Even Jabhat al-Nusra’s presence close to the Jordanian and Israeli borders is less of a threat, according to Feras. The jihadists are fewer and they are more “pragmatic,” if only out of necessity, than their Al-Qaeda confreres in Idlib, Aleppo, and Raqqa.
Feras’s assessment of the relative strength of moderates in the south tracks with recent Israeli intelligence findings. According to Ehud Yaari, the Lafer International Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Peace, Israel has also found that rebel groups stretching from the “Golan frontier up to Mount Druze in the east, and between the southern suburbs of Damascus and the city of Deraa” have been recognized by the Israeli military and intelligence services as “a potentially effective barrier to a takeover by Al-Qaeda disciples.”
More intriguingly, Yaari writes, Israel has also been quietly assuming a larger role in coordinating with these rebels: “What began as a purely humanitarian step – extending emergency medical aid to injured and sick Syrians from neighboring villages – has now reportedly expanded into a well-developed mechanism for providing a whole range of items, from medications to food, fuel, clothes, heaters and more. One should assume that the same understandings which allowed over 600 wounded Syrians to be evacuated for treated in Israeli hospitals – including a special military field hospital on the Golan – are facilitating other forms of assistance as well.” [Italics added.]
The Israel Defense Forces, while refraining from direct intervention on Syrian soil, has unfailingly waged tit-for-tat attacks against regime targets whenever Assadist forces fire artillery that lands on or near the Israeli-controlled side of the Golan border fence. This has provided the southern rebels with a de facto rear buffer, which at the very least creates a tactical complement to the not-so-secretive “operations room” run in Amman in which the CIA, Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate, and Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Presidency coordinate Syrian rebel activity. But Yaari’s coy insinuation that Israel might now also be helping the rebels at the military level (intelligence coordination? gun-running?), motivated solely by a national security imperative to keep the Golan secure and Al-Qaeda-free, merits further scrutiny. Such a turn of events would not be so terribly surprising given what other regional ironies the Syria crisis has furnished.
The timing of these disclosures also coincides with another seemingly coordinated telegraphing by the Obama administration. Last week, U.S. Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham (both Republicans) told three separate reporters aboard a plane headed back to Washington from the Munich Security Conference that Secretary of State John Kerry believes that U.S. policy on Syria has failed. “[Kerry] acknowledged that the chemical weapons [plan] is being slow-rolled, the Russians continue to supply arms, we are at a point now where are going to have to change our strategy,” Graham told the Daily Beast’s Josh Rogin. “He openly talked about supporting [and] arming the rebels. He openly talked about forming a coalition against Al-Qaeda because it’s a direct threat.” State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki of course denied the substance of Kerry’s remarks, as did two Democratic senators who were privy to the same briefing and professed themselves absolutely shocked – shocked – that McCain and Graham gibbered to the press.
However, it hardly seems likely that the Republican interventionists were mistaken in their relay of Kerry’s comments or that their interviews with prominent journalists were really unexpected. For one thing, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has himself testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee that the U.S.-Russian chemical disarmament deal, the implementation of which has recently slowed to a near-halt, only empowered Assad and that around 26,000 extremists were now active in Syria, many with the intention to eventually strike at the American homeland. Furthermore, McCain and Graham were the same two lawmakers who were personally briefed by President Obama in the lead-up to possible airstrikes on the regime back in August, following Assad’s deployment of chemical weapons in Ghouta. They were then essentially seconded to articulate to the U.S. media what the White House wanted the world to believe was its hawkish Syria policy – which policy in reality turned out to be the very dud deal with Vladimir Putin that has now plunked Kerry in the awkward circumstance of confessing his second thoughts to former senate colleagues. But one should not expect Kerry’s nervousness, assuming it was indeed intended for wider consumption, to lead to a genuine about-face in his boss’ fundamentally intransigent “strategy.” At best, what we’re now witnessing is a minor tactical shift.
As ever, the Obama administration views Syria’s rebels as handmaids for advancing an uninterrupted policy of negotiation and reconciliation with the Assad regime – a regime that cannot even allow humanitarian aid into Homs, or civilians out, without the commission of further grievous war crimes. The rebels’ new guns are meant only to again test the fantasy that Assad can be talked out of power. Need I even spell out the rest? If the rebels perform too well, if they steal too many sophisticated weapons from Syrian army caches, or if they ever demonstrate a credible threat of advancing on the “state institutions” which the White House has repeatedly said it wishes to see remain intact – the very military and intelligence services guilty of torturing, raping, and killing people on an industrial scale – then you can rest assured that these late-arriving and still-insufficient Kalashnikovs and Chinese anti-tank missiles will once again become rescinded luxuries.
