Syria Uses Scud Missiles in New Effort to Push Back Rebels

WASHINGTON — President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have resorted to firing ballistic missiles at rebel fighters inside Syria, Obama administration officials said Wednesday, escalating a nearly two-year-old civil war as the government struggles to slow the momentum of a gaining insurgency.

Administration officials said that over the last week, Assad forces for the first time had fired at least six Soviet-designed Scud missiles in the latest bid to push back rebels who have consistently chipped away at the government’s military superiority.

In a conflict that has already killed more than 40,000 Syrians, the government has been forced to augment its reliance on troops with artillery, then air power and now missiles as the rebels have taken over military bases and closed in on the capital, Damascus. The escalation has not changed Washington’s decision to avoid military intervention in Syria — as long as chemical weapons are not used — but it did prompt a rebuke.

“As the regime becomes more and more desperate, we see it resorting to increased lethality and more vicious weapons moving forward, and we have in recent days seen missiles deployed,” said Victoria Nuland, a State Department spokeswoman.

President Obama has said that the use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line,” implying that it might lead to an American military response.

Mr. Assad’s decision to fire Scuds — not known for their precision — inside his own country appears directly related to the rebel ability to take command of military bases and seize antiaircraft weapons. The Scuds have been fired since Monday from the An Nasiriyah Air Base, north of Damascus, according to American officials familiar with the classified intelligence reports about the attacks. The target was the Sheikh Suleiman base north of Aleppo, which rebel forces had occupied.

The development may also represent a calculation by the Syrian leadership that it can resort to such lethal weapons without the fear of international intervention, partly because Washington had set its tolerance threshold at the use of chemical weapons. Mr. Obama has never suggested that the United States would take action to stop attacks against Syrian rebels and civilians with conventional weapons, no matter how severe.

“This may be another example of the unintended consequence of the red line the administration has drawn with regard to chemical weapons,” said Joseph Holliday, a former Army intelligence officer and a senior analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, a nongovernmental research group. “Assad views every weapon short of chemicals as fair game.”

The disclosure about the Scuds came as representatives of more than 100 nations gathered in Marrakesh, Morocco, for a conference intended to give a political lift to the Syrian opposition, which is formally known as the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. And it came amid an increase in violence in Syria, including reports of a new massacre of about 100 Alawites, Mr. Assad’s sect, and a large bombing in the capital.

Mr. Obama, in an interview on Tuesday with ABC News, formally recognized the coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people.

William Burns, the deputy secretary of state who led the American team to the Morocco gathering, said Wednesday that he had invited opposition leaders to Washington, including Sheik Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib, the coalition leader.

Mr. Khatib, however, took issue with a decision by the Obama administration to classify Al Nusra Front — one of several armed groups fighting Mr. Assad — as a foreign terrorist organization.

“The logic under which we consider one of the parts that fights against the Assad regime as a terrorist organization is a logic one must reconsider,” Mr. Khatib said. “We can differ with parties that adopt political ideas and visions different from ours. But we ensure that the goal of all rebels is the fall of the regime.”

Obama administration officials have said that the Nusra Front is an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the terrorist group that has sought to foment sectarian violence there and topple the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.

“All of us have seen what Al Qaeda in Iraq tried to do to threaten the social fabric of Iraq,” Mr. Burns said at a news conference. “And that’s not a future that the vast majority of Syrians want to see, and it’s certainly not a future that the international community supports.”

Mr. Burns spoke after a declaration recognizing the new coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people was adopted at the Morocco gathering. It also called on Mr. Assad to “stand aside” to permit a “sustainable political transition.”

In Damascus on Wednesday, a car bomb and two other explosives went off outside the Interior Ministry headquarters — known as the House of Justice — in Kafar Souseh, on the southern outskirts, Syrian state news media reported. Two Lebanese television channels that favor the Syrian government reported that there had been casualties. One channel, Mayadin, reported that the interior minister, Mohammad al-Shaar, had been wounded, but other accounts said he had escaped unharmed.

An activist in Damascus, Abu Qays, said Syrian security forces had sealed off Shami Hospital, a central Damascus facility used by Syria’s elite, in a possible indication of high-profile casualties in the blasts.

But it was the Scud attacks that caught the attention of American intelligence experts. Scuds are capable of carrying chemical weapons, though American officials emphasized that conventional warheads, not poison gas, had been used in the recent strikes.

NATO recently approved the deployment of American, Dutch and Germany Patriot antimissile batteries to Turkey, a neighbor of Syria that has become one of Mr. Assad’s most ardent rivals, to protect against a possible Syrian missile attack. The Patriot batteries have not yet arrived in Turkey, and it may take weeks for them to get there.

An American official said that the Syrian brigade that controls and operates the Scuds was an all-Alawite team. “There’s tremendous sensitivity about that weapon system, so Assad keeps it in the hands of his most trusted agents,” he said.

It is not clear whether all of the Scuds struck the base they were aimed at or what casualties they might have caused. But there was military logic to the move, experts said.

“The Assad regime has consistently escalated its use of force whenever the rebels’ strength has presented a significant challenge to the regime,” Mr. Holliday said.

“In January 2012, the regime started to use artillery because the rebels learned how to defend against regime ground forces,” he added. “The regime started using its air power in June because the rebels had gained control of the countryside. Now that the rebels have begun to defeat Assad’s air force and overrun his bases, it shouldn’t be surprising that the regime is responding with Scuds.”