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ISIS claims to have killed 1700 Iraqi
Shia air force recruits in Tikrit | 16 June 2014 |
The roots that nourish the growth of Islamic extremism, as exampled by the recent advances made by a jihadist group with the grandiose name of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [ISIS] in Mosul and Tikrit, are to be found in the struggle of late stage capitalism to keep itself afloat.
They go back a long ways and are tied to the reality that this system of robbing the many to enrich the few creates economic crisis in which nobody can buy what they are selling. This gave us our most recent economic crisis and it also gave us the Great Depression of the 1930's.
It was the industrial production and people power requirements of World War II that brought the United States and much of the world out of that great capitalist economic crisis. Since then we have lived in an economy that has required war and the resulting death of human beings to remain
"healthy." This is one reason why the communist propagandists called it
"morbid capitalism," the other is that it actually is dying.
Soon after that world war ended, the US began to slip into a new economic recession so a new reason to spin up the war machine was needed.
"The International Communist Conspiracy to take over the World" was discovered. The
"threat" of Soviet expansion had to be anticipated. The
"Cold War" became the reason for spending billions preparing for a hot one. The decade of 1960's saw one of the longest periods of
"post-war" economic expansion and millions of Vietnamese paid for it with their lives as the US fought communists leading a small faraway country to independence. The US had been financing the war even when the French were doing the dying for
"our side."
Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union and they didn't have
"communism" to kick around any more, at least not in a way that could justify billions in taxes and destructive public expenditures. Those who failed to understand the necessity of war to capitalism's survival in this late stage naïvely talked of a peace dividend. The war profiteers knew better and they knew that had better come up with a new raison d'être, but fast. After flirting with the "
War on Drugs" and finding it insufficient, they settled for the specter of Islamist extremism and the
"War of Terror." Soon Nine-Eleven gave them the PR boost they needed to turn this
"War on Terror" into a major contributor to capitalism's life support. Soon there were
60 thousand US troops in Afghanistan on a mission to get the Al Capone of the
"War on Terror." In his dreams, Osama Bin Laden couldn't fill the body bags they did.
"War on Communism" becomes "War on [Islamic] Terrorism"
Unwittingly or otherwise, the US and its NATO partners had been creating fertile ground for this new foe even as it waged the
"War on Communism." In the name of combating communism, they had long supported the suppression of democracy by autocratic rulers throughout the Middle East and North Africa [MENA], fearing that democracy might be the
"gateway drug" to something stronger. So everywhere in the region (and beyond) they worked against the real democrats, and their
"fellow travelers," the anarchists, socialists, communists and other social justice advocates. Taking this opportunity to plug my documentary film
Vietnam: American Holocaust, I offer this
example:
MARTIN SHEEN: Earlier in 1963 The U.S. supported a coup in Iraq that put the Baath Party in power. The CIA specifically supported a young 25 year old Baathist by the name of Saddam Hussein, providing him with a list of his enemies including 700 communists and democrats to be eliminated. A blood bath ensued.
CLAY CLAIBORNE: At a White House meeting to plan the overthrow of Diem, less than a month before JFK is himself murdered, Bobby Kennedy worries that Vietnam might not be so easy and wonders about the wisdom of putting someone they hardly know in charge of such an important country.
Picture from NSC meeting, voice of Robert Kennedy with sub-titles.
ROBERT KENNEDY: Could I, I may be a minority, but I just don't see that this makes any sense on the face of it. Uh, I mean , it's different from a coup in Iraq or South American country; we are so intimately involved in this, and what we're doing really is, uh, what we talked about when we were sitting around the table talking about all this kind of thing we talked about four weeks ago. We're putting the whole future of the country and really, Southeast Asia, in the hands of somebody that we don't know very well...
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| Robert Kennedy at National Security Council meeting |
And so it went. With US Presidential support, Saddam Hussein was able to establish his dictatorship in Iraq and
a later US President would
provide him with the technology to gas his own people, before yet another US President would decide it was time for him to go.
Everywhere the US could in the Middle East and North Africa and beyond, it worked to throttle the progressive forces that could have provided sounder leadership out of the malaise of the Middle East, and put or left in place, fascist or autocratic governments and, of course, clerics to console the masses.
