Blame Assad first for ISIS' rise

[Originally posted at NOW]

The regime has abetted Sunni extremists to influence Western public opinion.

In the week since Al-Qaeda spinoff the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) brought Iraq back into international headlines by seizing around a third of the country in a matter of hours, there has understandably been a great deal of soul-searching and hair-pulling as to how a group that was supposed to have been “decimated,” in a country that was supposed to be last decade’s headache, has once again managed with just a few hundred men to humiliate an army many times its size and generally outfox the entire world.

Fingers have been hastily pointed in every direction, with culprits found ranging from the timeless “conspiracy” (in the Iraqi prime minister’s words) to Tony Blair (who took to his website Saturday to cantankerously declare his complete innocence of all charges). An increasingly widespread claim – appealing perhaps because of its ring of an ironic morality tale about imperial folly – has it that ISIS’ growth is in fact the doing of the West’s closest but most duplicitous Arab allies, the oleaginous Gulf dictatorships, who have done to us once again what they’ve been doing since they backed the Afghan Mujahideen that nurtured Bin Laden in the 1980s. Will we ever learn?

Lost in this din, driven more by the grinding of old axes than dispassionate consideration of the evidence, is the obvious fact that one man has contributed vastly more than anyone else to getting ISIS where it is today: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

First, though, it’s worth exploring the Gulf hypothesis, because like any popular misconception, it does contain elements of truth. It’s unquestionably the case, as Josh Rogin argued in The Daily Beast on Saturday, that the Gulf monarchs make little if any real effort to prevent their more pious subjects from sending considerable sums of money to extremist outfits, including ISIS. That a Kuwaiti man named Ghanim al-Mteiri had no objection to going on the record to the New York Times in November about his financing of Jabhat al-Nusra, Syria’s official Al-Qaeda franchise, says everything that needs to be said about the Al-Sabah regime’s commitment to what Rogin still calls the “war on terror.”

But this is not the same as saying – as Rogin’s title (“America’s Allies Are Funding ISIS”) does, and as others such as Simon Henderson in Foreign Policy and Robert Fisk in The Independent have – that ISIS is actively and deliberately sponsored as a matter of policy by the Saudis and other Gulf rulers and should be thought of as no more than a proxy created to advance Riyadh’s regional ambitions. Quite to the contrary: ISIS has long been at war with Saudi’s actual clients in Syria, the Islamic Front and what is loosely called the Free Syrian Army (FSA), who have successfully driven it out of much of its former turf in the north. Indeed, among the many sources of hostility between ISIS and the other brigades is precisely the former’s rejection of Saudi intervention. While FSA leaders openly express gratitude for Riyadh’s help, ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani mocks the Kingdom as a “state which claims to be Islamic,” and denounces as traitors all factions “supported by the Saudis, America, and the infidels of the West.”

Another cause of friction is the FSA’s frequent accusations of ISIS collaboration with the regime. Though this line of argument, too, can take irrational and conspiratorial forms, there are a number of incontrovertible facts that, taken in aggregate, suggest the “Assad-or-the-terrorists” dichotomy that so much guides (or misguides) Western policy toward Syria is not nearly as straightforward as we’re led to believe:

● For long periods of time, the regime largely spared ISIS’ bases from the kinds of aerial and other attacks it daily visits upon the rest of the country. A government adviser told the New York Times’ Anne Barnard this was indeed a deliberate policy, designed to “tar” the broader opposition and “frame [the] choice” as either Assad or the extremists. As one ISIS defector told The Daily Telegraph, “We were confident that the regime would not bomb us. We always slept soundly in our bases.” He added, in a quote that didn’t make the final text, that ISIS had even been infiltrated by regime agents. “I know men who were officers in the police and Syrian intelligence branches who are now in ISIS. They grew long beards and joined.” Another good reason for Assad not to drop barrel bombs on them.

● According to the same Daily Telegraph report, both ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra have raised millions of dollars through sales of crude oil from fields under their control to the regime, a unique case of overt partnership between ISIS and a state actor.

