Category Archives: Syria

Turkey, Iran help broker rare truce in Syria

Reuters reports: Syria’s warring parties declared a 48-hour ceasefire in two frontline areas on Wednesday after unprecedented mediation from Turkey and Iran, signaling a new approach by some of the main regional backers of the opposing sides.

The ceasefire halted fighting between insurgents on the one hand, and the army and its Lebanese militant Hezbollah allies on the other, in the rebel-held town of Zabadani and in a pair of Shi’ite Muslim villages in Idlib province.

The two areas are strongholds of each side under ferocious attack by the other. Sources familiar with the talks, which have been under way for weeks, said the truce could be extended to give time for ongoing negotiations aimed at evacuating civilians and combatants.

Three officials close to Damascus described the truce as a result of mediation by Turkey, which backs rebels fighting against President Bashar al-Assad, and Iran, whose support has been vital to his survival. [Continue reading…]

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Defeating ISIS in Syria is essential to prevent catastrophe

Frederic C Hof writes: Islamic State (Isis) is the catastrophic consequence of political illegitimacy in Iraq and Syria. In Iraq, the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, created a governance vacuum. With the unflagging support of Iran, he disenfranchised and alienated Sunni Arabs through narrow, partisan and utterly sectarian policies. In Syria the vacuum’s creator is Bashar al-Assad – with the enthusiastic backing of Iran, he pursues a political survival strategy of collective punishment, featuring mass homicide focused on civilians. Legitimate governance in both places may be a long way off. But keeping Isis from sinking roots in Syria is an urgent priority, which, if unmet, will enable this criminal band to sustain its combat operations in Iraq from a secure rear area where it will also menace Turkey and Jordan.

Political legitimacy – a condition in which the citizenry agrees on the rules of the political game – is a tall order for the two countries in question. Can Iraq survive as a state, even as a confederation? Is there a future for Syria within borders drawn during the colonial era? Surely a stable, peaceful and confederated Iraq is not right around the corner. And for Syria, reconstruction, reform, and reconciliation may be generational undertakings.

No doubt the process of overcoming the conditions that made large swaths of Iraq and Syria safe for Isis will be a long one. The hardships associated with this process will be borne in large measure by Syrians and Iraqis. Yet to admit that the struggle for political legitimacy will be extended is not to say that the battle against Isis must be a multi-year engagement. Indeed, in Syria it must not be, as this deadly combination of al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein loyalists seeks to establish itself in a country where it has no natural constituency. [Continue reading…]

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New diplomacy seen on U.S.-Russian efforts to end Syrian civil war

The New York Times reports: With President Bashar al-Assad of Syria facing battlefield setbacks, diplomats from Russia, the United States and several Middle Eastern powers are engaged in a burst of diplomatic activity, trying to head off a deeper collapse of the country that could further strengthen the militant group Islamic State.

Russia, Mr. Assad’s most powerful backer, has built new ties with Saudi Arabia, a fervent opponent, and even brokered a meeting between high-ranking Saudi and Syrian intelligence officials. On Tuesday, the Saudi foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, met with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, in Moscow, wrangling over the fate of Mr. Assad.

Unusual meetings have come in quick succession. Last week, the top Russian, American and Saudi envoys held their first three-way meeting on Syria; Russian officials briefed Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem. He then met officials in Oman, whose ties to both Saudi Arabia and Iran raised the prospect of talks between those archrivals. Russia stopped blocking an international inquiry into who has used chemical weapons in Syria, a longstanding American priority. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. shelves its $500M Syrian rebel army — sees Syrian Kurds as a more reliable fighting partner

The Daily Beast reports: The Obama administration is still publicly counting on a $500 million rebel army to beat ISIS in Syria. But privately, the Pentagon brass long ago moved past its own proxy force, The Daily Beast has learned. They’ve found another group to fight the self-proclaimed Islamic State instead.

In recent weeks, the handful of fighters in the administration-backed rebel army — the so-called “New Syrian Force” — have been killed, kidnapped, or fallen off the proverbial radar. But the Pentagon maintained a brave face, even after these 54 fighters (out of what was supposed to be a total of 15,000) were decimated by Islamist attacks. “We continue to see volunteers want to be a part of this program,” Air Force Colonel Pat Ryder, a Defense Department spokesman, told reporters Friday.

It’s a public stance that has left many in the administration and in the defense establishment scratching their heads.

“I don’t understand why we are still training, other than to inoculate criticism. … [The administration] cannot admit it is a complete disaster,” said one senior defense adviser familiar with the U.S. approach. Even after the U.S.-trained fighters vanished, “there was no receptivity to new ideas.”