Through NATO support for a Zionist and expansionist Israel and its brutal treatment of the Palestinian people, they have given the people of MENA a hard lesson in the reality of western values. Israel has been for them a towering monument to the hypocrisy of everything the West is selling.
Israel has also consistently thrown its weigh behind the most right-wing elements in Arab governments and the Islamists in the political sphere.
Israel helped to create Hamas in the hopes that the Islamic group would prove a more moderate counterweight to the secular nationalistic Palestinian Liberation Organization. Israel prefers an Assad victory in the present conflict in Syria. This pattern has repeated in many places and at many levels as the imperialists made alliances with fascists and right-wing religious movements against the Left.
Perhaps nowhere was this alliance more dramatic than in Afghanistan, the very home of Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda. Under President Reagan's leadership in the 1980's, the US formed an alliance with the Mujaheddin [which literally means
"people doing jihad"] against the Soviet backed secular government. They even gave the Mujaheddin the latest in US air defense equipment, which is something they have refused to do for the secular Free Syrian Army that is fighting the fascists and jihadists in Syria. They sold the project as a way to bleed the teetering Soviet Union and showed little regard for the lives lost or what they were leaving in their wake. That included the Taliban and a fertile field for the growth of Islamist terrorists organizations. Robin Cook, Foreign Secretary in the UK from 1997–2001,
wrote in the Guardian, 2005:
"[Osama] Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan."
Through their efforts they had done much to reduce the progressive movements in the region. They have displayed Western behavior that taught the people not to look in that direction for salvation, and they had created such misery that people naturally fell back on their religion, for as Karl Marx
said:
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Socialism got a bad rap because it had been perverted in the Soviet Union and China and because some fascists like to dress up as
"socialists." Qaddafi and Assad ran the most brutal and repressive regimes in the region but they called themselves
"socialists." The caricature western
"Left" didn't win any friends of the people awards by supporting pseudo
"socialist" regimes run by these fascists in Libya and Syria.
The short story is that many forces have come together in this period that encouraged many people in the Middle East and North Africa to look backwards rather than forward for solutions to their problems.
Enter Nine-Eleven
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| Syrian protesters |
Immediately after Nine-Eleven, NATO went after the monsters they helped create in Afghanistan. Presumably those most responsible for the terrorist attack were already dead, but there were billions of dollars to be made in the efforts to replace an extremist Islamic government with an extremely corrupt secular one. Afghanistan was only the opening act in a new series of attacks on Muslim countries. Soon the primary target of US vengeance came into view. It was Saddam Hussein, the very man the US had helped rise to power four decades earlier, the same one who used poison gas to kill thousands of his own citizens while the US looked on, and his oil rich country of Iraq.
The problem was, there was no al Qaeda in Iraq,
at that time. Saddam Hussein's brutal methods thwarted the development of such jihadist groups. When the second President Bush was looking for a reason to invade Iraq, Michael Maloof, who I
strongly suspect of being Sy Hersh's
"former intelligent officer" on all things Syrian, was a CIA analyst and part of a two man team tasked with making a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. He couldn't find any and its said he was eventually fired because
he couldn't stop trying. In any case, another excuse had to be found and remembering that Hussein had used poison gas to kill his own people, his alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction became the casus belli for the second Iraq War.
"We know he has WMD because we have the receipts."
Beyond setting up these general conditions, it was the US policy and conduct during the Iraq War that set the stage for the current advances by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [ISIS], which is what al Qaeda in Iraq [AQI] became. Under the Hussein regime, a Sunni elite ruled Iraq even though Shiite were the majority. This allowed the US to claim that replacing a corrupt Sunni regime with a corrupt Shiite regime was a move towards
"democracy."
To occupy and control Iraq, the imperialists fell back on first principles, exacerbate all ethnic and sectarian differences in an effort to divide and rule. First the US disbanded the Iraqi national army. Then it employed the most vicious and sectarian Shiite militia, some of them no more than CIA hired death squads, to enforce security. It also tried to suppress Shiite militias that stood for national unity and against collaboration with the occupiers like Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr. It also gave Kurds the license to largely abandon the Iraqi national enterprise.
