Patrick Cockburn writes:
The
final bankruptcy of American and British policy in Syria came 10 days ago as
Islamic Front, a Saudi-backed Sunni jihadi group, overran the headquarters of
the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) at Bab al-Hawa on
the Syrian side of the border with Turkey.
The FSA, along with the Syrian
National Coalition, groups that the United States and Britain have been
pretending for years are at the heart of Syrian military and political
opposition, has been discredited. The remaining FSA fighters are in flight,
have changed sides, or are devoting all their efforts to surviving the
onslaught from jihadi or al-Qa’ida-linked brigades.
The US and Britain stopped the delivery of
non-lethal aid to the supply depot at Bab al-Hawa as the implications of the
disaster sank in. The West’s favourite rebel commander, General Salim Idris,
was on the run between Turkey and his former chief supporter and paymaster,
Qatar. Turkey closed the border, the other side of which is now controlled by
the Islamic Front.
The so-called moderate wing of the Syrian insurgency has
very limited influence, but its representatives are still being urged by
Washington and London to attend the peace conference in Geneva on 22 January to
negotiate Bashar al-Assad’s departure from power.
Confusion over what is happening is so great that
Western leaders may not pay as much of a political price at home as they should
for the failure of their Syrian policy. But it is worth recalling that the
Syrian National Coalition and the FSA are the same people for whom the US and
UK almost went to war in August, and saw as candidates to replace Assad in
power in Damascus. The recent debacle shows how right public opinion in both
countries was to reject military intervention.
Who are the winners in the new situation? One is
Assad because the opposition to him – which started as a popular uprising
against a cruel, corrupt and oppressive dictatorship in 2011 – has become a
fragmented movement dominated by al-Qa’ida umbrella organisation the Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil); the other al-Qa’ida franchisee, the
al-Nusra Front; and the Islamic Front, consisting of six or seven large rebel
military formations numbering an estimated 50,000 fighters, whose uniting
factor is Saudi money and an extreme Sunni ideology similar to Saudi Arabia’s
version of Islam.
The Saudis see this alliance as capable of
fighting pro-Assad forces as well as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,
but Riyadh’s objections to the latter appears to be based on its independence
of Saudi control rather than revulsion at its record of slaughtering Shia,
Alawi, Christians, Armenians, Kurds, Turkomans or any dissenting Sunni.
The allegation of Saudi control is becoming
easier to substantiate. Until a year ago, the Saudis stayed somewhat in the
background when it came to funding the Syrian rebels, in which the leading role
was played by Qatar in association with Turkey.
But the failure of the rebels
to win and US anger that the Qataris and Turks had allowed much of the aid to
go to jihadis led to an important change this summer, when Saudi Arabia took
over from Qatar as chief supporter of the rebels.
An interesting example of just how hands-on this
Saudi direction has become is illustrated by a fascinating interview given by a
top defector from the FSA to Isil, Saddam al-Jamal. Commander of the Liwa Allah
Akbar battalion, he was until recently the top FSA commander in eastern Syria,
much of which is under rebel control.
He recalls that “we used to meet with the
apostates of Qatar and Saudi Arabia and with the infidels of Western nations
such as America and France in order to receive arms and ammo or cash”. He says
Western intelligence operatives had of late been worried about the growing
influence of al-Qa’ida affiliates and repeatedly asked him why he was growing a
beard.
Jamal gives an account of a recent three-day
meeting between the FSA commanders from northern and eastern Syria with
Western, Saudi, Qatari, Emirati and Jordanian intelligence operatives. This
appears to have been soon after the Saudis took over the Syria file from the
Qataris.
He says the FSA commanders, including General Idris, had a meeting
with Prince Salman bin Sultan, the Saudi deputy defence minister who was the
leading figure at the meeting. Jamal says that Prince Salman “asked those who
had plans to attack Assad positions to present their needs for arms, ammo and
money”.
The picture that Mr Jamal paints is of an FSA
that was a complete pawn to foreign intelligence agencies, which is one reason
why he defected. The Saudis subsequently decided that the FSA would not serve
their purposes, and were frustrated by America backing away from war in Syria
and confrontation with Iran.
They set about using their limitless funds to
attract into alliances rebel brigades such as the Islamic Front which would be
Sunni fundamentalist, committed to the overthrow of Assad, against political
negotiations, but distinct from al-Qa’ida. In reality, it looks highly unlikely
that Saudi money will be enough to bring down or even significantly weaken
Assad though it may be enough to keep a war going for years.
The old, supposedly moderate, opposition has been
marginalised. Its plan since 2011 has been to force a full-scale Western
military intervention as in Libya in 2011 and, when this did not happen, they
lacked an alternative strategy.
The US, Britain and France do not have many
options left except to try to control the jihadi Frankenstein’s monster that
they helped create in Syria and which is already helping destabilise Iraq and
Lebanon.
Turkey may soon regret having given free passage to so many jihadi on
their way to Syria. Ankara could close its 500-mile border with Syria or filter
those who cross it. But Turkish policy in Syria and Iraq has been so
dysfunctional in the past three years that it may be too late to correct the
consequences of wrongly convincing itself that Assad would fall.
The Geneva II peace conference on Syria looks as
if it will be born dead. In so far as the FSA and its civilian counterparts
ever repres-ented anyone in Syria they do so no longer. The armed opposition is
dominated by Saudi-sponsored Islamist brigades on the one hand and by al-Qa’ida
affiliates on the other.
All US, British and French miscalculations have
produced in Syria is a re-run of Afghanistan in the 1980s, creating a situation
the ruinous consequences of which have yet to appear. As jihadis in Syria realise
they are not going to win, they may well look for targets closer to home.
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