But what Ryder didn’t say is that, in the eyes of the administration, a better force had emerged — already trained, competent, organized — that posed little risk of abandoning the fight or worse yet, switching sides. They are the Syrian Kurdish militia — the Popular Protection Units or YPG, by their Kurdish initials. And they have successfully wrestled Syrian territory out of ISIS’s hands.

“We knew it would be a challenge but we didn’t expect them to confront the fight they did,” said a second senior defense official, referring to the New Syrian Force. On the other hand, “the YPG is the most effective fighting force in Syria.”

According to one group, the YPG has so far reclaimed at least 11 villages from ISIS, including in the Syrian city of Kobani, one of the biggest victories in the year-long campaign. And in June, the YPG regained control of the Syrian border town of Tal Abyad, cutting off a key ISIS conduit to weapons and supplies. Like the New Syrian Force, the YPG can call in coalition airstrikes as needed.

Along with hoping nascent Arab fighters can take on ISIS, the U.S. is now keen to work alongside as many as 50,000 proven Kurdish fighters. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS takes aim at its toughest foes

Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan write: For more than two years, one region in Syria—the south—has managed to push back the so-called Islamic State’s incessant attacks and meticulous planning. But that situation might be quietly changing with the recent capture al-Qaryatain. It’s a town in Homs province that is roughly equidistant from the ancient city of Palmyra, which the terror army took in late May, and Damascus. Most of the estimated 40,000 inhabitants, many of them internally displaced persons from other areas of Syria, fled. Another 230 — including 30 Assyrian Christians — have been reportedly captured. Hundreds of Assyrian families have also fled the neighboring town of Sadad in fear.

The failure of ISIS to establish a presence in southern Syria has been largely thanks to the preemptive action taken by groups operating in that region. Elsewhere in the war-ravaged country, rival rebels have succumbed to ISIS by ignoring the group’s characteristic method of divide and conquer: by deploying sleeper cells which infiltrate opposition-held areas and cultivate locals such that towns and villages go over to ISIS well in advance of any military blitzkrieg. The “civil war within a civil war” that has categorized the latter-half of the Syrian conflict has been won and lost on the basis of counterintelligence. ISIS has proved more adept when it comes to both dispatching spies and informants and weeding them out. Many rebels have proved disastrously ill-equipped — or simply too corrupt — to forestall ISIS’s creeping takeovers of their territory. At least this has been the case in northern Syria.

In the south, anti-ISIS forces have proved more vigilant. [Continue reading…]

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Russia, Saudis fail in talks to agree on fate of Syria’s Assad

Reuters reports: Russia and Saudi Arabia failed in talks on Tuesday to overcome their differences on the fate of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a central dispute in Syria’s civil war that shows no sign of abating despite renewed diplomacy.

Russia is pushing for a coalition to fight Islamic State insurgents — who have seized swathes of northern and eastern Syria — that would involve Assad, a longtime ally of Moscow. But, speaking after talks in Moscow, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir reiterated Riyadh’s stance that Assad must go.

“A key reason behind the emergence of Islamic State was the actions of Assad who directed his arms at his nation, not Islamic State,” Jubeir told a news conference after talks with Russia’s Sergei Lavrov.

“Assad is part of the problem, not part of the solution to the Syrian crisis… There is no place for Assad in the future of Syria,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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Tehran may be planning a foreign policy reversal

Hassan Hassan writes: In many ways, Iran’s behaviour in the region over the past five years has been an exception to its usual rule. The narrow sectarian politicking that has shaped much of its foreign policy since 2011 has given it a deeper foothold in its western neighbourhood. But that has also limited its influence in other areas and may well undercut the full potential of its regional standing.

The question is: will the nuclear deal lead to a shift in Iranian foreign policy towards the pre-2011 model?

For decades, Tehran was able to build influence and alliances in the region beyond the sectarian prism. Some of those alliances were often counterintuitive, such as the close ties with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood in general. Other examples include the deep links with Syria’s religious establishments in Damascus and Aleppo, and so-called leftists and ­anti-imperialists throughout the region. More importantly, the brief alliance in 2006 with Qatar to rival the regional bloc led by Saudi Arabia provided Iran with huge strategic potential.

That legacy led Iran to boldly embrace the Arab uprisings in 2011. It labelled them as Islamic awakenings akin to its 1979 Islamic revolution, and it promptly reached out to the burgeoning forces of change. The uprisings presented a rare opportunity for Iran to enter the region after a decade of resistance by many of the Arab world’s traditional regimes.

