The New Middle East (62 page)

The Nusra Front have seen their support grow because they are better, more experienced, more disciplined fighters than those that loosely form the FSA. While many Syrians felt intense disillusion with the West over its failure to act in their country the way it acted in Libya, by contrast the Nusra Front do not want to see Western intervention, because their aim, like Al-Qaeda in Iraq’s, is a fundamentalist Islamic state in Syria. In July 2012 the Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu-Bakr al Baghdadi was saying that the Syrian state should be wiped off the map. He called for ‘applying the
sharia
, uniting the
ummah
[Islamic community] by demolishing the borders implemented by the Sykes–Picot [agreement], eradicating filthy nationalism and hated patriotism, and bringing back the Islamic state, the state that does not recognize artificial boundaries and does not believe in any nationality other than Islam’.
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The following April he claimed his group and the Nusra Front had come together as the ‘Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant’.
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Al-Qaeda in Iraq made a mess of its game plan by attacking minorities and fellow Sunni Muslims with unspeakable brutality. When you are in a fight to the death you will often take all the help you can get but even the Nusra front balked at being too closely associated with its Iraqi brethren. Syria’s jihadists responded by saying they would follow al-Zawahari but distanced themselves politely from the damaged goods, even by al-Qaeda standards, of the extremists in Iraq.
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However having to publically declare an allegiance to al-Qaeda central, just to keep the even more hard-line group in Iraq at arm’s length, was an own goal for the violent jihadists. There was no ambiguity anymore about their purpose in Syria and that undermined the support they had at that stage won from the local population for their more restrained actions on the ground. It also added to the fears of the country’s religious minorities. The new wing of this violent extremist franchise had been trying to get it right, second time around, in Syria. But, even without having to show their true colours, in the long run they are unlikely to succeed because just like the other Arab revolutions, Syria’s was not led from the mosque.

That means that not every young fighter you saw shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ to the TV cameras was an Islamic fundamentalist, though they were often clumsily portrayed that way in some of the Western media. Christian soldiers invoke the Almighty before they go into battle, so what is odd about young Muslim men doing the same? But what was clear to the young activist from Homs, Omar Shakir, was that the failure of the Western powers to get involved and offer an alternative was accelerating this radicalisation.

I’m against those people, as are all the Syrian people who support the revolution. People in Syria, some of them pray, some of them they don’t. People don’t ask: ‘Are you Alawis, or Sunni, or Shia?’ or whatever, and we never had these jihadist people. But now because in this revolution the international community is not doing anything these people enter the country and the problem is they are affecting both sides, not just the regime. They will kill you if you defy them, if you don’t follow them. The problem is that there are so many people in Syria who want revenge. Revenge is controlling them. People are beginning to lose their minds. When I came out I had time to rest and to think. But that’s impossible inside Syria. You can’t think because of the shelling.

The prospect of Islamic extremists getting a foothold in the country finally provoked President Obama to declare under what circumstances he was ready to intervene. ‘We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people,’ he said in August 2012. ‘We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.’
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It was a stark admission of just how much else the Assad regime could get away with. His remarks were prompted after Syria’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi accidentally admitted for the first time that the regime even had them when he promised they would not be used: ‘Any chemical or biological weapons will never be used, I repeat, will never be used in the Syrian crisis, no matter what the internal developments in this crisis are,’ he had told reporters. But by the summer of 2013 the Europeans, the Israelis and finally the Americans all said there was some evidence that small amounts of chemical weapons had been used in the conflict. There were new calls from the US Senate for action to be taken. The question then became how thick Obama’s red line was, and what standard of proof would be required for a more robust intervention in the crisis. In a clear reference to the intelligence failures ahead of the Iraq invasion the White House wrote to John McCain that while ‘Our intelligence community does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin . . . Given the stakes involved, and what we have learned from our own recent experience, intelligence assessments alone are not sufficient – only credible and corroborated facts that provide us with some degree of certainty will guide our decision-making.’
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Obama had boxed himself in by drawing a red line in front of a regime that didn’t know when to stop. Not taking action once it was crossed would mean undermining the authenticity of the red line he had drawn for Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Taking action against the country’s chemical weapon stockpiles though was not easy.

One of Israel’s senior military commanders told me:

It’s almost mission impossible to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons. In order to destroy them you have to control them, and that’s a long process. If something is dug into underground tunnels you might be able to block it in but if you hit some of it then you’ve put it out there [released the gas]. So it is very difficult. This doesn’t mean you can’t do anything, but you can’t be sure of dealing with all of it.

What worried Israel and the West the most was that these weapons might find their way outside the Syrian arena. The wild card was the jihadists among the opposition fighters.

Makdissi’s blunder led to criticism of him within the regime. He is a Christian and was clearly considering his position when I met him in the summer. By then his family was already in Beirut. He fled the country in December. His Damascus home was ransacked by the Shabiha and his beloved collection of Syrian art was looted. He issued a statement a few months later from an undisclosed location saying: ‘I left Syria because of the violence and polarisation that left no place for moderation and diplomacy.’ He added that division in the country had reached a ‘destructive’ level.

