Alive Or Not? Guesswork And A Strange Feeling ..

The night of Dec 2, 2012.

Recapturing the puzzling news of the recent day. After such a long time struggling against the tyranny in Syria we all are cautious due to rumors.

It was never easy to confirm some tweets and posts filed under 'BREAKING' or stuff like that.

But this night is somehow exceptional.

All I'm writing now down expresses my own subjective views about the ongoings I've witnessed online the last three days. Therefore the drawn conclusions represent exclusively my personal point of view.

First of all there was the mysterious internet shutdown in whole Syria. Attempts of analysis tracked the regime as responsibles for that. Comprehensible, because the revolutionaries would have no interest in putting the whole country offline, especially when it comes to the meanwhile legendary Fridays when they upload evidence footages of protests taking place all over.

In the beginning of the internet shutdown we feared a regime strategy using chemical weapons against the Free Syrian Army and other freedom fighter groups in liberated areas as a last attempt to crackdown the revolution and to regain ground in an almost lost battle. Fortunately that didn't happen up to now, several usage of white phosphorus ammunition was reported but a major attack with lethal chemicals wasn't reported yet. Maybe the regimers realized that such an attack could also hit their own people; by examining the map the liberated areas are closely mixing up with regime held areas, especially in Damascus.

We can only speculate about what really happened in those more or less 60 hours of virtual darkness. But another event of this Saturday tracked our interest more than usual: despite heavy clashes between the Free Syrian Army and regime forces around the Damascus International Airport flights were cancelled. It seemed that from that moment on no one was able to leave the capital with the help of an airplane. Then an A320 from the Syrian Airlines, flight SYR441, was reported to start direction Moscow, destination Vnukovo, the smaller airport of the Russian capital.

Some unusual details about that flight drew our attention: the machine flew above average speed, a sign that only a few passengers or/and little cargo was on board. If it had been a Russian airplane it wouldn't had wonder me at all, years ago I flew with the Aeroflot from Germany to St Peterburg arriving approximately 20 minutes before the scheduled time. That had to do with the circumstance that the captain of the Tupolew switched on the auto pilot after reaching the ordered flight height heading straight towards the destination .. and .. that we were only six passengers on board.

Another interesting detail was the announcement that the closure of the Damascus International Airport will be compensated by opening the military airport of Tartous for civil airlines' arrivals and departures. Not that they tried to assure the public to do everything to renormalize the situation at the capital's airport. True or not, that message should prepare the public for a longer closure due to the ongoing clashes. Regarding that, flight SYR441 appears retrospectively even more suspicious.

Examining the route of the plane raised another question. Instead of flying via Eastern Turkey and the Black Sea across the Ukraine to Russia flight SYR441 took a route around Turkey over the Mediterranean, crossed Greece and Bulgaria before heading direction Moscow. Well, maybe they were instructed to follow that route by the international air space control agency. Maybe.

Then one of the Brotherhood party members announced during a pro-Morsi rally in Cairo that 'Bashar al-Assad is probably dead or has left Syria'. My first thoughts were like: c'mon, you don't need to use such kind of rumors to heaten up the protesting masses (it worked well what the footage on Al Jazeera proved). In the moment I wanted to reject that occurance I remembered Lakhdar Brahimi's last comments and estimations about Assad's actual situation and possible future. His undertone changed slightly but perceptable from trying to defend Bashar's status as representant of (at least a handful of) the Syrian people to a much more clearer rejection. Not that I'm fully trusting in politicians like him but something says me that this could have been a signal to a certain group of the regime's circle to drop down, to get rid of Assad.

In the language of the Chess game said: in a situation like the regime's top one the king had switched the position with the checkers to get sacrificed. We can only suggest who might become the replaced king in that game, probably it will take another time before he will be presented. But Bashar al-Assad is according to that theory off the board.

And to all appearances on board of that ominous flight SYR441. The last remaining question is now: in what condition he might have been on board? Speculation 1 - alive after being urged (I don't suppose convinced, mainly after his last public announcement some weeks ago) to leave Syria. Speculation 2 - in a wooden case. Maybe it came to a violent dispute after the lobby of those trying to save their own asses as far as possible with the hardliners' circle around Bashar. That would explain a possible successful coup d'etat during the well-planned internet shutdown. Certain things can only become realized when the lights are out.

Alive or not - the powerful friends of the Syrian regime will try to prevent all kind of exposed clearness around these possible ongoings if my assumptions become proven true. The reason for that is a) keeping the Syrians as long as possible in the dark to construct a new follow-up able to act for their interests and b) to avoid a sudden push for the revolution movement when the end of the Assad era becomes - from the regime's allies point of view - too early confirmed.

As previously mentioned, this summary bases upon combining observations of unconfirmed occurances (the only facts are the two and a half days' internet shutdown and the Syrian Airlines flight SYR441 from Damascus to Moscow) and personal estimations after monitoring twenty months the people's revolution in Assad's Syria, a jungle of rumors, myths and speculations.