C.J. Chivers offers a profile of Abdulkader al-Saleh, a k a Hajji Marea, leader of the military wing of Al Tawhid, the largest antigovernment fighting group operating in and near Aleppo.

At the core of a simplistic narrative about Syria that has been popularized in Western antiwar circles is the idea that a legitimate protest movement got hijacked by foreign jihadists operating as mercenaries for Gulf states. Those who still hold this view will presumably dismiss Chivers’ account as propaganda. However, for anyone who thinks that reporters like this are able to shed more light on events in Syria than do people like George Galloway or anyone else promoting the “good terrorist, bad terrorist” meme, this profile is worth reading. It represents a political arc that has been replicated all over Syria as protesters picked up arms and the common cause of toppling the Assad regime united individuals and groups covering a broad political spectrum.

An enduring preoccupation of many observers — whether they be policymakers inside Washington or the politically engaged with no institutional affiliations — is the need to peg Syrians into ideological or sectarian groupings. Syrians such as Saleh, however, seem to have little interest in political labels. What concerns them much more is Washington’s hypocrisy: that stern warnings are issued to Damascus about the use of chemical weapons being unacceptable, while Assad’s continuing slaughter of ordinary Syrians every day with conventional weapons receives little comment.

Abdulkader al-Saleh

Men like Mr. Saleh present both a challenge and an opportunity for the West as it struggles to understand what is happening in Syria and to nurture networks that might provide stability and routes for Western influence should the government fall.

Mr. Saleh’s long-term intentions are not entirely clear. He says he is focused solely on winning the war, and promotes a tolerant pluralistic vision for the future. He is also openly aligned with Al Nusra Front, a growing Islamic militia that has been blacklisted by the United States, which accuses it of embracing terrorist tactics.

Officials in Washington are aware of Mr. Saleh, and other commanders of his standing. There is no evidence that they have connections with them, or a plan for how to develop relations in a Syria that is partly under their influence.

Mr. Saleh, wounded in battle multiple times, survived an assassination attempt in the fall, adding to his legend in the Aleppo governorate, where he is the rebels’ primary military commander.

“Was it $200,000?” he asked a peer, during a recent interview in a command post hidden in an Aleppo basement, about the bounty for his head. He seemed uninterested by the answer.

“Our concern now is only in the military side and how to fight this regime and finish this,” he said.

The son of a shopkeeper in Marea, just north of Aleppo, Mr. Saleh took an indirect route to guerrilla leader. As a young man, he served two and a half years as an army conscript, working, he said, in a chemical weapons unit.

He later joined the Dawa religious movement as a missionary. He traveled abroad, including, one of his brothers said, to Jordan, Turkey and Bangladesh, where he taught and studied Islam and invited people to hear the call to faith.

Life in Syria lured him back. His hometown lies in an agricultural belt, ringed by dark-soiled fields. Mr. Saleh opened a shop on one of Marea’s main streets, from where he imported and sold seeds. He married and started a family, which grew to include five children.

Not long after the uprising began, he joined with neighbors and relatives to organize demonstrations against what he described as the government’s repression.

When the fighting began, and rebels formed underground cells to plan ambushes, make bombs and persuade government soldiers to defect, Mr. Saleh’s standing grew. People spoke of a successful commander who was honest, organized and almost serenely calm under fire.

In many quarters his identity remained unknown. “We were secretive,” he said. “The public knew there was someone named Hajji Marea who led the demonstrations. But nobody knew who he was.”

Though he stands a little more than six feet tall, Mr. Saleh is unimposing, retaining an open face and youthful lankiness. Outsiders might not even make him for a fighter. One recent day, wearing a hoodie and moving with a loping gait, he could have passed for a graduate student.

His battlefield name, Hajji Marea, roughly translated, means “the respectable man from Marea.” [Continue reading…]

Following an Israeli strike on Syria this week, the Wall Street Journal reports: Inside Syria, rebels and members of the opposition pointed to the lack of an immediate retaliatory strike as proof that the Syrian regime is impotent against enemies even as it is quick to target its own people.

“It’s a disgrace when Israeli war planes attack Syria and your jets have no other job but to attack bakeries, mosques, universities and civilians,” Mouaz al-Khatib, head of the Western-backed Syrian opposition umbrella group known as the National Coalition, wrote Thursday on his Facebook account, addressing President Bashar al-Assad.

On Wednesday, Mr. Khatib said he was willing to start a dialogue with representatives of the Syrian regime provided it releases 160,000 opposition detainees, prompting a sharp rebuke from other members of the coalition.

