One of the highest-ranking military officers yet to abandon Syrian President Bashar Assad defected to neighboring Jordan and said in an interview aired Saturday that morale among those still inside the regime had collapsed.
In another setback for the Assad regime, a leading human rights group accused Syria's government of stepping up its use of widely banned cluster munitions, which often kill and wound civilians.
The twin blows illustrated the slowly spreading cracks appearing in Assad's regime as well as its deepening international isolation. While few analysts expect the civil war between Assad's forces and rebels seeking his ouster to end soon, most say it appears impossible for the 4-decade-old regime to continue to rule Syria.
Maj. Gen. Mohammed Ezz al-Din Khalouf announced his defection from Assad's regime in a video aired Saturday on the Al-Arabiya satellite channel. It showed him sitting next to his son, Capt. Ezz al-Din Khalouf, who defected with him.
The elder Khalouf said that many of those with Assad's regime have lost faith in it, yet continue to do their jobs, allowing Assad to demonstrate broad support.
"It's not an issue of belief or practicing one's role," he said. "It's for appearance's sake, for the regime to present an image to the international community that it pulls together all parts of Syrian society under this regime."
He also said fighters from the Lebanese military group Hezbollah were fighting in Syria in "more than one place," but did not give further details.
The Syrian government did not immediately comment on the defection. It portrays the uprising as a foreign-backed conspiracy to weaken Syria being carried out by terrorists on the ground.
Seif al-Hourani, an activist from one of the rebel groups that helped get Khalouf and his family out of the country, said via Skype that Khalouf's son made contact with rebels about six months ago and leaked them information before he asked for help getting the family out of Syria.
That process took almost a week because of violence in the southern province of Daraa, the easiest place to shuttle Khalouf across the border, al-Hourani said.
Six days ago, rebels smuggled Khalouf, his wife, and three of their children out of Damascus to the southern province of Sweida. Two days later, they moved them to Daraa. They waited there until late Friday when it was safe enough to drive them to the border and hand them to Jordanian authorities, al-Hourani said.
Like many rebels, al-Hourani spoke on condition he be identified only by that nickname — by which he is widely known among his comrades — because he feared retaliation on his family.
Khalouf was chief of staff of the army branch that deals with supplies and fuel.
While rebels lauded his defection as a blow to the regime, it was unlikely to have a significant effect on Assad's ability to wage war.
Widespread defections among conscripts and low-level soldiers have sapped the Syrian army's infantry, but high-level defections have been rare, and Assad's air force and heavy munitions allow the government to pound rebel areas, even if it cannot take them back.
Still, cracks continue to spread through Assad's regime as rebel forces expand their areas of control and put increasing pressure on the capital, Damascus.
Also Saturday, Human Rights Watch said Syria's government is killing an increasing number of civilians with cluster bombs.
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