Had it had its way, Tehran would have spread its arms across the region much deeper and wider. But it did not – for two reasons. The first one was the conscious decisions it has taken in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain and Yemen. It helped Bashar Al Assad in the military campaign to tackle the political crisis facing his regime and stepped up its military and political support for Shia groups in the wider region.

The second reason for Tehran’s sectarian drift was largely imposed on it. The situation in which its proxies have found themselves, from Yemen to Lebanon, caused Iran to back them at any cost. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey is waging a two-front war. Some worry it’s only making things worse

The New York Times reports: The Turkish deal with the United States sets up an “ISIS-free” bombardment zone along a 60-mile strip of the border region [of Syria] that features another exclusion: At Turkey’s request, it is also explicitly a zone free of the Kurdish militia, even though the Kurds had begun advancing toward the area to start battling the Islamic State there.

Despite cooperating with American forces for months, the Syrian Kurds are now starting to worry that their success might not outweigh Turkey’s importance to the United States.

“There is only one group that has consistently and effectively battled ISIS in Syria, and that is the Y.P.G.,” said Redur Khalil, a spokesman for the militia who says it has grown to include 35,000 soldiers, about 11 years after its start as a self-defense force in a single town. “Opening another front in the region — as Turkey has by attacking the P.K.K. — will make the forces fighting ISIS weaker,” Mr. Khalil said. “Which in turn makes ISIS stronger.”

Cale Salih, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and the author of numerous articles on Kurdish affairs, summed up the unease over the deal with Turkey this way: “If it comes at the price of the relationship with one of the few effective partners on the ground in Syria, it doesn’t seem to make sense.” [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: Turkey’s decision to move against the Kurds is likely to do more to destabilize the region, some analysts say.

The police dragnet has fostered resentment against authorities in places such as Suruc, where Kurdish families have relatives living on both sides of the border. The United States has looked the other way as Turkey has hit the PKK in Iraq. The U.S. silence on the Turkish operations may hurt its burgeoning alliance with the YPG, whose fighters have proved to be the most effective ground force battling the Islamic State.

“It’s not smart for Turkey to do this,” Aaron Stein, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, said of Turkey’s twin military campaigns.

“Opening a two-front air war against insurgents you can’t defeat by air power alone is not smart strategically,” he said. Indeed, the U.S. military says it has launched more than 5,600 strikes on the Islamic State since last August, but the raids have not dislodged the group from its major strongholds. [Continue reading…]

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Al Qaeda in Syria leaves area where Turkey seeks buffer

Reuters reports: The al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front says it has quit frontline positions against Islamic State north of Aleppo and ceded them to other rebels, leaving an area of northern Syria where Turkey wants to set up a buffer zone.

A Nusra Front statement dated Sunday criticized a Turkish-U.S. plan to drive Islamic State from the Syrian-Turkish border area, saying the aim was to serve “Turkey’s national security” rather than the fight against President Bashar al-Assad.

The United States and Turkey last month announced their intention to drive Islamic State from a strip of territory in northern Syria near the Turkish border in a campaign that would provide air cover for Syrian rebels in the area.

Though Nusra is an enemy of Islamic State, its foothold in northern Syria has been a problem for the U.S.-led campaign against the ultra-hardline group. Late last month, Nusra attacked Syrian rebels trained as part of the U.S.-led campaign against Islamic State, calling them agents of U.S. interests. [Continue reading…]

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As rifts open up in Syria’s al-Qaeda franchise, secrets spill out

Aron Lund writes: In July, the al-Qaeda branch known as the Nusra Front expelled one of its founding members a man known as Saleh al-Hamawi. As described in Friday’s post, another founding member of the group, Abu Maria al-Qahtani, has reportedly been sidelined and stripped of power.

With the Syrian jihadis’ internal debates increasingly spilling online, one recent social media posting has revealed new details about the Nusra Front’s mysterious leader, Abu Mohammad al-Golani, and the self-proclaimed Islamic State’s “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Hudheifa Azzam is the son of the legendary Palestinian Islamist ideologue Abdullah Azzam. The elder Azzam is often regarded as the founder of the modern jihadi movement, although it is not obvious he would have liked the direction it later took. Differences between Azzam and his junior associate in 1980s Afghanistan and Pakistan, a Saudi by the name of Osama bin Laden, were already apparent at the time of Azzam’s mysterious death in 1989.

