Tag Archives: Syrian rebels

U.S. Aid to Syrian Rebels: Last Chance or Too Late?

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By Ryan Mauro:

The aid is an attempt to build up the moderates as an alternative to the Islamists but critics question if it is too late for that.

Fighters from Tahrir al-Sham, a jihadi opposition group in Syria funded by Qatar. (Photo:© Reuters)

Fighters from Tahrir al-Sham, a jihadi opposition group in Syria funded by Qatar. (Photo:© Reuters)

After a White House announcement that it will provide military help to the Syrian rebels, the CIA will soon be delivering small arms to the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syria Army (FSA) through Turkey and Jordan. The FSA is the only one of the 12 rebel groupsthat is not Islamist (excluding one group that is an offshoot of a Kurdish terrorist group).

Is this the last chance to build up a third alternative to Assad and the Islamist rebels or is it too late?

The provision of anti-aircraft missiles has been ruled out, while the decision on anti-tank missiles has yet to be made. The strongest political force within the opposition is the Muslim Brotherhood and the strongest fighting force is the 7-10,000-strong Jabhat al-Nusra, an Al-Qaeda affiliate. Al-Nusra members have already said they willattack the West later, so the worry about arms falling into their hands is completely reasonable.

The CIA says that the Syrian rebels are more clearly divided along ideological lines now and the leadership has coalesced in recent months. Deputy National Security Advisor Benjamin Rhodes confidently said the U.S. is able to deliver arms into moderate hands because, “We have relationships today that we didn’t have six months ago.” This is a positive development, but as the Clarion Project has pointed out, “All of the rebel groups cooperate on some level and weapons are constantly captured, sold or lost in a chaotic war zone.”

According to the Washington Post, Idris and the FSA leadership “favor the creation of a democratic government, although the network includes avowedly Islamist groups.” One such group is the Syrian Liberation Front, but the Post reassures us that they are “moderate” and “pragmatic” Islamists.

Read more at The Clarion Project

 

U.S., Allies Creating Ascendency of Islamist Radicals in Syria

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SyriaFreeArmyFightersBigThe Clarion Project:

The U.S. and its allies have directly created the problem of Islamist radicals running the insurgency in Syria by providing support to them, all the while saying that they were simply supporting a domestic democratic uprising that reluctantly turned violent only after the regime turned to force.

In its report, the New York Times summed up the situation in Syria by saying, “Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.”

The report went on to explain that most of the so-called rebels, or freedom fighters, seeking to overthrow the brutal but secular Assad regime are all radical Islamists. These are the same rebels to whom the US is giving hundreds of millions of dollars in nonmilitary aid.

Senator John McCain said that the problem caused by U.S. interventionism on behalf of the Islamist insurgents in Syria is all the fault of the non-interventionists. “Everything that the non-interventionists said would happen in Syria if we intervened has happened. The jihadists are on the ascendency, there are chemical weapons being used and the massacres continue,” he said.

The lead group, al-Nusra Front, is considered a terrorist group by the U.S. and is directly affiliated with al-Qaeda, to whose leaders it has pledged loyalty. The rest are radical Islamists of various stripes who have pushed aside secular fighting forces. They have already seized the government’s oil fields. They are beginning to repress wary secular activists with Islamic courts. If they obtain control of the chemical weapons compound, there is no telling what horrors they could visit upon the Syrian people and beyond.

Another prominent group, Ahrar al-Sham, shares much of Al Nusra’s extremist ideology but is made up mostly of Syrians.

The two groups are most active in the north and east and are widely respected by other rebels for their fighting abilities and their ample arsenal, much of it given by sympathetic donors from the Gulf states.

Read more at The Clarion Project

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Libya Blowback: US Missiles intercepted in Egypt bound for Hamas-controlled Gaza

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By Patrick Poole

A stunning story out of Egypt on Friday (HT: Jonathan Schanzer at FDD) after a raid in northern Sinai uncovered a cache of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles bound for Hamas-controlled Gaza. The discovery was made in Be’r al-Hefn near Arish in an area known as a transit point for materials headed for the smuggling tunnels running from Sinai into Gaza.

