Rebels Unravel

The blowback from the fatwas issued by Sunni clerics has begun. A commander of the Free Syrian Army, Kamal Hamami, was killed in Latakia province bordering Turkey in northern Syria by members of the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Islamic State of Iraq and Levant. Reuters has the story, "New front opens in Syria as rebels say al Qaeda attack means war":

Louay Mekdad, FSA Supreme Command Political Coordinator, said Abu Ayman al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State's Emir of the coastal region, personally shot dead Hamami and his brother at the roadblock. 

The FSA has been trying to build a logistics network and reinforce its presence across Syria as the U.S. administration considers sending weapons, in part to present a bulwark against units it considers "terrorist organizations." 

But with funding from Gulf-based individuals, Islamist brigades have taken a leading role in rebel-held regions of Syria, filling the vacuum of power by setting up religious courts and governance bodies. 

The FSA -- a mixture of loosely-affiliated brigades -- is accused by locals of looting and has not been able to present a unified front to sideline hardline units who favor an Islamic caliphate over pluralist democracy. 

Some frustrated FSA fighters say they have joined Islamist groups and moderate and hardline fighters sometimes buy and sell weapons from each other. 

The anti-Assad Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict, said the FSA and the Islamic State have had violent exchanges in several areas of Syria over the past few weeks, showing growing antagonism between Assad's foes. 

"Last Friday, the Islamic State killed an FSA rebel in Idlib province and cut his head off. There have been attacks in many provinces," the Observatory's leader Rami Abdelrahman said.

There is a civil war within the civil war. You have the looters of the FSA fighting against the jihadis of Al Nusra Front recently rebranded or merged, depending on how you look at it, with Islamic State of Iraq and Levant. This was the obvious outcome of pursuing contradictory policies. The West has an enormous security apparatus to combat Al Qaeda, yet we were willing to facilitate our Gulf Arab allies in fomenting jihad against Syria. Now we're going to have to deal with the consequences.

Colum Lynch, writing in Foreign Policy, reports on European concerns over radicalized Sunni fighters returning from Syria to create problems in their home countries on the continent. It is as if the desire to topple al-Assad erased everything that was learned from exporting jihad to Afghanistan in the 1980s. Or maybe the failed-state model of Afghanistan is actually the desired outcome. It does guarantee perpetual war.