It was in this environment of occupation that al Qaeda, a group with no past presence in Iraq, was able to take root and grow. They were aided and supported by the remnants of the Ba'athist regime in Iraq as well as the Ba'athist regime in Syria, just as the jihadists in Libya are now being funded and advised by remnants of the Qaddafi regime. No one who is familiar with this history is surprised that Mosul fell to an alliance of ISIS and former Ba'ath Party fighters or, given the harsh marginalization the Iraqi Sunni community has suffered under the Shiite dominated al-Maliki government, that this effort has enjoyed some popular support from the Sunni population.
Who's Baghdadi?
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| Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi |
The leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is considered by many the new
"Osama Bin Laden" on steroids. At the time of the US invasion of Iraq he was a lecturer of Islamic studies and an Iman at mosques in Baghdad and Falluja. He was detained by US forces 4 June 2004 and held for three years at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq. After he was released he established the
"Sunni Army" militia and joined al-Qaeda. On 13 October 2006 the group which had several names since its formation in 2004, none of which were what it was generally called in the West, Al Qaeda in Iraq [AOI] because it had
sworn loyalty to Osama Bin Laden in 2004, formally announced itself as the Dawlat al-'Iraq al-Islamiyya or
"Islamic State of Iraq" [ISI].
Among the other half dozen top leaders of the ISI were Abu Ayman al-Iraqi, an ex-intelligence officer from Saddam Hussein's air force and two other ex-officers from Saddam Hussein's army, Haji Bakr and Abu Ahmad al-Alwani. Altogether, three members of the al Arabiya News
list of the top six ISIS leaders are veterans of US detention in Iraq. Both the Shura and Military councils appear to be heavily weighted in favor of those from a military background as compared to religious.
ISI gained a fearsome reputation in the patriotic struggle against the US occupation just as this insulting and often brutal occupation was creating fertile recruiting ground for its militias. This recruitment wasn't limited to Iraq. The US war, which took more than a half-million Iraqi lives, was hated all over the globe. The US occupation of Iraq was equally despised and just the thing to draw young Muslims towards jihad.
Just as today, ISI's funding came from
"taxes" and
"tolls", from robbery, kidnapping, and ransom, looting of everything from factories to archaeological sites in captured areas,
looting grain silos, controlling grain and cotton production and so on, supplemented by private foreign contributions. Behind all the religious rhetoric about a new caliphate and serving Allah, the leaders of the ISI were building a criminal empire that would have made Al Capone jealous.
The ISI adopted a strategy of attacking prisons to free jailed members and gain new recruits from the other freed inmates. They've done this 24 times. When they did it to the notorious Abu Ghraib prison last year, they released 1,000 prisoners. They were recruiting thugs and murders to help them loot, not the devout for a religious mission. Why am I not surprised? Isn't this the first time extreme religiosity has been used to disguise nefarious purposes?
ISI was always a Sunni extremist group. Even when its focus was fighting the US occupation and its Iraqi government, it always found time for sectarian attacks on Shiite Muslims and Christians, as well as indiscriminate attacks that killed everyone. After the
"Awakening" and the
"Surge," its stranglehold on major urban areas like a Fallujah was broken but it continued to operated and build in the more backwards and rural areas. Even as the US was drawing down its forces in Iraq, the continued brutality and injustices of the incompetent Shiite government the US was leaving in its place was doing little to respond to Sunni grievances or unite the whole people.
ISI comes to Syria
Odd as it may sound, the
leadership of ISI may have seen its initial expansion into Syria as a
defensive move! After the Syrian Revolution began, the eyes of young Arabs turned to the struggle going on in Syria against the Assad regime. Colonel Hajji Bakr feared that everyone would start going to Syria to fight, leading to a collapse of their group.
Initially Baghdadi forbade anyone going to Syria and considered all who disobeyed his order to be defectors. This non-interventionist policy wasn't holding so Bakr proposed the forming of a non-Iraqi battalion to be sent to Syria. This new command would be under Syrian leadership and was to attract non-Iraqi fighters from abroad. No Iraqi officers could join. This was the beginning of Jabhat al Nusra [JAN], also know as al Nusra Front. Baghdadi sent Abu Mohammed al-Golani to Syria to run it.
