Tag Archives: Middle East

Syria for the Syrians – or for everyone else?

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From the very first days of the uprising in Syria, dictator Bashar al-Assad has maintained that foreign jihadists (his version of “outside agitators” I suppose) were dominating and leading the violence and preventing the return of peace for ordinary Syrians. It remains a standard line in the propaganda of those supporting Assad. As time has gone on, however, this initially dubious claim has increasingly seemed accurate, as foreign fighters have flooded the country by the thousands.

(To be sure, President Assad can hardly deflect the qualifying facts that he played host, for years before the war, to the Baathist command structure of the Iraqi insurgency that evolved into ISIS and then intentionally allowed hundreds of foreign jihadists to join ISIS in the first three years of the civil war.)

The currently heavy foreignness of the opposition now seems evident to most observers, whatever its original composition might have been. Although it remains difficult to get accurate counts to determine the relative balance of foreign insurgents to Syrian-born rebels, it is clear the both ISIS and Nusra Front are heavily dominated by non-Syrians, particularly at the leadership level. ISIS has had effective control of the eastern anti-government forces and territory since last summer, while Nusra Front now has effective control over the main western insurgency forces in the primary conflict arena.

What then are the consequences for native Syrians of flooding Syria’s civil war with foreign combatants?

Pictured: Destroyed Syrian Army tanks, August 2012, after the Battle of Azaz. (Credit: Christiaan Triebert via Wikipedia)

Pictured: Destroyed Syrian Army tanks, August 2012, after the Battle of Azaz. (Credit: Christiaan Triebert via Wikipedia)

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Kerry opening door to piecemeal peace in Syria?

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For the past year, the US State Department has stridently rejected the use of localized ceasefire-and-surrender deals brokered by the UN (recap explanation below) as a tool for winding down the overall conflict in Syria. Now, Secretary of State John Kerry appears to have opened the door to the piecemeal peace strategy (or at least accepted it might be a valid component of an overall strategy):

Mr. Kerry’s support for the Russian and United Nations initiatives comes at a time when the American-led push to negotiate a solution to the bloody Syria conflict has lost momentum. [UN envoy] Mr. de Mistura’s step-by-step strategy to de-escalate the civil war has been attracting growing interest among some Obama administration officials.

Mr. Kerry said before the failed peace talks in Geneva last year that the United States’s goal was a transitional government in Syria that did not include President Bashar al-Assad. But Mr. Kerry refrained from making such an explicit demand in his remarks on Wednesday; instead he urged the Syrian leadership to reconsider what it is doing.

 
This marks a significant shift, it would seem, and opens up a lot more realistic outcomes than are found by steadfastly clinging to an opposition government without authority and a rebel coalition without military dominance against a leader who is no longer likely to be toppled.

Two months ago, remember, the administration was not amenable to the idea at all:

…at the moment, the United States hasn’t even applauded the existing diplomatic progress, remaining hung up on unrealistic regime change objectives instead of seeking to stop the killing. State Department Spokeswoman Jen Psaki blasted the truce proposals on Monday, saying “Unfortunately, many local truces achieved thus far have more closely resembled surrender arrangements,” without acknowledging that halting the fighting and withdrawing doomed rebel forces is translating into hundreds (probably thousands) of civilian lives being saved.

 

Arsenal Recap: Local Ceasefire-and-Surrender Agreements

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Syria’s war is not over, but the revolution definitely is

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The Syrian Civil War may still have a long hard slog ahead of it, but the Syrian Revolution is definitely over and the “moderate fighters” are now commanded by the religious extremists (not “moderate civilian leaders”), according to new reporting by The New York Times:

In northern and eastern Syria, where Mr. Assad’s opponents won early victories and once dreamed of building self-government, the nationalist rebel groups calling themselves the Free Syrian Army are forced to operate under the extremists’ umbrellas, to go underground or to flee, according to Syrian insurgents, activists and two top commanders of the American-financed F.S.A. groups.

 
The recent Nusra Front victory at the besieged Syrian military base at Wadi al-Deif — which had held out against rebels for two years on the primary north-south artery in Western Syria — seemed to crystallize the entire situation in one place, according to the Times sources:

The fall of the army base at Wadi al-Deif, which straddles an important supply route in Idlib Province, proved the Nusra Front’s dominance, they said. Other insurgents had long besieged the base without victory. Nusra succeeded after seizing much of the province from Harakat Hazm and the Syrian Revolutionaries Front, two of several groups that until recently, American officials were calling the opposition’s new hope.

 
Back in November I noted a story about Nusra Front crushing the CIA-backed Harakat Hazm rebel group and stealing their weapons, which was believed to include some pretty heavy hardware. That seems to have played a role in the Nusra Front victory at Wadi al-Deif:

Those groups had received sophisticated American-made TOW antitank missiles, and their commanders expected to act as the ground force in the American-led campaign against ISIS. But lately they say the flow of American aid has dwindled as Washington’s strategy shifts to building a new force from scratch.

