WHITE HOUSE NOTEBOOK: 'Red lines' and entourages

JERUSALEM (AP) — Red lines. When it comes to the Middle East, President Barack Obama is encountering them everywhere. They are painted on the ground as directional markers for visiting dignitaries, and they are in Obama's and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's foreign policy rhetoric as not-to-be-crossed warnings to Syria and Iran.

As Obama prepared to tour a missile battery that is part of Israel's Iron Dome defenses, an aide at the Tel Aviv airport directed the president to follow the red line on the tarmac.

"Bibi's always talking to me about red lines," Obama quipped, referring to Netanyahu by his familiar name.

Netanyahu has set "red lines" on Iran's nuclear development capabilities. Israel repeatedly has threatened to take military action should Iran appear to be on the verge of obtaining a bomb. The U.S. has pushed for more time to allow diplomacy and economic penalties to run their course, though Obama insists military action is an option. The issue has become a point of tension between the two allies.

Obama himself has used the phrase to describe limits that could prompt action against Syria's Assad regime. Any use of chemical weapons by Syria's regime, Obama has said, would constitute a "red line" that if breached could prompt direct U.S. intervention. It's a threat that could be tested amid new accusations that the regime used chemicals in an attack in a village in the north of Syria.

Referring to the painted red lines at the airport, Obama joked that it was "a psychological ploy."

Netanyahu replied: "It was minutely planned."

___

President Barack Obama's traveling retinue is no small matter. The combination of aides and press who follow the president makes for a massive grouping of followers that are simply part of the job of being president. But if Obama doesn't take notice, someone else in his family certainly does.

"Michelle teases me mercilessly," Obama confessed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, referring to his entourage during arrival ceremonies in Tel Aviv. "She says whenever she travels with me, it's embarrassing."

___

During a receiving line on the airport tarmac, Obama and Netanyahu stopped briefly to chat with Obama's deputy national security, Ben Rhodes.

Obama noted that Rhodes' brother, David, is president of CBS News.

"Sounds like a very incestuous relationship," Netanyahu observed, chuckling at the idea of siblings in power roles with the administration and the news media.

"Not if you watch CBS News," Obama replied.

___

Israeli President Shimon Peres presented Obama with gifts during their meeting. Obama received a friendship clock, which has the time in Washington on one side and the time in Jerusalem on the other. The clock has a gold inscription of the U.S. presidential seal. The clock was made at Adi Watches in Kibbutz Yavne, the only watch factory in the Mideast.

Peres also gave the president a friendship bracelet for the first lady. It is designed as two circles, representing the two nations, with a small freedom bird on each. Obama's daughters also are being sent bracelets with freedom birds.

___

Israelis and others awaiting President Barack Obama's arrival in Israel on Wednesday were surprised to see his signature black limousine sitting on the back of a flatbed truck.

The U.S. Secret Service said the vehicle suffered mechanical problems before Obama arrived but wouldn't say just what the problem was. Mechanics were examining the vehicle to figure out what happened.

The disabled limo was swapped out for a back-up, and Obama's busy itinerary in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem on Wednesday was unaffected. The Secret Service says its advance teams plan ahead for these types of glitches.

"This is why we bring multiple vehicles and a mechanic on all trips," said Secret Service spokesman Brian Leary.

View the original article here

Syrian rebels pierce Assad's siege lines in Homs: opposition

AMMAN (Reuters) - Syrian rebels launched a counter-offensive against a government siege of their positions in the strategic city of Homs despite coming under ferocious aerial bombardment on Sunday, opposition campaigners said.

The mixed city, inhabited by Sunnis and Alawites, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam who have dominated Syria since the 1960s, has emerged as a major battleground in the two-year-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, which has claimed about 70,000 lives so far, according to the United Nations.

Homs, 140 kms (88 miles) north of Damascus in central Syria, lies on a vital road juncture linking army bases on the coast, home to a large proportion of Assad's minority Alawite sect, and government forces in the capital Damascus.

Sunni Muslim rebels broke through government lines in the north and west to ease a months-long army siege on their strongholds in the center of the city, opposition sources said.

Fighters based in the provinces of Hama and Idlib advanced on Homs this weekend from the north while brigades from rural Homs attacked government positions in Baba Amro. This area was overrun by the army after a long siege a year ago and subsequently visited by Assad.

The official state news agency said "a unit of our brave army engaged with an armed terrorist group that had tried to infiltrate Baba Amro ... and killed and wounded several of its members."

Abu Imad, an opposition activist, said the sound of aerial bombardment on Baba Amro in western Homs shook the city.

"This situation is muddled in the whole of Homs, but what is certain is that the regime is busy trying to repel rebel brigades who have broken into Baba Amro from its rural surroundings," he said.

Both sides have taken heavy casualties since the army went on the offensive 10 days ago to take the central districts of Khalidya, al-Qusour and Old Homs, where rebel brigades have been dug in for months, according to opposition military sources.

Rebels repelled several army attempts to take Khalidya with infantry in the last 10 days and dozens from both sides have been killed, the sources said.

ASSAD SAYS FOCUS IS BIG CITIES

Assad, fighting to maintain his family's four-decade-old grip on the country, appears to be focusing his military campaign on holding the main cities, along a highway axis running north of Homs to Hama and Aleppo and south to Damascus and Deraa, according to opposition sources.

In a meeting with parliamentarians from Turkey's main opposition Republican People's Party in Damascus on Thursday, Assad said he couldn't control some parts of Syria, accusing Turkey of backing what he described as terrorists.

"We can't control all parts of Syria. We are focused on big cities. There are terrorist attacks in the countryside," Assad said according to a report the party published on Sunday.

Nader al-Husseini, an activist from Baba Amro, said several roadblocks in the district had fallen to rebel fighters and dozens of loyalist troops and militia had fled to the nearby districts of Jobar and Inshaat.

"For the regime to take hits in Baba Amro is damaging to its morale, especially since Assad visited Baba Amro and was filmed there, supposedly sealing the regime's triumph," Husseini said.

In the east of Syria, a desert region that extends to Iraq's Sunni heartland, government jets bombarded the city of Raqqa, which fell to the opposition last week, killing five people. But some refugees who had fled to nearby rural and desert regions have begun returning to the city, activists said.

Large parts of eastern Syria, which accounts for all of the country's oil production and most of its grain output, have been captured by the armed opposition in recent weeks.

But the Syrian National Coalition, an umbrella group of the political opposition, postponed a meeting to form a provisional government, in the latest setback to opposition efforts to create an administration to take over if Assad is ousted.

The coalition meeting to elect a provisional prime minister, which was due to be held on March 12 after being postponed once already, has been rescheduled for March 20, but it was uncertain it would be held even then, coalition sources said.

Meanwhile, the number of refugees fleeing Syria could triple by the end of the year from one million now, according to a new U.N. estimate.

"Everything depends on whether or not we will have a political solution but we need to be prepared for a very strong increase of the present numbers," U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres told reporters in Ankara.

Opposition campaigners said at least 20 bodies of young men captured and shot by security forces were found on Sunday in a small waterway running through the contested city of Aleppo.

It was the largest number of bodies lifted in a single day from what became known as "the river of martyrs", after 65 bodies turned up in late January. An average of several bodies a day have been appearing in the river since, several activists in the northern city, which is near Turkey, told Reuters.

Syrian authorities have banned most independent media from the country, making verification of reported events difficult.

(Reporting by Khaled Yacoub Oweis, Amman newsroom; Editing by Jason Webb)

View the original article here