Army defectors aim to overthrow Syrian president's regime

BEIRUT -- A group of military defectors known as the Free Syrian Army is emerging as the first armed challenge to President Bashar Assad's authoritarian regime after seven months of largely nonviolent resistance.

Riad al-Asaad, the group's leader and an air force colonel who recently fled to Turkey, boasted in an interview Wednesday that he now has more than 10,000 members and called on fellow soldiers to join him in overthrowing the "murderous" regime.

While analysts said those numbers might be inflated, al-Asaad was confident more soldiers would soon join his ranks.

"They will soon discover that armed rebellion is the only way to break the Syrian regime," he said in a phone interview from Turkey. "I call on all the honorable people in the Syrian army to join us so we can liberate our country," he said. "It is the only way to get rid of this murderous regime."

The dissident group is gaining momentum that signals a trend toward militarization of the uprising. That momentum has raised fears that Syria may be sliding toward civil war.

The movement could propel the revolt by encouraging more senior level defections, or it could backfire horribly, giving the regime a new pretext to crack down even harder than it already has. Nearly 3,000 people have been killed in the violence since March, according to the U.N. and activists.

Land base is needed

Until the rebels can secure a territorial foothold as an operational launching pad -- much like the eastern city of Benghazi was for the Libyan rebels -- the defections are unlikely to pose a real threat to the unity of the Syrian army.

"The Libyan model is looking increasingly attractive to the Syrian opposition," said Shadi Hamid, director of research at The Brookings Doha Center in Qatar. However, he described the dissident army as a "high risk, high reward situation."

He said territorial gains might encourage the international community to offer support and make regime change more real in the minds of outside observers.

"But the flip side of that is that it gives the regime ... pretext to wipe out a city so it is a very risky move," Hamid added.

International intervention, such as the NATO action in Libya that helped topple Moammar Gadhafi, is all but out of the question in Syria. Washington and its allies have shown little appetite for intervening in yet another Arab nation in turmoil. There also is real concern that Assad's ouster would spread chaos around the region.

Syria is a geographical and political keystone in the heart of the Middle East, bordering five countries with which it shares religious and ethnic minorities and, in Israel's case, a fragile truce. Its web of alliances extends to Lebanon's powerful Hezbollah movement and Iran's Shiite theocracy. There are worries that a destabilized Syria could send unsettling ripples through the region.