By Samia Nakhoul

Reuters 
 

DUBAI: The increasingly bloody crisis that is engulfing Syria has started to go international.
A French initiative in the U.N. Security Council to secure condemnation of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s repression of protesters is just one symptom of growing world alarm.
Turkey reported Wednesday that 122 Syrians had fled across the border to escape an expected military crackdown in a northwestern Syrian town where the government has accused “armed gangs” of killing more than 120 security personnel.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared that his country would not “close its doors” to Syrian refugees and urged Assad’s government to be more tolerant toward civilians.
Small groups of refugees fled earlier to Lebanon when Syrian security forces were suppressing protests in a border town.

Israel and the United States accuse Damascus of promoting Palestinian rallies at the fence dividing Syria from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights to divert attention from the challenge to four decades of Assad family rule.
The United States, unlike France and Britain, has stopped just short of proclaiming that Assad has lost all legitimacy. But his ability to control Syria is also in question.

“Assad is finished, but we have to see how this regime will crumble,” said Burhan Ghalyoun, a Syrian opposition supporter and academic at the Sorbonne in Paris. “Is it going to crumble from inside, through growing demonstrations, or will the world unite, demand that the killing ends and threaten intervention?”
But no Western leaders – let alone their autocratic Arab partners – have shown any appetite to intervene in Syria, an Iranian ally with a volatile ethnic and religious mix lying in a web of regional conflicts.

Syria’s old Cold War ally Moscow, unhappy about how NATO powers have interpreted a U.N. resolution authorizing military action to protect civilians in Libya, has said it may veto a possible Security Council resolution condemning Damascus.
Turkey, which had sunk huge efforts to foster a new relationship with Syria over the past decade, has publicly chided Assad for failing to heed its urgings that he respond to unrest by leading reform, rather than risk being swept away.

Qatar, a wealthy Gulf state friendly to Syria – as well as to the United States – has also been involved in attempts to persuade Assad to change course, diplomatic sources say.
After contacts between Washington, Ankara and Doha, the Qatari prime minister met Assad twice in Syria last month, the sources say, adding that Qatar offered Assad funds and political support if he embraced reform, but he backed away from the idea.

Despite some vague promises of dialogue and selective prisoner releases, Assad seems locked onto a course of repression to ensure the survival of his 11-year rule.
Threats by the authorities to send the army to restore order in Jisr al-Shughour have stirred memories of a fierce crackdown there in 1980, when the president’s father, the late Hafez Assad, put down a Muslim Brotherhood uprising.

That was the prelude to the 1982 episode in the city of Hama where many thousands were killed and the old town was razed by troops sent to wipe out Brotherhood rebels.
Wael Merza, a Syrian academic and opponent of the Assad administration, said, “Bashar is trying to recreate the 2011 version of his father’s Hama massacre in 1982. He is opting for a city-by-city massacre rather than one mass killing.”

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, with its roots in Islamism, is sensitive to the plight of Syrian Sunnis – the majority in a population ruled by an elite that is dominated by Assad’s minority Alawite sect. The Turkish prime minister warned last month that Turkey would “not tolerate another Hama.”
Lebanese analyst Jamil Mroue predicted that Erdogan would likely toughen his line on Assad after Turkey’s election Sunday.

Last weekend, Turkish President Abdullah Gul told visiting Egyptian pro-democracy activists that rulers in the region must respect their own people and accept their legitimate demands.
“I would like to remind rulers in Muslim Arab countries of the necessity of being realistic, of perceiving the world better and of seeing that there is already no place for authoritarian regimes in the Islamic world,” Gul said.
“Everyone is aware that I am speaking about countries such as Syria and Libya,” he added.
Despite its friendship with Syria, Turkey hosted a conference of Syrian opposition figures last week. Turkish officials say Ankara is also prepared for a further influx of Syrian refugees.

Mroue said it was not clear whether Assad was really in charge or complicit in the harsh measures against protesters – a question that has been recurrent since he inherited power in 2000.