The
"Front", as it became known, came to Syria with fresh but seasoned fighters and better arms than the Free Syrian Army. They enjoyed some notable battlefield successes and soon became famous worldwide, attracting jihadists from the Gulf, North Africa, Yemen, even Europe and the US. Meanwhile, back in Iraq, Baghdadi and Bakr were beginning to fear they'd created a monster that out shined them. They ordered al-Golani to announce that al Nusra was officially under the
"State of Iraq" and Baghdadi. Golani said he'd think about it. Then he sent Baghdadi a letter saying it wouldn't be in the best interest of the revolution, sorry Charlie.
Baghdadi and Bakr were furious. Then US President Obama put
al Nusra Front on the terrorist list, making Golani the most wanted man in Syria. That was the last straw. They feared al Nusra was getting off the reservation so as a test of loyalty, Baghdadi told Golani at a meeting in Turkey to conduct military operations against the FSA. The Front's Shura council unanimously rejected the orders. In a strongly worded letter Baghdadi responded by telling Golani to obey the orders or disband al-Nusra. After waiting for a reply, which never came, Baghdadi sent an envoy who Golani refused to meet.
Baghdadi was now more determined than ever to bring al Nusra Front firmly under his wing and announce the formation of a united Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [ISIS]. There was a lot of
"inside baseball" spy vs. spy stuff that went on. Baghdadi sent Iraqi commanders to meet with and entice Front commanders to join them. Some were caught by the Front and
"detained." The Iraqi emir of
"the State" traveled to Syria and summoned Golani to a meeting. Golani apologized
"for security reasons" but refused to back it up in writing once he was safely away. So Baghdadi decided to unilaterally announce the disbanding of al Nusra Front and the formation of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Al Nursa didn't disband but it did split with some going to ISIS and others staying with the JAN. A Saudi officer, called Bandar al-Shaalan recruited some of the al Nusra officers for Baghdadi.
In what may have been the opening shot of the hot war between the jihadists, Bakr suggested Baghdadi send a security detail to seize JAN's arms depots, eliminate all who resisted, and put bombs under the cars of Golani and his close associates. Sensing trouble, Golani appealed to the head of all al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to settle the dispute between the two al Qaeda franchises. Zawahiri got Yemen and Saudi jihadists involved and came to the decision that the time wasn't right for the merger, al Nusra would stand as the official al Qaeda franchise holder in Syria and ISIS was to disbanded. In an audio message aired on Al Jazeera 8 November 2013, he said:
"The Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) is to be abolished, while the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) remains functioning,"
BTW, a source that tells you ISIS stands for Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is a source that doesn't know what it is talking about. [
or in the case of Juan Cole on DN this morning, dumbing down for his audience, because he certainly knows what he is talking about ] Anyway ISIS rejected that solution with the help of certain Saudi sources that supported the
"State." Those included the Saudi religious leader Abu Bakr al-Qahtani and a mufti names Nasser al-Thaqil. The former Saudi officer Bandar Bin Shaalan became the groups representative to Saudi Arabia and the religious extremists in the Gulf that supported Baghdadi. These included Turki Benali of Bahrain who released a statement titled
"Extended Hands for Allegiance to Baghdadi" under the name of Abu Humam Bakr Bin Abdul-Aziz al-Athari. In addition to attracting donors from the region and fighters from all over the world, Shaalan became responsible for media affairs. Truly, he became the Kingdom's connection to ISIS.
With Baghdadi's refusal to abandon the Levant to al Nusra came more mediation. Zawahiri asked the head of al Qaeda in Yemen, Nasser al-Wahishi to mediate. Golani continued saying that Baghdadi's presence in Syria would destroy the revolution and Baghdadi refused to respond so this mediation failed. Then a Kuwaiti sheik named Hamed al-Ali entered the dispute on the side of Golani stressing unity and calling Baghdadi's
"State" a grave political and religious mistake. Both sides agreed to give the final word to Zawahiri but when he came down on the side of Golani, Baghdadi reject that solution and continued looking for muftis to support his position while renewing efforts to eliminate al Nusra's leadership.
The break has since solidified between the two groups and occasionally broken out in armed conflict. While they both share the al Qaeda extremism, al Nusra has a large number of Syrian fighters whereas ISIS is mainly foreign fighters. Also unlike ISIS, al Nusra actually fights the Assad forces. Because of these factors, the other forces in the Syrian opposition have sometimes been able to co-operate with Jabhat al Nusra [JAN] and include them in a united front against ISIS.
