Assad foes hint he can avoid trial if he resigns

— Syria’s opposition coalition gave qualified backing Monday to its leader’s surprise offer last week for a dialogue with President Bashar Assad to end the civil war, pressing him to respond definitively and even offering the added inducement that he could avoid trial if he resigns and leaves the country.

Although the offer made by opposition leader Mouaz al-Khatib was, by his own admission, a personal gambit and was initially greeted with a torrent of criticism inside the Syrian opposition movement, his colleagues in the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces basically endorsed it over the weekend.

While some complained that al-Khatib had not consulted them before he made the offer, and a few even called for his resignation, others went along in part to counter the appearance of fractiousness that has long been a weakness in the opposition.

Al-Khatib, a respected Sunni cleric in exile who once was the head imam at the historic Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, said he would engage in dialogue with Assad’s government only if it released 160,000 political prisoners and renewed all expired passports held by members of the Syrian diaspora, which includes large numbers of dissidents.

On Sunday, an aide to Assad gave a vague response. The aide, Ali Haidar, Syria’s minister of national reconciliation, said in an interview with Russia Today, a Kremlin-financed news organization sympathetic to Syria’s government, that the government is open to talks with any opposition members who reject violence. He also said it is willing to address the passport issue but not necessarily the release of prisoners. Haidar said the 160,000 figure is exaggerated and asked al-Khatib to send a list of prisoner names.

The Syrian opposition, which considers Assad a brutal dictator responsible for the estimated 60,000 or more deaths in the nearly two-year conflict, had long contended that there could be no talks with his government until he resigns. While the opposition is still saying Assad’s departure must be part of any political settlement to end the conflict, it is no longer a precondition for talks.

Apparently emboldened by the belated support from other members of the opposition coalition, as well as endorsements of his initiative from the U.N. secretary general and special Syria envoy, al-Khatib demanded during an interview with Al Jazeera on Monday that Assad give him a “a clear stand” on the proposal.

“We say we will extend our hand for the interest of people and to help the regime leave peacefully,” al-Khatib said in the interview. “It is now in the hands of the regime.”

Al-Khatib sought to strengthen his political credentials at a regional security conference held in Munich over the weekend. He met separately with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and the foreign ministers of Russia and Iran, the Assadgovernment’s strongest foreign supporters.

In what appeared to be a gesture of goodwill timed to coincide with those meetings, Syrian rebels released two abducted Russian workers and an Italian citizen in exchange for captured rebel fighters. The news of the exchange, reported by the Russian Foreign Ministry on Monday, did not specify how many rebels were part of the deal.

Fighters captured the three on Dec. 12 as they traveled from Homs, a major city devastated by heavy fighting, to the tiny Russian military refueling base at the port of Tartus.

Amid the discussions of dialogue, activists said Syrian warplanes hit several opposition strongholds in the Damascus outskirts, from where rebels have been threatening the capital, the seat of Assad’s power.

The Britain-based activist group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also said that early on Monday, rebels captured the Baath Dam on theEuphrates river in the northeastern province of Raqqa. Months ago, rebels captured the nearby Tishrin dam. They can now control the flow of water to some areas around the country.

Elsewhere in Syria, army troops battled rebels in oil-rich Deir el-Zour in the east, along Syria’s border with Iraq. In the north, fighting was concentrated around the battlefield city of Aleppo, particularly along the road that links the city with its airport.

Also on Monday, Syria’s defense minister signaled that his country won’t hit back at Israel over an airstrike inside Syria, claiming the Israeli raid was actually in retaliation for his regime’s offensive against rebels he called “tools” of the Jewish state.

Information for this article was contributed by Hania Mourtada, Rick Gladstone and Andrew Roth of The New York Times and by Albert Aji, Bassem Mroue, Zeina Karam, Barbara Surk and Frank Jordans of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 6 on 02/05/2013

Upcoming Events