As a young man, Azzam’s son Hudheifa worked with his father in support of the Afghan resistance against the Soviet Union, and he remained active on the jihadi scene. Recently, he left Jordan to settle in northern Syria, where he has presented himself as an independent scholar. He seems to work closely with Syrian Islamist hardliners like Ahrar al-Sham, but he is a strong opponent of the Islamic State and has been critical of the Nusra Front and al-Qaeda as well.

Like many other independent Islamist figures in Syria, Hudheifa Azzam has found Twitter to be an excellent means of broadcasting his opinions. On July 21, he fired off a series of tweets targeted at the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The information in these tweets was vouched for by two Nusra Front dissidents, Saleh al-Hamawi and Abu Maria al-Qahtani, who were to varying degrees involved in the events he describes.

In short, Azzam’s story is as follows, with the addition of a great deal of context for clarity. Whether you think his information is to be trusted or not is up to you. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian president’s cousin fatally shoots top air force official in road rage incident

AFP reports: A cousin of Syria’s president has shot dead a senior air force officer in a road rage incident in the Latakia coastal heartland of their minority Alawite community, according to a monitoring group.

Suleiman al-Assad, a first cousin once removed of Bashar al-Assad, killed Colonel Hassan al-Sheikh “because he overtook him at a crossroads” Thursday evening, said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Assad “followed him, swerved the car around, got out and shot him dead”, said Abdel Rahman, whose group has contacts across war-torn Syria. [Continue reading…]

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The Nusra Front’s internal purges

Aron Lund writes: On July 15, the Syrian al-Qaeda franchise known as the Nusra Front issued a statement explaining that it had expelled a former leader from the group. The man, a Syrian known as Saleh al-Hamawi, was among the Nusra Front’s founding members. A combination of personal and ideological tensions seem to have led to his marginalization and, finally, to his expulsion.

The Nusra Front is emerging from a two-year-old internal crisis. It remains trapped in a lethal four-front battle against the forces of President Bashar al-Assad, the extremist al-Qaeda splinter group known as the Islamic State, rival Syrian rebel factions, and the United States and its antiterrorist coalition, which initiated air strikes against the Nusra Front in September 2014.

As the group struggles to define its identity, other senior Nusra Front figures may well face the same fate as Saleh al-Hamawi. [Continue reading…]

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U.S.-backed Syrian rebels refuse to fight ​Nusra Front after kidnappings

The Guardian reports: A group of Syrian rebels that includes fighters trained by the United States have declared their refusal to fight al-Qaida’s affiliate in the country, the Nusra Front, following a series of kidnappings by the militant group.

A source in Division 30, which has endured a campaign of kidnappings by the Nusra Front, said they also oppose the American airstrikes carried out in the last few days against the al-Qaida-linked fighters.

The statements complicate the American strategy in Syria, which has suffered a string of setbacks and delays, deploying just over 50 fighters dedicated to fighting the terror group Islamic State in the year since its programme to train and equip rebels began. [Continue reading…]

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Grim expert assessments of Syria’s peace process

Aron Lund writes: On July 29, the United Nations special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, stood before the UN Security Council to explain his strategy for peace in Syria. The Swedish-Italian diplomat took office in July 2014, following the resignation of his predecessor, Lakhdar Brahimi, who had attempted to reconcile Syria’s warring parties at a high-stakes peace conference known as Geneva II. Held in two rounds in January and February 2014, these talks failed to produce any results.

Pessimistic about the chances for a countrywide peace deal, de Mistura first tried to negotiate a local ceasefire in the Aleppo area. It failed, for many of the same reasons that Geneva II had failed: lukewarm international support, attempts by President Bashar al-Assad’s government to water down and exploit the deal, and outright hostility from armed rebels who were, in any case, too divided to effectively enforce a ceasefire. In spring 2015, de Mistura gave up on the Aleppo plan, at least for the time being. Acting on instructions from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, he instead launched a series of consultative talks with the parties in April 2015, to prepare for a reboot of the peace process.

Meanwhile, the tide of the conflict turned. Assad had enjoyed battlefield success for much of 2014, but by March 2015, his hollowed-out economy and understaffed army began to buckle. The Iranian nuclear deal concluded on June 14, 2015, seemed set to strengthen one of Assad’s key allies. Several opposition conferences have taken place inside and outside of Syria during the year, some of them backed by the Syrian president’s other major ally, Russia, and many have speculated that these meetings are linked to “Geneva III,” as de Mistura’s efforts were inevitably dubbed.