Assad and ISIS
The support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was
critical to the growth of al Qaeda in Iraq in its formative years. During the US occupation of Iraq, he gave them safe haven in Syria and
ran the rat-line for them into Iraq. Syrian security forces ran a series of safe houses leading to the Iraqi border. He also ran the main pipeline through which foreign jihadists joined the fight against US imperialism in Iraq. All throughout the US occupation, bearded young men with one way tickets and little luggage would fly into Damascus Airport to be transported across Syria by Assad's security services and delivered to al Qaeda in Iraq. For these and other reasons, there was no love lost between George Bush and Bashar al-Assad. He looked at Syria with the same contempt he had for Iran and he tried to sanction it with the same isolation.
Through this alliance, the Assad regime was able to develop intimate ties and personal connections to al Qaeda in Iraq. Ties between the jihadists and fascist regimes have a long history. Bashar's daddy, Hafez Assad,
also used the jihadists before he chopped them up. Mummar Qaddafi
funded jihad all over Africa and as far away as Asia. An alliance of jihadists and Qaddafi regime remnants is behind most of Libya's current security woos. Now we see reports of former Iraqi Baathist security officers and
Syrian security officers acting as "emirs", or commanders in ISIS.
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| In Assad's Prisons |
Among other things, these ties allowed Bashar al-Assad to know who exactly to lock up after the US started pulling out of Iraq in 2008. Suddenly, jihadists in Syria were more trouble than they were worth. Assad
welcomed the change in the White House. President-elect Obama
sent his people to Damascus a week after winning the election. Soon Assad was being brought in from the cold and signing on as a partner in the
"War on Terror," US military delegations followed the
diplomatic and
congressional ones to Damascus and Assad was making his famous water-boarding plus detention facilities available for the CIA's special rendition program. When the Arab Revolt came to Syria in early 2011, it came as a surprise. Obama's Damascus envoy John Kerry and Bashar al-Assad
were collaborating on some grandiose plans for the whole region the same week Qaddafi started shooting protesters in Benghazi.
Meanwhile, back in Iraq, the continued effects of US war damage to Iraq's infrastructure, the chauvinistic US occupation, and the sectarian Shiite government the US left in its wake, continued to ignore and antagonize the Sunni community and consequently jihadists continued to multiply. Mummar Qaddafi wasn't the only regional leader happy to see his jihadists off to fight the Americans in Iraq. Al Qaeda in Iraq grew and morphed into the Islamic State of Iraq and it continued to dispatch suicide bombers to Baghdad and other Iraqi cities with tragic regularity.
After massive peaceful protests broken out in Syria 15 March 2011, and grew in April and May, Assad knew just
what to do with the jihadists in his jails. He let them out! He needed them free, i.e.
at large, to form the terrorist groups he claimed were his real opposition. Besides, he needed the space to lock up those protesters demanding democracy!
Many of the jihadists freed by Assad, together with some Syrian state security officers, joined Baghdadi's people in Syria. This is the core group that brought jihadism to the Syrian conflict and allowed the Islamic State of Iraq to grow its pretensions to include the Levant. From his earlier collaboration with some of these same personalities, Assad knew just how to utilize this terrorist threat. He also knew how to help them recruit internationally and could
"fail" to stop their entry into Syria. He knew that if he could make it appear that the only choices for Syria's future was al Qaeda or al Assad, the West would back Assad and so would most Syrians. Assad knew it was a big risk to let those mad dogs off the leash but he was desperate. He needed the jihadist threat to grow. That wasn't difficult.
Thanks in large part to Obama's interdiction of arms to the Free Syrian Army and the other pro-democracy fighters, ISIS & JAN tended to have the best weapons, win the most victories and recruit the most fighters, and just as a decade earlier young Muslims were being drawn to Iraq and Afghanistan to fight US imperialism, now they were being drawn to Syria to aid a people seemingly otherwise abandoned by the world.
