It was never a coincidence that Assad released many hardened Salafists and jihadists from Sednaya prison in 2011, men who have since gone on to occupy commanding positions in ISIS, Nusra, and the Islamic Front. Dr. Mohammed Habash, a Syrian cleric and former member of parliament who was sent to this prison between 2008 and 2009, told The National this week that Sednaya was a center for radicalization long before schoolchildren sprayed graffiti on the walls of Deraa. Who better, then, to send back into Syrian society during the days of a still-peaceful protest movement than the very terrorists Moallem now accuses the West of helping to destroy his country?
I rang Ruth Sherlock after her story appeared and she kindly shared with me some of the reportage that didn’t make the final cut. Among the highlights: Assef Shawkat – Assad’s brother-in-law and the regime security chief who was first poisoned, then blown up by rebels two summers ago – was the one in charge of coordinating with Al-Qaeda jihadists imprisoned at Sednaya. Also, one defector from ISIS told Sherlock that his former group is indeed infiltrated and manipulated by the mukhabarat. “I know men who were officers in the police and Syrian intelligence branches who are now in ISIS,” he said. “They grew long beards and joined. When I asked my emir I was told they had defected from the regime. But this does not make sense, because ISIS doesn’t accept defectors; they killed a friend of mine because they discovered he had been in the military as a normal soldier.”
This tracks well with what Ali Mamlouk, another top security chief (still alive), privately told a US delegation in Damascus a year before the Syrian revolution kicked off, as documented by State Department cables: “In principle, we don't attack or kill them immediately. Instead, we embed ourselves in them and only at the opportune moment do we move.”
In other words, if Assad really wanted to stop Al-Qaeda in Syria, he need only give the order. Perhaps then ISIS headquarters and training camps all throughout the north would be bombed by his Air Force, as other rebel installations have.
The above will seem shocking only to those who discovered this crisis when cars began exploding, but it’s actually pretty ho-hum to journalists and national security experts who have made a careful study of the pathological liars now expected to “improve the atmosphere for negotiations” in Switzerland. And here we come to what’s new and interesting in the Telegraph report – that Western intelligence agencies have long known about this regime-jihadist “double game,” and might have made more of it before now. Evidently, the chutzpah of seeing a leading state sponsor of terrorism reinvent itself as a leading counterterrorist for an international confab is “bare-faced hypocrisy,” as one source put it.
Yet if hypocrisy demands exposure and contradiction, why does the United States continue to play along with this prefabricated and regime-friendly counterterrorism narrative by focusing exclusively on fighting Al-Qaeda and not extirpating the root of all extremism in Syria, which still resides comfortably in the presidential palace?
Another Telegraph exclusive, this one a solo effort by Sherlock, has found that Washington has once again decided to back and at least indirectly arm the Syrian opposition – but only to fight ISIS, not its oil buyer. Saudi and Qatari intelligence and the CIA are overseeing the distribution of a bonanza of heavy weapons and cash to the Syrian Revolutionary Front and Jaysh al-Mujahedeen, two newish re-brandings of the Free Syrian Army. The former has quite a lot of Muslim Brotherhood (read: Qatari) support behind some of its constituent brigades, even though its leader, Jamal Ma’arouf, is directly sponsored by the Saudis.
What both groups have received in the last two weeks is impressive, according to my own sources: 200 tons of heavy machine guns, mortars, Red Arrow anti-tank guns, and ammunition for the lot of it, all having arrived in the last fortnight. Even more impressive is that this hardware is passing through a Syrian-Turkish border crossing controlled by the Islamic Front, which has in principle consented to see the materiel reach its designated recipients. The most extreme ideologues in the Front, those in Ahrar al-Sham, have only intermittently attacked these shipments, I’ve been told, but so long as everyone sticks to sticking it to the takfiris, the United States has promised not to turn off the Saudi spigot.
So Langley, Riyadh, and Doha are now engaged in fighting the very Al-Qaeda crazies that Moallem pretends is the whole of the Syrian opposition rather than a contractor of the Syrian Oil Ministry and marionette of the secret police.
America’s counterterrorism-only policy is made more bewildering by Obama’s own profession of non-aggravation by the presence of ISIS and Jahbat al-Nusra. As he told Remnick, who challenged his assertion that Al-Qaeda had been “decimated” after the killing of Osama Bin Laden, “The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a JV [junior varsity] team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant. I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a [B]in Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.”
Various local power struggles and disputes? This tortured basketball metaphor is another way of saying, “No big deal, somebody else’s civil war.” Even what Obama pretends to care about, he doesn’t really care about, as former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has observed of the president’s approach to Afghanistan in a much-scrutinized memoir.
Bald-faced hypocrisy seems to be an international condition. At least it explains why Moallem is waddling around Lake Geneva and not sitting in the dock.
