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2 World
braces for Syrian trainwreck By
Peter Lee
According to Russia's TASS news
agency, a grim milestone was achieved in Syria a
few days ago: several peaceful demonstrators in
Aleppo were massacred. [1] The twist is that the
demonstrators were calling for protection by the
Syrian army to end the destruction of the city;
they were shot by insurgents.
A single,
thinly sourced news item is not needed to
demonstrate the profound moral and strategic
disarray afflicting the Syrian insurrection as the
country totters toward collapse. A handier and
more reliable reference point is the abrupt and
forcible reorganization of the overseas Syrian
opposition at the behest of the United States.
The Syrian National Council (SNC) is now
just a junior partner in a broader opposition
grouping, the "Syrian National Coalition for
Opposition and
Revolutionary Forces" (SNCORF). Reportedly, this
new group was formed at the insistence of US
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She is
retiring in a few weeks and apparently wished to
pull the plug on the ineffectual SNC and replace
it with something less overtly Sunni/Muslim
Brotherhood-esque. The SNC's major sponsor, Qatar,
and the great minds at the Doha branch of the
Brookings Institute responded with the marvel that
is SNCORF.
SNCORF is striving for
rainbow-coalition inclusiveness. The big tent
includes secularists, Christians, Alawites, and
women - and also 22 SNC/Muslim Brotherhood
holdovers - but, for the time being, no Kurds.
Also, none of the Western reporting indicated that
representatives of the most inclusive and
legitimate in-country opposition, the National
Coordination Committee for Democratic Change, led
by Hassan Abdul Azim, attended the meeting.
In an attempt to have its communal cake
and eat it too, SNCORF announced that this
inclusive grouping would be headed by a Sunni
cleric, an ex-imam of the Umayyad Mosque, one
Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib, who appeared in a suit and
tie to advertise, if not his secularism, his
secular-friendly taste in attire.
A
throwback in a suit Judging from the
comments of Asad Abu Khalil , the acerbic "Angry
Arab" observer of Middle East shenanigans, the
motto for SNCORF and America's Syria policy may
well turn out to be "Reorganize in Haste ...
Repent at Leisure".
Abu Khalil reported on
several interesting items he gleaned from
al-Khatib's web postings:
I spent last night reading the
writings of ... Ahmad Ma'adh Al-Khatib: a clear
follower of the Muslim Brotherhood and a
disciple of Yusuf Al-Qaradawi [an important
theological mentor to Egypt's Muslim
Brotherhood]. He has many views that his Western
sponsors did not know about. Take his treatise
on masturbation here: he maintains that this
"sinister habit" causes tuberculosis and tears
down the flesh.
Here, Mr Ahmad Ma'adh
Al-Khatib calls for Jihad to rescue the ummah
[the posting referred to now appears to be
inaccessible]. Enjoy him, please, especially
those in Western governments which approved him
and promoted him without reading a word of his
writings.
I am sure that the US Zionists
who approved the appointment of Mr Al-Khatib as
head of the exile Syrian opposition did not know
that he referred to Zionism as a "cancerous
racist movement."
Mr Ma'adh Al-Khatib
says here [see above note on access to the
posting] that Saddam has virtues among them:
"that he terrified the Jews".
This kook
(who could not have been appointed to the
position of preacher in the Mosque of the
Umayyads in Damascus without the approval of the
Syrian regime intelligence apparatus) here
declares that Facebook is a US-Israeli
intelligence plot. Read to believe. [2]
Good luck, Secretary Clinton, with
that Syrian opposition re-boot.
There was,
perhaps, a more significant element to this
reorganization that was largely overlooked - the
relative absence of Saudi Arabia at SNCORF's
coming-out party. The meeting in Doha was
orchestrated by the United States, Turkey, and
Qatar. Qatar's prime minister keynoted the opening
session and "presided" over the expanded meeting
of the Syrian opposition. [3] Apparently,
no Saudi Arabian heavyweight attended. That is
significant because the reorganization of the
Syrian overseas opposition was a reaction against
the inadequacies of the Qatar-backed SNC, but also
a response to the crisis caused by the mushrooming
influence of Saudi-funded jihadis inside Syria.
Foreign efforts to support the
insurrection had largely turned into directionless
dithering, thanks in large part to Western
unwillingness to validate and empower the
expatriate and Muslim Brotherhood-dominated SNC
with significant amounts of arms. Saudi Arabian
Salafists displayed no such qualms about
dispatching arms and jihadis to Syria, with the
result that extremists have filled the
revolutionary vacuum.
