoping that it would give them a chance to keep their parliamentary seats even if Hariri, by far more popular than they are among Tripoli's Sunnis, decides to punish them in 2013.

But while trying to market the porportional system, the Safadi-Mikati-Suleiman team have to make sure not to offend their masters in Hezbollah. So what do they do? They put out pieces written by Stanford fellows in The New York Times advocating a proportional system, and arguing that such a system hurts Hariri and the likes of Walid Jumblatt only.

So long for independent academic thinking and objectivity in respected US media.

Lebanon, by the Numbers

Elias Muhanna

Lebanon’s peculiar brand of democracy, dysfunctional and widely unpopular, is a perennial source of national vexation, debated over Sunday lunches and in the press.

Since the Taif agreement of 1989, which helped end the civil war, half of Parliament has been reserved for Christians, the other half for Muslims, with each half distributed among 11 of Lebanon’s 18 officially recognized sects (Maronite, Greek Orthodox, Protestant, Sunni, Shiite, Druze, Alawite, etc). Each of Parliament’s (pdf) 128 seats is sect-specific: only members of that sect can run for it. (Voters, however, can cast their ballot for every seat in their district regardless of their own religious affiliation.) The president must be a Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni and the speaker of Parliament a Shiite. Hundreds of bureaucratic appointments are also subject to sectarian apportionment under the Constitution.

The imposition of religious representativeness in politics is a scourge. In the best of circumstances, it is vulnerable to the demagoguery of religious leaders; in the worst, it breeds civil violence and paralyzes the government. But others fear that a more open system would not provide the guarantees of power-sharing among religious minorities that the current model entails.

In recent months, the focus of these long-standing divergences has centered on the intricacies of Lebanon’s electoral law. The next parliamentary elections are less than a year and a half away, and a loose coalition of civil society groups, independent politicians and Lebanon’s president – the former army general Michel Suleiman — has recently proposed implementing a system of proportional representation to replace the current majoritarian, or “winner-take-all,” model.

Under the existing system, a fledgling party with a small but dedicated following stands no chance of getting its candidates elected in a district where a more established party holds sway. Under proportional representation — in which seats are allocated in keeping with the share of votes collected — a small party could win some seats with a minority of votes. In addition to ensuring multiparty representation in each district, proportional representation would empower lesser-known independent candidates. Over time the newcomers could coalesce to form a bulwark against the traditional political mainstream and advance a more liberal agenda.

Predictably, most major parties have conspired to protect the status quo; they want to maintain their primacy within it. The Future Movement, the main Sunni party, worries that the Sunni allies of its Shiite archrival, Hezbollah, might encroach on its turf. Walid Jumblatt, the country’s main Druze leader, fears that he would lose votes to other Druze figures with small-time followings in his traditional stronghold, the Chouf mountains.

In a rare show of unity, the leaders of Lebanon’s main Christian parties have come together to oppose the president’s draft law. The proposed law would combine Lebanon’s small electoral districts into fewer and larger ones, which is necessary for proportional representation to work effectively. (Imagine an election between 10 different parties in a 10-seat district: if each party wins 10 percent of the overall vote, each one gets its own seat. In a two-seat district, only the top two lists win seats.) But an electoral map with  larger districts also means  larger constituencies, which in turn means that substantial numbers of Christian candidates could be voted in on the lists of non-Christian parties (like the Future Movement and Hezbollah). And that would erode the influence of the traditional Christian political elite.

And so the Christian political establishment has offered a radical counter-proposal: a law that would institute proportional representation but also require citizens to vote only for members of their own sect (Sunnis would elect Sunnis; Greek Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, etc.)

One of the many problems with this idea is that it would generate considerable inequalities of suffrage between Christians and Muslims. As is, Christians already have greater voting power than Muslims because they still occupy half of Parliament even though they now represent less than half of Lebanon’s population. Under the new proposal, this disparity in representation would be further exacerbated.