The most remarkable part of the story is that the missiles were American-made, arriving from Libya according to multiple reports.

Egypt Independent reported:

The North Sinai Security Director seized  a shipment of advanced anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles at dawn on Friday.

The directorate received a tip that the missiles were being secretly stored in a repository in Be’r al-Hefn — just south of Arish, the capital of North Sinai — and would be smuggled through tunnels to the Gaza Strip, said a security source.

After informing the Interior Ministry in Cairo, two assistants to the interior minster led a large formation of police in a raid on the area. Be’r al-Hefn has often been used as an illegal storage area for explosives and weapons.

“With the help of secret informants, the police found the storage site, where they found six US-made advanced missiles inside large holes in the ground [that were waiting to be] smuggled to the Gaza Strip through tunnels,” the source said.

He said the shipment likely originated in Libya, and that the range of the rockets was 2 km.

That US-made weapons are finding their way from Libya should be of grave concern for American security officials. Presumably these are weapons provided by the Obama administration to the Libyan rebels in their fight against Gaddafi in 2011.

US weapons have also made their way to Syria via Libya with active US assistance according to reports. In October, Russia accused the US of sending Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to Syria, a claim that Defense Secretary Panetta denied.

Back in August I noted here at PJ Media the New York Times caught scrubbing one of its stories of any mention of CIA funneling arms to the Syrian rebels.

This is not the first time that US missiles have been bound for Gaza and Hamas. During Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in January 2009, Hamas attempted to use American-made Stinger missiles they had acquired against Israel’s AH-64 ‘Apache’ helicopters to no effect since the weapons system identified the Israeli aircraft as friendly.

A Maan News Agency report on yesterday’s raid noted that authorities had recovered 17 French missiles several weeks ago in the same area.

Syrian Jihadists Get Obama’s Blessing

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Rebels_24092012-450x344By Joseph Klein

President Obama chose an exclusive interview with ABC News’s Barbara Walters to announce his decision that the United States now formally recognizes the recently formed umbrella coalition of Syrian rebels who are fighting to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad. The coalition is known formally as the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. In yet another example of leading from behind, Obama’s decision follows recognition of the rebel coalition by France, Britain, Turkey, the European Union and the Gulf Cooperation Council.

“We’ve made a decision that the Syrian Opposition Coalition is now inclusive enough, is reflective and representative enough of the Syrian population that we consider them the legitimate representative of the Syrian people in opposition to the Assad regime,” Obama said.

Providing arms openly and directly to the rebels, rather than relying solely on the indirect channels set up by Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, may be next.  Obama may also give in to pressure from Turkey and establish some sort of no-fly zone over Syrian territory near the Turkish border. Although Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said this week that the relevant intelligence had “really kind of leveled off” with regard to Assad’s plans to move forward imminently with the use of chemical weapons, any intelligence assessments suggesting more aggressive preparations by Assad can be used by the Obama administration as a pretext for military intervention.

In short, it looks like the Obama administration has made a strategic decision to position itself for possible direct military intervention in the 21-month-old civil war and to gain influence during any post Assad transition by putting its money on what it thinks is the most inclusive opposition group.

The question remains, however, as to the composition of the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces that the Obama administration has recognized as “the legitimate representative” of the Syrian people. And just because we confer that mantle of legitimacy on the coalition does not make it so.

In his interview with Walters, President Obama sought to isolate extremist elements.  “Not everybody who’s participating on the ground in fighting Assad are people who we are comfortable with,” Obama said. “There are some who, I think, have adopted an extremist agenda, an anti-U.S. agenda, and we are going to make clear to distinguish between those elements.”