● Although ISIS only officially formed in April 2013, its roots lie in Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the same group Assad paid and equipped in the mid-2000s to fight the Americans in precisely the region of Iraq now occupied by ISIS. In 2003, on the regime’s orders, Syria’s ordinarily mild-mannered Grand Mufti Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro issued a gladiatorial fatwa calling for attacks, including suicide bombings, against the Americans in Iraq. Those who came back alive after making the trip over the border – following training and funding from the regime – were promptly thrown into Damascus’ notorious Sednaya prison upon their return. Years later, on May 31, 2011, Assad suddenly pardoned and released dozens of Sednaya’s most dangerous inmates, who predictably went on to become leaders in Islamist rebel brigades, including extremist ones. This was at the same time the regime was imprisoning, torturing, and indeed murdering the secular and nonviolent democracy activists out in the streets. What was going on? As Aron Lund, editor of the Carnegie Endowment’s "Syria in Crisis" page, put it, “There are no random acts of kindness from this regime.”

● Nawaf al-Fares, the defected former Syrian ambassador to Iraq, has claimed the regime ordered a series of suicide bombings in Syria in 2012, carried out by the very jihadists he himself had sent to Iraq years previously. Again, the idea was to discredit the opposition, thereby duping the world into preferring Assad. “The Syrian government would like to use Al-Qaeda as a bargaining chip with the West,” he said, “to say: ‘it is either them or us.’” Another defector, former intelligence officer Afaq Ahmad, similarly recalls how “the jihadist groups and brigades” were “very useful for the regime,” which infiltrated them and even brokered non-aggression pacts with some of them.

To be clear, nobody is suggesting ISIS fighters are pure agents provocateurs, or that the regime doesn’t also kill them as and when expedient. Indeed, presumably realizing (or being told by “brotherly” Iran) after the fall of Iraq’s Mosul last week that ISIS had been allowed to grow stronger than intended, on Sunday Assad’s air force began bombing the group’s strongholds across northeastern Syria.

But that, if anything, only underlines the point that the regime knew the locations of those strongholds all this time. There simply is no other actor, not even the roundly assailed Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki, who has done so much for so long to directly facilitate ISIS’ rise. So far from facing a choice between “Assad and the terrorists,” in other words, Syrians – and now Iraqis too – suffer the latter precisely because they have for so long been plagued with the former.

Iran more likely than US to intervene in Iraq crisis

[Originally posted at NOW]

Analysts tell NOW Iran is already acting to counter surprise jihadist gains in Iraq, while US involvement will likely be limited.

In a rapid coup that has alarmed Middle Eastern and international capitals alike over the past 48 hours, an Al-Qaeda spinoff known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has overrun virtually all of northwestern Iraq, including the country’s second city, Mosul, and has made further advances southeast toward the capital, Baghdad.

While few expect the group to make it that far, that it was able with just a few hundred men to so easily rout an estimated 30,000 Iraqi soldiers raises serious questions about Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s grip on the country and has prompted fears of further and bloodier sectarian warfare – not only in Iraq, but also neighboring Syria, where ISIS already controls significant and contiguous territory. Since capturing Mosul Tuesday, the group has acquired unprecedented stocks of US-made military hardware, some of which has already reportedly been taken back to eastern Syria, and looted an estimated $480m in cash while freeing as many as 2,500 prisoners.

So acute is the crisis that an imminent military response seems to be a question not so much of “if” but rather “by whom.” One scenario, supported by Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, would make use of militants from the nearby semi-autonomous Kurdistan province, who took control of their much-coveted city of Kirkuk Thursday following the Iraqi army’s flight. At the same time, the United States is said to be contemplating launching drone strikes on ISIS positions in Iraq, something Maliki has reportedly been privately requesting since May.

Yet analysts with whom NOW spoke said the most likely form of intervention was also the most potentially dangerous: that of Maliki’s Iranian ally and its various Shiite Islamist proxies, setting the stage for a repeat of the horrific sectarian warfare that engulfed Iraq in 2006-2007. Already, the Islamic Republic has dispatched an elite military unit of its Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, reportedly including its commander, Qassem Suleimani, while Shiite Islamist leader Muqtada al-Sadr has hinted at a revival of his once fearsome Mahdi Army militia.

