Framing the Syrian Conflict

What we are told does not match what we observe

Did the one-sided reporting of the 13 years of the Syrian conflict reach a correct conclusion ─ a civil war that an exhausted Assad regime finally recognized it had lost? Or, was there aggression against a Syrian government, where foreign elements took advantage of the unrest and seized an opportunity to depose the Assad regime?

Tracing battlefields and its participating fighters, from initial protests to the relative calm that preceded the flight of the stung Bashar al-Assad, yields clues to the shape of the conflict and its place in authentic history. Each protest and each battle solicited contrasting views on what happened and how it happened. Identifying the battlegrounds and the constituencies of the armed groups that engaged in the battles is a more objective means to determine the nature of the Syrian conflict.

The Rebels
Security forces subdued the 2011 spring protests that occurred in Daraa, Homs, and Damascus. On June 4, the protests turned into armed conflict. In Jisr ash-Shughur, which borders Turkey, a rebellious group seized the municipality and the first warlike clashes with Syrian security forces and the military occurred.

On July 29, 2011, seven officers defected from the Syrian military and formed the Free Syrian Army (FSA). At that time, it appeared that the local rebels had evolved into an army. This did not happen. A New York Times (NYT) article, New Role for General After Failure of Syria Rebel Plan, Eric Schmitt, Oct. 19, 2015 explains.

WASHINGTON — The Army general in charge of the Pentagon’s failed $500 million program to train and equip Syrian rebels is leaving his job in the next few weeks, but is likely to be promoted and assigned a senior counterterrorism position here, American officials said on Monday.

Maj. Gen. Michael K. Nagata, is stepping down as commander of American Special Operations forces in the Middle East, which made him responsible for the training program that ultimately produced only a few dozen fighters. That was a far cry from the 15,000 fighters that the program was going to train over a three-year period when it was formally started in December. The Obama administration abandoned its efforts to build up a new rebel force inside Syria to combat the Islamic State, announcing that it will instead use the money to provide ammunition and some weapons for groups already engaged in the battle.

Three features in this NYT explanatory article:

(1) Inability to recruit more than a few dozen fighters, who will receive the highest compensation, the best training, and the most capable weapons to engage ISIS indicates there was not a population willing to fight anyone. It is assumed that the FSA was being trained to engage ISIS before engaging the Assad government.

(2) Having the U.S. government involve itself in a battle concerning a sovereign nation, without consulting and coordinating with that nation, is counterproductive and troubling.

(3) Due to inability to shape a formidable challenge to ISIS for four years, the U.S. permitted ISIS to expand its territory from Raqqa in Syria to Mosul in Iraq and increase its violent actions.

By late 2012, most of the groups that described the FSA — moderate, Salafist, and Jihadist militias — had departed from the original command structure. The Syrian Islamic Liberation Front ­(SILF), an umbrella group, formed in summer 2012 with a clear Salafist ideology became the most significant group allied to the revised FSA.

In 2014, after ISIS members had already entered Syria from Iraq and established a military presence, fighters for the impending Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) transited Turkey and poured into Syria. The constantly changing landscape of rebel fighters and their affiliations coalesced in 2015 when “Turkish, Qatari and Saudi political and military support created Ahrar al-Sham. The leading coalition of nationalist Islamists and Salafi jihadists in the Islamic Front became the most powerful armed opposition group from 2015 onwards.”

With the rebel groups better defined, a map of the battlegrounds and areas controlled by the belligerents in the Syrian War can be observed. The date is June 14, 2017, all of Aleppo had been recaptured by the Syrian army, and the Kurdish liberation of Raqqa, with assistance of U.S. air support, was beginning.

Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Syrian_civil_war.png

The grey area describes a large chunk of Syrian land that was seized by a foreign invader (ISIS) from Iraq and not in a civil war. Charles Lister, Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, in a Brookings Intuition paper, Profiling Jabhat al-Nusra, describes how this happened.

Late one night in August 2011, seven jihadi commanders crossed from Iraq into north-eastern Syria seeking to take advantage of that country’s increasing instability to establish a new Syrian wing of the recovering Islamic State in Iraq (ISI). By order of the latter’s then-leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a Syrian known as Abu Mohammed al Jawlani (ED: Present de facto leader of Syria) led six accomplices through the border in order to quickly set about establishing connections with the ISI’s well-entrenched Syrian jihadi networks. In a matter of weeks, the necessary foundations had been laid for the birth of ‘Jabhat al-Nusra.

ISIS from Iraq was not well received and “by the end of 2013, ISIS had become an overtly hostile adversary of Syria’s opposition….Jabhat al-Nusra was drawn into fighting against ISIS and consequently into a phase of outright competition with ISIS for ‘true’ jihadi credibility in Syria.”