Shortly before Obama’s decision to officially recognize the opposition coalition became known, his administration designated a militant Syrian rebel group known as the al-Nusrah Front as an al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist organization.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland explained that “al-Nusrah has sought to portray itself as part of the legitimate Syrian opposition while it is, in fact, an attempt by [Al-Qaeda in Iraq] to hijack the struggles of the Syrian people for its own malign purposes.”

Obama is taking us deeper into some very choppy waters in a very leaky boat. He stubbornly continues his refusal to recognize the broader transnational threat posed by Islamic jihadists who use many front groups to spread their Islamist ideology by force or stealth.

Jihadists play on a global field, but are now focusing their attention on destabilizing and replacing regimes in the Middle East and Africa.  They go under many names and migrate back and forth among bases in Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Algeria, Mali and Nigeria, just to name a few locations.  Syria is their current front-line target.

According to the co-founder of the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, Dr. Jacques Beres, who treated Syrian rebels in the city of Aleppo, about half of the rebels he treated were jihadists, many of whom were foreigners.  “It’s really something strange to see. They are directly saying that they aren’t interested in Bashar Assad’s fall, but are thinking about how to take power afterward and set up an Islamic state with Sharia law to become part of the world Emirate,” Dr. Beres told Reuters.

The most cohesive ideology fueling the best armed groups, whether affiliated with the opposition coalition the Obama administration chose to recognize or remaining outside the coalition, is Islamic jihadism. At least twenty-nine different Syrian rebel groups, including fighting “brigades” and civilian committees, have reportedly pledged their allegiance to al-Nusrah. More than 100 anti-government organizations and fighting battalions are planning demonstrations under the rallying cry “we are all Jabhet al-Nusra.”

read more at Front Page

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Al-Qaeda, Islamists Seek Sharia State in Syria

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By Ryan Mauro

Syrian dictator Bashar Assad is on his way out and the best he can hope for is to create an Allawite mini-state for his loyalists. Al-Qaeda smells blood in the water and wants a piece of the pie once Assad falls. The Muslim Brotherhood, like Al-Qaeda, envisions an Islamic State of Syria. Some of the secular rebels determined to overthrow Assad are worried, warning that the Islamists are pulling the rug from under their feet.

The Assad regime began directly supporting Al-Qaeda as the U.S. invasion of Iraq neared, though the Hezbollah networks supported by Assad worked with Al-Qaeda before that. Now, Al-Qaeda in Iraq has turned its sights on its former sponsor, just as General David Petraeus predicted. One low-level Al-Qaeda operative in Iraq says, “Our big hope is to form a Syrian-Iraqi Islamic State for all Muslims, and then announce our war against Iran and Israel, and free Palestine.”

Saudi Wahhabists are recruiting and dispatching fighters to Syria and the regime is worried enough about Hamas to apparently assassinate one of its leaders. A Libyan Islamist militia leader with Al-Qaeda ties met with the Free Syria Army in November and is almost certainly responsible for the arrival of Libyan fighters afterwards. The Free Syria Army, consisting largely of army defectors, is generally regarded as a secular force but jihadists sometimes operate under its banner. For example, a video has surfaced of fighters claiming to belong to the Free Syria Army with the flag of Al-Qaeda in the background. The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers, says there are about 300 different rebel groups in Syria and as many as one-fourth may be Al-Qaeda supporters.

The biggest foreign supporters of the rebels are Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia—all three of which support Islamists. One Islamist fighter belonging to a group called the Revolutionary Shield says he and 100 of his colleagues have been getting $120 per month for three months. He believes the funding comes from the Gulf countries and is distributed by the Muslim Brotherhood. Qatar’s role is worrisome because it used its influence to help the Islamists in Libya. Secular Syrians accuse Turkey of doing the same thing, with one Kurdish leader explaining, “Turkey supports the Islamists in Syria and puts them out front.”

