As my colleagues Damien Cave and Hwaida Saad report, the White House claimed on Monday that President Bashar al-Assad's “grip on power is loosening,†amid continued fighting on the streets of Syria's commercial capital, Aleppo, and the defection of the country's prime minister.
While forces loyal to Mr. Assad appear unlikely to give up their effort to crush the uprising any time soon, one tangible sign of a tilt in the balance of power is the increasing number and frequency of reports from foreign journalists who have managed to enter Syria without government permission. After months of being forced to piece together a rough sense of events in Syria by comparing footage posted online by opposition activists with reports broadcast on state-run channels, several foreign news organizations have placed correspondents on the front lines of the battle for control of Syria's two largest cities, Aleppo and Damascus, in recent we eks.
In just the past few days, reporters like Javier Espinosa of El Mundo, Martin Chulov of The Guardian, Hadeel Al Shalchi of Reuters and Ben Wedeman of CNN have offered vivid descriptions of the battle for Aleppo. Further south, barely three miles from the presidential palace in Damascus, Paul Wood and Fred Scott of the BBC filed a remarkable video report on Monday, showing young rebels training on the outskirts of the capital.
These reports are striking in part because the ruling Baath Party was previously so successful in preventing reporters f rom working freely inside Syria - forcing journalists and bloggers to engage in a kind of triangulation of official and opposition media reports on demonstrations and violence.
Until the rebels took up arms, the Syrian state's monopoly on violence also gave it a near-monopoly on information. While nothing has come of calls to open humanitarian corridors in Syria - to create the kind of internationally policed “safe areas†that provided some measure of protection to Kurds in northern Iraq the 1990s, and almost none to Bosnians in Sarajevo and Srebrenica a few years later - one byproduct of the armed insurgency's success in taking control of isolated patches of territory, even inside cities, has been the creation of an archipelago of unsafe areas inside the country that foreign journalists can be smuggled into and report from successfully.
The presence of foreign reporters is particularly important since Syrians working both for and against the government have an interest in distorting the truth to further their political aims and garner support from other countries.
Last month, the German reporter Christoph Reuter, a correspondent for the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, managed to reach the region of Houla, where a notorious massacre was carried out recently. While both sides have blamed their opponents for the killings there, Mr. Reuter returned with video recordings of testimony from witnesses who made a compelling case that forces loyal to Mr. Assad were responsible for the atrocity. Mr. Reuter's report, which is worth reading and watching in full on Spiegel Online - the magazine's English-language site - was inspired partly by influential reports in the German press, citing anonymous sources, which cast blame on the rebels.
The witnesses who spoke to Mr. Reuter on camera, and away from any government-assigned minders, told a very different story.
Even with the presence of more foreign reporters, video post ed online by supporters and opponents of the Assad government remains an important source of information. Earlier on Monday, my colleague David Goodman examined footage broadcast on a state-run channel, showing the aftermath of an apparent attack on a government television studio. Two clips posted online by opposition activists, said to have been recorded on Monday, appeared to offer vivid glimpses of fighting in the north of the country and a small, bold demonstration in central Damascus, near the recognizable landmark of the Abbasyin stadium.
While the demonstration in Damascus did not appear large, the relative freedom of the protesters to chant “Leave!†and “One! One! One! The Syrian people are one!†in this brief clip appears strikingly different from images recorded surreptitiously just four months ago, apparent ly showing tight security in roughly the same location.
