Syria: A Complex, Dangerous Puzzle
| published Sept. 24, 2014 |

By R. Alan Clanton
Thursday Review editor

For U.S. policy-makers and a variety of U.S. allies, the introduction of airstrikes inside war-torn Syria is a tricky balancing act. Only months ago, Syrian President Bashar al Assad was the enemy of the civilized world—a once quasi-reformer who had regrettably morphed overnight into a tyrant during the Arab Spring. Rather than work with the opposition within his fractious country, he cracked down, triggering a violent civil war which has now lasted for more than three years. Tens of thousands died, millions of civilians were displaced, and lawlessness and chaos eventually prevailed across half of the country.

Assad, by then a pariah responsible for a collateral genocide, was the enemy. But that was then, and this is now.

On Wednesday, the United States and five participating Arab nations continued intensive bombing of targets inside Syria, targets believed to be crucial to ISIS operations. Among the targets in ISIS-controlled areas: oil facilities and oil distribution assets. ISIS generates, by some estimates, millions of dollars each day from its control of the flow of oil.

ISIS burst onto the scene, wreaking havoc across the wider Middle East with its scorched-earth warfare and its inflexible radicalism. The terror group—full name the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria—emerged from the very lawlessness which Assad had wrought in two thirds of his war-torn country, and within the span of only a few short weeks its fast-moving army swept across Iraq, sending the Iraqi army into a mass retreat, sparking sectarian violence, and terrorizing the population of every town and village along the way with barbaric acts of vengeance and retribution.

ISIS’s swift advance was so breathtaking that it looked as if Iraq—a nation in which thousands of Americans died—would slip away from the tenuous democracy it had become and fragment completely. Worse, ISIS threatened the very stability of the entire Middle East and sent shudders through Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, and now Turkey.

Suddenly, there was something far worse than Assad. And against the background of other flashpoints—the Ukraine, a Cold War style Russia, Israel versus Hamas in Gaza, unresolved tensions between China and Japan, provocative moves by China in the South China Sea—the threat from ISIS quickly trumped all other fires.

International politics is sometimes triangular, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend, or so the old expression goes. Today, Assad’s government says it welcomes international military efforts to eradicate ISIS from within his country’s deeply-scarred, fractious borders. ISIS calls Syria its home, and ISIS considers Raqqa—in northern Syria along the Euphrates River—the capital of its expanding caliphate. Assad even included in his statement of support a welcome of U.S. intervention through air strikes, targeted missiles and drones. Anything, in other words, that might rid him of the most violent of the rebels operating inside Syria.

Under practically any other foreign policy circumstance, the endorsement—tacit or otherwise—of the presumptive leader of the country being bombed by U.S. warplanes would be a welcome turn of events. But in the deadly, chaotic barroom brawl that is Syria, to be on the same side as Assad is to invite a multitude of problems.

On Monday, the United States and five Arab countries initiated a massive air campaign directed against ISIS. At 8:30 p.m. EDT, a swarm of U.S. Navy and Air Force fighters, dozens of stealth bombers, destroyer-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles, and armed drone unleashed more than fifty direct attacks against ISIS positions on the ground in a dozen locations across Syria. The Arab countries participating included Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The U.S. military also sent the F-22 into its first combat operations, using the high-tech stealth fighters—capable of speeds of more than 1000 miles per hour and invisible to radar—to attack targets deep inside ISIS-controlled areas.

The U.S. also launched withering air assaults on specific buildings and structures believed to be the headquarters of a previously-obscure al Qaeda spin-off called the Khorasan Group, a terrorist enclave made up of hardened fighters from a dozen countries, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Chechnya, Iran, and Lybia. Intelligence officials believe that embedded among the Khorasan Group’s 50-plus members are highly-skilled bomb-makers, trained by notorious explosives experts in Yemen. American officials, while being non-specific, have said that this independent faction was in the advanced stages of a terror attack against the United States. Security and intelligence experts believe that Yemen-based bomb-makers may have developed a way to build bombs entirely out of non-metal components, and there is evidence to show that those bomb schematics have found their way to members of Khorasan (a group some fear may be more deadly than ISIS).

Monday’s air attacks inside Syria came after many weeks of complex debate and evolving policy regarding whether the United States, the United Kingdom, and other European or Middle Eastern nations should intervene directly in Syria. Intervention against ISIS in Syria, some foreign policy experts warned, would be a slippery slope—and a de facto violation of international law if Assad did not openly authorize such incursions. On the other hand, as many military analysts have pointed out, any long range plan to defang and degrade ISIS would require some form of direct interdiction inside Syria—the country of the terrorist army’s birth, and the area it calls home.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters that there would be no easy resolution to the battle against ISIS, and warned that trying to quantify the number of air missions, the kinds of ground forces required, or the time frame of the battle, was unproductive. Kerry stressed that the fight against ISIS would not be easily measured in weeks or months. Only a day earlier, Jordan’s King Abdullah also said that the fight could last for many months, even years.

