The Three-way Tug of War that’s Pulling Syria Apart

Last month, the Islamic State recaptured Palmyra from where it was evicted by the Syrian army only in March; and this week, the Islamic State has launched a fierce assault in the eastern city of Deir Ezzor, near Syria’s border with Iraq, and has successfully managed to surround the military airport, thus cutting off food supplies to the besieged city.

Although the Syria experts of the mainstream media are claiming that the Islamic State’s jihadists from the Anbar province of Iraq have crossed over from the border to reinforce the militants in Palmyra and Deir Ezzor, but we should keep in mind that Ramadi was liberated in December 2015 and Fallujah in June last year. Why did it take the Islamic State’s jihadists several months to recapture Palmyra and mount an assault in Deir Ezzor when the aforementioned cities in eastern Syria are located only a few hours’ drive from Anbar in Iraq across a highly porous border?

The Russian defense ministry, by contrast, has given the explanation that thousands of Islamic State jihadists have crossed over to eastern provinces of Syria from Mosul in Iraq; and several analysts have blamed the US for not doing enough to prevent the reinforcements reaching to eastern Syria from Iraq, because the preference of the US seems to be to drive out jihadists from Iraq but letting them give a hard time to the government troops in Syria.

The Syrian civil war is actually a three-way conflict between the Sunni Arab militants, the Shi’a Arab regime and the Syrian Kurds. And the net beneficiaries of this conflict have only been the Syrian Kurds who have expanded their area of control by cleverly aligning themselves first with the Syrian regime against the Sunni Arab militants since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in August 2011 to August 2014 when the US declared a war against one faction of the Sunni Arab militants, i.e. the Islamic State, after the latter overran Mosul in June 2014; and then the Syrian Kurds aligned themselves with the US against the Islamic State, thus further buttressing their position against the Sunni Arab militants as well as the Syrian regime.

Although the Sunni Arab militants have also scored numerous victories in their battle against the Shi’a regime, but their battlefield victories have mostly been ephemeral. They have already been evicted from Ramadi and Fallujah in Iraq and their withdrawal from Mosul, against the Iraqi armed forces with American air and logistical support, is only a matter of time.

In Syria, the Sunni Arab militants have already been routed from east Aleppo by the Syrian government troops with Russian air support. Although a faction of Syrian opposition, the Islamic State, is still occupying Raqqa and Palmyra in eastern Syria, but it’s obvious that the Islamic State is going to lose Raqqa to the Syrian Kurds and Palmyra to the Syrian government troops sooner or later.

The only permanent gains of the Sunni Arab militants would be Idlib in western Syria, Daraa and Quneitra in southern Syria; and a few areas in northwestern Syria, like al-Bab, which might change hands from the Islamic State to the relatively moderate factions of the Sunni Arab militants through Turkish arbitration.

Notwithstanding, the only difference between the Soviet-Afghan jihad that spawned the Islamic jihadists like the Taliban and al Qaeda for the first time in history, and the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, 2011-onward, is that the Afghan jihad was an overt jihad; back then the Western political establishments and their mouthpiece, the mainstream media, used to openly brag that the CIA provides all those AK-47s, RPGs and stingers to the Pakistani intelligence agencies, which then distributes those deadly weapons among the Afghan mujahideen (freedom fighters) to combat the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

After the 9/11 tragedy, however, the Western political establishments and corporate media have become a lot more circumspect, therefore this time around, they have waged covert jihads against the Arab-nationalist Gaddafi regime in Libya and the anti-Zionist Assad regime in Syria, in which the Islamic jihadists have been sold as “moderate rebels,” with secular and nationalist ambitions, to the Western audience.

Since the regime change objective in those hapless countries went against the mainstream narrative of ostensibly fighting a war against terror, therefore the Western political establishments and the mainstream media are now trying to muddle the reality by offering color-coded schemes to identify myriads of militant and terrorist outfits that are operating in those countries: such as, the red militants of the Islamic State, which the Western powers want to eliminate; the yellow Islamic jihadists, like Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham, with whom the Western powers can collaborate under desperate circumstances; and the green militants of the Free Syria Army (FSA) and a few other inconsequential outfits, which together comprise the so-called “moderate” Syrian opposition.

If we were to draw parallels between the Soviet-Afghan jihad of the ‘80s and the Syrian civil war of today, the Western powers used the training camps located in the Af-Pak border regions to train and arm the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan with the help of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.

Similarly, the training camps located in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan are being used to provide money, training and arms to the Syrian militants to battle the Syrian regime with the support of Turkish, Jordanian and Saudi intelligence agencies.

