That said, Lieutenant Colonel Ahmad Saoud, the FSA officer recently released from ISIS prison, is a now a member. “The Syrian Revolutionaries Front is designed to fight [ISIS],” he told me in an interview conducted over the weekend, at the apogee of the anti-ISIS fighting. And while Saoud considers all the brigades of the SRF to be “part of the Free Syrian Army,” he has little time for the current leadership of the Supreme Military Council: Saoud described its head, General Salim Idris, as a “bad commander.” And unlike the SMC, which has signed up for the forthcoming Geneva II peace talks with the regime, Saoud and the SRF don’t think now is any time to negotiate. “We need to destroy Assad first before going to negotiations,” he said. “There is no way for Assad to step down if he is still strong.”
What about the Islamic Front? “We are not happy with them, especially after their attack on [the Supreme Military Council’s warehouses]. But we are working now with them to destroy the regime. Okay, we aren’t getting along that much, but at the same time, we have the same goal. As long as they are good with us, we will still fight with them just to destroy the regime.”
Another new formation, the Army of the Mujahedeen, an alliance of eight brigades, represents an Aleppo-based counterpart to the SRF and indeed was responsible for hitting ISIS positions in that province during this latest spate of operations. The jihadis, it said, were “undermining the stability and security in liberated areas” by resorting to gangsterism and draconian sharia law: “We, the Army of the Mujahedeen, pledge to defend ourselves and our honor, wealth, and lands, and to fight [ISIS], which has violated the rule of God, until it announces its dissolution.” Either ISIS defects to the mainstream rebellion, they said, or it gives up its weapons to the true rebels and gets the hell out of the country.
Friday, January 3 saw the beginnings of a massive campaign by all three rebel militias against ISIS across northern Syria, with an as-yet undetermined level of inter-factional coordination and planning. By the end of the first day of anti-ISIS warfare, at least 60 fatalities were registered by the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. This military sweep coincided with an unprecedented series of anti-ISIS – and often pro-FSA – protests throughout Idlib and Aleppo, even extending into Damascus and Deraa. Many openly characterized the group as moral equivalents of the regime, if not hirelings of it. One such demonstration, in Takharim village in Idlib, was fired upon by ISIS, prompting greater anger at the jihadis. Children donned Guy Fawkes masks in defiance of the many faceless foreigners now claiming to rule Syria on their behalf. Abu Rayyan was mourned and eulogized from Binnish to Maarat al-Nouman. One ISIS commander was captured by the FSA in Atareb, out of which the jihadis were said to be expelled completely — and which Assad’s Air Force then swiftly bombed, prompting more speculation among Syrians about ISIS-regime collusion. Fares, unbowed by the attack on his colleagues days prior, released his newest contribution to guerrilla art: the creature from Aliens (the regime) with a smaller version bursting through its chest (ISIS).
By Saturday, January 4, following an FSA-issued 24 hour-deadline for ISIS to capitulate and quit Syria, 200 jihadis were rounded up, and around 30 people in Idlib, both civilians and rebels, were summarily executed by ISIS, which had also resorted to car bombings and the shelling of rebel-held territories. At minimum, 38 ISIS fighters had also been killed by this point, according to the Syrian Observatory. As a further sign of the jihadi organization’s waning fortunes, it issued a desperate communique with three demands of its own. The first was that all road blockades in cities and villages intended to hamper the movement of ISIS fighters be listed; the second was that no such fighter be detained or insulted or harmed; the third was that all ISIS detainees and muhajireen from any other groups be released immediately. Failing the satisfaction of these three demands, also within 24 hours, ISIS would issue a general order to withdraw from all the front-lines facing the regime — the clear implication being that it would return the territory to Assad. (Here again, if ISIS was looking to dispel accusations of being handmaid of the regime, it did a piss-poor job.)