Damascus issued a statement saying that it “stands with any international effort to fight terrorism, no matter what a group is called—whether Daesh, or Nusra Front (ISIS), or Khorasan, or something else." Syria also vowed to help with the fight against ISIS, saying that the militants represent an existential threat to both Syria and Iraq.

Many of the rebel factions inside Syria have expressed cautious support for the air attacks. Some have not. The rebel group called Harakat Hazm—a relatively moderate group in the fractious landscape of northern Syria—said that the air attacks by the United States and the other Arab nations were clear violations of Syrian sovereignty, and disruptive to the overall campaign of ousting Assad from power.

“The only party benefitting from the foreign intervention in Syria,” Harakat Hazm said in a statement released on Facebook and Twitter, “is the Assad regime, especially in the absence of a real strategy to bring it down.” Other rebel factions said that despite the amount of firepower being unleashed on ISIS and other groups, no attempt has been made by the U.S. or its partner nations to force Assad from power. Both Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group based in Lebanon, and Hamas, the anti-Israel group in Gaza, have issued condemnations of the airstrikes. Hezbollah said that military participation by the other Arab countries in the attacks was a mere ruse to mask an attempt by the U.S. “to dominate the region again.”

Assad has met recently with King Abdullah of Jordan, as well as with envoys from Iraq, in an effort to coordinate efforts against ISIS and in a show of consensus among Muslim nations.

But some of Assad’s closest supporters and allies have expressed unvarnished disapproval of the air strikes, and have scolded Assad for offering an endorsement of U.S. intervention. Iran, long a key Syrian ally, condemned the attacks. This is the same Iran which openly supports the U.S. and French air attacks in Iraq, where such intervention has helped to slow the advance of ISIS militants, who are predominantly Sunni, and in many cases violently anti Shiite. Iran supported the rise of Nouri al Maliki, a Shiite Muslim, in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Speaking to reporters in New York, outside the United Nations, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called the U.S. and Arab air attacks illegal.

Russia, another longtime ally of Syria and a frequent source of weapons and airplanes, has also loudly condemned the U.S. airstrikes as “unilateralist” and “dangerously arbitrary.” Over the years, Russia—dating back to the days of the Soviet Union—has provided hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of military hardware to Syria. And Assad, it is widely assumed, must keep that generosity in mind.

Thus, many military analysts say that the current air campaign—though certainly necessary to defang and destroy ISIS—may in fact carry a high risk of further destabilizing an already fractious and lawless region of the world. The air attacks may also have the inadvertent effect of shoring up the Assad regime.

The humanitarian dimension to the war continues to grow each day. Over the past weekend more than 135,000 civilians fled to the northernmost border of Syria and entered neighboring Turkey. All told, some 1.3 million refugees have made their way to the frontier, and roughly half may already be inside Turkey—seeking refuge from the fighting and fearful of the violence inflicted by ISIS. Kurdish fighters are caught in a desperate battle to retain control of the remaining cities and towns along the northern rim of Syria, and they have called for Kurds and other ethnic and religious minorities to join them in their fight against ISIS. ISIS units are using tanks, artillery and heavy firepower in its assaults in places like Kobani, near the border with Turkey.

In addition to the humanitarian crisis now unfolding as thousands crowd into refugee camps in Turkey, there is the problem of people trying to get into the war zone. Heeding the call of the brethren, thousands of Kurdish men are now attempting to enter Syria from the north. Their intention is to join forces with the Kurds already fighting ISIS along several fronts in Syria and Iraq. Turkish police and military, fearing a rapidly expanding war within miles of the border, are using tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets to dissuade the influx of would-be fighters.

Last week Turkey changed its mind about allowing the use of its airfields by U.S., French or British fighters in the air campaign against ISIS, but Turkey has steadfastly promised to regain control of its largely porous border with Syria and Iraq. Law enforcement officials in the U.K. and the U.S. believe that many hundreds of Europeans have travelled across the continent, then, slipped across the border into Syria or Iraq along Turkey’s poorly managed border. British intelligence experts believe that as many as 500 European citizens may now be fighting alongside ISIS units in Syria and Iraq.

On Wednesday, U.S. President Barack Obama spoke to the United Nations general assembly, asking for the world’s help in a campaign to eradicate terrorism worldwide, but stressing the specific threat from ISIS. Obama also scored something of an international victory during a meeting of the Security Council when he was able to wrest unanimous approval for a resolution calling for nations to crack down on citizens who travel abroad for the purposes of engaging in terror.


Related Thursday Review articles:

U.S. Military Strikes Inside Syria; R. Alan Clanton; Thursday Review; Sept. 23, 2014.

Turkey’s Growing Humanitarian Crisis; R. Alan Clanton; Thursday Review; Sept. 22, 2014.

The Hunt for ISIS, the Hunt for Jihadi John; R. Alan Clanton; Thursday Review; Sept. 14, 2014.