BEIRUT ? Riyad Hijab, the Syrian prime minister who fled to Jordan last week, declared in his first news conference in Amman on Tuesday that the Syrian government is falling apart and has ceded control of large parts of the country to rebel forces.
?The regime is collapsing, morally, materially and economically,? he said. ?Militarily, it is crumbling, as it no longer occupies more than 30 percent of Syrian territory.?
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Hijab is the most senior official to defect from the embattled government of President Bashar al-Assad, and his escape was a strong sign that Assad is losing his grip. When the news of Hijab?s defection first spread last week, the Syrian government claimed he had been fired.
But Hijab said in the news conference that he left while still in office and undertook a harrowing three-day journey before reaching Jordan. And he openly pledged his support to the opposition.
?I won?t be anywhere but within the ranks of the people?s revolution, a loyal soldier, a defender of all the just demands of the revolution,? he said.
Hijab spoke a day after rebel fighters said they shot down a MiG-23 jet in eastern Syria and captured the pilot, a claim disputed by the Syrian government, which blamed a ?technical failure? for the crash.
If the rebel assertion is verified, the action would represent a significant improvement in the military skills demonstrated by the ragtag fighters and could be a sign that they are receiving more sophisticated weapons from their international sponsors, which now include Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
The jet apparently went down in Mohassan, a small town southeast of Deir al-Zour, a flash point in the battle between opposition forces and Assad?s government.
The official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) said the jet crashed because of technical reasons and that a search for the pilot was underway. ?A technical failure that happened to a military aircraft while it was on an ordinary training flight over the eastern area caused the command devices to break down, and the pilot to leave the plane by the ejection seat,? said a military source quoted by SANA.
Jets were first used to blast rebel positions in residential areas of Aleppo late last month, as Assad?s military forces intensified their efforts to crush the uprising.
The Syrian military?s air power superiority with both jets and helicopters has been frequently cited by commanders and soldiers in the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) as the biggest hindrance to their ability to hold territory. Rebel fighters have often pleaded for an internationally enforced no-fly zone or for surface-to-air missiles, which they say would tip the balance of the conflict in their favor.
Aref Hammoud, an FSA spokesman based in Turkey, said Monday that the jet was shot down with a 14.5mm antiaircraft gun, not missiles. ?Machine guns were used to shoot at the plane. It was in a low range, which made it possible to hit,? he said. ?Those machine guns were captured from the regime army, and God helped us to hit down this plane.?
Source: http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=1d5fc5a0196af69fff78dfc94ff65dfe
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