The yellow area is Kurdish populated territory in the Syrian nation. With U.S. aerial and logistics support, the primarily Kurdish and militant YPG has led the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a coalition of U.S.-backed left-wing ethnic militias and rebel groups. SDF overcame ISIS in Raqqa, continues to fight remnants of ISIS, engages a Turkiye led force in the North (SNA), and is challenged by Syrian Arabs hostile to its territorial control and advancements. The SDF has not engaged the Syrian government in a civil war. A recent map shows the extent of this continuous internal war in Syria, which is separate from the Syrian conflict.

In the previous map, the small white areas contain al-Nusra, considered by the U.S. State Department in December 2012 “a terrorist organization allied with al-Qaeda.” The Syrian government perspective was the same. By repelling al-Nusra, the Syrian military engaged in a war against an organization designated as terrorist and not in a civil war that involved the original protestors.

The green areas were controlled by a multitude of militias and factions.
The light green area in the south, bordering Jordan and Iraq, is mostly desert and is a lightly populated region.
The darker green areas in the south, bordering on Jordan and the occupied Golan contained some of al-Nusra affiliates and a large population that initiated the protests against the government. These protestors were not rigorously engaged in a civil war against the government.

The light green area in the North, adjacent to and south of Aleppo, was occupied by Syrian opposition groups, which were mostly composed of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the Levant Front and the al Qaeda affiliated, al-Nusra Front. In 2018, “The Netherlands' public prosecutor declared the Levant Front to be a terrorist organization, despite the Dutch government having earlier provided it with support.”

The small dark green area in the center, above Homs and the other two mixed dark and light green areas in the north, bordering Turkey, were, at that time, controlled by the Syrian National Army (SNA), a collection of confusing anachronisms that represented a coalition of nationalist Islamists and Salafi jihadists. In a report, Strategies of Turkish proxy warfare in northern Syria, Engin Yüksel, an Associate Fellow with the Netherlands Clingendael Institute, explains the difficult to understand coalition of moderate and extremist, groups, hostile to the government and to one another

Turkey sought to merge and consolidate those Islamist groups aligned with its own agenda and enhance its influence. As ideological and leadership differences made integration into the SNA problematic, Turkey constructed a new organisational umbrella in May 2018: The National Liberation Front (NLF). Although this organisation consisted initially of 15 armed groups – of which six were ‘moderate’ nationalist Islamists and nine FSA-affiliated – it was led by the commander of Faylaq al-Sham (ED: a moderate Islamist rebel group).

What was the Syrian conflict?
It may seem superfluous to define a conflict that has already occurred. Look at it another way. Did artificial constructs to the mayhem contribute to the enormous catastrophes that followed? Was the destruction preventable? Is continuing with a possible falsification of the past leading to a damaging future?

The Syrian conflict did not contain the elements that defined a civil war. It exhibited political, ethnic, cultural and religious tensions that led to civil disturbances and insurrections, but did not have unified commands with unified issues in a well-defined conflict.

• The rebels were a mixture of disparate groups, who ceded authority, denied authority, ignored authority, changed their ideologies, and fought each other as much as they fought the government. Almost all were Islamists, driven mainly by religious politics rather than by Syrian identity. Many were extremists whose counterparts had been rejected by western governments.

• All attempts to organize a rebel army were conducted by Turkyie and the United States.

• The Syrian government approached the rebels as either a group wanting to dominate Syria with a singular and overriding Islam or as a terrorist organization wanting to impose shariah on the Syrians and reduce those who were not Muslims to secondary citizens.

• The rebel groups did not present well-defined issues and had no singular command.

• Foreign militias (ISIS) captured Syrian territory.

• Foreigners entered the country to fight with the rebels.

• Foreign nations subsidized the armaments and provoked the fighting.

  President Joe Biden said, “Our biggest problem was our allies…The Turks… the Saudis, the Emirates, what were they doing? They were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad. These policies ended up helping militants linked to al-Qaeda and ultimately IS .” He did not apologize for President Obama administration’s CIA operation, which spent $1Bn to train and arm Syrian rebels against the Assad government.

• Internal conflicts between ISIS and Syrian opposition, between Kurds and Turkey, and Islamic militias among themselves complicated resolution of the civil unrest that confronted the Syrian government.

• Economic sanctions added to the catastrophes rather than relieving them.

• U.S. sponsored militants seized the Syrian oil fields and denied the Syrian people access to the funds and to an energy source.

• Populations relocated to escape the fighting and few fought or took sides.

Verdict
Syrians had reasons to wage civil war but that does not mean this was done. Preceding the battles, the civil unrest, violence, and insurrections that confronted an embattled Syrian government were only of greater magnitude than the suppression and killings of protestors in the Vietnam War, Gulf War and Iraq War protests, Civil rights protests, Black ghetto uprisings, Black Power and Black Panther movements, and Black Lives Matters demonstrations. Without external interferences escalating and intensifying the conflicts, the Assad government could have managed the initial chaos and possibly made compromises, which, at times it seemed willing to do. Foreign aggressions by ISIS, Israel, and Turkish proxies against a Syrian government and its populations occurred. Foreign elements supported terrorist organizations and took advantage of the unrest as an opportunity to depose the Assad regime. There were battles, but they did not have characteristics of a civil war. If there were an opposition, other than HTS, engaged in a civil war, where was it when Assad left Damascus open for that opposition to enter and claim victory?