The Abandonment of the Syrian People
It was this abandonment by the world, most particularly the West, that allowed the agony of the struggle against a 40 year old dictatorship to grow to the point where jihadism could gain a foothold in Syria in the first place. In the beginning a people rose up non-violently to demand democracy. When they were repeatedly fired upon they began to exercise their right of self-defense. Ten of thousands of Syrian Arab Army
soldiers defected, the Free Syrian Army was founded and they were joined in the fight by a whole range of militias that formed up, some on a secular basis and others on a religious one, with a hold range of views, but united in the task at hand, overthrowing of the Assad dictatorship.
The foe they face holds state power and controls a modern military which for three years now he has used to murder the masses without mercy. Massive civilian deaths are central to
his military strategy. For three years the world has collaborated in watching and doing nothing to stop him while Assad has enjoyed powerful military intervention on his behalf. In addition to vetoing any effective United Nations action, Russian has provided Assad an endless supply of bombs, bullets and banknotes, as well as all manner of military hardware,
Russian military advisers and
Russian special forces to guard key installations. Iran has also provided financial aid, weapons and boots on the ground. Some say they have largely taken over the running of the Syrian state and the control of military operations. Under pressure from Iran, the Maliki government in Iraq has supported the Assad government by allowing Iran to use its facilities to resupply Assad's forces and it has encouraged sectarian Iraqi militias to join the fight on Assad's side. Iran also
"influenced" the Lebanese force Hezbollah to intervene big time and bail Assad out just when he was teetering. It is generally pointed out that Saudi Arabia and Qatar have supplied money and weapons to the rebels as though there was some sort of rough parity of outside forces but this is hardly the case because Russian, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon have supplied far more than light weapons, money and ammo.
By and large, the Syrian revolutionary forces have had to rely on their own efforts and have received little military help from other countries. The civilian population has had to endure three years of relentless aerial bombardment without a single attempt by anyone in the international community to impose a no-fly zone. The forces opposing Assad have had to rely largely on looting Assad's arsenals for their supply of weapons. They have received important financial support from other Arab governments and individuals and this has at times allowed them to pay salaries, get supplies and buy weapons abroad. They have also received weapons directly, most notably from Libya, which has also been the biggest source of foreign fighters taking up the anti-Assad cause in Syria; some being motivated by revolution, some by jihad, most probably by a little of both. The US also provided millions in humanitarian aid, said to include radios and MREs.
The lack of heavy weapons to defend against Assad's tanks and planes has been one of the biggest factors allowing this slaughter to continue and here the NATO countries, led by Obama, haven't been neutral. They have actively intervened to deny Assad's opposition the most effective weapons for these tasks. President Obama went far beyond merely refusing to provide heavy weapons to Assad's democratic opposition, he sent the CIA to southern Turkey and Jordan to
interdict any heavy weapons they might get from any source. They even kept anti-aircraft missiles the FSA had bought from the Libyans with their own money locked up in warehouses in Turkey while Assad's barrel bombs rained down on the children of Aleppo. These are the basic conditions that allowed the people's demand for democracy to turn into a festering wound in Syria, and into this mix came ISIS.
While ISIS may have waged some fearsome battles against Bashar in the beginning, they soon showed that they much preferred imposing their brutal version of Shari Law on civilians in the liberated areas to confronting the Syrian Army on the battlefield. Then as time went on, a curious relationship began to emerge. Not only did they cease to attack Assad's forces, he seemed never to attack them. The Syrian Air Force would bomb Free Syrian Army installations while leaving ones clearly marked with the black jihadist flag untouched. Other anecdotal evidence of collusion emerged. There was a Syrian Arab Army unit that defected to ISIS only to
find themselves turned back over to Assad forces. There was the siege of some Assad forces that the FSA turned over to ISIS only to watch the jihadists immediately allow them to be resupplied. Soon
open warfare was
breaking out between ISIS and the other forces in the Syrian opposition, the Free Syrian Army, the Islamic Front, even the Syrian jihadist group al-Nusra. Then we heard
stories of battles between the FSA and ISIS in which the Syrian Air Force, Assad's air force,
provided air support to the jihadists. And as if they weren't already receiving too much money from wealthy Bin Laden lovers in Qatar and the Kingdom, Bashar al-Assad started
buying millions of dollars of oil from ISIS!
