Enemies of Syria Launch Plan B (or is It Plan C?)

It can't be just a coincidence that the recent Al Qaeda offensive in the suburbs of Damascus is taking place at the same time as Israel has stepped up its air war against Syria.

Every indication is that the Gulf monarchies that prop up the Salafist jihadis waging war on Syria are making a concerted effort, along with their Israeli allies, to change the contours of the conflict and continue to dictate the terms of any future agreement as the siege of Raqqa is to commence in April.

Since the beginning of the year ISIS and Nusra have used suicide bombers to target Shiite pilgrims at shrines outside Damascus.

Anne Barnard reports in "Resurgent Syrian Rebels Surprise Damascus With New Assaults" that

After the government seized the eastern half of Aleppo from rebels last year, it worked hard to create the impression that the war was essentially over. The recent activity, including a series of suicide bombings in Damascus and a rebel attack Thursday on the northern city of Hama, seemed to indicate that the war might be entering a new phase instead.

While the government still seems to be consolidating control over major population centers along Syria’s western spine, it appears at a minimum likely to face a lingering rural insurgency and bombing campaigns in the cities by hard-line jihadist groups.

At the least, the rebel assaults carried a political message: that the insurgents could still disrupt life in the capital and challenge the forces of President Bashar al-Assad at several points around the country, while simultaneously attacking Islamic State fighters.

By mounting a series of simultaneous assaults around the country, the rebels seemed intent on exploiting one of the government forces’ main weaknesses. While they have Russian air support and help on the ground from Iranian-trained militias, they are spread thin after six years of war and the drain of so many men fleeing the country rather than serving in the army.

It was not immediately clear if the rebels could maintain the offensive. Their forces around Damascus have been badly depleted in recent years and their territory rolled back as the government besieged districts and forced their surrender.

And the new assaults raised political concerns, in that they continue the alliance between a spectrum of rebel groups and hard-line Islamists considered terrorists by Russia and the United States.

The rebels are also walking a fine line with Syrian and international public opinion. To build leverage for imminent peace talks, they need to show they can still cause trouble for the government on the ground, undermining its claim that it can control territory and maintain security.

Yet, they stand to pay a huge political price if they ally themselves with groups that have been intensifying Baghdad-style insurgent attacks like the suicide bombing that killed more than 30 people last week in a historic courthouse in Damascus.

Barnard goes on to describe the central coordination at work in the recent offensive:

There were reports late Tuesday of several new insurgent assaults on government territory taking place at once: one in Hama Province and another on the western outskirts of Aleppo. In recent weeks, rebels have also launched attacks in Daraa Province to the south. Until recently, fighters there had lain low at the behest of foreign sponsors including the United States, but it now appears they have either decided to defy their patrons or persuaded them to heat up the front again.

Rebel and jihadi groups were also advancing against the Islamic State in the Qalamoun region, north of Damascus.

The immediate goal appears to be to protect the caliphate, to draw government forces away from the battle to retake Raqqa; to that end, Israel is acting as the jihadis air force.

Baghdad has lived with suicide bombings for more than a decade. I don't think Nusra moving to a conventional terror campaign is going to change anything. What is a game-changer is if Israel substantially expands its Syrian target list. I can't imagine that they would risk directly jousting with Russia. Liberman's threat to destroy Syria's Russian-supplied air defenses seems outlandish. The problem is it can't be completely dismissed.

Any mojo Trump has left is in foreign policy, and it is bleeding out fast. (There was some good news yesterday when it was reported that Rex Tillerson will skip the NATO summit next month.) If W. can have a statue in Albania, why can't Trump have one in Rojava?

Anne Barnard's Schizophrenic Syrian Civil War Reporting

Anne Barnard has been working overtime in her reporting on the Syrian civil war to paint the conflict as an oppressed people rising up against an Alawite Stalin, Bashar al-Assad, bent on ethnic cleansing. Any Syrian who supports the government is either a dupe, a Shiite zealot or a regime goon. 

The latest installment in this effort -- since last week Barnard, Beirut Bureau Chief for the New York Times, has been reporting from Damascus -- is "Enlisting Damascus Residents to Answer Assad’s Call." And despite its toeing of the U.S. State Department line -- Barnard highlights the role of Iran in training pro-government neighborhood militias -- reality, even if it is always shunted to the bottom of her stories, finds its way into the piece:

In an apartment draped with philodendrons in the nearby Shiite quarter, Bassem Wehbe described why the militia was needed. A Sunni gang had kidnapped him from his nearby grocery store, he said, taunted him with sectarian slogans and chopped off his finger with an ax. His finger still bandaged, he played a video of the act that the captors had sent to his family. 