Worse is the vision of Lebanon’s political future at the heart of the Christian plan. The president’s proposal envisages a country whose citizens vote for candidates on the basis of party affiliation and political platform, not sect. The Christians’ counter-proposal imagines Lebanon as a collection of 18 insular religious communities jealously nominating their own nobility and eyeing one another with suspicion. The first model is a bold step toward dismantling political sectarianism; the second is an enormous step backward, toward greater divisiveness.

Because of its inexpediency, a substantive revision of the electoral law in time for the 2013 elections seems unlikely — despite the fact that a solid majority of Lebanese say they would prefer proportional representation to the current system. Yet if Lebanon is ever to establish a new social contract — one based on true citizenship rather than begrudging coexistence — it will need to change its electoral arithmetic.

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Elias Muhanna is a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Program on Arab Reform & Democracy. He writes about Lebanese political affairs on the blogQifa Nabki.

Anyone who thinks Iran can bail out Assad, think Again!

AP: Iran bans foreign currency trading on the street

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran's central bank deputy governor said Monday that trading foreign currency outside of banks and licensed currency exchange operations was now banned, marking the government's latest attempt to stem an outflow of foreign currency amid worries over the state of the economy.
The latest U.S. sanctions targeting Iran's central bank have further stoked Iranians' concerns about an economy already grappling with double-digit inflation and the weight of earlier U.S., European and United Nations sanctions linked to a controversial nuclear program. The West says the program is aimed at developing weapons while Iran says it is for purely peaceful purposes.
Shortly after the new U.S. sanctions were announced earlier in January, the rial lost about 13 percent of its value relative to the dollar before rebounding slightly. The sanctions have not yet gone into effect.
Overall, the rial has shed about 40 percent of its value against the dollar since December 2010.
Deputy Central Bank Gov. Ebrahim Darvishi said authorities were monitoring street vendors and currency trading operations, in what was the government's latest effort to shore up the currency which was being traded on the open market at rates differing from those set by the government. He said that any foreign exchange trade must come with a receipt or the funds would be confiscated.
"Do not take it to the market," Darvish said on state radio, referring to foreign currency such as the U.S. dollar. "Any investment in the field of foreign currency and the dollar is forbidden."
The ban — officially announced Sunday — comes as Iran looks to stem the outflow of foreign currency. The central bank said the move was aimed at curbing money laundering, with officials complaining that the exchange brokers were offering rates far removed from those set by the government.
On Monday, the U.S. dollar sold at 16,950 rials while the central bank had set the rate at 14,000 rials to the dollar.
But it comes against a backdrop of economic woes as officials complain that there was too much liquidity in the market. Officials in Iran's chamber of commerce say there are more than $300 billion liquidity in the country.
Iranians, worried about the potential impact of the latest sanctions, have appeared focused on buying up dollars and gold coins instead of depositing money in the banks that are offering interest rates far lower than the inflation rate.
The sanctions have amplified those worries and also led to the government reducing from $2,000 to $1,000 the amount of dollars travelers can take with them as they leave the country.
The latest move appeared primarily aimed at curbing street trade of foreign currency, but it had a broader impact.
While money changing shops open, they were largely reluctant to do any business, and most currency traders on the street abandoned their corners.
"The market is full of security agents," said Hassan Rahamani, one of the dealers, adding that there has been little business since Sunday.
The official IRNA news agency said Monday that dealers are doing business secretly while the semiofficial Fars news agency reported that more agents were to hit the streets.

Foreign Currency Reserves depleted at Syrian Central Bank

The Syrian Pound (SP) lost further ground to the dollar on Tuesday with reports from Syria that the greenback traded at 71 SP, while daily financial transactions showed unwillingness or inability of the Syrian Central Bank to pump dollars into the Syrian market to preserve the SP's value.

In mid march, before the outbreak of the Syrian Revolution against the regime of President Bashar Assad, the dollar stood at 45 SP.