ISIS should have been stopped in Raqqa
As the conflict dragged on and Assad's violence and murder increased with Western tolerance and acceptance, the blood of a growing number of Syrians provided fertile ground for the growth of jihadism. When Obama reneged on his pledge to respond to Assad's growing and continued use of chemical weapons, he showed again that Western promises were worth nothing and Western regard for Arab lives was worth even less. This failure to act on long promoted
"humanitarian" concerns greatly demoralized the democratic forces and represented a propaganda coup for those that said only fools would look to the West to find a vision of Syrian or Iraqi future. After 21 August 2013, many more fighters cast their lot with the jihadists. The fall of Mosul and Tikrit in Iraq to forces under the leadership of ISIS is blow back from Obama's failure to take action after Assad's chemical attacks.
The Syrian revolutionaries regard ISIS as a tool of the regime. Its brutal imposition of Shura law in the areas it controls, complete with beheadings and torture for religious infractions, creates precisely the image of terror and sectarian violence the regime wants for its opposition. Their terrible reputation causes Syrians to fear the revolution and foreigners to refuse it support. It has carried out assassinations and kidnappings against the Free Syrian Army and other anti-regime forces and where ISIS has been routed, it has been FSA fighters not SAA soldiers found in their jails. Why they rarely attack regime forces remains a mystery but it is easy to see why the Assad regime so rarely attacks them, by accident or design, they are doing the regime's work.
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| Clearly marked ISIS HQ in Raqqa remains unbombed |
Well funded by Shaalan's Saudi backers and free from attack by Assad's forces, ISIS was on a roll. By May 2013 they had taken over control of Raqqa and the surrounding liberated areas from the Free Syrian Army. Once they did, Assad's air force stopped bombing military targets in Raqqa. It was there, in Raqqa, that ISIS was able to establish a center. With the Syrian opposition forces tied up fighting Assad's forces and with their own forces seemingly safe from regime attacks, these foreign jihadists could grow in the safe haven they had been allowed to establish in Syria. From there they have been able to take the battle back across the border to Iraq.
In Syria, ISIS has been exposed and isolated from the revolutionary forces. A coalition of virtually everybody else, Free Syrian Army, the Islamic Front, even the official al Qaeda franchise, al Nusra Front, have been fighting it and making some gains by throwing them out of a number of places in Syria. Had the Free Syrian Army been adequately supported in its fight against ISIS in Raqqa, I don't think we would be talking about ISIS in Mosul now. In Iraq, ISIS has been able to marshal Sunni resentment against the Maliki government. They are only a few thousands but they are committed and battle-tested, this has allowed them to take the lead of a much larger Sunni revolt.
When they took Mosul, they became even stronger. They took some $480 million and a good supply of US weapons. Already they are taking some of these weapons back across the border to fight the Free Syrian Army, so one of the great ironies of this situation is that in the armed struggle between the Free Syrian Army and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, it may be ISIS that will have the best and most US weapons.
So far the Iraqi government forces have shown themselves to be inadequate to the task of defeating ISIS, in Mosul, they acted like old soldiers and just faded away. Where they have fought, they have attacked the whole Sunni population in such a way as to actually strengthen the jihadists. Maliki wages war in Sunni areas like Fallujah in much the same way Assad does in Syria, with little regard for human life or damage to civilian infrastructure.
For now, the Kurdish forces have occupied positions abandoned by the Iraqi military in Kirkuk, but are avoiding any direct conflict with ISIS. There are even rumors of an agreement between the two.
Iran has vowed support for the Shiite government in Baghdad and has already sent troops, but they bring with them no solutions. They have been one of the main promoters of sectarian strife in the region. Ditto, their puppet Maliki, although since Maliki is a puppet with two masters, the US and Iran will be meeting shortly to try to keep their strings from getting crossed.
US air power is also quite useless in this situation. A no-fly zone won't bother ISIS at all, not at all. They are desert guerrillas, they have no bases, no depots, no industrial base. The only thing Obama can do with bombs is kill a bunch of civilians and US boots on the ground are what caused these problems to begin with.
The only force that is doing it right, the only force on the ground that is actually fighting ISIS and winning is the Free Syrian Army and its allies and the best course of action for those concerned about the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham is to see that they get the arms and supplies they need to defeat both ISIS and the Assad regime and set Syria on the road to a democratic future.
Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria
