S-300 Missile Batteries Months Away

Yesterday's big story -- that Syria had accepted delivery of S-300 missile batteries from Mother Russia -- turned out to be Hezbollah TV puffery. This from an informative story this morning from Anne Barnard and Neil MacFarquhar, "Assad Warns Israel, Claiming a Stockpile of Russian Weapons":

Mr. Assad spoke in an interview broadcast on Al-Manar television, which is owned by his ally Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese Shiite militant group, further punctuating his message of growing confidence that he could prevail over an insurgency that is now more than two years old and has claimed more than 80,000 lives. 

Asked about Russian weapons deliveries, Mr. Assad said: “Russia is committed with Syria in implementing these contracts. What we agreed upon with Russia will be implemented, and part of it has been implemented over the recent period, and we are continuing to implement it.” 

He was vague on whether Russia’s deliveries had included a sophisticated S-300 air missile system — of particular concern to Israel because it could compromise its ability to strike Syria from the air and because those missiles can hit deep inside Israeli territory. The Israelis have said they would not abide a Syrian deployment of S-300s, suggesting they would use force to destroy them. 

Before the broadcast, Al-Manar sent out text messages that paraphrased Mr. Assad as saying Syria had already received a first shipment of the S-300 missiles. 

It was unclear why Al-Manar said before the broadcast that Mr. Assad had spoken about the missile system when it was not directly mentioned in the televised interview. Al-Manar later said it mischaracterized what Mr. Assad had said. But American and Israeli officials have been pressing Russia to defer the S-300 system delivery to Syria, and there were other indications that the paraphrased comments may have been a premature boast or bluff.

Reuters is reporting this morning that delivery of the missile batteries is months away.

The particularly interesting part of the Barnard and MacFarquhar piece is its description of the implosion of the Syrian Coalition:

All week, the 63-member Syrian Coalition, the main rebel group, has been entangled anew in petty disputes over how many seats to add. Its leadership announced Thursday that it would boycott the peace conference. It attributed the boycott to Iranian and Hezbollah interference in Syria, but analysts saw it as a position born of weakness and the inability to forge a strong, united bargaining front. 

“This is a low point,” said Amr al-Azm, a Syrian-born history professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio who tracks the opposition. “Unlike earlier screaming matches, you have a bad military situation on the ground and Geneva is looming and the opposition has nothing to play. This is as bad as it gets.”

None of this should be surprising. The Syrian Coalition has always been an artificial, slapdash construct of the Gulf monarchies and the West with little organic connection to the people fighting day to day on the ground in Syria. As Barnard and MacFarquhar note,

For the United States and its allies, the first challenge is creating a united delegation from an opposition that has always been anything but united. 

The Syrian Coalition has been plagued by internal turmoil since its inception in late 2011. 

The group has failed to deliver on most of its promises, ranging from distributing humanitarian aid to areas outside government control, to creating a unified military command, to becoming a serious government-in-exile. 

Instead the uneasy, distrustful members — dominated by long-exiled members of the Muslim Brotherhood, academics living abroad for decades and political activists fleeing Syria — have spent most of their time in luxury hotels arguing over which faction should claim what responsibility. 

The coalition’s problems have not been lost on Mr. Assad, who spoke contemptuously of his political adversaries in the Al-Manar television interview, describing them as exiles and paid stooges of hostile foreign governments — another indication that prospects for the Geneva conference are dim. 

“We will attend this conference as the official delegation and legitimate representatives of the Syrian people,” he said. “But, whom do they represent? When this conference is over, we return to Syria, we return home to our people. But when the conference is over, whom do they return to — five-star hotels?”