How exactly the Wadi al-Deif battle unfolded remains murky, with different commanders giving different versions. But reports and images from the operation make two things clear: antitank missiles were used, and Nusra claimed the victory. That means that the American-backed fighters could advance only by working with the Nusra Front, which the United States government lists as a terrorist group, or that they have lost the weapons to the Nusra fighters, effectively joined the group or been forced to follow its orders.

One commander of a group that received antitank missiles said that some F.S.A. fighters were forced to operate them in the battle on behalf of the Nusra Front, which had captured them from American-backed groups — a turn of events that he worried would lead the United States to cut off support.

 
Earlier this month I was also reading a whole bunch of articles about how miserable life under the Syrian rebels is (in stark contrast with how normal things have returned to under regime-held areas). Based on those reports, the rebels spend most of their time attacking each other, looting their own occupied zones down to the studs, profiteering from the populace, and generally causing mayhem and misery. In some communities, such as Douma, residents are openly staging protests against the rebel authorities and counting down the days until “liberation” by the government they once opposed.

Maybe I’m biased in favor of seeing what I want to see (because I’ve been opposed to intervention and as opposed to the rebels as the regime for 2.5 years now) or maybe I’m just reading slanted sources. But the more I keep reading about what’s going on in Western Syria, the more open I am to considering that the regime might actually be the real lesser-of-two-evils at this point, even if they didn’t start out that way.

Is the regime criminal and horrific? Yes absolutely. But probably not more so than the rebels, who at this point are the ones really dragging out the misery for civilians, through direct cruelty and indirectly by refusing to concede a severely lost cause. Did the regime wildly mishandle the first year-plus of the war, to everyone’s detriment and pain? Agreed. Is the regime viscously sectarian, as critics still maintain? Yes, but so are the opponents.
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Texas to Syria: The Jihadist Journey of a Used Pickup Truck

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Woops:

Texas plumber says he has no idea how his old company truck ended up in a jihadi photo from the front lines of the war in Syria produced by the militant group ISIS.

The New York Daily News reported that Mark Oberholtzer of Texas City traded the company car in at a dealership in 2013 and hadn’t thought of it since.

On Monday, however, the Ansar al-Deen Front, a Syrian militant group, posted a photo featuring the black Ford F-250 pickup with an anti-aircraft gun mounted on the truck bed and the logo of Oberholtzer’s Mark-1 Plumbing Company and contact information emblazoned on the doors.

 
Ansar al-Deen Front (aka “Supporters of the Religion” Front) is one of the newer Syrian militant coalitions, operating as an alliance of three “neutral” rebel fighters (mostly foreigners) only since July 2014. They are based in western Syria and claim not to be aligned with either ISIS or the various FSA and Nusra Front groups opposing ISIS. This isn’t terribly surprising since they are apparently mostly not Syrians — hailing from farther flung places such as Morocco and Chechnya — which probably reduces their stake in the internal divisions of the anti-Assad groups.

But back to the poor plumber in Texas. Apart from the death threats from stupid people who can’t figure out this was obviously unintended, I love this story for its globalized absurdity. It is the perfect distillation of all the dedicated but under-appreciated reporting for about 10 years by all the Iraq correspondents noticing pre-owned/stolen North American vehicles repeatedly showing up in bombing attacks and trying to figure out how they got there but not being able to trace them very far. Even FBI investigations didn’t make definitive progress. See this 2005 account:

The inquiry began after coalition troops raided a bomb-making factory in Fallujah last November and found a sport utility vehicle registered in Texas that was being prepared for a bombing mission.

Investigators said they are comparing several other cases where vehicles evidently stolen in the United States wound up in Syria or other Middle East countries and ultimately into the hands of Iraqi insurgent groups — including Al Qaeda in Iraq, led by Jordanian-born Abu Musab Al Zarqawi.

 
Of course, Al Qaeda in Iraq was subsequently renamed the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), bringing the whole thing full circle to today’s conflict.

And this new story also involves another of my favorite topics (dating to the Libyan Revolution in 2011): Militants Driving Fast With Stolen Anti-Aircraft Guns on Pickup Truck Beds That Should Not Be Used That Way.

texas-truck-ansar-al-deen

Syria Air Force drops chlorine gas on ISIS

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During a fierce battle outside the perimeter of the Syrian Armed Forces base at Deir al-Zor, a heavily defended enclave in the heart of ISIS territory in eastern Syria, the Syrian Air Force allegedly dropped unidentified chlorine weapons on the ISIS forces surrounding the base (Associated Press, December 6, 2014):

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said […] The rebels stormed parts of the base before a counterattack and intense air raids by government forces pushed them back, it added. The group said that some Islamic State fighters had breathing problems in the area after government forces used chlorine gas against them.

 
Chlorine, while quite lethal in its own right, is a very different (and somewhat more survivable) agent from the sarin nerve gas weapons used by the pro-Assad forces on civilians in August 2013. While the sarin stockpiles are being declared to global inspectors and relinquished, the regime has allegedly continued to drop improvised chlorine-infused barrel bombs from fighters jets to intimidate northwestern villages several times in early 2014. Chlorine barrel bombs are nowhere near as “effective” (i.e. massively fatal) as conventional weapons or regular chemical warheads like those used in March and August 2013.