Meanwhile, sources from the Iraq Central Bank (ICB) also reported that the Iraqi Dinar is under market pressure forcing the ICB to pump foreign currency into the Iraqi market to preserbe its value. 

Iraqi sources reasoned that Syrians and Iranians are straining the Iraqi currency in their quest for US dollars. Treaties between Iraq and Syria, on one hand, and Iraq and Iran, on the other, allow for the trade of local currencies. Syrians are swapping their free falling pounds, the Lira, with Iraqi dinars. They then swap their dinars with dollars that they take back home, where greenbacks are rare and are in high demand.

Iranians are doing the same by using the Iraqi dinar as an intermediary currency between their Riyal and the dollar. The end result is the accumulation of Syrian Liras and Iranian Riyals at the vaults of Iraq's Central Bank, which has been losing major chunks of its Foreign Currency (FX) Reserves over the past few weeks.

The Iraqi government is in a better position to defend its Dinar thanks to foreign currency revenue from the daily sale of 2.2 million oil barrels. The Syrian and Iranian governments, however, find it hard to put their hands on foreign currency. They come to Baghdad looking for dollar and in the meantime put strain on the Iraqi Central Bank and its Dinar. Yet, such a measure will not be enough to salvage the hyper inflation hitting Syria, in the short term, and Iran, in the medium and long terms.

Predictions have it that the Syrian Pound will lose further ground to the dollar, which is expected to stand at 90 SP in the coming few weeks. The 90 SP marks double the price for the dollar before the outbreak of the revolution in mid-March. This means that a Syrian employee whose salary is $1000 dollars a month (45,000 SP), will be taking home half the amount as his same salary becomes the equivalent of $500 when the dollar hits the 90 SP mark. 

During the mid-80s, the Lebanese experienced similar hyperinflation. The dollar shot up from 3 Lebanese Liras in 1982 to 2,200 in 1992. The Lira never recovered and the dollar trades at around 1,500 Lebanese Liras today, except that the successive governments eventually managed to readjust to the new Lebanese Lira's value. 

In Syria, the Central Bank looks to have run out of FX reserves and is unable to defend its national currency. The value of the Syrian Lira is now up to market forces, and these – given Syria's unrest – are not expected to act in favor of keeping the Syrian Lira strong.

For further information, click here.

Syria: beyond the wall of fear, a state in slow-motion collapse

Ian Black
The Guardian

"Another sign of Syria's deepening crisis is that the state is no longer functioning properly. It is "collapsing in slow motion", in the words of one expert. Security chiefs are concerned about bribes being demanded to release detainees. Half the weapons acquired by rebels are estimated to have been sold by army personnel while customs agents look the other way as shipments come in from Lebanon. Rumours persist of different branches of the secret police shooting at each other on clandestine operations. And officials are said to have been destroying documents recording off-the-book payments authorised by a phone call from the president's palace."

"Many now have first-hand experience of the apparatus of state repression, and describe details of underground cells, beatings and torture. It is common knowledge that Iranian security advisers are on hand with their sinister expertise in communications monitoring and riot policing. Damascus feels, and looks, like Tehran in 2009 during protests over the rigging of the presidential election."

Great CNN Report from Zabadani

In Syria, what does Russia want?

Hussain Abdul-Hussain
Bitterlemons International

Russian policy on Syria might seem planned and coherent, but a closer look shows that Moscow has no imagined end-game for Syria's unrest, and is rather improvising its stances as events unfold.


Moscow has a clear interest in the survival of the regime of President Bashar Assad, who is a major importer of Russia's arms. Syria reportedly buys ten percent of Russia's annual arms exports at a cost of $1 billion. In Libya, Russian arms makers lost close to $4 billion in contracts with the downfall of Muammar Gaddafi. Moscow is keen to prevent a repeat in Syria.

