The prevalent fear remains that if Obama did consent to the running of surface-to-air missiles to the rebels, then the primary beneficiaries would be terrorists who could use such hardware to down commercial airliners in other countries. According to N.R. Jenzen-Jones, the director of Armament Research Services, an arms and munitions consultancy, the technological capability to track and disable MANPADs remotely does indeed exist: “It’s called controllable enabling, which is basically a chip-level feature that requires the missile to be enabled before it can be used. You can also password-code the device to allow it to be active for three days or whatever, the theory being that it’s not long enough for the missile to be trafficked out of a country or used against civilian aircraft.” Jenzen-Jones says he has it from an authoritative source that the US developed controllable enabling long after its mandate by US Congress as part of the 1988 Defense Appropriation Bill. The implementation lagged for years — until 9/11.
In any case, the fear of materiel in Syria being used by terrorists rather than against them strikes al-Bahra as misplaced. “The Free Syrian Army has already started fighting [the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham] and at the same time they’re fighting the regime. So they have two fronts. If the US is really serious about fighting terrorism, they should assist the FSA against ISIS. But keeping the same amount of military support as before when you have two fronts instead of one, it makes no sense.”
The “new” SMC
So let’s say Obama was inclined toward an about-face. There’s another problem he faces in any credible assistance package to the rebels at this late hours: where’s it going to go?
The Supreme Military Council, once seen as the West’s only clearinghouse for non-lethal aid distribution, is dead – or rather reconstituted with new commanders who are less familiar to Langley and thus less trusted. According to a Washington-based aid coordinator, “the US hasn't figured out yet that the old SMC is now defunct. There aren't any fighters left who answer to [former SMC chairman] Salim Idris or his men.” This temporal disconnect was well illustrated in a recent yet unreported aid fiasco, the coordinator told me. A shipment of medical supplies that Washington had dispatched into Syria in late February was earmarked for civilian hospitals and certain fighting units. The cargo was first taken through the Turkish-Syrian border crossing near Bab al-Hawa, and then stored in a warehouse nominally belonging to the SMC. The problem? That warehouse was in fact only “rented” for a few days by the former logistics officers of Idris’ team, and all the US-purchased supplies were then doled out to fighters willy-nilly. So the question now becomes whether or not the “new” SMC, headed by General Abdullah Bashir, and more formally integrated with the civilian leadership of the Syrian National Coalition, will be recognized or adopted by the United States the way its predecessor had been. An influential contingent of the SMC consists of the Saudi-backed Syrian Revolutionaries Front (SRF), with which the CIA has only begun to acquaint itself. (You can tell the spooks are getting cozier because David Ignatius recently wrote about the SRF in the Washington Post.)
On paper, at least, the reboot looks an improvement on the old version. There are four prerequisites for joining the new SMC’s command structure, I’m told. The first is that you must actually fight in Syria and command units which do (no more sitting around in Reyhanli cafes and Skyping your way through the war). The second is that you must not have any political or organized religious affiliation that would compromise your loyalty to the rebellion (here I suspect the Saudis’ not-too-subtle crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood has reached the Syrian insurgency after all). The third is that you must be a defector from the Syrian military and therefore have professional soldiering experience (Obama has repeatedly maligned the rebels as “farmers and engineers” and thus not worth arming). The fourth is that you must have a clear stance on extremism.
It’s the fourth that’s bound to be the trickiest.
On Wednesday, The Independent carried an interview with Jamal Maarouf, the leader of the SRF and a member of the new SMC. “It’s clear that I’m not fighting against Al-Qaeda,” Maarouf told the British broadsheet, referring not to the SRF’s archenemy ISIS but to Jabhat al-Nusra, the official arm of Al-Qaeda in Syria, seen to be more “pragmatic” and less draconian in its engagement with the local populace. The SRF, like every other nationalist or moderate insurgent group, has fought alongside Nusra in Yabroud, and even shared weapons with it. “This is a problem outside of Syria’s border, so it’s not our problem,” Maarouf said. “I don’t have a problem with anyone who fights against the regime inside Syria.”
Common, embarrassing and well-documented though such statements are coming from top rebel commanders, this latest intervention might not have the discernible impact on US policymaking the Independent seems to think it will. For one thing, rebels used to say the same about ISIS before they went to war with the Zarqawist footpads. For another, Maarouf told the opposite to Ignatius as recently as mid-March (the SRF had to expel both ISIS and Nusra, he said then), and Nusra’s own leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani singled out Maarouf and the SRF as "unbelievers" for their work in combating extremism.
At the more practical level, there is no denying that Nusra has been an integral component in the broader civil-war-within-a-civil-war that has raged for the past several months between the rebels and ISIS – a campaign that has coincided with the height of America’s permissiveness in allowing Gulf-bought weapons into Syria. Would such a tolerance of Nusra, then, weigh as heavily if missiles that were only carried by Western spies could be shut down from command centers in Amman or Incirlik crossed the Jordanian or Turkish borders? And does Maarouf’s suddenly laissez-faire disposition toward Al-Qaeda even matter since the chances remain slim to none that Barack Obama will authorize weapons that could actually win the war?