Additionally there is probably not a lot of sympathy to be found for ISIS combatants exposed to chlorine attacks, in light of their own likely use of chemical IEDs in Iraq (New York Times, October 23, 2014):

Unconfirmed reports of improvised bombs made with chlorine gas and used by militants have arisen from time to time since the Islamic State began seizing territory in Iraq at the beginning of the year, raising concerns that Iraq’s old chemical weapons stores had fallen into the militants’ hands.

 
The weapons referred to above, as summarized here, are the really old rusty ones from before the first Gulf War. However, while largely unusable as intended, some of the ingredients in them can be re-purposed into IED additives. Additionally, chlorine (which was not discussed in the major Times investigation) is not just used in weapons and is thus far more readily available as an ingredient than other chemical weapons agents.

ISIS allegedly detonated a chlorine-filled IED in September against Iraqi police officers (Washington Post, October 23, 2014):

The police officers, all members of the Sunni Jabbour tribe, which has turned against the Islamic State, were guarding a line in the town’s north. After an exchange of fire, they said, they were surprised to see Islamic State fighters retreating from their position about 150 yards away.

Suddenly there was a boom in the area the extremists had just vacated, said Lt. Khairalla al-Jabbouri, 31, one of the survivors. “It was a strange explosion. We saw a yellow smoke in the sky,” he said. The wind carried the fog toward their lines. The men say it hung close to the ground, consistent with the properties of chlorine gas, which is heavier than air.

“I felt suffocated,” Jabbouri recalled. “I was throwing up and couldn’t breathe.”

Another officer, Ammer Jassim Mohammed, 31, who suffers from asthma, said he passed out within minutes.

 
Other minor ISIS chemical IED attacks in Iraq have also been reported. There are also allegations that ISIS used some other type of chemical agent in Kobani.

Regardless, it sounds very much like both ISIS and the Syrian Armed Forces are using makeshift chlorine weapons for dramatic effect (though not necessarily for battlefield utility) — and now one is simply using it on the other. Not a lot of tears will be shed for ISIS fighters exposed to what is essentially their own directly proportional chemical comeuppance.

Pallets of 155 mm artillery shells containing "HD" (distilled sulfur mustard agent) at Pueblo Depot Activity (PUDA) chemical weapons storage facility. (Credit: US Army via Wikipedia.)

Pallets of 155 mm chemical weapons artillery shells (sulfur mustard in this photo). (Credit: US Army via Wikipedia.)

While defending Israel, Biden accuses them of a war crime

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Fourth Geneva Convention, August 12, 1949, Article 33 on “Individual responsibility, collective penalties, pillage, reprisals” prohibits collective punishment as a war crime:

No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.
Pillage is prohibited.
Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.

 
Typically, United States officials are very cautious about throwing around technical terms, including those mentioned above, that could trigger legal consequences. Vice President Joe Biden tends not to be so careful:

Vice President Joe Biden called on Israel to stop the demolition of homes of terrorists’ families, which he described as “collective punishment.” Biden also criticized expansion of Jewish settlements “in the West Bank and East Jerusalem” and called on the government to do more to stop “vigilante justice” attacks against Palestinians.

Biden was speaking at a noon plenary on Saturday at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Forum being held at the Willard Hotel in Washington DC. His speech ignored the upcoming elections, focusing instead on America’s bedrock support for Israel and the “tactical disagreements” that “should be honestly discussed between friends.”

 
I wonder how fast he will be forced to apologize for making an accurate remark about an ally once again.

Kobani allegedly attacked from Turkish side by ISIS

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In a potentially huge development, observers and Kurdish fighters say ISIS staged an attack on the north side of the border town of Kobani — previously besieged on just the other three sides — by crossing through Turkish territory.

Turkey denied this version of events, but it’s not totally implausible. The border is heavily mined there, so such an attack would probably require some complicity by low-level border checkpoint guards, but the latter have previously been a bit lax about stopping Sunni Arab militants from crossing for the right price.

Here’s what each side says happened:

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and a Kurdish official in the town, Idris Nassan, said the vehicle used in the dawn car bombing had come from Turkish territory.

Prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s office said in a statement that while Islamic State had attacked several parts of Kobani, including Mursitpinar, it was “definitely a lie” that the vehicle used in the bombing had crossed from Turkey.
[…]
The observatory said a second bomber detonated an explosive vest in the same area before two more suicide attacks hit the southwestern edge of the town.

Turkey’s pro-Kurdish HDP party said the militants were using state grain depots on the Turkish side of the border as a base from which to attack Kobani and described their presence in an area patrolled by Turkish security forces as a “scandal”.

 
An alternate explanation supporting Turkey’s version would involve ISIS fighters driving very carefully and undetected through the very narrow gap between the northern edge of the town and the border fence, but the witnesses on the Kobani side of the border seem pretty convinced (according to the report above, at least) that the vehicle had crossed the border.

Labeled overhead map of Kobani / Ayn Al-Arab, Syria, showing its relationship to the Turkish border crossing bottleneck on the north side. The empty band of space is a fenced-in border buffer with land mines. Click map to enlarge or click here to navigate in Google Maps.