But arms sales may not be the only motive behind Russia's support for Assad. Perhaps Moscow fears that international intervention in Syria could emerge as an accepted model for the future. If Russians take to the streets en masse demanding an end to the long rule of their president-turned-prime-minister Vladimir Putin, now running for a third presidential term, the Kremlin might want to make sure that it can strangle any such movement without fear of the United Nations jumping on its back to protect protesters.

A third reason behind Moscow's obstruction of the world effort to stop Assad's brutal force against his citizens could be Russia's self-perception as heir to the glorious Soviet empire. Since Putin's accession to power in 2000, Moscow has always tried to show foreign policy muscle.

This posture has helped Putin awaken national chauvinism by rallying Russians around his leadership against mostly imagined foreign threats. With the Assad family being a former Soviet ally, and with western capitals supporting Assad's opponents, Russia might have seen in Syria an opportunity to stand up to the "imperial" West by preventing the downfall of another one of Moscow's old Arab friends and arms clients.

The Russian government has so far thrown its lot behind Assad. On October 4, it exercised its veto power to kill a UN Security Council resolution that would have denounced the Syrian government.

Moscow's initial support of Assad was based on its understanding that his forces could swiftly bring the uprising to an end. But days turned into weeks and weeks into months, during which Moscow might have concluded that Assad could be the wrong horse to back and that, instead, it should reach out to his opponents and show itself as the sponsor of peace between the two sides.

The Russian position has therefore undergone a noticeable evolution since the outbreak of the Syrian revolution in mid-March. During the first weeks, Russia described the unrest as a domestic issue, calling on the world to respect Syrian sovereignty by staying away.

However, a surge in the number of deaths, standing at 5,000 by December meant that Russia could not make the Syrian crisis go away simply by claiming it a domestic issue.

Moscow realized that it should either come up with a solution to stop the bloodshed, or risk western capitals eventually imposing one. Russia therefore endorsed the Arab League initiative, which calls for the immediate cessation of hostilities, the withdrawal of the Syrian army from cities, the release of detained anti-regime activists, and the admittance of Arab observers and foreign media to verify Assad's compliance.

Damascus said on November 2 that it would accept the initiative, but failed to sign on the protocol for its implementation, forcing the league to suspend Syria's membership nine days later. Seeing that its allies in Damascus were squandering a golden opportunity that could circumvent western intervention, Moscow circulated in mid-December a Security Council draft resolution that endorsed the initiative. By doing so, Russia moved from categorically ruling out any international intervention in Syria to attempting to shape such an effort in its favor.

The Syrian government signed on the initiative on November 19 but still obstructed the admittance of Arab observers. News reports from Syria said that the regime's forces were committing massacres against army defectors and civilians in the north.

In a sign that Moscow had grown impatient with Assad, Russia circulated on December 24 another Security Council draft resolution, this one employing stronger language against Assad. Feeling the Russian heat, the Syrian president reluctantly admitted the Arab Monitoring Commission, which is expected to disclose its findings by January 20.

Should the Arab mission be deemed a failure, world opinion would certainly tilt in favor of UN intervention, in which case Russia would find itself alone at the UN fending off another western diplomatic offensive against Assad. Meanwhile, indicators show that Assad's grip on power is weakening and his finances--needed to keep his military machine going--deteriorating.

In the second diplomatic showdown at the UN, expected in February, Russia might not rush to the defense of Assad and could instead come to a compromise with other world powers over his removal.

Perhaps sensing that Moscow's pro-Assad stance could change, chief of the opposition Syrian National Council Burhan Ghalioun told Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during a meeting in Moscow in mid-November that should Assad fall, Russian interests in Syria would be "guaranteed."

- Published 5/1/2012 © bitterlemons-international.org

Hussain Abdul-Hussain is the Washington bureau chief of the Kuwaiti newspaper, Alrai.