During the Afghan jihad, it is a known historical fact, that the bulk of the so-called “freedom fighters” was comprised of Pashtun Islamic jihadists, such as the factions of Jalaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf and scores of others, some of which later coalesced together to form the Taliban movement.

Similarly, in Syria, the bulk of the so-called “moderate opposition” is comprised of Islamic jihadists, like the Islamic State, al-Nusra Front, Jaysh al-Islam, Ahrar al-Sham and myriads of other militant groups, including a small portion of defected Syrian soldiers that goes by the name of the Free Syria Army (FSA.)

Moreover, apart from Pashtun Islamic jihadists, the various factions of the Northern Alliance of Tajiks and Uzbeks constituted the relatively “moderate” segment of the Afghan rebellion, though those “moderate” warlords, like Ahmad Shah Massoud and Abul Rashid Dostum, were more ethnic and tribal in their character than secular or nationalist, as such.

Similarly, the Kurds of the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces can be compared with the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan. The socialist PYD/YPG Kurds of Syria, however, had been allied with the Shi’a regime against the Sunni Arab jihadists for the first three years of the Syrian civil war, i.e. from August 2011 to August 2014, as I have already mentioned.

At the behest of the American stooge in Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani, the Syrian Kurds have switched sides in the last couple of years after the United States’ policy reversal and declaration of war against one faction of the Syrian opposition, the Islamic State, when the latter overstepped its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in June 2014.

However, the reports of infiltration of the Islamic State’s jihadists from Iraq into eastern Syria by the Russian defense ministry sources lend credence to the suspicion that although the US seems sincere in driving out jihadists from Iraq, but it is still playing the double game of using the Sunni Arab militants to weaken the Syrian regime.

NATO’s Playbook of Proxy Wars in the Middle East

Since the times of the Soviet-Afghan jihad, during the eighties, it has been the fail-safe game plan of the master strategists at NATO to raise money from the oil-rich emirates of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Kuwait; then buy billions of dollars’ worth of weapons from the arms’ markets of the Eastern Europe; and then provide those weapons and guerilla warfare training to the disaffected population of the victim country by using the intelligence agencies of the latter’s regional adversaries. Whether it’s Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia, Libya or Syria, the same playbook has been executed to the letter.

More to the point, raising funds for proxy wars from the Gulf Arab States allows the Western executives the freedom to evade congressional scrutiny; the benefit of buying weapons from the unregulated arms’ markets of the Eastern Europe is that such weapons cannot be traced back to the Western capitals; and using jihadist proxies to achieve strategic objectives has the advantage of taking the plea of plausible deniability if the strategy backfires, which it often does. Remember that al-Qaeda and Taliban were the by-products of the Soviet-Afghan jihad, and the Islamic State and its global network of terrorists is the blowback of the proxy war in Syria.

Notwithstanding, the Western interest in the Syrian civil war has mainly been to ensure Israel’s regional security. The Shi’a resistance axis in the Middle East, which is comprised of Iran, the Syrian regime and their Lebanon-based proxy Hezbollah, posed an existential threat to Israel; a fact which the Israel’s defense community realized for the first time during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war during the course of which Hezbollah fired hundreds of rockets into northern Israel.

Those were only unguided rockets but it was a wakeup call for Israel’s military strategists that what will happen if Iran passed the guided missile technology to Hezbollah whose area of operations lies very close to the northern borders of Israel?

Therefore, when the protests broke out against the Assad regime in Syria, in early 2011 in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings, under pressure from the Zionist lobbies, the Western powers took advantage of the opportunity and militarized those protests with the help of their regional allies: Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf Arab States. All of the aforementioned states belong to the Sunni denomination, which have been vying for influence in the Middle East against the Shi’a Iranian axis.

Moreover, since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in August 2011 to June 2014, when the Islamic State overran Mosul in Iraq, an informal pact existed between the Western powers, their regional allies and the Sunni Arab jihadists of the Middle East against the Shi’a resistance axis. In accordance with the pact, the Sunni militants were trained and armed in the training camps located in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan.

This arrangement of an informal pact between the Western powers and the Sunni Arab jihadists of the Middle East against the Shi’a Iranian axis worked well up to August 2014, when Obama Administration made a volte-face on its previous regime change policy in Syria and started conducting air strikes against one group of Sunni militants battling against the Syrian regime, i.e. the Islamic State, after the latter transgressed its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq and threatened the capital of another steadfast American ally: Masoud Barzani’s Erbil in the oil-rich Iraqi Kurdistan.

