Daily Times

Long gone are the days when the US-led ‘friends of Syria’ could plausibly claim that two thirds of Syria was controlled by rebel forces, that Damascus was under siege and that the days of President Bashar al-Assad were numbered. The war on Syria has taken a U-turn during the past year. Assad now firmly holds the military initiative. The long awaited foreign military intervention could not take off; it was prevented by the emerging multi-polar world order. Syrian and non-Syrian insurgents are now on the run.

The thinly veiled UN legitimacy, which was used to justify the invasions of Iraq and Libya under the pretexts of the responsibility to protect on humanitarian grounds, failed to impose no-fly zones, humanitarian corridors and other instruments of foreign intervention. The official Syrian Arab Army (SAA), which was strategically organised and stationed to fight a regular war in defence against Israel, was taken by surprise by an internationally and regionally coordinated unconventional attack on its soft civilian backyard where it had zero presence.

Within a relatively short period of time the SAA succeeded in containing the initial attack, in adapting trained units to unconventional guerrilla war in cities, and in winning over the support of the civilian population, without ceding any ground of its defence vis-à-vis Israel. Ever since, the SAA gained more ground, liberating more civilian centres from insurgent terrorists, closing more border crossing points used for infiltration of foreign fighters into the country, cutting of their supply lines and besieging pockets of their presence in inner old cities and in their isolated concentrations in the countryside. More than 95 percent of the common borders with Lebanon and around Homs are now secured. Except the northern city of Raqqa, nowhere in Syria can the insurgents claim exclusive control. The SAA is winning all its battles.

The declared goal now of the US, Saudi, Qatari and Turkish financial, military and logistical support for the insurgents is no more ‘regime change’, but creating a balance of power aimed at improving their standing in future negotiations with the regime. To do so, they claim they are extending their support to what they describe as “moderate” insurgents. However, ‘moderate’ rebels are a rare species. Entering its fourth year now, the war on Syria has created a highly polarised war zone that has left no room for any moderates. Combatants are fighting now to the death.

The fighting lines are strictly drawn between homeland defence and foreign intervention, between national forces and international terrorists, and between an existing secular and civil state and a future state perceived to be governed by an extremist or a moderate version of Islamist ideology supported by the most backward, tribal and undemocratic regional states with similar sectarian ideologies. During his testimony at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last September 3, US Secretary of State John Kerry denied that the “moderate” Syrian rebels are infiltrated by al Qaeda terrorists as “basically not true”. The Syrian “opposition has increasingly become more defined by its moderation, more defined by the breadth of its membership, and more defined by its adherence to some democratic process and to an all-inclusive, minority protecting constitution, which will be broad-based and secular with respect to the future of Syria,” Kerry testified. Hard facts on the ground in Syria challenge Kerry’s testimony as a politically motivated and misleading statement.

Last March, General David Rodriguez, head of the US Africa Command, testified before the House Armed Services Committee that, “Syria has become a significant location for al Qaeda-aligned groups to recruit, train, and equip extremists.” The previous month, James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, called Syria a “huge magnet” for Islamic extremists. Last January, Clapper also told a Senate intelligence hearing that “training complexes” for foreign fighters were spotted in Syria. Matthew Olsen, director of the US government’s National Counterterrorism Centre, said on record, “Syria has become really the predominant jihadist battlefield in the world.”

These and other high level US conclusions do not testify to the existence of ‘moderate’ insurgents in Syria and vindicate the official Syrian narration as much as they refute Kerry’s statement about the “democratic,” “secular” and “moderate” Syrian “opposition”.

Moderate rebels are either marginal or a rare species in the Syrian insurgency, and if they do exist they are already increasingly concluding ‘reconciliation’ agreements with the Syrian government, according to which they disarm, join the government’s anti-terror military and security campaign or simply attend to their personal lives. The Americans and their Saudi and Turkish bullies are left with the only option of creating artificial ‘moderates’, whom they unrealistically and wishfully dream of turning into a credible leading force on the ground.

As part of his efforts to mend fences with Saudi Arabia, US President Barack Obama seems to have pursued recently a two-pronged diplomatic and military policy. Diplomatically, he closed the Syrian embassy and consulates in the US and restricted the movement of the Syrian envoy to the UN as a ‘down payment’ ahead of his visit to the Kingdom on March 28. Militarily, he promised more arms to Syrian ‘moderate’ rebels during his visit. After the visit he was reportedly considering arming those ‘moderate’ rebels with more advanced weaponry, including anti-aircraft missiles or MANPADs.

While providing these ‘moderates’ with MANPADs is yet to be confirmed, Israel’s Debkafile website on April 7 reported that two ‘moderate’ Syrian rebel militias — the Free Syrian Army and the Syrian Revolutionary Front — have been supplied with advanced US weapons, including armour-piercing and optically-guided BGM-71 TOW missiles, which have entered the Middle East for the first time. Images of rebels equipped with these arms have begun to circulate in recent days. Both militias are coordinating and cooperating with the al Qaeda offshoot, the Islamic State in Iraq, al-Sham (ISIS) and the al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra, both listed as terrorist groups by the US, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iraq.

Within this context, the existing CIA-led programme in Jordan for training pre-approved ‘moderates’ will reportedly be expanded to raise the number of trainees from 100 to 600 a month. At this rate, according to Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Centre, “it would take close to two years to produce a force” that could numerically rival the extremist Ahrar al-Sham group and “it would take seven years” to create a force that could rival the extremist Islamic Front, let alone the mainstream groups of terrorist insurgents like ISIS and al-Nusra.

Going ahead with such a US-Saudi training programme in Jordan is tantamount to planning an extended war on Syria until such time that the regime changes or the country becomes a failed state. Moderate Syrian rebels are a US mirage. With logistical vital help from Turkey, the Saudi and Qatari US allies were determined to successfully militarise and hijack legitimate popular protests for change lest they sweep along their own people and spill over into their own territories.

It is about time the US policy makers reconsider, deal with the facts on the ground in Syria and stop yielding to the bullying of their regional allies who continue to beat the drums of war only to survive the regional tidal wave of change. To contain this tidal wave of change, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have sponsored an Islamist alternative as a counterrevolution. The Muslim Brotherhood International (MBI) was a version of this alternative. Unfortunately, the US went along with it. The MBI’s failure in Egypt pre-empted for good any hope for its success in Syria.

President Assad’s statement on April 7 that the “project of political Islam” has failed was not overoptimistic or premature. Neither was the statement of his ally, the leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, on the same day that “the phase of bringing down the regime or bringing down the (Syrian) state is over…They cannot overthrow the regime, but they can wage a war of attrition.”

The US campaign for more than three years now for ‘regime change’ in Syria has created only a huge magnet for international terrorism, thanks to Saudi, Qatari and Turkish military, financial and logistical support. Peaceful protesters were sidelined to oblivion. More than three years of bloodshed left no room for moderates.

All world and regional indications as well as military developments on the ground refer to one fact: Assad is here to stay. Change will come only under his leadership or his guidance. Understanding with him is the only way to internal and regional stability. Arming ‘moderate’ rebels will only perpetuate the Syrian people’s plight and fuel regional anti-Americanism. The sooner the US acts on this fact, the better for all involved parties.

The writer is a veteran Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. She may be contacted at nassernicola@ymail.com