Almost ten years to the day that the United States invaded Iraq, the world has seen yet another Ba'athist dictator's statue being pulled down in yet another Arab country. Only this time, it wasn't American soldiers helping the locals make reproaching use of their footwear. It was al-Qaeda. One could do worse for symbolism in locating the schizophrenic failure that has been US policy in the modern Middle East.
Raqqa city, the provincial capital of Syria's northeastern region, was overtaken on Monday after an eight-day fight that left 65 anti-regime militants and 150 Assadist troops dead. Forty-five of the latter were evidently perforated with machine gun fire after the battle had ended by a hitherto unknown group going by the unappealing name of Ansar Caliphate Brigade. They were acting on a mutually agreed-upon order not to leave any hostages. A few were kept alive, mainly for propagandistic purposes, including the governor of Raqqa and the regional head of the Ba'ath party, who can be seen in this video looking like Bernie Madoff surrounded by a few of his investors.
The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Jabhat al-Nusra, the US-blacklisted Syrian arm of al-Qaeda in Iraq, was the vanguard force behind the sacking of Raqqa, whose smallish population of 240,000 has lately swelled to around 800,000 as internally displaced Syrians have fled there from other areas to escape violence. Ahrar al-Sham, another Salafi-Jihadist unit, was also involved in what has so far been the most successful rebel operation in the two-year anti-Assad insurgency. The regime responded, predictably, by launching air strikes on Raqqa.
The sacking of Syria's first provincial city follows another high-profile raid of the former nuclear facility at al-Kibar, where, according to IHS Jane's, "a number of fixed launchers for missiles" may have fallen to the opposition. The wrinkle here again is that al-Kibar is located in Deir Ezzor, a province to Raqqa's south, and Deir Ezzor is Jabhat al-Nusra country. Now would be a good time to recall what Osama bin Laden's recommendations were on the proper use of Scuds.
Washington, one senses, is beginning to re-evaluate its non-policy as well as its non-strategy for Syria, which had lately taken the form of attempting to ring-fence a humanitarian catastrophe and security sinkhole in the Levant in the hopes that a kind of Congo on the Mediterranean might be maintained - Congo, of course, being one of President Obama's other major foreign policy concerns. The results so far have been as one might have anticipated for a failed state that borders Iraq, Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan, and the placard makers of Kafranbel have proved abler policy intellectuals than Tom Donilon, Valerie Jarrett, and Denis McDonough.
At the weekend, 40 Syrian soldiers fled into Nineveh Province in Iraq in order to evade what Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's spokesperson Ali al-Musawi said was a Syrian insurgent attack at the Yaarubiyeh border crossing. On Monday, these soldiers were being transported back into Syria via Anbar Province, in a bus that was under the armed Iraqi military escort, when they were set upon and killed by unknown assailants at the Waleed crossing. Maliki, in comments approvingly regurgitated by the Syrian Arab News Agency, claimed that "vandalism and the use of arms will lead nowhere." In an interview with Foreign Policy magazine, Faleh al-Fayyad, Maliki's national security advisor, blamed Qatar, Turkey, and other Arab states for financing al-Qaeda in Syria, while promising that his own government harbored no real affection for Bashar al-Assad who "has hurt Iraq the same as Saddam Hussein." Yet this avowed victim-enemy of Assad has been transporting Iranian arms and Iranian personnel into Syria for months, embarrassing the White House's repeated attempts to get it to stop (Joe Biden once staked his vice presidency on predicting the pro-American tilt of Maliki).
Also left uncommented on by al-Fayyad is the fact that Iraq's 2008 amnesty law, designed to appease restive Sunnis, resulted in the release of 17,800 out of a total of 33,600 prisoners in the whole country. The US-Iraq Security Agreement, which transferred detainees from American to Iraqi custody, enabled the release of an additional 5,000. Not only are Iraqi prisons jihadist recruitment centers, staffed by notoriously corrupt guards who facilitate al-Qaeda prison breaks, but Maliki has, only this past January, released a further 300 detainees incarcerated under anti-terrorism laws in an effort to appease more Sunnis. How many of today's Syrian jihadists were yesterday's Iraqi convicts is impossible to discern. Suffice it to say that if the fabric of the Sykes-Picot Agreement is indeed unraveling, as Walid Jumblatt not long ago predicted, then it is the holy warriors of the Jazira who are tugging at the threads most assiduously.
Now enter into this forbidding matrix a newly-minted Secretary of State looking to redeem of his former foolishness about the beneficence of Damascus. At a news conference in Riyadh on Monday, John Kerry told reporters: "There is no guarantee that one weapon or another might not at some point in time fall into the wrong hands. But I will tell you this: There is a very clear ability now in the Syrian opposition to make certain that what goes to the moderate, legitimate opposition is, in fact, getting to them, and the indication is that they are increasing their pressure as a result of that."
In other words, not only has the Obama administration finally discovered who the legitimate opposition are, it has also decided improve on its largesse of walkie-talkies and night-vision goggles and to trust that its designated middle-men will start acting as reliable brokers for delivery. The US has been training rebels in Jordan since last year, allegedly in the use of anti-tank and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and in securing chemical weapons stockpiles should these need securing. Britain, which had to undergo a Syria rethink after David Cameron's visit to the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan last November, has announced that it will send bulletproof vests and armored vehicles to the kinds of Syrian fighters who don't get arrested at Heathrow Airport. Walid Saffour, the Syrian National Coalition's representative in London, openly predicted that the next and final phase in this drip-drip policymaking will be a "breakthrough that will end the restrictions of European countries" to dispatch ammunition and "quality weapons." Saffour went on to speculate that even if the European Union didn't end its formal embargo, EU countries would "quietly" change their individual policies.