After the reversal of policy in Syria by the Western powers and the subsequent Russian military intervention on the side of the Syrian regime, the momentum of Sunni Arab jihadists’ expansion in Syria has stalled and they now feel that their Western patrons have committed a treachery against the Sunni jihadists’ cause; that’s why, they are infuriated and once again up in arms to exact revenge for this betrayal.

If we look at the chain of events, the timing of the Paris and Brussels attacks has been critical: the Islamic State overran Mosul in June 2014, the Obama Administration began conducting air strikes against the Islamic State’s targets in Iraq and Syria in August 2014, and after a lull of almost a decade since the Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and 2005, respectively, the first such incident of terrorism took place on the Western soil at the offices of the Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, and then the Islamic State carried out the November 2015 Paris attacks and the March 2016 Brussels bombings.

Notwithstanding, it is an irrefutable fact that the United States sponsors the militants, but only for a limited period of time in order to achieve certain policy objectives. For instance: the United States nurtured the Afghan jihadists during the Cold War against the erstwhile Soviet Union from 1979 to 1988, but after the signing of the Geneva Accords and the consequent withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan, the United States withdrew its support from the Afghan jihadists.

Similarly, the United States lent its support to the militants during the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, but after achieving the policy objectives of toppling the Qaddafi regime in Libya and weakening the anti-Israel Assad regime in Syria, the United States relinquished its blanket support from the militants and eventually declared a war against a faction of Syrian militants, the Islamic State, when the latter transgressed its mandate in Syria and dared to occupy Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in early 2014.

The United States’ regional allies in the Middle East, however, are not as subtle and experienced in the Machiavellian geopolitics. Under the misconception that the alliances in international politics are permanent, the Middle Eastern autocrats keep pursuing the same untenable policy indefinitely, which was laid down by the hawks in Washington for a brief period of time in order to achieve certain strategic objectives.

For instance: the security establishment of Pakistan kept pursuing the policy of training and arming the Afghan and Kashmiri jihadists throughout the ’80 and ‘90s and right up to September 2001, even after the United States withdrew its support from the jihadists’ cause in Afghanistan in 1988 after the signing of the Geneva Accords.

Similarly, the Muslim Brotherhood-led government of Turkey has made the same mistake of lending indiscriminate support to the Syrian militants even after the United States’ partial reversal of policy in Syria and the declaration of war against the Islamic State in August 2014 in order to placate the international public opinion when the graphic images and videos of the Islamic State’s brutality surfaced on the internet.

Keeping up appearances in order to maintain the façade of justice and morality is indispensable in international politics and the Western powers strictly abide by this code of conduct. Their medieval client states in the Middle East, however, are not as experienced and they often keep pursuing the same unsustainable policies of training and arming the militants against their regional rivals, which are untenable in the long run in a world where pacifism is generally accepted as one of the fundamental axioms of the modern worldview.

Notwithstanding, the conflict in Syria and Iraq is actually a three-way conflict between the Sunni Arabs, the Shi’a Arabs and the Sunni Kurds. Although after the declaration of war against a faction of Sunni Arab militants, the Islamic State, the Obama Administration has also lent its support to the Shi’a-led government in Iraq, but the Shi’a Arabs of Iraq are not the trustworthy allies of the United States because they are under the influence of Iran.

Therefore, the Obama Administration was left with no other choice but to make the Kurds the centerpiece of its policy in Syria and Iraq after a group of Sunni Arab jihadists transgressed its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq from where the United States had withdrawn its troops only in December 2011. The so-called Syrian Democratic Forces are nothing more than Kurdish militias with a tinkering of mercenary Arab tribesmen in order to make them appear more representative and inclusive in outlook.

As far as the regional parties to the Syrian civil war are concerned, however, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf Arab States might not have serious reservations against the close cooperation between the United States and the Kurds in Syria and Iraq, because the Gulf Arab States tend to look at the regional conflicts from the lens of the Iranian Shi’a threat. Turkey, on the other hand, has been wary of the separatist Kurdish tendencies in its southeast more than the Iranian Shi’a threat.

The sudden thaw in Turkey’s relations with Russia and latent hostility towards the West is partly due to the fact that Erdogan holds the US-based preacher, Fethullah Gulen, responsible for the July coup plot and suspects that the latter has received tacit support from certain quarters in the United States’ intelligence community; but more importantly, Turkey also feels betrayed by the duplicitous Western policy in Syria and Iraq, and that’s why it is now seeking close cooperation with Russia in the region.

Syrian Civil War is the Reenactment of Soviet-Afghan Jihad

Zia-ul-Haq and Fazl-e-Haq.