The longer the fighting went on the more damage was done to Syria’s fragile society. The UN’s General Robert Mood told me while in Damascus that the massacre in Qubair and two weeks before that the larger one in Houla were ‘the beginning of the sectarian aspect of the conflict’. The UN investigated both incidents, but the clean-up of any evidence in Qubair ruled out clear conclusions. Its report published the following August said that most of the people murdered in Qubair belonged to the al-Yatim family. The team found that since the uprisings had begun there had been tensions between the Sunni Muslim villagers and their Alawi neighbours in Al-Twaime. After one of the residents of Qubair had a row with his Alawite neighbour the Sunni villagers had sought protection from a handful of local FSA fighters. When the government found out, they surrounded the village, shelled it and then sent in troops and the militia. Somewhere between forty and seventy-eight people died, including women and children. The UN report found that ‘reasonable suspicion exists that unlawful killing of civilians occurred at the hands of pro-Government forces, including
Shabbiha
from neighboring villages’.
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In Houla, where 108 people died, most of them women and children, the UN were more certain as to who carried out the massacre. These murders were thoroughly investigated by the UN, and ‘little evidence was collected suggesting that anyone other than Government forces and
Shabbiha
committed the killings’.
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It was the first big sectarian atrocity of the conflict. There was lots of talk at the time that it might mark a turning point in the conflict by provoking international intervention or stir diplomatic solution. It did not. ‘I kept thinking we’ve hit the bottom, then we went deeper,’ said a Syrian woman I met in Damascus the following year. ‘Now I’m worried where the bottom will be.’ The Houla massacre was the first time the outside world could see clear evidence that the government tactic of setting sect against sect was working, but Professor Haykel says that the sectarian edge to the war showed itself earlier, in Baba Amr:

Homs seems to have been a battle that was part of a strategy by the government to evacuate as many Sunnis from the city as possible so that they can create a zone so that Homs can link up to the Bekaa Valley. There’s this idea of creating a zone where you have Shiites in Lebanon connecting to Alawites along this belt west of the Orontes River all the way up through the Alawis’ heartland.

The fighters of the Free Syrian Army had been hoping to make history repeat itself by holding their positions in Homs, but greater forces were determined that it would not. ‘We are paying the price for Libya here,’ a diplomat who was then in Damascus told me. ‘It will take a while before others in the Security Council believe us again. We have shot ourselves in the foot.’ He was referring to the legacy of the ‘all necessary measures’ clause that President Obama had championed to save Benghazi.

[The Russians and the Chinese] did not believe the British, the French and the Americans would have what the Israelis call the chutzpah, to do it! The Russians have been completely hurt by this, there is [real] mistrust. I have had comments from my Russian counterpart, though he is very Soviet and doesn’t stray out of the [diplomatic] lines, he said: ‘We were betrayed’ and it’s played into the hands of the Syrians. This has gone beyond a matter of [the Russians’] interests it’s a matter of ego.

By contrast, Chinese diplomats rarely talk to their opposite numbers in the West. Beijing lets senior academics in government-controlled universities express their unvarnished views on events on its behalf. ‘We felt we were cheated,’ Zhu Weili, the director of Middle East Studies at Shanghai International University, told me:

As an expert, I feel that we have been cheated. Regarding the establishment of the no-fly zone in Libya, China abstained from the voting and allowed the resolution to pass, but the Western countries took this opportunity to launch fierce attacks there. The Western countries hoped that what happened in Libya would happen in Syria. But they know very little about Islamic sectarian policy. Syria is not Libya at all. The situation in Syria is much more complicated.

If the opposition groups collected a dollar for every time a foreign player reminded the world that ‘Syria is not Libya’ their revolution would have been self-funding. But both sides of the divide in the Security Council used that excuse to justify their position. For Russia though it was complicated. Its support for Syria dates back to the Cold War era, a period in which the US was building its alliances with the Gulf states. In the first year of the conflict it sold $1 billion worth of arms to Syria.
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In June 2012 it tried to ship refurbished Mi-25 military helicopters to Syria, causing a row with the US. Russia also has huge private investments in energy, tourism and infrastructure projects. Syria’s deep warm-water port in Tartus is a strategic asset for Moscow, which has a naval facility there. Western diplomats told me Tartus was where, by 2013, the Russians were delivering regular arms supplies for the Assad regime. But for Moscow, which has fought a brutal war against its own Islamist rebels, Assad was seen ‘not so much as “a bad dictator” but as a secular leader struggling with an uprising of Islamist barbarians’.
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So important was Syria to Russia that the Israelis tracked the movement of Russian advisers to serve as a litmus test for the regime’s stability. They watched for the moment when the Russians were ready to head for the door en masse because they assumed it meant the exit of the regime was not far behind.

However, says Professor Joshua Landis, the director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma and a Syria specialist, there was no incentive for Assad’s troops to think about suing for peace. ‘The militaries in North Africa could turn against the presidents because they knew they’d all be hired by the next guy that came along,’ he told me.

But in Syria, when Assad gets booted out and a Sunni takes over he is going to purge the entire structure from top to bottom, like they did in Iraq. So the Alawite officers are fighting not only for their jobs, but for their lives. There is no good solution. If they put down their guns and surrender they are likely to meet a very bad fate. The rebels have said they want justice and that anybody with blood on their hands is going to pay for it. And so many of them have blood on their hands, almost every Alawite family has some soldier who has got blood on his hands. They are not talking about five hundred people going to jail, they are talking about tens of thousands of people going to jail. And the more brutality this regime uses, the more people have compromised themselves.