The New York Times reports: American involvement with the rebels so far has largely been through so-called operations rooms in Jordan and Turkey staffed by intelligence officials from the United States and other countries that have provided arms to limited numbers of vetted rebels. So far, the support provided has included light arms, ammunition and antitank missiles, which have helped the groups destroy government armor but have not resulted in major rebel advances or helped control the spread of ISIS.

“The United States can probably work with them to some extent, but they haven’t been hugely effective so far, which is why the Islamic State is there in the first place,” said Mr. Lund, the Syria analyst.

The support so far has been limited, leaving many rebels feeling that the aid is prolonging the war, not helping them win. And the fluidity of battlefield alliances in Syria means that even mainline rebels often end up fighting alongside the Nusra Front, whose suicide bombers are relied on by other groups to soften up government targets.

“Even the groups that the U.S. has trained tend to show up in the same trenches as the Nusra Front eventually, because they need them and they are fighting the same battles,” Mr. Lund said.

The operations rooms — known as the Military Operations Command — also have had their influence sapped by the spread of extremists.

Ahmed Naimeh, the top Syrian official in the operations room in Jordan, was captured by rebels during a visit to Syria this year, ironically while trying to unify local rebel groups. He has not been heard from since, and many suspect that the Nusra Front killed him.

An operations room in Turkey has provided support to a number of moderate groups in northern Syria, shifting the balance of power away from the Islamists, according to a report published this week by the International Crisis Group. But this, in addition to a decline in direct support from Persian Gulf states, has not strengthened the rebels, instead causing “a weakening of overall rebel capacity to halt regime gains in Aleppo and hold ISIS at bay to the east,” the report said. [Continue reading…]

McClatchy reports: In an effort to map out the ideological spectrum of Syria’s various rebel groups, Turkish and American officials used a color-coded scheme: green for trusted friends, red for clear-cut enemies and yellow for those in the middle.

That middle section turned into a point of contention when it became clear that the Turks were willing to work with groups that were anathema to the United States, including al Qaida’s Nusra Front and the hard-line Ahrar al Sham. Turkish officials seemed to be gambling that they could build a moderate rebel force by nudging groups in the middle toward the green, friendly category.

“We said, ‘Yes, sure, OK, but a number of the groups that you’re working with, which you consider open to persuasion, we consider beyond the pale. And we will not work with them, and we’d rather you not work with them and we think they need to be blocked from transiting your borders,’ ” Francis Ricciardone, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey until last month, recalled Thursday in a media call arranged by the Atlantic Council foreign policy institute, where he’s now the director of the Middle East program.

“We ultimately had no choice but to agree to disagree,” Ricciardone said.

U.S. officials haven’t publicly acknowledged previously knowing that Turkey was providing assistance to Nusra, which the State Department designated a foreign terrorist organization in December 2012. Turkey’s Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Now the schism with Turkey, never resolved, is resurfacing in a more public way with President Barack Obama’s pledge to build a “moderate” Syrian rebel force as he wades deeper into the Middle East’s turmoil. When the United States and Muslim partners such as Turkey or Saudi Arabia clash over the very definition of “moderate,” who gets to decide the makeup of a coalition-backed rebel force? And no matter what it’s called, is Obama ready to accept the risk of backing a movement that’s widely viewed as too small, too weak and too untrustworthy to win? [Continue reading…]

The difficulty the U.S. faces in identifying which Syrian groups are fit to view as partners, is a product primarily of the ideological straightjacket inside which Washington operates.

U.S. officials who are obsessed by their own fear of being accused of unwittingly or intentionally offering support to extremists, are asking the wrong questions.

The exact political complexion of each group is of far less consequence than their proclivity to commit war crimes, level of corruption, and commitment to create an inclusive Syria. Whether a particular group can be dubbed “moderate” gives relatively little indication of how they would rank on those counts.

The fact that officials bemoan a paucity of reliable partners among the opposition groups says as much about the Obama administration’s willful neglect of the conflict as it says about the opposition.

The Washington Post reports: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s hold on power is looking less certain than his recent assertions of victory suggest, as America snubs his appeals for a partnership, Islamic State militants inflict defeats on his troops and his own Alawite constituency shows signs of growing discontent.

Far from looking invincible, the man who blamed terrorists for the rebellion against him instead is at risk of being cast as the leader under whose watch they flourished and who now can’t do anything to check — much in the way Iraqi leader Nouri al-Maliki was held to account for the fall of the city of Mosul.

The shift does not appear to have registered with Assad, who remains confident, his supporters say, that the United States and its allies will soon be forced to seek his partnership in an international coalition against terrorism.

President Obama is expected to spell out his own strategy for confronting the Islamic State in a speech Wednesday that will prioritize Iraq, seemingly deferring yet again any effort to confront the mess that Syria’s war has become and leaving Assad in place for the foreseeable future.

Neither the Islamic State militants concentrated in the north and east of Syria nor the more moderate, Western-backed rebels pose any immediate military threat to Assad’s grip on power. Iran and Russia show no signs of wavering in their support for his regime.

Yet there is also a growing recognition in Washington and allied capitals that the breathtaking militant gains require a broader approach to the underlying grievances that fueled their ascent, U.S. officials and diplomats say, refocusing attention on Assad’s role in the brutal suppression of the Sunni-dominated revolt against his rule.

In the weeks since Assad’s triumphant claim that he had prevailed over his foes after his victory in tightly controlled elections, his boasts seem more shaky and his approach may be about to backfire.

A string of humiliating defeats inflicted on the Syrian army in the northeastern province of Raqqah last month suggested that Assad, like many in the region and beyond, had underestimated the gathering strength of the former al-Qaeda affiliate. The Syrian government refrained from confronting the Islamic State throughout its year-long rise to power, which conveniently sustained the narrative that extremism was the only alternative, according to Syrians who speak regularly to members of the regime. [Continue reading…]