Obama administration secretly preparing options for aiding the Syrian opposition

Josh Rogin

Foreign Policy

As the violence in Syria spirals out of control, top officials in President Barack Obama's administration are quietly preparing options for how to assist the Syrian opposition, including gaming out the unlikely option of setting up a no-fly zone in Syria and preparing for another major diplomatic initiative.

Critics on Capitol Hill accuse the Obama administration of being slow to react to the quickening deterioration of the security situation in Syria, where over 5,000 have died, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. Many lawmakers say the White House is once again "leading from behind," while the Turks, the French, and the Arab League -- which sent anobserver mission to Syria this week - take the initiative to pursue more aggressive strategies for pressuring the Assad regime. But U.S. officials said that they are moving cautiously in order to avoid destabilizing Syria further, and to make sure they know as much as possible about the country's complex dynamics before getting more involved.

But the administration does see the status quo in Syria as unsustainable. The Bashar al Assadregime is a "dead man walking," State Department official Fred Hof said this month. So the administration is now ramping up its policymaking machinery on the issue. After several weeks of having no top-level administration meetings to discuss the Syria crisis, the National Security Council (NSC) has begun an informal, quiet interagency process to create and collect options for aiding the Syrian opposition, two administration officials confirmed to The Cable.

The process, led by NSC Senior Director Steve Simon, involves only a few select officials from State, Defense, Treasury, and other relevant agencies. The group is unusually small, presumably to prevent media leaks, and the administration is not using the normal process of Interagency Policy Committee (IPC), Deputies Committee (DC), or Principals Committee (PC) meetings, the officials said. Another key official inside the discussions is Hof, who is leading the interactions with Syrian opposition leaders and U.S. allies.

The options that are under consideration include establishing a humanitarian corridor or safe zone for civilians in Syria along the Turkish border, extending humanitarian aid to the Syrian rebels, providing medical aid to Syrian clinics, engaging more with the external and internal opposition, forming an international contact group, or appointing a special coordinator for working with the Syrian opposition (as was done in Libya), according to the two officials, both of whom are familiar with the discussions but not in attendance at the meetings.

"The interagency is now looking at options for Syria, but it's still at the preliminary stage," one official said. "There are many people in the administration that realize the status quo is unsustainable and there is an internal recognition that existing financial sanctions are not going to bring down the Syrian regime in the near future."

After imposing several rounds of financial sanctions on Syrian regime leaders, the focus is now shifting to assisting the opposition directly. The interagency process is still ongoing and the NSC has tasked State and DOD to present options in the near future, but nothing has been decided, said the officials - one of whom told The Cable that the administration was being intentionally cautious out of concern about what comes next in Syria.

"Due to the incredible and far-reaching ramifications of the Syrian problem set, people are being very cautious," the official said. "The criticism could be we're not doing enough to change the status quo because we're leading from behind. But the reason we are being so cautious is because when you look at the possible ramifications, it's mindboggling."

A power vacuum in the country, loose weapons of mass destruction, a refugee crisis, and unrest across the region are just a few of the problems that could attend the collapse of the Assad regime, the official said.

"This isn't Libya. What happens in Libya stays in Libya, but that is not going to happen in Syria. The stakes are higher," the official said. "Right now, we see the risks of moving too fast as higher than the risks of moving too slow."

The option of establishing a humanitarian corridor is seen as extremely unlikely because it would require establishing a no-fly zone over parts of Syria, which would likely involve large-scale attacks on the Syrian air defense and military command-and-control systems.

"That's theoretically one of the options, but it's so far out of the realm that no one is thinking about that seriously at the moment," another administration official said.

Although the opposition is decidedly split on the issue, Burhan Ghalioun, the president of the Syrian National Council, earlier this month called on the international community to enforce a no-fly zone in Syria.

"Our main objective is finding mechanisms to protect civilians and stop the killing machine," said Ghalioun. "We say it is imperative to use forceful measures to force the regime to respect human rights."