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October 31, 2012

U.S. Pulls Support for Key Anti-Assad Bloc

White House Says New Syria Opposition Group, Including On-Ground Fighters, Should Replace Paris-Based Exile Council

By JAY SOLOMON and NOUR MALAS

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for an overhaul of Syria's political opposition, pulling U.S. support for the main exile-led group in favor of those fighting President Bashar al-Assad's forces on the front lines.

Mrs. Clinton's announcement Wednesday marked a shift of U.S. policy and reflected months of growing American frustration with the Syrian National Council, the Paris-based body initially charged by the West to galvanize opposition to Mr. Assad.

Her comments also suggested a U.S. attempt to forge greater influence over Syria's opposition, which Turkey and the Gulf states, such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have most strongly affected. The new initiative is led by Robert Ford, the former U.S. ambassador to Damascus.

"This cannot be an opposition represented by people who have many good attributes but have in many instances not been inside Syria for 20, 30 or 40 years," Mrs. Clinton said at a news conference during a visit to Zagreb, Croatia. "There has to be a representation of those who are on the front lines fighting and dying today to obtain their freedom."

U.S. officials said they have increasingly realized that the SNC has become largely irrelevant to the conflict, which is being driven by heavily armed rebel militias. Most of the arms coming to these groups are supplied by the Gulf states and are flowing through Turkey, according to U.S. and Arab officials.

Mrs. Clinton said the State Department had in recent weeks provided to international partners a list of names and organizations that should play a central role in the making of a new organizational structure for the Syrian opposition movement. She said the Obama administration has focused on weeding out groups with Islamist extremist agendas or ties to terrorist groups, such as al Qaeda.

"We also need an opposition that will be on record strongly resisting the efforts by extremists to hijack the Syrian revolution," Mrs. Clinton said. "There are disturbing reports of extremists going into Syria and attempting to take over what has been a legitimate revolution against an oppressive regime for their own purposes."

Mrs. Clinton's comments come ahead of a conference Qatar is hosting next week for opposition groups and representatives from the U.S., European Union and key Mideast states. They also come days before a U.S. presidential election in which the issue of U.S. involvement in Syria has become a major issue.

President Barack Obama and his Republican presidential opponent, Mitt Romney, have both ruled out ordering a direct U.S. military role in helping to oust Mr. Assad. Mr. Romney has charged Mr. Obama with not doing enough to support Syria's opposition and said a Republican administration would see to it that rebel fighters obtain arms. The White House has ruled out directly arming rebels, fearing weapons could fall into hostile hands, though U.S. officials say they are providing intelligence, humanitarian aid and communications tools.

The rebellion against Mr. Assad, which began in March 2011, has claimed more than 35,000 lives, say human-rights groups. Sectarian tensions and fighting linked to the conflict are spilling over Syria's borders into Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey.

On Wednesday, bombings and fighting ripped through many cities, as activists reported some of the heaviest government bombardment on areas around the capital, Damascus. In rebel-held Atarib, 12 miles west of Aleppo city, government artillery hit a queue of people waiting for bread at a makeshift bakery, killing at least 15 people, a witness said. Just three miles away, rebels have surrounded the 46th Special Forces Regiment for about a month now and say they can't take it over because they lack ammunition.

Activist video showed black plumes of smoke rising from just near the Aleppo Citadel, a Unesco World Heritage Site, though there were conflicting reports on whether the medieval palace was directly hit. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K. based opposition watchdog, said 187 people were killed across the country.

A primary reason the U.S. seeks Mr. Assad's overthrow is to weaken his main ally Iran, by curtailing Tehran's ability to ship arms to its own allies in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. U.S. intelligence agencies believe Tehran is providing arms, training and money to Mr. Assad.

Syria's political opposition has taken a back seat since early this year to the local fighting groups waging an insurgency against the Assad regime, said U.S. and Arab officials. Exiled political leaders had trouble keeping up with the changing nature of the fighting groups, which began mostly with military defectors and local revolutionaries taking up arms, but have increasingly attracted foreign fighters and jihadists.

Meanwhile, the SNC's role as interlocutor with world powers became redundant amid a stalemate between the Syrian regime's international supporters and opponents. Even a preliminary deal between the SNC and the Free Syrian Army, an umbrella group aiming to represent the armed opposition, frayed, as the army could no longer claim control over the growing insurgency.

Syrian opposition leaders say the U.S. began to distance itself from the SNC in May, when the group boycotted an Arab League-sponsored meeting in Cairo to help unify the opposition and bring more groups under the council's umbrella.

Repeated efforts to stem bickering between Islamist and secular factions on the council, as well as try to provide the council with better representation on the ground in Syria, have failed.

U.S. officials have recently focused on improving contacts with opposition leaders inside the country, including those leading military councils.

After parts of Idlib and Aleppo provinces fell into rebel hands this summer, U.S. and European officials working on Syria have focused their efforts on grooming what is being called "local administrative councils," a blend of civilian and military leaders that can assume governance for semi-liberated areas. It is these local councils that the U.S. hopes to draw into a new opposition body.

Some founding members of the SNC view the initiative with suspicion, saying the U.S. has conducted an inconsistent Syria policy. "We have a big challenge ahead in Doha," said Samir Nashar, a member of the SNC's executive body and prominent political dissident. "The Americans are trying to pressure all regional states to abandon the SNC and make it one component of a different body. This is not the first time they tried to do this."

Still, administration officials say the new plan has gained the tentative support of many in the SNC. And they say the intention is not to marginalize the council, but draw it into a wider body with more Syria-based members that can work more effectively on issues like humanitarian support.

The SNC, which recently expanded to 420 members from 280 members in a bid to become more inclusive, is expected to hold separate meetings in Doha on electing a new executive body, before joining consultations on the new U.S.-led initiative.

The idea is to form a separate, 50-member body in which the SNC would hold 15 seats, people involved in talks on the initiative said.

The newly created local administrative councils would hold about 14 seats, while the rest would go to political representatives from Syria's Kurdish minority, as well as prominent opposition personalities. U.S. officials have pushed for the new body to be led by Riad Seif, a secular, Sunni dissident from Damascus who is largely popular and left the country this summer.

But the plan is already being viewed with skepticism. A U.S. and European push to give a prominent role in the opposition for Manaf Tlass--a high-ranking military defector and another secular, Sunni figure--fizzled after Mr. Tlass failed to gather enough support from revolutionaries on the ground.

"The U.S. has repeatedly chosen figures it wants to place as regime alternatives, but those alternatives have been repeatedly shot down by the street," said another founding member of the SNC.

--Rima Abushakra in Beirut contributed to this article.

Write to Jay Solomon at jay.solomon@wsj.com and Nour Malas at nour.malas@dowjones.com