“What I’m afraid of is that this is going to be an increasingly sectarian and Iranian-proxy-led [military campaign],” said Kirk H. Sowell, an Amman-based political risk analyst and publisher of Inside Iraqi Politics. “And this is already happening. […] The US is equivocating, but Iran is not going to hesitate. They’re already directly involved.”

“My fear is that the Iranian regime will attempt to swoop in and offer an alternative strategy in which the Quds Force commanded by Qassem Suleimani deploys in force to advise and direct a Shiite sectarian solution resembling what they have done in Syria,” concurred Colonel Joel Rayburn, senior research fellow at the National Defense University. “If Maliki and the other parties accede to this Iranian solution, it will mean the partition of the country into three or four warring sectarian states – just as has happened in Syria,” Rayburn told NOW.

Direct intervention by Shiite Islamist militants would likely further polarize an already fractured nation, dragging a Sunni community that has already for years complained of marginalization further toward the extremists among its own ranks, including ISIS, according to Lebanese analyst Mustafa Fahs.

“The [Sunni] region could even support ISIS and ex-Baathists, and gather troops who are against Iran and the Maliki government,” Fahs told NOW. Already, evidence has emerged of collaboration with ISIS by former Iraqi Baathist Sunni militias in the capture of Mosul.

Despite these risks, Rayburn told NOW he “fear[ed] that a desperate Maliki may choose this course as his best means of holding onto power.”

A much preferable alternative, in Rayburn’s view, would be the utilization of Kurdish forces, though historic tensions between them and the government render it unlikely.

“In my view, partnering with the Kurdish Peshmerga would be the best military course of action for Maliki. Many of the Peshmerga units are well-trained and well-led and know the territory, and they are already based nearby the danger areas. […] But to do this would require a political accommodation between Maliki and the Kurdish parties that it is unclear Maliki is willing to undertake,” Rayburn told NOW.

Moreover, with Kirkuk – sometimes dubbed the “Kurdish Jerusalem” – already in the Peshmerga’s hands, they would have little incentive to take the fight elsewhere on Maliki’s behalf, added Sowell.

“I would be surprised [if the Peshmerga intervened in Mosul.] The areas where they’ve made a move have been areas they wanted to take over anyway. […] They will make their contribution by providing refuge to Arabs” fleeing ISIS-held areas, he told NOW.

As for the United States, despite the possibility of a certain degree of military involvement, up to and including limited air strikes, according to Sowell, President Obama is unlikely to radically revise his traditionally non-interventionist Middle East policy.

“[The US] will definitely be providing arms, ammunition, and what not [to the Iraqi government],” said Sowell. “But air strikes, I don’t know. Air strikes within Mosul would not be effective anyway. We don’t have the intelligence to do this with sufficient precision. It would have to be on a very selective basis: let’s say we have a satellite pickup, there’s a convoy of ISIS guys that leave Mosul, and once they’re outside the city we hit them.”

“But I’m not sure Obama would be willing to do even that,” he added. “There’s a sort of allergy in the Obama White House [against] doing anything related to Iraq, frankly. The 2008 campaign is still determining Iraq policy, even though circumstances have radically changed.”

Myra Abdallah contributed reporting.

Why did al-Qaeda turn on the FSA?

[Originally posted at NOW]

Months of mistrust, power politics, and disagreement over prospective Western intervention have driven recent violence between opposition brigades.

In his address marking the twelfth anniversary of the 11 September, 2001, World Trade Center attacks, al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri made a conspicuous addition to his organization’s lengthy list of foes. For the first time, formally included in the “enemies of Islam” umbrella category was the loose alliance of militant Syrian opposition brigades commonly known as the Free Syrian Army (FSA), whom Zawahiri denounced as treacherous tools of America akin to the ‘Sahwa [Awakening]’ militias financed by the US to combat al-Qaeda in Iraq. The fugitive warlord vowed to “destroy” the FSA factions with whom al-Qaeda’s fighters in Syria have hitherto tended to cooperate against the Bashar al-Assad regime.

