Syria: Despite prime minister's defection, Assad’s inner circle intact (+video)

Syrian President Bashar Assad’s administration struck a defiant tone Monday, renewing its counterattack on rebel forces in the country’s largest cities and vowing to stay in place, despite the defection of the country’s prime minister.

The defection of Prime Minister Riad Hijab to Jordan was the highest-profile departure from Assad’s government so far, but analysts said it was unlikely to indicate a fatal fissure in his inner circle. Hijab, who’d been appointed just two months ago, is a Sunni Muslim, while Assad’s most ironclad allies are fellow members of his minority Alawite sect. Assad appointed a successor within hours.

Sectarian rhetoric has worsened on both sides of the nascent civil war in recent weeks, with the regime portraying the rebels as Sunni terrorists and the rebels calling Alawites heretics and blaming them for Assad’s ability to withstand international isolation and sanctions for 17 months. Human rights groups already are raising concern that Alawites will face bloody reprisal attacks should Assad fall.

About five Alawite clans, all linked through intermarriage and business interests, control the real power bases in Syria — such as the security apparatus and the military — and there have been no notable defections from their ranks, said Ammar Abdulhamid, an exiled opposition member who is on the Syria Working Group at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, a think tank in Washington.

“They control the key decision-making process in tactical terms,” Abdulhamid said of the powerful Alawite dynasties. “The defection shows that the regime has lost control of an old game: the Sunni fig leaf.”

Other reported defectors — including at least two more Cabinet ministers, members of the security apparatus, and Syria’s first astronaut — were said to have left the regime over the weekend, according to opposition activists. The claims couldn’t be independently verified and their strategic significance was unknown. The government denied that others had defected.

Assad’s government has lost control of much of Syria’s rural north and has been battling opposition guerrillas in at least six urban areas, including the capital, Damascus, since four of the president’s top security aides were killed in a bombing at the state security headquarters July 18.

It was difficult to determine, however, who had the upper hand in fighting in Damascus and Aleppo, the country’s largest city and its business hub.

Opposition activists and journalists on the ground reported that fighter jets and helicopter gunships pounded rebel targets in Aleppo, and there were signs that the rebels were giving up ground. A reporter for the Turkish newspaper Zaman wrote Monday that rebels had abandoned their headquarters in Aleppo on Saturday after government planes dropped bombs nearby. The reporter said Syrian government aircraft also could be seen bombing the Salahadin neighborhood two miles away, but that it was impossible to reach the neighborhood because of the presence of loyalist troops.

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