Halting, rather than provoking an escalation of violent confrontations, should have guided the international community. No organized opposition had either the military power to topple the Syrian government when it had military assistance from Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, or had the vocal persuasion to convince the Syrian public that a unified and secure Syria could replace the Assad regime. What reason was there to aid and abet a catastrophe that extinguished several hundreds of thousands of lives, sent five million to internal displacement, two million to seek foreign refuge, and brought an economy into shambles?

Quoting Nikolaos van Dam on Syria, Assad, the Opposition, Refugees, Kurds, Terrorism, & the Future of the Middle East,

Frédéric Pichon has called his book on the Syrian War ‘Une Guerre Pour Rien’, or ‘A war for nothing’. But in fact, it is much worse than that: the war has not only been for nothing, because none of the aims of the opposition have been achieved, but it brought Syria also decennia backward in development and caused irreparable losses and social damages.

A coda to the melodrama, tells the complete story and portends the future for Syria.

The final outcome of the conflict and Syria’s future.
If, at the outset of the Syrian conflict, Western governments were presented with an alternative governing by Hay’ at Tahrir al Sham (HTS ), led by al-Nusra leader, Abu Mohammed al Jawlani, would any of the governments have accepted it? Well, who is HTS, who is al-Nusra, and who is Abu Mohammed al Jawlani?

A merger of several armed groups formed HTS. These were Jaysh al-Ahrar, an armed Salafi Islamist faction, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS), formerly al-Nusra Front when it was allied with al-Qaeda, Ansar al-Din Front, a jihadist alliance that remained neutral in the conflict between ISIL and other groups, Jaysh al-Sunna, an Islamist rebel group that was established as a merger between different rebel groups, recruited child soldiers and had its ammunition depot and base allegedly bombed by the U.S. air force, Liwa al-Haqq, a pragmatic and more moderate Islamist rebel group, and the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement, an Islamist rebel group that received U.S.-made BGM-71 TOW anti-tank missiles , and after a few months, left HTS, warred with HTS, and eventually joined the Turkish-backed Syrian Liberation Front.

We know al-Nusra Front as having been allied with al-Qaeda and Mohammed al-Jawlani as ISIS’ pick to lead the charge in Syria and as the al-Nusra Front leader. Do we remember that, in Dec 2013,the leader of al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria told Al Jazeera that he “ruled out peace talks with President Bashar al-Assad, warned that Arab states should be cautious of the recent improvement of Iran-US ties, and he would not accept the outcome of the upcoming international conference in Geneva scheduled for January, 2014.”

Other quotes from al-Jawlani.
“We in Jabhat al-Nusra strive to establish an Islamic emirate…[but] we have not yet announced the establishment of an emirate. When the time comes, and the sincere mujahideen and the pious scholars agree with our stance, we will announce this emirate, by the will of Allah.”

After at least 50 Jabhat al-Nusra militants were reported killed by U.S. missiles in northern Syria, al-Jawlani stated: “This is what will take the battle to the heart of your land…Muslims will not watch while their sons are bombed. Your leaders will not be the only ones who would pay the price of the war. You will pay the heaviest price.”

Has al-Jawlani changed, or is he following the thoughts of al-Qaeda in Iraq leader, al-Zawahiri? Charles Lister at The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point provides some clues.

In line with his long-held belief that acquiring allies through pragmatic moderation was the most viable path toward sparking mass revolution, al-Zawahiri’s document focused on affiliate self-discipline and restraint. Al-Qa`ida factions were advised to “focus on spreading awareness among the general public” and more broadly to invest in “maslaha (securing interests) and mafsadah (averting harm).” Fighters were ordered to refrain from fighting those “who have not raised arms against us” and to cease attacking targets where Muslim civilians may be harmed. Perhaps most surprisingly and clearly differentiating it from the Islamic State, al-Qa`ida units were to “avoid fighting the deviant sects” (Shia, Alawites, Ismailis, Ahmadis, and Sufis) and to “avoid meddling with Christian, Sikh and Hindu communities…[as] we are keen to live with them in a peaceful manner.”

Can we believe that HTS, composed of an assembly of radical Islamist groups, that has not consulted with other protest groups in forming a government, transplanted its cadres from Idlib to Damascus, unilaterally controls all institutions (One proposal by the new education ministry removes the theory of evolution from school textbooks.), and makes all decisions is the correct steward for a reinvigorated united, secular, pluralistic, and democratic Syria?

Quoting the famous philosopher, Groucho Marx, “Who do you trust, me or your eyes?”