He said he tried to reason with his captors — who he believed were Syrians influenced by televised sermons of radical clerics in Saudi Arabia — telling them of the Sunni-Shiite mixed marriages and business dealings common in the Old City. 

“They said, ‘No, this period is over,’ ” Mr. Wehbe said. “Is it possible we were in this country?” 

A few days later, Christians packed the Street Called Straight, carrying the coffin of a man killed by kidnappers to a nearby church. 

Watching was one of the militiamen from the park, who had said earlier that he joined only to protect the neighborhood. Now, he said he would happily deploy to fight rebels in the suburbs. 

“The best way to defend,” said another militiaman, “is to attack.”

For a more nuanced assessment of support for the al-Assad government than Barnard's, check out "The Plight of Syrian Minorities," which appears on the Counterpunch website this weekend. Written by Anna Haq, a pseudonym, religious minorities -- Alawites and Christians -- are described as not being mindlessly sectarian; rather, they are secular minded and not generally in favor of the Baathist ruling party under al-Assad. It's just that the rebels are so bad there is no longer any choice but to support the government. Here are the passages that grabbed my attention:

Despite the claim of the opposition that the government has lost its credibility, the Assad regime has established its control not only militarily but also among those who remained on Syrian soil. In Homs, the army made major advances in the neighborhood of al-Khaldieh where the armed rebels gathered after the fierce battles of Baba Amer. On their route to Khaldieh, the armed rebels forced the inhabitants of old Homs, mostly Christians, out of their homes over night. Those who could not leave (the elderly and the sick) sought refuge in the Jesuit Monastery in Bustan al-Daiwan. The rebels would like to think that these sixty hostages might be there only ticket out of a foreseeable siege. Meanwhile, in retaliation for the bombardment of al-Khaldieh, and of what might seem a last hope to wreck havoc among civilians, the rebels have been firing mortars at the neighborhoods of Akrama and al-Nuzha. Concentrations of Alawites and Christians, these neighborhoods seem perfect to target allegedly pro-government civilians. 

Of course, not all Alawites and Christians are pro-Assad. Unless directly related to the Assad family, Alawites remain largely peasantry communities. Like many of the Christian minority, urban Alawites are middle-class civil servants who cannot afford a taxi ride toward Beirut or Amman and prefer a dignified death in their homes to the humiliation of refugee camps. “I have been labeled pro-government without given the chance to express my political views,” says Hisham furiously, his gesticulations are wider than the skype window. “This revolution erupted against the tyranny of the Assad family but the Sunni rebels proved to be more barbaric than the Assad army could ever be.” The recent rebel attack on al-Qumeirah checkpoint generated some attention to the plight of minorities in Syria, yet the Alawites have been spared such sympathy. “It is bad enough that the media ignored the situation of religious and ethnic minorities since the eruption of the revolution. Now that they remembered us, they seem to marginalize the Alawites,” Khaled confirms while compassionately tapping the 20-years old Hisham on the back. “I am Christian but I am anti-Assad. Well, I was anti-Assad but the rebels left us no choice. I volunteer for my neighborhood checkpoint to protect my loved ones,” adds Hisham. 

The slaughtering of 14 young men at al-Qumeirah checkpoint was the latest scare in west Homs. The bodies of the four soldiers and ten young civilians were found decapitated, heads were taken as trophies. The checkpoint is one among few others set by the government around al-Zara but maintained mostly by civilians to guard their villages from the rebels treading the path from Lebanon to al-Husun. The recent attacks served as a reminder to religious and ethnic minorities of their plight: they are alone in their fight. Earlier in the conversation, Adnan wondered: “where were the BBC when a Christian engineer was slaughtered in his bed in Homs in March 2011? Do they know that he made an exceptional contribution to the Civil Engineering department at al-Baath University for which he received a prize he did not live enough to enjoy? Where were they when many other youth were murdered in their beds by the rebels? Where is the Syrian Coalition? Are they ever going to denounce the barbaric acts of the jihadist? Do they think they can win the liberals back with their cowardly silence?”

The reality of the Syrian civil war, convincingly presented in this one story, is what has Anne Barnard working overtime trying to obscure. The rebels have very little domestic support at this point. The most active rebel military units are Kurds and foreign fighters of Al Qaeda affiliates. The U.S. government cannot officially acknowledge this since it does not support Kurdish statehood, and it is at war with Al Qaeda affiliates. Yet the Obama administration is committed to providing military aid to the opposition. It's a schizophrenic position, the strain of which is reflected in Barnard's reporting.