Although de Mistura was reportedly pressured by some countries in the Security Council to convene another conference on the Brahimi model, he finally opted for a more cautious approach. Saying that he does not see any real chance for a peaceful political transition in Syria at this time, de Mistura declared on July 29 that he will try to engage the parties in a less contentious negotiating format, aiming to limit human suffering, identify areas of shared interest, and formulate common principles. If successful, these talks could pave the way for negotiations over core issues in the future. For now, four working groups will be set up to discuss “safety and protection for all, political and constitutional issues, military and security issues, and public institutions, reconstruction and development,” in the words of one news report.

How will de Mistura’s project affect Syria’s future and what is in store for the country in 2015? To answer these questions, I have asked a group of leading Syria specialists to explain how they rate chances of the UN peace bid and how they view Syria’s future more generally. I’m sad but not surprised to see the level of pessimism that prevails. [Continue reading…]

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Barrel bombs, not ISIS, are the greatest threat to Syrians

Kenneth Roth writes: As the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS, commits horrendous videotaped executions, it might seem to pose the greatest threat to Syrian civilians. In fact, that ignoble distinction belongs to the barrel bombs being dropped by the military of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. The Islamic State has distracted us from this deadly reality.

Barrel bombs are improvised weapons: oil drums or similar canisters filled with explosives and metal fragments. They are dropped without guidance from helicopters hovering just above antiaircraft range, typically hitting the ground with huge explosions and the widespread diffusion of deadly shrapnel. They pulverize neighborhoods, destroy entire buildings and leave broad strips of death and destruction.

The Syrian military has dropped barrel bombs, sometimes dozens in one day, on opposition-held neighborhoods in Aleppo, Idlib, Dara’a and other cities and towns. They have pulverized markets, schools, hospitals and countless residences. Syrians have described to me the sheer terror of waiting the 30 seconds or so for the barrel bomb to tumble to earth from a helicopter hovering overhead, not knowing until near the very end where its deadly point of impact will be. [Continue reading…]

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Syria approaching de facto partition amid Assad military setbacks

The Guardian reports: The growing anarchy and stalemate in Syria has brought the country closer to de facto partition, as the overstretched and exhausted army of the president, Bashar al-Assad, retreats in the face of a war of attrition that has sapped its manpower.

The regime’s military has sought to retain a footprint in far-flung areas of the country, from Deir Ezzor in Syria’s eastern desert to Aleppo in the north and Deraa in the south, attempting to consolidate its hold over state institutions and protect its officer corps by retreating in the face of overwhelming offensives and subjecting lost territory to relentless and indiscriminate aerial campaigns.

But, facing a manpower shortage as tens of thousands of young men desert, the military has had to rely largely on local militias as enforcers for the regime. It is ceding territory to rebel fighters and the terror group Islamic State in favour of regrouping in its strongholds to the west, slowly paving the way for partition. [Continue reading…]

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In further blow to training program, U.S.-backed rebels abducted in Syria

The Washington Post reports: The debut of a new U.S.-trained force in Syria suffered another setback on Tuesday when five American-backed rebels were apparently abducted by al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, the latest of several attacks on that group in the past week.

A U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss events in Syria, said it appeared that five Syrian fighters allied with the United States had been taken prisoner in the past few days by another armed group, probably Jabhat al-Nusra. Military officials said the Syrians appeared to have been abducted after they set out from their compound near the Syrian town of Azaz.

But with no U.S. troops on the ground to track the situation more closely, the official cautioned that the details of what took place remained murky. “It is a dynamic situation on the ground there,” he said.

News of the abduction comes several days after the leader of Division 30, the Syrian opposition unit from which the United States has pulled cadets for its new training program, and other members of his unit were captured by the Islamist group. At the time, U.S. officials stressed that none of those abducted had gone through recent training in Turkey. [Continue reading…]

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Highest number of Syria air strikes recorded in July

Al Jazeera reports: Syrian government has conducted nearly 7,000 air strikes during the month of July, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, making it the most intense bombing reported in one month since the beginning of the conflict in 2011.

At least 6,673 air strikes were recorded during the month of July, including 3,654 barrel bombs dropped by government helicopters on 13 out of 14 Syrian provinces, the UK-based monitoring group said in its report on Saturday.

Damascus suburbs and Idlib province were the most targeted provinces, according the Observatory, which has a network of activists on the ground.

At least 791 civilians were killed due to these air strikes, including 207 children below the age of 18. At least 3,000 others were injured while thousands were forced to flee their homes as a result. [Continue reading…]

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