News coverage of the
uprising now often includes reporting on gruesome
atrocities perpetrated by insurgents, the
occasional raising of the al-Qaeda flag, and the
profound weariness and disgust Syrian citizens are
expressing against the insurrectionists as well as
the government. With blowback into Lebanon and
Turkey, and Israel now firing on Syrian armor, the
situation is generally acknowledged to be getting
out of hand - and the SNC, never much more than a
stalking horse for the Muslim Brotherhood and a
convenient propaganda front for the foreign powers
seeking to unseat Bashar al-Assad, is definitely
not the group needed to bring order out of the
chaos.
SNCORF, with its Muslim Brotherhood
component sufficiently diluted (or, if you prefer,
with its internal politics now satisfactorily
factionalized so that the US and Europe can expect
to exert a controlling influence on its policies
and actions), is being positioned as a suitable
and properly vetted vehicle for formal recognition
of the Syrian opposition as a government-in-exile
and conduit for foreign military aid.
SNCORF might best be regarded not so much
as an attempt to level the playing field with
al-Assad as an initiative to level the playing
field with the Salafist jihadis who have been
filling the power vacuum created by the civil war
in Syria.
Can the reach of the Salafist
jihadis on the battlefield be rolled back so Syria
can enter the liberal democratic nirvana promised
by the West? The Syrian toothpaste is pretty much
out of the tube, Syria appears headed for national
collapse, and it is open to question whether
SNCORF, even with the superpowers bestowed upon it
by its inclusiveness, democratic aspirations,
loving coverage in the Guardian, and Western and
Gulf Cooperation Council diplomatic and military
support, can bring peace and unity back to the
torn and bloody nation.
Death squads
missing from action SNCORF has its work cut
out for it, and it's worth wondering if Syria's
emigres and dissidents - characterized as
"reliable technocrats", not "insurrectionists with
fists of iron" - can tear the leading role on the
Syrian battlefield away from the jihadis and the
local bandits, bullies, and heroes who make up the
Free Syrian Army and the multitudes of local
anti-government militias.
There is one
remedy for Islamic extremist insurgencies that is
perceived as extremely effective by its US
practitioners but is unfortunately out of reach of
SNCORF, at least for the time being: death squads.
Syria is now at a point similar to that of Iraq in
2006 - a Sunni insurrection has fought the central
authority to a standstill, but at the cost of
Salafist extremists hijacking local power.
In Iraq, the Sunni opposition to the US
occupation eventually fractured as Sunni tribal
leaders, threatened by the bloody-minded ambition
of their jihadi allies and incentivized by US
money, arms and protection, set aside their
anti-American, anti-Shi'ite, and anti-Iran
sentiments, at least for the time being, turned on
the jihadis and cleansed Iraq's Sunni heartland -
Anbar Province - of al-Qaeda militants.
The BBC provides some context of this
event, the "Anbar Awakening", describing a
situation that looks a lot like today's Syria:
But by 2006, in one of the many
unintended consequences of the invasion, foreign
fighters such as the Jordanian Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, who had pledged themselves to
al-Qaeda and received funding directly from
Osama Bin Laden, had come to dominate the
insurgency. Their control extended over vast
swathes of Iraq.
Their ruthless exercise
of power threatened to rip the country apart.
...
For Sheikh Jabbar, desperate times
required desperate measures and this was the
moment he triggered what would become the
Awakening, a military counter-offensive in which
he and his supporters joined forces with their
former enemies, the Americans, to confront
al-Qaeda.
Sheikh Jabbar sought help from
the Americans to break al-Qaeda's hold on Anbar
province. In late 2006, he arranged a meeting
with Colonel John Tien of the US Army in which
he asked for weapons and ammunition for his men
to take on al-Qaeda. The Awakening had begun,
marking a key turning point in the fortunes of
Iraq. Although at the time they numbered in the
dozens, the forces who would later be known as
the Sons of Iraq swelled to a 100,000 or so. [4]
The leaders of the Sunni Awakening in
Anbar Province were the leading figures of their
communities, tribal big shots with extensive local
familial and patronage relationships. They were
also working hand in hand with the US military
occupation, a rather capable killing machine. This
tag-team arrangement helped make the Iraq al-Qaeda
hunt a success.
In a study of the
Awakening published in the Washington Quarterly,
John McCrary quoted the son of one of the Anbar
sheiks:
The Coalition Forces has the very
strong military ability. The civilians and the
tribes, they have a difference that the
Coalition Forces doesn't have. It's that they're
local - they found and know who comes from
outside. They know who are the insurgents and
who are al-Qaeda in general, such that there is
no more al-Qaeda or anything else. You wouldn't
believe me. I'm not exaggerating that in two
months, in two months everything was finished.
[5]
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