Standard Narrative of Obama's Efforts to Aid Rebels

A story appears this morning in the New York Times, "No Quick Impact in U.S. Arms Plan for Syria Rebels," by Mark Mazzetti, Eric Schmitt and Erin Banco, that paints a picture of an Obama administration purposely slow walking its support of the Syrian opposition:

In fact, the officials said, the administration’s plans to use the C.I.A. to covertly train and arm the rebels could take months to have any impact on a chaotic battlefield. Many officials believe the assistance is unlikely to bolster the rebellion enough to push President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to the negotiating table. 

The plans call for the C.I.A. to supply only small arms, and to only a limited segment of the opposition — the actual numbers are unclear. In addition, much of the training, which is to take place over months in Jordan and Turkey, has not yet started, partly because of Congressional objections.

The cautious approach reflects the continued ambivalence and internal divisions of an administration that still has little appetite for intervention in Syria, but has been backed into a corner after American and European spy agencies concluded that Syrian government troops had used chemical weapons against the rebels. Mr. Obama had declared the use of chemical weapons to be a “red line” leading to American action. 

Many in the administration say they are still seeking to satisfy themselves that they have taken all precautions possible to prevent weapons from falling into the hands of Islamic extremists in Syria. To them, the plan carries echoes of previous American efforts to arm rebels in Angola, Nicaragua and elsewhere, many of which backfired. There is also fear at the White House that Mr. Obama will be dragged into another war in the Middle East. 

But others, particularly many in the State Department, argue that the United States must intervene to prevent a further deterioration of security in the region and to stop a humanitarian crisis that is spiraling out of control, officials said.

This is the standard narrative: Obama, cornered because of a foolish statement about chemical weapons use crossing a "red line," agrees to arm, but not with heavy weapons, a Free Syrian Army that is more a creature of the hotel conference room than the battlefield; but actually Obama's decision is mostly show, a public display of appeasing the hawks among the Gulf Arab monarchies and in the State Department.

How much of this standard narrative is true and how much is Obama administration public relations remains to be seen. An argument can be made that as the situation in northern Syria moves closer to an Afghanistan-esque failed state as FSA rebels battle Al Qaeda and with fighters from the Pakistani Taliban arriving to wage jihad against al-Assad, Obama is engaging in damage control. One thing that the Mazzetti et al. story mentions, and that I've seen reported elsewhere recently, is that Congress -- the doves, not the usual hawks -- is beginning to buck. Apparently CIA director John Brennan and VP Joe Biden have been jawboning legislators to get the military aid moving:

The plan — made possible after Mr. Obama signed a secret “finding” that circumvents international laws prohibiting lethal support to groups trying to overthrow a sitting government — continues to face bipartisan skepticism in Congress. 

“It’s not clear to me that the administration has a workable policy,” Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican on the Intelligence Committee, said last week. 

Senior officials, including Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the C.I.A. director, John O. Brennan, have lobbied lawmakers in closed briefings and personal phone calls since late June. On Sunday, a senior administration official said that the Congressional concerns had been addressed and that “we look forward to pressing forward.” Some senior Congressional officials said Sunday that final details must still be worked out. 

The Congressional impasse has exposed other shortcomings in the administration’s approach, lawmakers and independent Syria specialists said.

The SAA appears to be pressing the attack. Agence France Presse reports government assaults in Idlib province in the north and the Qaboon district of Damascus.

Al-Assir vs. Lebanese Army + Qatar's New Absolute Ruler

Agence France-Presse is reporting this morning of heavy fighting in Damascus' surrounding suburbs as Syrian government forces attempt to clear rebels from approaches to the city; also, the rebels have apparently launched an "offensive" against government-held neighborhoods in western Aleppo; but it appears to be more a cosmetic display of force.

Reuters has a story this morning about a rift between Al Qaeda jihadis fighting in Syria. Al Nusra Front is at odds with Islamic State of Iraq over who is in control -- just another example of the hillbilly nature of the jihadi opposition.

Anne Barnard has a story, "Civilians Flee and Soldiers Die in Clashes in Lebanon," about the outcome of the battle in Sidon between the Lebanese Army and radical Sheik Ahmad al-Assir’s militia. Al-Assir is on the lamb, but the Daily Star of Lebanon reports that the Lebanese Army is mopping of his gunmen.

Barnard hints at a connection between al-Assir and the Saudi-backed mainstream Future Movement:

The mainstream Sunni party, the Future Movement, led by the powerful Sidon-based family of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister assassinated in 2005, has often condemned the cleric’s sectarian rhetoric and use of arms, though Hezbollah supporters accuse the party of secretly backing him. 

