Big Push to Take Out Syrian Government in the Next 30 Days

The pattern that appears to be developing, with high-profile military victories by Islamic State in Ramadi and Palmyra, is an effort to establish "facts on the ground" by the jihadi proxies of the Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council prior to the June 30 deadline on the P5+1 negotiations with Iran on its nuclear program. Because after that date we will be residing in a new world. Either there will be a international agreement normalizing relations with the Shiite power or the talks will founder and the sanctions assiduously cobbled together by the U.S. over many years will disintegrate. So the Saudis and the other sheikhdoms are positioning themselves for the inevitable, and the United States is a willing accomplice.

For instance, check out Moon of Alabama's recent post, "Obama Administration Dilly-dallying On Islamic State Action":

The Islamic State took Ramadi with the help of armored bulldozers and some 10 suicide vehicles. That many of the nominal defenders of the city had no real will to fight also helped. But there is another important actor that allowed it to happen. In the critical 24 hours the U.S. coalition which had promised to defend Iraq and to defeat the Islamic State launched just seven air strikes and all only against minor IS targets around the city. That's like nothing. 

Now the paltry "dog ate my homework" excuse is a sandstorm no one but the U.S. air support group noticed. 

Yesterday the Islamic State held victory parades around Ramadi. A hundred vehicles with black flags parading on a wide open road with black flags on every streetlight pole.

The pictures show a bright and sunny blue sky. No U.S. air interdiction was seen. Remarks one knowledgeable tweep looking at those pictures: "The Islamic State in Ramādī yesterday. Quite amazing the coalition didn't take them out actually. Makes one wonder about the coalitions rules of engagement. Now it "looks" as if Ramādī was offered to them on a silver plate ... "

One wonders why the U.S., which has control of the skies, allows these long columns of jihadi fighters to proceed unmolested. A version of the same thing can be said about the air power of the Syrian military. If Assad is so ruthless as to regularly use barrel bombs of chlorine gas, as is often depicted in the Western media, how is it that Islamic State fighters can steadily advance on a desert city like Palmyra?

Anne Barnard reports this morning in "ISIS Strengthens Its Grip on Ancient Syrian City of Palmyra":

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Islamic State militants on Thursday solidified their rout of Syrian government forces in the historic desert city of Palmyra, moving to the outskirts to seize its airport and the notorious Tadmur Prison, according to residents and statements from the group. 

It was the first time that the ISIS militants seized an entire city from Syrian government forces; it won control of its first major city, Raqqa, from Syrian insurgents and the Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front after the two became rivals. 

The rout on Wednesday in Palmyra, whose spectacular ancient ruins are a symbol of the country’s heritage embraced by Mr. Assad’s supporters and opponents alike, came just five days after the militants seized the much larger city of Ramadi in Iraq.

The Islamic State group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, declared on Thursday that it was in control of the town after soldiers “ran away” and “left behind hundreds of dead and injured,” according to a statement released through ISIS social media channels.

Antigovernment activists who also oppose the Islamic State circulated grisly images of dead and decapitated bodies of young men lying on what looked like a street in the center of Palmyra, saying they were members of the Shueitat tribe, hundreds of whom were massacred last year for resisting the group. 

The defeat is likely to increase pressure on President Bashar al-Assad, whose forces have suffered setbacks in the northern province of Idlib in recent months and have increasingly struggled to fill their ranks after four years of war against an insurgency that began with political protest and morphed into a war with several fronts.

It seems that the Syrian government relinquished Palmyra without a pitched battle:

There were no updates from the government on the situation in Palmyra. State television had broadcast patriotic music and nature scenes the night before as residents reported that soldiers and pro-government militiamen were fleeing the town, leaving many civilians unable to evacuate. 

State media, by contrast, reported that “popular defense groups” had withdrawn “after securing the evacuation of most of the families.”

Palmyra gives ISIS control of a large prison, Tadmur, from which it can recruit or dragoon fighters, and there are gas fields near the city, as well as the antiquities to plunder and destroy for sensational publicity. But where the Syrian government is vulnerable is in Idlib where the Nusra-led (and Turkish- and Saudi-backed) Islamic coalition continues its advance. As Barnard outlined in a report on Tuesday, "Insurgents Continue Advance in Syria, Keeping Pressure on Government Forces," the jihadi goal here is control of the remaining piece of government turf in Idlib that acts as a gateway to the coastal pro-Assad Alawite region of Syria:

The advance was carried out by the same coalition of Islamist groups, including the Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, that seized the provincial capital, the city of Idlib. Other, more nationalist rebel groups, including some that have received weapons through a covert American program, also took part.

The rebel forces moved one village deeper into the remaining finger of territory that the government controls, a strip south of the city that links to the government’s coastal strongholds. 

Insurgents swept into the village of Mastoumeh and a military camp there in a two-day offensive this week, according to antigovernment activists and videos that showed fighters celebrating amid burning military vehicles. 

Syrian pro-government television channels appeared to acknowledge the advance, reporting that the air force was bombing areas in Mastoumeh that had fallen to rebels and that military units from there had retreated to the town of Ariha farther south.

