Syrian fighter pilot uses jet to defect to Jordan - Washington Post

BEIRUT — A Syrian pilot defected to Jordan on Thursday, flying his MiG-21 fighter jet south across the border and seeking asylum at a Jordanian air base in the first such case involving a plane since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s rule began 15 months ago.
The defection came hours after the U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, issued the most direct appeal yet to members of the Syrian security forces to abandon the regime and join the opposition. Though there is no indication that the pilot was responding to the appeal, posted on the Facebook page of the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, the defection was welcomed in Washington as a further sign of building discontent within the Syrian military.

“As you know, we have long called for members of the Syrian military to refuse to obey orders, to break with the Assad regime,” said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland. “And we’d like to see more of this.”
The defection came on a day of surging violence across Syria, with human rights groups and activists reporting at least 96 deaths nationwide. Most of the deaths resulted from intense shelling of rebel strongholds in the provinces of Homs and Daraa as the Syrian army intensified a push to recapture areas that have fallen under rebel control.
In the Facebook posting, Ford issued a stark warning to the security forces that the United States intends to work with Syrians after the Assad government falls to track down those responsible for the violence and bring them to justice.
“Members of the Syrian military should reconsider their support for a regime that is losing the battle,” Ford wrote. “The officers and soldiers of the Syrian military have a choice to make. Do they want to expose themselves to criminal prosecution...? Or do they want to help secure the role of the professional military in a democratic Syria by supporting the Syrian people?”
It was unclear whether the defection of a lone pilot, identified by Syrian government media as Col. Hassan Mirei al-Hamadeh, signified anything more than an individual case of disgruntlement.
The official Syrian Arab News Agency initially reported that he had gone missing on a training flight. But after Jordan announced that it had granted the pilot’s request for political asylum, the agency denounced him as “a deserter and a traitor to his country” and said he would be “punished accordingly.”
The conflict in Syria began as a peaceful uprising but has in recent months evolved into a full-blown conflict between Assad’s armed forces and rebels fighting in the name of the Free Syrian Army.
A spokesman for the Free Syrian Army, Col. Malik Kurdi, called Hamadeh a hero “who shared in the suffering of the Syrian people and expressed his rejection of the tyranny practiced by the regime.”
Speaking by telephone from the Free Syrian Army’s de facto headquarters in a refugee camp in southern Turkey, he said Hamadeh was from the mostly Sunni province of Idlib, a Free Syrian Army stronghold, and that many more pilots would like to defect. “But there are strict measures and a lot of controls on them,” he said.

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