This policy shift coincided with last week’s launch of a so-called “Purification of Filth” (naqi al-khabath) campaign by al-Qaeda’s primary Syrian franchise, the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), which the group said would comprise military attacks in eastern Aleppo against rival factions including the al-Farouq and al-Nasr brigades, both of which nominally fall under the command of the Western-backed Supreme Military Council (SMC) led by General Salim Idris. On Tuesday, photos circulated on social media appearing to show ISIS executing a man in public on charges of belonging to a “Sahwa” (i.e. SMC) group. And for more than a week prior to that, ISIS had engaged in fatal clashes with SMC fighters in Deir az-Zour and al-Raqqa provinces.

Hostilities then reached uncharted territory when on Wednesday ISIS violently seized the northern town of Azaz from the SMC’s Northern Storm Brigade, prompting fellow SMC faction Liwa al-Tawheed to send its fighters to “liberate” the town from the jihadists. A ceasefire deal was later negotiated, and the three groups have now divided the territory between themselves for the time being.

Syrian media activists told NOW that while the pretext for the Azaz clashes was ISIS’ objection to a foreign doctor’s presence in the town, it also appeared to be a plain power grab by the al-Qaeda affiliate.

“ISIS members stormed the Azaz civil hospital during a visit by a German doctor from Doctors without Borders, and demanded that the doctor leave the hospital and leave town immediately,” Aleppo-based activist Naqaa Sadeq told NOW. When the Northern Storm Brigade refused this demand, “the takfiris [ISIS] deemed it permissible for them to control all headquarters in Azaz and began invading houses.”

Much the same rationale was behind the al-Raqqa clashes, according to a local activist who would only give his name as Wael. “The first clash between extremist battalions and the FSA occurred in the Tel Abyad area, which controls the border crossing. Since then, ISIS has spread its influence by controlling vital positions in the liberated areas,” he told NOW.

Beyond mere power politics, however, distrust between jihadists and more moderate opposition forces – which has been reported since at least July, when ISIS killed a number of SMC fighters, including a senior commander, in Latakia and Idlib provinces – has recently been aggravated by the prospect of Western military intervention in Syria following the chemical weapons attack in Damascus in August. As the Guardian’s Martin Chulov reported from Aleppo earlier this month, while ISIS fighters vehemently oppose a US-led strike, believing it to be a plot to target them, the SMC’s rebels welcome the idea, with one even adding that he “hope[s] the Americans know where [ISIS’] headquarters are” too.

Accordingly, when the US backed away from its militant posture in favor of a Russian-sponsored compromise, ISIS may have sensed an opportunity to score a hit against their SMC rivals, according to Charles Lister, analyst at IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Centre.

“The perceived decline in forceful Western pressure on Assad over the last [ten] days has bolstered jihadist confidence and weakened the image of the core moderates […] by combating moderates currently hostile to them, jihadists may be hoping to nip the problem in the bud,” Lister told NOW.

There is also growing resentment at ISIS and its fellow al-Qaeda surrogate, Jabhat al-Nusra, for their increasingly authoritarian rule over the territories they hold, said Lister.

“Both ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra have exerted increasingly public levels of social control in northern and eastern Syria in recent weeks and there is no doubt that this has generated frustration within some locally-based moderate groups.”

Among local civilians, too, dissatisfaction with the jihadists has frequently been on display. At a demonstration in Aleppo Friday, residents chanted familiar anti-Assad songs, but with da’ish [the Arabic acronym for ISIS] in place of the president’s name. And on the Twitter social media network, pro-opposition Syrian users widely circulated the slogan “Da’ish does not represent me”.

With rebels now dedicating time and resources to battles against fellow rebels, the question arises as to whether the Assad regime stands to gain militarily. Certainly that is the view of some opposition fighters, who see the descent into rebel-on-rebel killing as handing Assad victory, according to Chulov. Yet Lister told NOW the reality may be more complex.

“So far, incidents of infighting have remained isolated to less active military zones, so the impact on the overall battle against the government has been minimal. However, if this situation expands further, then yes, the military could feasibly benefit, but likely still only on a localized level.”

Doha Hassan contributed reporting.