George Santayana presciently said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The only difference between the Afghan jihad back in the ‘80s, that spawned the Islamic jihadists like the Taliban and al Qaeda for the first time in history, and the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, 2011-onward, is that the Afghan jihad was an overt jihad: back then the Western political establishments and their mouthpiece, the mainstream media, used to openly brag that the CIA provides all those AK-47s, RPGs and stingers to the Pakistani intelligence agencies, which then distributes those deadly weapons among the Afghan mujahideen (freedom fighters) to combat the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

After the 9/11 tragedy, however, the Western political establishments and corporate media have become a lot more circumspect, therefore, this time around, they have waged covert jihads against the Arab-nationalist Gaddafi regime in Libya and the anti-Zionist Assad regime in Syria, in which the Islamic jihadists (aka terrorists) have been sold as “moderate rebels,” with secular and nationalist ambitions, to the Western audience.

Since the regime change objective in those hapless countries went against the mainstream narrative of ostensibly fighting a war against terror, therefore, the Western political establishments and the mainstream media are now trying to muddle the reality by offering color-coded schemes to identify myriads of militant and terrorist outfits that are operating in those countries: such as, the red militants of the Islamic State, which the Western powers want to eliminate; the yellow Islamic jihadists, like Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham, with whom the Western powers can collaborate under desperate circumstances; and the green militants of the Free Syria Army (FSA) and a few other inconsequential outfits, which together comprise the so-called “moderate” Syrian opposition.

It’s an incontrovertible fact that more than 90% of militants that are operating in Syria are either the Islamic jihadists or the armed tribesmen, and less than 10% are those who have defected from the Syrian army or otherwise have secular and nationalist goals.

As far as the infinitesimally small secular and liberal elite of the developing countries is concerned, such privileged classes can’t even cook breakfasts for themselves if their servants are on a holiday and the corporate media had us believing that the majority of the Syrian militants are “moderate rebels” who constitute the vanguard of the Syrian opposition against the Syrian regime in a brutal civil war and who believe in the principles of democracy, rule of law and liberal values as their cherished goals?

In political science the devil always lies in the definitions of the terms that we employ. For instance: how do you define a terrorist or a militant? In order to understand this, we need to identify the core of a “militant,” that what essential feature distinguishes him from the rest? A militant is basically an armed and violent individual who carries out subversive acts against the state.

That being understood, we now need to examine the concept of “violence.” Is it violence per se that is wrong, or does some kind of justifiable violence exists? I take the view, on empirical grounds, that all kinds of violence are essentially wrong; because the goals for which such violence is often employed are seldom right and elusive at best. Though democracy and liberal ideals are cherished goals but such goals can only be accomplished through peaceful means; expecting from the armed and violent thugs to bring about democratic reform is incredibly preposterous.

The Western mainstream media and its credulous neoliberal constituents, however, take a different view. According to them, there are two kinds of violence: justifiable and unjustifiable. When a militant resorts to violence for secular and nationalist goals, such as “bringing democracy” to Libya and Syria, the blindfolded liberal interventionists enthusiastically exhort such form of violence; however, if such militants later turn out to be Islamic jihadists, like the Misrata militia in Libya or the Islamic State and al-Nusra Front in Syria, the gullible neoliberals, who have been duped by the mainstream narrative, promptly make a volte-face and label them as “terrorists.”

Notwithstanding, on the subject of the supposed “powerlessness” of the US in the global affairs, the Western think tanks and the corporate media’s spin-doctors generally claim that Pakistan deceived the US in Afghanistan by providing clandestine support to the Taliban and the Haqqani network; Turkey hoodwinked the US in Syria by using the war against the Islamic State as a pretext for cracking down on Kurds; Saudi Arabia and UAE betrayed the US in Yemen by mounting airstrikes against the Houthis and Saleh’s loyalists; and once again Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt went against the “ostensible” policy of the US in Libya by conducting airstrikes against the Tripoli-based government, even though Khalifa Haftar, the military commander of the armed forces in eastern Libya, lived next door to the CIA’s headquarter in Langley, Virginia, for more than two decades.

If the US policymakers are so powerless and naïve then how come they still control the global economic order? This perennial whining attitude of the Western corporate media, that such and such regional actors betrayed them otherwise they were on the top of their game, is actually a clever stratagem that has been deliberately designed by the spin-doctors to cast the Western powers in a positive light and to demonize the adversaries, even if the latter are their tactical allies in some of the regional conflicts.

Fighting wars through proxies allows the international power brokers the luxury of taking the plea of “plausible deniability” in their defense and at the same time they can shift all the blame for wrongdoing on the minor regional players.

Regardless, back in the ‘80s, the Afghan so-called “freedom fighters” did not spring up spontaneously out of nowhere, some powers funded, trained, armed and internationally legitimized those militants; how else could such ragtag militants had beaten back the super power of its time?