But in Sidon on Monday, even Future supporters said they did not want to see him defeated, suggesting his support may run deeper. One Sunni man said he had been tempted many times to join Mr. Assir’s militia because it made him feel protected “as a Sunni.” 

A few blocks away, a Shiite resident and Hezbollah supporter, Inaya Haydar, said Mr. Assir should be arrested, even if it meant heavy fighting. 

“Let it take as much as it needs,” Ms. Haydar, a nurse, said after staying up all night to the sounds of gunfire, rocket-propelled grenades and shells and watching from her window as wounded people poured into Hamoud Hospital. 

The cleric, she said, had shown his hypocrisy by calling on Hezbollah to disarm its militia, a perennial issue in Lebanese politics. “What is he doing now?” she said. “He is armed too, and against the Lebanese Army.”

As Secretary of State John Kerry barters with Saudi monarchs over the future body count in Syria, Qatar's absolute ruler, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, has announced his abdication. He is handing power to his 33-year-old son Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani. Rob Norland has the story:

The Qataris have managed, as well, to have friends among hard-line Islamist groups — a State Department cable released through WikiLeaks criticized their timidity against terrorists — while at the same time serving as the longtime hosts of America’s biggest military base in the Middle East, the forward headquarters of the Pentagon’s Central Command, at Al Udeid Air Base. 

“The Qataris’ approach to things is very ambitious, punch above their weight, be involved in as many arenas as possible, but have that core American military relationship as their security backstop, and then have relationships with all sorts of groups and people,” said Mr. Gause, who is affiliated with the Doha office of Brookings. 

With so many irons in such a diversity of fires, the emir’s stand-down is something of a mystery. The biggest question is what will happen to Prime Minister Hamad. He has not only been foreign minister since 1992, before the emir seized power from his father, but is also widely viewed as the emir’s bagman in arranging that coup. 

“It is just inconceivable that H.B.J. could remain in office with a 33-year-old emir the age of his own sons,” said a longtime resident here, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, mindful of that clause in the Constitution that makes it a crime to criticize the emir.

A lot is in play these days. Russia, Snowden, the Taliban, Qatar, Lebanon -- the future of the Middle East.

Spain Busts Up Al Qaeda Network, Highlighting Western Schizophrenia

The BBC is reporting this morning that Spain has raided an Al Qaeda recruiting network responsible for sending fighters to Syria. The network is based in the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta and the Moroccan city of Fnideq.

This highlights the schizophrenia of the West regarding Syria. On the one hand there is an extensive anti-terrorism infrastructure built up over the last decade-plus to combat Al Qaeda and its affiliates, while on the other we are actively working to enhance terrorist networks in a catastrophic quest to collapse the sovereign nation of Syria. In fact, Secretary of State John Kerry is in Qatar today to huddle with the Gulf Arab monarchies at the forefront of the effort to export jihad to Syria. (An interesting story on the Syrian Arab News Agency from yesterday alleges, based on documentary evidence, that Saudi Arabia is offering a general amnesty for criminals to fight in Syria.)

Last weekend on the Counterpunch web site, Franklin Lamb published a story taking the temperature on Capitol Hill. He interviewed his Congressional-staffer contacts and the opinion was that a no-fly zone was an inevitability, and with a no-fly zone comes all-out war. So the prevailing wisdom was that shortly, possibly a matter of months, the United States would be in a full-scale military conflict with Syria.

Fox is reporting this morning that a bipartisan group of senators led by Kentucky's Rand Paul is trying to block Obama from sending military aid to the rebels.

Rick Gladstone has a story in the New York Times this morning about the Philippines threatening to withdraw its peacekeepers from the Golan Heights unless they are supplied with heavy weapons, antitank and antiaircraft guns, by the United Nations. The Times over the last several days has reduced its coverage of the Syrian civil war.

Patrick Cockburn has a story in The Independent from a couple days back that is worth checking out. He says that Damascus is more peaceful today than it was six months ago. "Assad's forces have a tight grip on 13 out of 14 provincial capitals and increasingly hold the main roads between them." The population is tired of war and have no sympathy for the rebels who shoot children and eat the hearts of fallen soldiers. Cockburn says the government's strategy seems to be a slow encirclement of the rebels. It seems to be working.

I think it's already obvious to anyone paying attention that the West is engaging in an obscenity by supporting the fatwas of Wahhabi clerics. Soon, when the only rebel military strategy left will be suicide attacks, this obscenity will be even more glaring.