Why al-Qaeda does not threaten Lebanon, yet

[Originally posted at NOW]

The alleged detection by U.S. intelligence agencies of what some officials say are the most serious al-Qaeda attack plots since September 11, 2001, has led to the closure until August 10th of nineteen American embassies across the Middle East.

The measure was described by the State Department as one taken “out of an abundance of caution.” Yet, despite a precedent for attacks on the U.S. embassy in Lebanon, as well as reports that the CIA warned Lebanese officials just last month of plans for impending attacks by al-Qaeda-linked groups in the country, the U.S. facility in Awkar, northeast of Beirut, was one of very few in the region to remain open this week.

In a statement sent to NOW via email, the U.S. embassy said it “does not discuss the specifics of our security operations. The Embassy has not changed its operating hours as a result of the travel advisory.” It declined to confirm whether reports that a team of senior U.S. specialists would travel to Lebanon to bolster embassy security were true.

According to analysts, one possible reason the embassy has stayed open is that it is already deemed sufficiently secure.

“Some of the U.S. facilities are more secure than others,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, author of Bin Laden’s Legacy and Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “It could be that some posts are more vulnerable to specific methods of attack. For example, if the method of attack is believed to be, say, a car bomb, then certain facilities are better insulated against car bombs.”

Others argue the primary reason is that there simply isn’t a significant threat from al-Qaeda in Lebanon, despite brief episodes of al-Qaeda-linked violence such as the 2007 war between Fatah al-Islam and the Lebanese army in Nahr al-Bared.

“All that we hear about al-Qaeda [in Lebanon] is a bunch of nonsense,” said Riad Kahwaji, founder and CEO of the Institute for Near East & Gulf Military Analysis (INEGMA). “In Lebanon there was never, ever a record of al-Qaeda successfully establishing itself. We have a record of al-Qaeda attempting, sending teasers, to see whether they can have a base here, but they never did. So Lebanon is not regarded as a country where al-Qaeda has strong capabilities,” he told NOW.

This, Kahwaji believes, is for two key reasons.

“First, Lebanon has a lot of intelligence activities; a lot of foreign [intelligence] services are established. Second, the Sunni community doesn’t really share the ideologies of al-Qaeda. They know from the Fatah al-Islam experience [about] the links [they] have with Syrian intelligence. [Al-Qaeda] was never accepted as one of their own.”

Gartenstein-Ross concurs that the nature of the Sunni community in Lebanon has been resistant to al-Qaeda infiltration.

“Given Lebanon’s own awful experience with civil war, part of it could be that the Sunnis just aren’t too eager to let al-Qaeda in. They’ve seen what al-Qaeda’s done in other countries; they have terrible experiences of what could happen to their country, so perhaps given that history, al-Qaeda’s narrative just isn’t that appealing.”

Even so, in light of the war raging in neighboring Syria – in which al-Qaeda subsidiaries such as The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) are heavily involved – certain analysts fear al-Qaeda’s influence is on the rise in Lebanon. Such fears are compounded by the participation of an estimated few hundred Lebanese Sunnis in the war – including jihadists, as seen most recently in the suicide bombings in Homs province Friday carried out by two brothers from Tripoli – and the porousness of the Lebanese-Syrian border.

“I fully agree […] that right now given what’s going on in Syria I have concerns that you may at some point see a greater al-Qaeda presence within Lebanon,” Gartenstein-Ross told NOW.

“But they have a strong incentive not to carry out an attack [in Lebanon] in that if they do, the porousness of the border is going to decline, which makes Lebanon a less appealing place for them to utilize.”

Kahwaji, by contrast, feels the prospects for an increased al-Qaeda foothold in the country are highly limited.

“It’s not easy. Lebanon is a small country, it’s not Iraq with its vast geography, or Libya, or Yemen, where you can go and disappear in the remote desert […] The intelligence for the Lebanese army, for Lebanese security [authorities], for the other agencies, are all over the place and therefore [militants] get picked up easily, so it’s not a safe ground for them.”

“Also they need to find communities that will share their thoughts and agree to give them safe haven. You can find a village or two that could have this sentiment, but that’s it.”

“It’s not safe and it never will be safe for al-Qaeda to operate in Lebanon.”