The opposition umbrella body called the Syrian National Council is based in Turkey and is being used by the Muslim Brotherhood to meet its stated “desire to coordinate the position of the opposition.” After the SNC was formed, it immediately sent a delegation to Qatar to meet with Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi, a senior Muslim Brotherhood cleric. Syria expert Thomas Pierret believes about half of the leaders in the SNC are Islamists and they are in charge of distributing the funds provided by the international community.

Many secularist opposition figures have left the SNC because of the Islamist influence. One, Kamal Labwani, complained to RadicalIslam.org about how the U.S. is pressuring the opposition to unite under the SNC. Another secularist, Walid al-Bunni, said, “We [secularists] became like extras.” Sherkoh Abbas of the Kurdistan National Assembly pit it bluntly: “[The SNC has] a hidden agenda to bring an Islamist, Sunni Arab nationalist regime to Syria by excluding the Kurds and other minorities.”

One of the leaders of the SNC is a prominent member of the American Muslim Brotherhood, Louay Safi.

He has worked as a top official in at least two Muslim Brotherhood fronts and was labeled an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the case against Sami al-Arian, a Brotherhood operative who served as the chief of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the U.S.

The Brotherhood allowed secularists to take the top post in the SNC in order to have an “accepted face” while controlling the body behind the scenes, as a top Brotherhood official explains here. It’s worked. The Friends of Syria, including the U.S., endorsed the SNC on April 1. Before that, on September 24, a State Department official took part in an event with an SNC representative that was organized by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a member of the American Muslim Brotherhood. For the past six months, the U.S. Institute for Peace has been meeting with 140 opposition officials in Germany with funding from the State Department. The U.S. Institute for Peace works closely with John Esposito, one of the foremost advocates of the Brotherhood and its fronts.

There are plenty of Syrian secularists that could have been embraced by the West. On September 17, the Coalition of Secular and Democratic Syrians launched in Paris. “We are all against totalitarianism in any form and that includes Islamist rule,” a spokesperson said. Its President, Randa Kassis, says that at least half of the population wants separation of mosque and state.

“The Islamist groups, which are superbly financed and equipped by the Gulf states, are ruthlessly seizing decision-making power for themselves. Syrians who are taking up arms against the dictator but not putting themselves under the jihadists’ command are being branded as unpatriotic and as heretics,” she said.

The good news is that the Free Syria Army is, by far, the most popular opposition force and it has butt heads with the SNC. One reporter writes that FSA soldiers, many of which defected from the secular regime, “do not appear to consider themselves mujahedin or otherwise fit the stereotype of Islamic extremists. Accordingly, individuals…[say] Islam does provide them with inspiration and strength but they do not fight for Islam and their goals are generally secular.”

It’s common for Free Syria Army officers to express their disdain for Al-Qaeda and Islamism. “Al-Qaeda is not welcome here and everybody knows it. Their ideology is not accepted and their help will be refused,” said one officer operating along the Turkish border. Former SNC President, Burhan Ghalioun, predicts that a free Syria will end its alliances with Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas.

There are visible Syrian secularists inside and outside the country, such as: Riad al-Assad, Riad al-Turk, Kamal Labwani, Michel Kilo, Walid al-Bunni, George Sabra, Burhan Ghalioun, Fawaz Tello, Abdulbaset Sieda, Suhair Atassi, Fayez Sara, Randa Kassis, Sherkoh Abbas, Ammar Abdulhamid, Farid Ghadry, Zuhdi Jasser  and countless secular defectors. Some of them are part of the SNC and others are not.

The demographics of Syria are often regarded as a barrier to the Islamists. About 10-13% of the population is Allawite, 10% are Christians, 10% are Kurds and 3% are Druze. These are all secular minorities. The majority Sunni population is divided between secularists and Islamists. This leads Dr. Barry Rubin to conclude that “Syria isn’t likely to see an Islamist takeover.” Others argue that the percentage of minorities is much lower than this, with the Christian population as little as 3.5%, Druze being only 1.7% and the Allawite population has been said to be as low as 6% by the Washington Post.

Read more at Front Page