On Sunday, January 5, the Islamic Front redoubled its anti-ISIS sentiment, claiming that it had been “push[ed]” to battle and that while its charter was initially welcoming of foreign fighters offering assistance in the struggle against Assad, “we will not accept any group that claims to be a state” — itself an attack on a foundational and non-negotiable ISIS tenet. Sunday also saw the internecine warfare spread to Hama and Raqqa provinces, with media reports of ISIS’s being “routed” from Syria. Atareb was taken by the rebels, and the black flag of ISIS replaced with the Free Syrian flag. One activist for the Sham News Network in Raqqa claimed that rebels had “liberat[ed] more than 80% of the Idlib countryside and 65% of Aleppo and its countryside.” “[T]he presence of the State of Baghdadi is finished,” said another activist, referring to ISIS commander Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The battle for Raqqa began on Monday, January 6, marking a serious turning point in the anti-ISIS campaign because it was the rival and “official” al-Qaeda franchise in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra that took the lead of battling the rogue Zarqawist al-Qaeda affiliate in this, the only province ever to be completely taken from the regime. ISIS was largely expelled from Raqqa city in a stunning volte-face for a group that had ruled the province as a totalitarian emirate-in-the-making without much confrontation by rival factions for the past several months. Jabhat al-Nusra led the charge against ISIS headquarters in Raqqa city, though Ahrar al-Sham took part in many of the Raqqa skirmishes too. Some 50 Syrian hostages of ISIS were released from the Vehicles Department building, a makeshift prison, as was one of many foreign journalists held captive by the group, Turkish photographer Bunyamin Aygun, who’d been taken in December. Thus did al-Qaeda free the victims of al-Qaeda, a scene either out of Monty Python or M.C. Escher. Two Raqqa churches that been burnt or confiscated by ISIS were also “liberated” by Nusra, which declared its intent to restore them for Christian use (next up: an inter-faith potluck presided over by Ayman al-Zawahiri himself). One fighter from Ahrar al-Sham told the New York Times that some ISIS members weren’t all bad boys: they’d just been deceived by their crazy masters and were now eligible for casting their lot with mainstream rebel forces. The total death toll from rebel-on-ISIS fighting as of Monday was 100. A truce brokered between ISIS, on the one hand, and al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, on the other, appeared to lower the temperature a bit in the Aleppo suburbs, as did ISIS’ withdrawal from strategic areas close to the Turkish border, including Atmeh and al-Danah.
By Tuesday, after 274 people were confirmed dead as a result of this campaign (the bulk of them non-ISIS rebels), Nusra leader Abu Mohammed al-Golani, while laying the blame on ISIS, urged the formation of independent legal councils for resolving rebel disputes to accompany the ceasefire. He also said that “detainees will be exchanged between all parties… and roads will be opened for everyone.” However, sincerity of this seeming gesture of conciliation toward ISIS was complicated by what Nusra spokesman Abu Maya told NOW: that the battle against ISIS was not yet over. “It is not solely up to the Nusra Front. The Islamic Front or even ISIS [itself] might not agree to the initiative,” Abu Maya said, passing responsibility entirely onto the other combatants, both friend and foe. And note that he did not urge or recommend that anyone accede al-Golani’s terms, leaving the possibility wide open that Nusra will continue to battle ISIS.
Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Centre in Qatar, said that Nusra’s prominence, however late in the let’s-all-get-ISIS game, should not be underestimated. “Certainly since ISIS' emergence in Syria in April and May 2013, Jabhat al-Nusra has played a more socially and politically pragmatic game, while ISIS has combined soft social outreach with increasingly harsh forms of penal law in conjunction with the imposition of its behavioral norms. As such, despite it being the official al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, on a generalized national level al-Nusra has made very few enemies within Syria's armed opposition on the ground and is therefore a major benefactor of this anti-ISIS fighting.”
All this of course means that the preceding events won’t change a thing in Washington, which still expects all good rebels to turn their guns not only on ISIS (killing Assadists, Hezbollah, and IRGC agents is not now, nor has it ever been, an urgent priority for the Obama administration), but also Nusra. America wants everything in exchange for nothing. And it’s not so easily impressed by homegrown Arab surges or semi-sahwas.
Whatever happens from here, though, the real casualty of the last week has been the lazy assumption that ISIS was ever unstoppable or too big to fail.
