Beirut: Although farfetched, the very idea that President Bashar Al Assad and his besieged regime could gain from planned Western military assaults against the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), such an outcome over the short-term is highly plausible and should not be dismissed out of hand.
While the world’s attention has been on fighting Isil in recent months, Al Assad has taken advantage of the media’s distraction by stepping up his air strikes campaign against Syrian rebels, racking up large numbers of civilian casualties. On Monday, strikes in Idlib killed 42 people, 16 of which were children. Now, ironically, with the US conducting its first air strikes against Isil in Syria, presumably informing the government beforehand, it seems that Al Assad and the US have become unlikely allies. However, was this something accidental or was it part of some concocted plan discussed behind closed doors?
As the Palestinian academic Ahmad Samih Khalidi argued a few days ago in the New York Times, a multitude of voices are calling on Washington to cooperate with Damascus and Tehran, ostensibly to defeat Isil in both countries. The logic of Khalidi’s case, backed by a similar call by Trita Parsi in the case of Iran, rests on the premise that the “enemy of my enemy is my friend,” even if most Western powers, including the US, operate under the prominent British statesman’s maxim that one “has no friends, nor permanent enemies, only interests” [Lord Parlmerston].
Khalidi asserted that “the most effective forces on the ground today — and for the foreseeable future — are decidedly non-moderate,” which essentially wrote off the Free Syrian Army (FSA), although the latter survived and, against all odds, continued to support a transition that would end Ba‘ath rule in favour of democratising institutions. What Khalidi failed to report, nevertheless, were the origins of Islamist elements that now beefed Isil, Jabhat Al Nusra and similar outfits. Equally important, he did not ask what were some of the reasons that prevented Al Assad from fighting them, instead of concentrating on the FSA.
In fact, Al Assad’s security machines filled Isil ranks from among the thousands of long-term prisoners that were tortured and broken, to do the regime’s bidding. According to several interviews broadcast in Syria’s Second Front, a documentary shown in Britain and elsewhere — it was televised on the PBS news program FRONTLINE in the US — Isil interrogators who arrested and debriefed opposition forces were Syrian Mukhabarat [Intelligence]. A further case was made that Al Assad worked with the so-called Al Qaida organisation to divide the Syrian opposition after a cache of documents — the Sinjar Records — was found in 2007 in Iraq, which described how Damascus facilitated the movement of foreign fighters into that hapless country at the height of the Iraqi insurgency. FSA documents affirmed that similar associations existed after defecting Syrian Army elements added their testimonies to the long list of proofs, which human rights organisations assembled to present to the International Court of Justice in future trials of senior Syrian leaders.
One needed to also ask why Al Assad released from prison such men as Abu Mus‘ab Al Suri (Mustafa Sittmariam Nassar), Zahran Aloush, commander of the Jaysh Al Islam; Abdul Rahman Suways of the Liwa’ Al Haq; Hassan Aboud of Ahrar Al Sham; and Ahmad Essa Al Shaikh, commander of the Suqur Al Sham, all of whom were held in regime jails for long periods of time and were now part and parcel of the uprising. Was the primary reason for these releases because prisoners completed their terms or, more likely, was it to further encourage the divide-and-rule approach that the regime imposed on the opposition?
Win-win situation
Of course, Damascus perceived its tacit cooperation with Isil against the FSA as a win-win situation, because the regime’s opponents — or so it claimed — were Islamist fanatics who would conveniently eliminate each other while the Ba‘ath Party would stand as a voice of stability and an arm of security.
Except that Al Assad’s security involved dropping barrel bombs on civilians and non-combatants, using chlorine gas on heavily populated urban zones, and levelling entire neighbourhoods with artillery and air power. Although UN minions quibbled about casualty rates, in reality actual figures probably topped 200,000, not counting the hundreds of thousands of injured, and millions made refugees either at home or in neighbouring states. To now posit, as Khalidi proposed and as duplicitous politicians pretended that Washington should work with Damascus, was illustrative of short-term dilemmas that overlooked long-term catastrophes.
Al Assad cherished the portrait he drew of himself as a bulwark against Islamists throughout the region — and actually persuaded Hezbollah to follow suit — although the irony was that such an imaginary perspective was concocted by Iran. Under the circumstances, and assuming that Al Assad managed to survive — with or without Western assistance — would such an outcome be preferable to the current situation? Was an Iranian domination of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon [at least those parts that fell under Hezbollah in the multicultural but leaderless country] better than Islamists taking over in Syria and Iraq?
Other lethal means
Syria and Hezbollah, under Iranian guidance, engaged in various acts of violence that, at a minimum, were not compatible with what Arab leaders and presumably Arab populations desired. Few doubted that an Al Assad victory in Syria would result in fresh terrorist actions in Syria and Lebanon, as the regime would no longer be inhibited from razing Aleppo the way it levelled Hama in 1982. Without chemical weapons to deter foes, Damascus would rely on other lethal means to assert itself that, inevitably, would make matters worse for hapless Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians and, perhaps, Iraqis and Jordanians.
A few days ago, the newly promoted Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu celebrated the release of his countrymen from Isil’s hands in Mosul, while Turkey welcomed an estimated 130,000 Syrian Kurds fleeing the latest onslaughts in Northern Syria. Last January, however, the same Davutoglu — then merely a Foreign Minister — claimed that the Syrian regime was “in a partnership backstage,” a vaguely worded assertion that seemed intentionally couched so that it could be read to imply an explicit partnership or an implicit alignment of interests. It remained to be determined whether the Turkish Premier, along with Western powers that called for the removal of Bashar Al Assad from power starting in 2011, would now be willing to see a past strategic foe become a friendly dictator to serve their interests.