Most members of the Syrian opposition consider Hezbollah and Iran accomplices in the suppression of their quest to topple Mr. Assad. On the ground Thursday, clashes raged on the outskirts of Damascus, the northern city of Aleppo and other flash points around Syria as the regime continued to use heavy artillery and aerial bombardment, according to residents and opposition activists.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi condemned the attack on Syria, calling it a blatant violation of sovereignty. Mr. Salehi’s deputy announced Tehran would give Syria a $200 million aid package that included funds to rebuild a damaged electrical plant and hospital, according to Iranian state media.

In an analysis, Fars News Agency, which is affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and is considered a mouthpiece for the group’s views, said Israel’s military strike had several goals, among them weakening Syria’s military and weapons stocks, demoralizing Syria’s army and preparing public opinion for foreign military intervention in Syria. The agency suggested that the best way to retaliate against Israel would be to better arm and fund Hezbollah in Lebanon.

There was little apparent anxiety in Israel a day after the attack. The prevailing view in Israel, as well as among many regional analysts, is that Syria and its allies currently have no stomach for an open conflict with the Jewish state.

“Syria is in a process of disintegration. It can’t afford to escalate with Israel, because Israel is capable of destroying a large part of the military in a short time, and it will make the job of the rebels easier,” said Shlomo Brom, a fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies and a former senior military planner.

“It is difficult for Hezbollah to respond in an open way,” he continued. “They are weaker. They moved from a situation in which they were adored by the Arab states, to a situation in which they are the bad guys because they are cooperating with those who are oppressing the people,” he said, referring to Hezbollah’s ties to Mr. Assad.

But Israel shouldn’t risk a strategically costly entanglement in Syria’s civil war for a tactical goal of blocking weapons transfers, cautioned Guy Bechor, head of the Middle East department at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center. He said Israel should continue to watch from the sidelines, like most foreign powers, while its enemy is embroiled in a debilitating internal conflict.

“This is not our war,” he told Israel Radio. “We’ve sat on the sidelines for two years. No one else is intervening, so why are we?”

AFP adds: There was still no official Israeli comment on Syrian claims that Israeli warplanes bombed a military site near Damascus on Wednesday or on separate reports that its aircraft struck a weapons convoy along the Syria-Lebanon border.

[Israeli] Newspapers, however, seemed to have little doubt on what had happened or the likely consequences.

“Complete restraint over the long term to Israel’s actions could be considered weakness by Hezbollah, so we should expect some form of response, even if not immediately and not necessarily a broad rocket and missile attack on Israel,” defence commentator Amos Harel wrote in the left-leaning Haaretz daily.

“The Hezbollah convoy, which according to foreign reports was attacked from the air while travelling from Syria to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, laden with explosives, will not be the last,” Nahum Barnea wrote in Yediot Aharonot.

“It would seem, from a pessimistic view, that we are on the way to a military confrontation on at least one of the two northern fronts,” he added, referring to Israel’s borders with Syria and Lebanon.

Jonathan Steele writes: The motives behind Israel’s attack on Syria on Wednesday are still as obscure as the nature of the target. But two things seem clear. It was related to Israel’s long war with Hezbollah in Lebanon rather than any desire to intervene in the fighting in Syria. Yet the attack was also a reminder that Syria’s turmoil is having dangerously unpredictable consequences across the region.

Finding a viable political solution is therefore all the more urgent. So it was good to hear that Moaz al-Khatib, who leads the Syrian National Coalition – the group of exiles who support armed intervention against the Syrian government and are backed by western and Gulf Arab states – now advocates talks with Basher al-Assad’s people. This is not the view of French, British and US leaders or most of Khatib’s Syrian colleagues, who talk vaguely of a political outcome but only mean Assad’s unilateral surrender.

Their unrealistic line was on display again on Monday, when France hosted the so-called Friends of Syria. Its analysis was gloomy. State institutions are collapsing, Islamist groups are gaining ground, more and more Syrians are dying, and there is no breakthrough in sight. “We cannot let a revolution that started as a peaceful and democratic protest degenerate into a conflict of militias,” said Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, even as he talked of more aid on the battlefield.

Several civic groups that reject the armed struggle were equally pessimistic at a meeting in Geneva. Theirs is the voice of Syria’s secular intelligentsia, who oppose foreign military intervention and favour a ceasefire and a negotiated solution on the lines that Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN/Arab League mediator, is trying to broker. Because they do not support the western line, they tend to be ignored by foreign politicians. [Continue reading…]