Gray Lady's Anne Barnard Savors Ambiguous Rebel Victory

Anne Barnard, back in Beirut after her stay in Damascus, celebrates the rebel capture of Minakh air base (spelled as "Minnigh" and "Minnegh" in other accounts) in northern Syria's Aleppo Province. Writing with Hwaida Saad, Barnard, in "Rebels Gain Control of Government Air Base in Syria," is even more accepting of rebel claims than the reliably pro-opposition Al Jazeera, which in its story, "Syrian rebels claim control of Aleppo airbase," is careful to frame the government's loss of the air base as hearsay. SANA issued a pro forma denial.

According to Barnard and Saad,

Warplanes from the base had struck at villages across northern Syria, and the base, in flat fields with little cover, had presented its own challenge. But as rebels began to acquire antiaircraft weapons from Qatar and other donors, shooting down helicopters and warplanes, it became harder for the army to restock the base by air, stranding the soldiers with dwindling supplies.

Chechen jihadis were apparently instrumental in the attack:

The base was first besieged by a Free Syrian Army brigade called North Storm, and joined by fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham and a group calling itself Jaish al-Muhajireen wal Ansar. Muhajireen means emigrants, and the group, which carried out several suicide attacks at the base, is led by Russian speakers from Chechnya and other parts of the Caucasus. 

Mr. Farzat said Chechen Islamist fighters near the airport had refused to let the defecting government soldiers flee, so he helped them escape by another route. “I give the Islamic fighters credit for the liberation,” he said.The seizure of the base could have an impact on the stalemated fight for Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, by freeing up rebel fighters and antiaircraft weapons to put pressure on Aleppo’s airport, which rebels have been unable to take despite months of trying. It could also dampen the morale of government troops in other remote outposts. 

Abu al-Haytham, a rebel fighter who fought for months to seize Minakh and is now in Turkey, called the capture of the base a morale booster and “a strike against the regime.” But, he added, “it won’t change anything on the ground — we just got some vehicles and ammunition.”

Licking her lips in anticipation of those freed-up antiaircraft guns being trained on Aleppo, Barnard also heralds an ISIS surge into the Alawite coastal stronghold of Latakia:

In Latakia, the rebel offensive, involving more than 1,500 fighters led by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, accelerated what had been a gradual rebel push into a province whose government-held central city has been a relatively secure haven for displaced Syrians from war-torn areas. 

Government forces withdrew Monday from a number of villages in the coastal mountains, said Ammar Hassan, an opposition activist in close touch with rebels. 

He said rebels had seized four mountaintop military posts that had been shelling villages below, and were trying to advance farther toward the coast and toward Qardaha, the ancestral mountain village of President Bashar al-Assad’s family.

Regardless of the veracity of rebel gains in these two particular instances, it does seem that Patrick Cockburn's assessment of the conflict after the government victory at Qusayr is on target: there are going to be no outright winners here. The government can continue to rack up victories, but the opposition -- with its myriad Islamist groups; its CIA-supported Free Syrian Army; its Kurdish separatists -- controls significant amounts of territory and appears ever ready to mount fresh offensives.

A piece that appeared in The Guardian at the beginning of last month, "Syria's al-Nusra Front – ruthless, organised and taking control," written by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, provides excellent insight into the antagonistic relationship between Al Nusra Front and Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, as well as why the United States seems blithely unconcerned about the spread of Islamist fighters into Syria:

If the jihadis are in the ascendant in the east, they are not without challenges. The first of these is a strategy that bore fruit for the Americans in Iraq: the threat of an Arab "awakening", or sahwa, in which the US pays tribes to fight the jihadists on their behalf. In Iraq, this delivered a disastrous defeat for al-Qaida and other jihadis, but it has since achieved mixed results in Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan. 

But while it took the Americans months of intricate negotiations and huge sums of money to convince a few tribal elders in Iraq, in Syria almost every other marginal tribal elder and his many cousins flirt with the the idea of sahwa, and the money that it could bring. 

"They used to tell us that the FSA will turn to sahwa and fight us, which I thought was an exaggeration," said the emir of gas before we departed. "Now I know that will happen for sure."

Abdul-Ahad's piece gives one a non-partisan perspective of the breadth of opposition within Syrian.