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The shrinking contested strip also divides the battles in Idlib from the coastal provinces, whose population has been swollen to more than double their prewar size by people displaced from other parts of Syria. There are fears that insurgents could take revenge on loyalists there. 

The coastal provinces have the country’s greatest concentration of Alawites, the sect to which Mr. Assad belongs and that contributes disproportionately to the military. And some fear that in the bloody struggle between government forces and a mostly Sunni insurgency, they will face retribution as a group. Some factions, like Nusra, have openly called for revenge on Alawites. 

Antigovernment activists have reported stepped-up bombing campaigns over towns and villages in Idlib Province, in the northeast corner of the country, as they are taken by insurgents.

This all has the look of an orchestrated campaign. The bogeymen of ISIS used as a cat's-paw to distract and elicit cosmetic airstrikes from the military behemoth, while the real work is carried out by the Islamic coalition funded by Turkey, the GCC and armed by the U.S. At this point it's a safe bet that the CIA is broadly coordinating the activity from its nerve center in southern Turkey. I mean, come on. What else is it doing there, caring for refugees?

Over the next month we need to pay attention to the Assad strongholds along the Mediterranean. If the Syrian Arab Army cannot protect this territory, the government's days are truly numbered. The Saudi-backed proxies are going to make a big push in the next 30 days to knock out Assad. In the meantime, expect the U.S. to maintain its confusing, contradictory dilly-dallying.

Proof that the P5+1 negotiations are on rocky ground comes in today's story by Thomas Erdbrink and David Sanger, "Iran’s Supreme Leader Rules Out Broad Nuclear Inspections." Ayatollah Khamenei has categorically denied that Iran will capitulate to "anytime, anywhere" inspections demanded by the U.S.:

TEHRAN — Iran’s supreme leader on Wednesday ruled out allowing international inspectors to interview Iranian nuclear scientists as part of any potential deal on its nuclear program, and reiterated that the country would not allow the inspection of military sites.

In a graduation speech at the Imam Hussein Military University in Tehran, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, widely believed to have the final say on whether Iran accepts a deal if one is reached next month, denounced what he said were escalating demands by the United States and five other world powers as they accelerate the pace of the negotiations with Iran. 

“They say new things in the negotiations,” Ayatollah Khamenei told the military graduates. “Regarding inspections, we have said that we will not let foreigners inspect any military center.” 

Like last summer, when he vowed that Iran would ultimately build an industrial-scale uranium enrichment capability — with 190,000 centrifuges, or 10 times the number now installed — the ayatollah’s comments are bound to cause deep complications for Iran’s negotiators, led by Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. 

Skeptics about the preliminary deals described by Secretary of State John Kerry have focused on the absence of “anywhere, anytime” inspections and a lack of clarity about whether and when Tehran would have to answer 12 outstanding questions from the International Atomic Energy Agency about what the inspectors call “possible military dimensions” of the program. 

Central to that is the ability to interview nuclear scientists, starting with Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the man considered by Western intelligence officials to be the closest thing Iran has to J. Robert Oppenheimer, who guided the Manhattan Project to develop the world’s first nuclear weapon. The scientists and engineers Mr. Fakhrizadeh has assembled over the past 15 years are best suited to explain, or rebut, documents suggesting that Iran has extensively researched warheads, nuclear ignition systems and related technologies. Mr. Fakhrizadeh has never been made available to inspectors for interviews, and his network of laboratories, some on university campuses, have not been part of inspections.

In April, Mr. Kerry told Judy Woodruff on “PBS NewsHour” that Iran could not avoid answering the questions about its past actions. “They have to do it. It will be done,” he said. “If there’s going to be a deal, it will be done. 

But it is not clear how that would be enforced, and it seems likely that oil and financial sanctions would be lifted early in the process, before the explanations to inspectors could be finished. 

After the last round of talks ended on Friday in Vienna, a barrage of complaints erupted in the Iranian state news media over reported demands by the United States for broad mandates for nuclear inspectors working for the United Nations nuclear watchdog.

The comments by Ayatollah Khamenei seemed to cement the Iranian position that requiring inspections of sites not designated by the country as part of its nuclear energy program is a nonstarter. While not new, the statement could make it harder for Mr. Zarif to seal a comprehensive deal before the self-imposed June 30 deadline.

Interviews with nuclear scientists have long been a contentious issue with Iran. Five scientists were killed in separate attacks from 2010 to 2012, attacks that the United States and other countries believe were initiated by Israeli intelligence. Iran has accused the International Atomic Energy Agency of leaking personal information about the scientists to Israel. Israel has never commented on the accusations. 

“They say the right to interview nuclear scientists must be given,” Ayatollah Khamenei said, according to his website. “This means interrogation. I will not let foreigners come and talk to scientists and dear children of the nation who have developed this science up to this level.”

We know from Scott Ritter's experience as a weapons inspector in Iraq that there is substance to Iranian claims. Inspectors feed information to foreign intelligence services who then use it for a variety purposes, such as "public diplomacy," a.k.a. information warfare.

This bold red line by Khamenei is one that is going to be very difficult to erase. If the Obama administration relents on inspections, it will be difficult to win approval for any P5+1 agreement in Congress. The next month should be a momentous one.