Who Sponsors ISIS Has U.S. Playing Defense

This is the last paragraph of "As Sunnis Die in Iraq, a Cycle Is Restarting," by Alissa Rubin and Rod Nordland, which can be found in today's paper:

The Iraqi government issued a statement accusing Saudi Arabia of funding the Sunni extremists, as Mr. Maliki continued to offer explanations for the stunning success of the Sunni extremists that do not focus on his leadership. The statement drew almost immediate criticism from the United States, with Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, describing it as inaccurate and “offensive.”

Reuters has a little more information about the statement, which was made yesterday by Maliki's cabinet:

Maliki's government accused Saudi Arabia, the main Sunni power, of backing ISIL - something Riyadh denies. 

"We hold them responsible for supporting these groups financially and morally and for its outcome - which includes crimes that may qualify as genocide: the spilling of Iraqi blood, the destruction of Iraqi state institutions and historic and religious sites," a government statement said. 

Maliki has blamed Saudi Arabia for supporting militants in the past, but the language was unprecedented. On Monday, Riyadh blamed sectarianism in Baghdad for fuelling the violence.

NBC's story, by Cassandra Vinograd, "Iraq Cabinet Accuses Saudi Arabia of Spurring 'Genocide'," reads like it was written by USG as a Saudi defense brief.

But for corroboration of the Iraq cabinet statement there is Josh Rogin's Daily Beast article which appeared this past Saturday, "America's Allies Are Funding ISIS":

But in the years they were getting started, a key component of ISIS’s support came from wealthy individuals in the Arab Gulf States of Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Sometimes the support came with the tacit nod of approval from those regimes; often, it took advantage of poor money laundering protections in those states, according to officials, experts, and leaders of the Syrian opposition, which is fighting ISIS as well as the regime.

“Everybody knows the money is going through Kuwait and that it’s coming from the Arab Gulf,” said Andrew Tabler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Kuwait’s banking system and its money changers have long been a huge problem because they are a major conduit for money to extremist groups in Syria and now Iraq.”

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been publicly accusing Saudi Arabia and Qatar of funding ISIS for months. Several reports have detailed how private Gulf funding to various Syrian rebel groups has splintered the Syrian opposition and paved the way for the rise of groups like ISIS and others.

Gulf donors support ISIS, the Syrian branch of al Qaeda called the al Nusrah Front, and other Islamic groups fighting on the ground in Syria because they feel an obligation to protect Sunnis suffering under the atrocities of the Assad regime. Many of these backers don’t trust or like the American backed moderate opposition, which the West has refused to provide significant arms to.

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“ISIS is part of the Sunni forces that are fighting Shia forces in this regional sectarian conflict. They are in an existential battle with both the (Iranian aligned) Maliki government and the Assad regime,” said Tabler. “The U.S. has made the case as strongly as they can to regional countries, including Kuwait. But ultimately when you take a hands off, leading from behind approach to things, people don’t take you seriously and they take matters into their own hands.”

Donors in Kuwait, the Sunni majority Kingdom on Iraq’s border, have taken advantage of Kuwait’s weak financial rules to channel hundreds of millions of dollars to a host of Syrian rebel brigades, according to a December 2013 report by The Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank that receives some funding from the Qatari government.

“Over the last two and a half years, Kuwait has emerged as a financing and organizational hub for charities and individuals supporting Syria’s myriad rebel groups,” the report said. “Today, there is evidence that Kuwaiti donors have backed rebels who have committed atrocities and who are either directly linked to al-Qa’ida or cooperate with its affiliated brigades on the ground.”

Kuwaiti donors collect funds from donors in other Arab Gulf countries and the money often travels through Turkey or Jordan before reaching its Syrian destination, the report said. The governments of Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia have passed laws to curb the flow of illicit funds, but many donors still operate out in the open. The Brookings paper argues the U.S. government needs to do more.

“The U.S. Treasury is aware of this activity and has expressed concern about this flow of private financing. But Western diplomats’ and officials’ general response has been a collective shrug,” the report states.

When confronted with the problem, Gulf leaders often justify allowing their Salafi constituents to fund Syrian extremist groups by pointing back to what they see as a failed U.S. policy in Syria and a loss of credibility after President Obama reneged on his pledge to strike Assad after the regime used chemical weapons.

That’s what Prince Bandar bin Sultan, head of Saudi intelligence since 2012 and former Saudi ambassador in Washington, reportedly told Secretary of State John Kerry when Kerry pressed him on Saudi financing of extremist groups earlier this year. Saudi Arabia has retaken a leadership role in past months guiding help to the Syrian armed rebels, displacing Qatar, which was seen as supporting some of the worst of the worst organizations on the ground.

The Saudis say that they only fund moderate Islamists. But the whole moderate vs. extremist distinction is a word game meant to obscure the fact that, as in the heady days of "Charlie Wilson's War," the U.S. is up to its old tricks again backing, along with its good monarchical friends in the gulf, the Mujahideen.

That's why you have the denial by the truly odious Jen Psaki. As a rule of thumb, if Psaki goes out of her way to issue a strong denial, as she did by labeling the Iraq cabinet statement as "offensive," you know there is a rat in the house. Psaki lies. This is what she does for a living.

