(Zaman Al Wasl)- Bashar al-Assad has directed calls for reserve military service in the province of Latakia. These calls for recruitment included a large number of people from Syrian areas who signed agreements of reconciliation. These requests coincided with large media campaigns demanding demobilization.
Special information was handed out to Zaman al-Wasl by a staff member in the second Latakia Recruitment Division, in which he confirmed the arrival of tables containing more than 50,000 names of citizens from different regions of Syria. They were invited to join the Assad forces for reserve military service. The tables are signed by the defense minister as Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces.
The official confirmed that several thousands of the recruited citizens from the province are under the age of 45, and have not previously enrolled. A large number of them, however, were previously invited but did not answer the call; they were luckily included in the final exemption decision.
According to the source, another table arrived including the names of more than 4 thousand young people from the province of Latakia, in order to join in the performance of compulsory military service.
Large numbers of tweets and blogs have been published on social media sites regarding this.
"Joshua Atiq" wrote on (Tartus news page): “"Today we received a new notification of reserve and advocacy by the recruitment division Banias," and he added, "I have been part of the reserve forces for 6 years, and today they contacted my brother, who was called to join the forces before, but he was exempted and now they have called for him once again.”
The Alawites-dominated areas are still the main manpower supply for the Assad's regime.
More than 125,000 pro-regime forces have been killed in seven years of brutal war, according to local monitoring groups.
The source of the recruitment division asserted that there are several names from the areas of "Rastan" and "Talbisseh" in the countryside of northern Homs and Daraa and the countryside of Damascus.
An officer in the Latakia region pointed out in an exclusive interview with Zaman al-Wasl that the regime wants to strengthen its forces and that in order to do so, it compels the inhabitants of the areas that have signed reconciliation with it to drive its youth into the army. Otherwise, they will have to face the inevitable fate of dying in prisons. Most of them are wanted by the intelligence and their criminal charges are already set.
The calls for the restoration of the shortage in Assad's forces coincided with large demands for the demobilization of senior military personnel, a group of journalists are working on it under full military supervision. Zaman Al Wasl has been the only newspaper that succeeded to cover the details.
These lists brought terror into the souls of Latakia's youth and its pro-Assad countryside under the control of the Assad regime. Many of them have returned to their lives in remote villages in the high mountains of Qardahah, Hafah and Jibla, where they used to go in order to escape military service.
The Qardaha, Sallanfa and Ain Sharqiya are all places where a large number of armed men flee from compulsory and reserve service.
The retired officer Abu Haidar confirmed for Zaman al-Wasl that the presence of large numbers of young people of the province and the western countryside of the province of Hama in the mountains, sleeping in the open or in abandoned homes, carrying arms and engaging in armed robberies to secure their expenses, and he also confirmed that these elements deal with the police to ensure their life requirements.
“The police authorities ignore them, because they do not want to open side battles, and in order to hide from the public their disagreements with those who consider them to be loyal to the regime,” he added.
The adjunct believes that the situation is now different, and that they either must be subjugated to the army or completely eliminated. The regime fears the continuation of their rebellion; they are from the province which means they have relatives and a popular force standing by them. This may provoke great strife among the loyal sect, which the regime still needs to assert its authority.
Zaman Al Wasl
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