Then in 2011, in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings in Libya, those same powers once again financed, trained, armed and internationally legitimized the Libyan militants by calling them pro-democracy, “armed” activists against the supposedly “brutal and tyrannical” rule of Gaddafi regime.

Similarly, in Syria, those very same powers once again had the audacity to fund, train, arm and internationally legitimize the Syrian militants; how else could such peaceful and democratic protests have mutated into a full-blown armed insurrection?

And even if those protests did mutate into an armed rebellion, left to their own resources, the best such civilian protestors could have mustered was to get a few pistols, shotguns and rifles; where did they get all those machine gun-mounted pick-up trucks, rocket-propelled grenades and the US-made TOW antitank missiles?

You don’t have to be a military strategist to understand a simple fact that unarmed civilian population, and even the ragtag militant outfits, lack the wherewithal to fight against the organized and professional armed forces of a country that are equipped with artillery, armored vehicles, air force and navy.

Leaving the funding, training and arming aspects of the insurgencies aside, but especially pertaining to conferring international legitimacy to an armed insurgency, like the Afghan so-called “freedom struggle” of the Cold War, or the supposedly “moderate and democratic” Libyan and Syrian insurgencies of today, it is simply beyond the power of minor regional players and their nascent media, which has a geographically and linguistically limited audience, to cast such heavily armed and brutal insurrections in a positive light in order to internationally legitimize them; only the Western mainstream media, that has a global audience and which serves as the mouthpiece of the Western political establishments, has perfected this game of legitimizing the absurd and selling the Satans as saviors.

Notwithstanding, for the whole of the last five years of the Syrian proxy war, the focal point of the Western policy has been that “Assad must go!” But what difference would it make to the lives of the ordinary Syrians even if the regime is replaced now when the civil war has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, created millions of refugees, displaced half of the population and reduced the whole country of 22 million people to rubble? I do concede that Libya and Syria were not democratic states under Gaddafi and Assad, respectively; however, both of those countries were at least functioning states.

Gaddafi was ousted from power in September 2011; five years later, Tripoli is ruled by the Misrata militia, Benghazi is under the control of Khalifa Haftar, who is nothing more than the stooge of Egypt and UAE, and the heavily armed militants are having a field day all over Libya. It will now take decades, not years, to restore even a semblance of stability in Libya and Syria; remember that the proxy war in Afghanistan was originally fought in the ‘80s and today, 35 years later, Afghanistan is still in the midst of perpetual anarchy, lawlessness and an unrelenting Taliban insurgency.

If we were to draw parallels between the Soviet-Afghan jihad of the ‘80s and the Syrian civil war of today, the Western powers used the training camps located in the Af-Pak border regions to train and arm the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan with the help of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.

Similarly, the training camps located in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan are being used to provide training and arms to the Syrian militants in order to battle the Syrian regime with the support of Turkish, Jordanian and Saudi intelligence agencies.

During the Afghan jihad, it is a known historical fact, that the bulk of the so-called “freedom fighters” was comprised of Pashtun Islamic jihadists, such as the factions of Jalaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf and scores of others, some of whom later coalesced together to form the Taliban movement.

Similarly, in Syria, the bulk of the so-called “moderate opposition” is comprised of Islamic jihadists, like the Islamic State, al-Nusra Front, Jaysh al-Islam, Ahrar al-Sham and myriads of other militant groups, including a small portion of defected Syrian soldiers who go by the name of the Free Syria Army (FSA.)

Moreover, apart from Pashtun Islamic jihadists, the various factions of the Northern Alliance of Tajiks and Uzbeks constituted the relatively “moderate” segment of the Afghan rebellion, though those “moderate” warlords, like Ahmad Shah Massoud and Abul Rashid Dostum, were more ethnic and tribal in their character than secular or nationalist, as such.

Similarly, the Kurds of the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces can be compared with the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan. The socialist PYD/YPG Kurds of Syria, however, had been allied with the Shi’a regime against the Sunni Arab jihadists for the first three years of the Syrian civil war, i.e. from August 2011 to August 2014.

At the behest of the American stooge in Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani, the Syrian Kurds have switched sides in the last couple of years after the United States’ policy reversal and declaration of war against one faction of the Syrian opposition, the Islamic State, when the latter overstepped its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in June 2014.

It’s very unfortunate that the haughty and myopic politicians and diplomats do not learn any lessons from history, otherwise all the telltale signs are there that Syria has become the Afghanistan of the Middle East and its repercussions on the stability of the energy-rich region and the security threat that the Syrian militants pose to the rest of the world will have far reaching consequences for many decades to come.