For seasoned news consumers, the unified response from Western governments and the prestige press that Maliki is to blame for all that is presently going wrong in Iraq (with nary a word about the role of wealthy gulf emirs in Jiffy Popping a Salafi army into being, nor the destabilizing effects of the 2003 U.S. invasion) is a strong indication that the goal of USG is not to fight terrorism but to neuter Shiite state power.

Another fruitful line of inquiry is to look at the rat line of Salafi fighters. Carlotta Gall made a start yesterday with "Spanish Police Target Cells Recruiting War Volunteers." More than half of ISIS's fighters are foreigners. Getting them to the battlefield requires a logistics network that a localized Anbar jihadi group could not have put together in such a short span of time. The jihad network is run out of mosques and madrassas. This network is funded by the gulf emirates, foremost of which is Saudi Arabia.

USG knows all this. But where is the rallying cry for sanctions? Compare it to the U.S. response to the peaceful vote in Crimea to accede to the Russian Federation. The U.S. is now in the midst of relaunching the Cold War with all its inherent risk of nuclear annihilation. And in the case of Crimea becoming part of Russia, there is no risk to U.S. national security. But a caliphate rising in the Middle East? That certainly represents a risk. So far the U.S. seems to be doing everything it can to make sure it becomes a reality.

Uncle Sam's Absurd Stance on Syria

Colum Lynch has a story, "Kerry presses Syrians to commit to peace talks in first U.N. visit as top U.S. diplomat," about John Kerry's maiden voyage to the United Nations as Secretary of State. After calling on Syria to come to the negotiating table for peace talks Kerry met with the new head of the Syrian Opposition Coalition, Ahmad al-Jarba, whose position remains the same: no peace talks with the Syrian government.

The Syrian opposition, which remains deeply divided, has so far refused to participate in peace talks without an assurance that they would result in Assad’s exit from power. A top Syrian rebel leader, Gen. Salim Idriss, who had been expected to participate in an informal briefing of the Security Council, which is scheduled for Friday morning, canceled his appearance this week. 

The intense focus on a diplomatic outcome signaled continuing U.S. misgivings about the prospect of arming a fragmented opposition, which includes extremists groups linked to al-Qaeda. The military balance of power in the country has recently shifted in favor of government ­forces.

The U.S. position is absurd. It demands peace talks and then sets conditions for those talks that make negotiations impossible: Bashar al-Assad must agree to relinquish power and Iran cannot participate. In actuality the United States has no desire to talk. The Syrian Arab Army is gradually grinding away, accumulating territory. The territory under rebel control is in the Euphrates valley stretching from war-torn Aleppo, where Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) held a Ramadan ice-cream social and tug-of-war, to Iraq and in the Kurdish northeast where the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) is already at work setting up a government.

In neither area is the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in control. At this point it is merely a front group -- a cut-out, a fiction -- maintained by the United States and its allies among the Gulf sheikdoms. The FSA fiction allows the United States to publicly call for peace while planning and supporting war. At some point down the road, if ISIS does maintain a foothold in Idlib or elsewhere and/or the Kurds are successful at formalizing control in the northeast, a Western intervention can be rationalized as a necessary effort to restore the territorial integrity of the region.

No Good Endgame for Rebels

Anne Barnard and a reporter whose identity is being shielded by the New York Times have a story this morning about the the battle for Homs, "Ruins in a Center of Syria’s Uprising." After reading it a couple of things come to mind. First, the reporting that's done by Anne Barnard consistently centers blame for the civil war on the Syrian government while marginalizing any role played foreign-funded jihadis. To read Barnard one is still living the first hopeful, heady days of the Arab Spring uprising where the rebels are protesters looking for democratic representation and freedom from an Alawite Stalin. Barnard does write what is actually happening on the ground -- her reporting is not fabrication. For instance, in today's story about Homs, she does include the fact that the territory held by the rebels is awash in sewage and rubble while life continues as close to normal as possible in government-controlled districts. But for Barnard there is always the tactful sculpting of the story to push the truth about the rebels down into the later paragraphs, making it appear more as an afterthought, as unimportant.

The other thing that struck me after reading the story about Homs is that there is no happy endgame for the rebels. The government is slowly, methodically grinding away at the territory in opposition hands. The rebels respond by car bombings and assassinations, often outside Syria, like the pro-Assad commentator, Mohammad Darra Jamo, who was gunned down at his home in southern Lebanon early this morning.

At first this strategy of bringing terror to neighboring countries seemed somewhat effective at ratcheting up pressure for foreign state intervention. The Western press raised alarms, incoherently blaming Hezbollah while ignoring the Sunni jihadist fingerprints, and called for action to stem a regional war. But now, with a many-sided conflict breaking out among the rebels in northern Syrian -- Kurdish militants took control of a border town from the Al Nusra Front; last week a commander for the Free Syrian Army was murdered by fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant -- there's no way that Western intervention can be neatly packaged in the Manichean narrative of good vs. evil that the editorial pages of the prestige press prefer. Support for the jihadis by Gulf Arab monarchies and Western powers has created the predicted blowback.

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.