Bozen – Syria has gone quiet lately, with search lights trained on Ukraine. But this is not the only reason, as recent articles in the London Review of Books by that inveterate Middle East reporter Seymour Hersch, and by Peter Neumann, professor of security studies at King’s College London in the New York Times, have disclosed. Perhaps a more important reason for the Syrian silence is the dawning awareness on the part of the West, that if Syria is a case of a wily dictator caught in his own net, the West suffers the embarrassment of having completely underestimated the parties to this conflict, and is now caught with egg all over its face. Something better not openly talked about.
The first indication that there was something seriously amiss was Obama’s about-face in a Rose Garden speech of August 31 2013, cancelling the threatened bombing raid on Syria in the aftermath of the chemical weapons attack of August 21, which by his own recognizance involved crossing the “red line” which would trigger an American military response. Obama’s official pretext was that he had suddenly become attentive to the calls of the Pope and the international community to consult Congress and international bodies like the UN before taking action. Of course, he knew that an incursion into Syria would probably not pass the two Houses, or would take so long that the momentum would be lost and that the Congress, and not he, would take the blame.
In fact, however, the reason was a different and more sinister one. And that is that British intelligence had established definitively that the nerve gas sarin, which was the chemical weapon that killed so many people in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta on August 21, did not belong to any of the batches of sarin held in the Syrian government arsenal. Most surprising, is that establishing this fact had depended upon the cooperation of Russian military intelligence, whose operatives had recovered samples of the chemical agent from Ghouta, which they then analysed and passed it on to British military intelligence; and which MI6 passed on to the Americans under the data-exchange programme of the Chemical Weapons Convention. Due to Russian cooperation the US Defense Intelligence Agency knew definitively the composition of each batch of Soviet-manufactured chemical weapons involved in the August attack. What they did not know was which batches the Assad government currently held. Once again, surprisingly, within days of the August 21 incident, a source in the Syrian government furnished a list of the batches it held. So convincing was the evidence that the Joint Chiefs made a complete about-face, persuading the President to call off the attack on Syria, which he did in the Rose Garden speech.
In fact, this did not come completely out of the blue. Since the spring of 2013, American military intelligence had become aware that, contrary to White House statements and the claims of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Syrian government was not the only party with chemical weapons at its disposal. On 20 June, 2013, in a highly classified US Defense Intelligence Agency document prepared to brief its deputy director, David Shedd, analysts claimed that the al-Nusra Front, one of the main Jihadist factions of the rebel opposition, maintained a sarin production cell. As Seymour Hersch reports: the document went so far as to claim this as “the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort”. Furthermore, the paper drew on classified intelligence from numerous agencies to argue that “Turkey and Saudi-based chemical facilitators were attempting to obtain sarin precursors in bulk, tens of kilograms, likely for the anticipated large scale production effort in Syria.”
It has long been known that one of principal supporters of the al-Nusra Front is Turkey, and Turkey, according to the intelligence community, had its fingerprints all over the August 21 sarin attack. Desperate that the rebels were losing, Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, thought he could pull off a clever trick by backing a chemical weapons attack that would be pinned on Assad and would force Obama to make good on his “red line” threat. This was not Erdogan’s first, and not his only, miscalculation. In May 2013 he went with a Turkish delegation to Washington to persuade Obama that the red line had already been crossed and that he must act. A joint press conference on 16 May 2013 suggests he did not come away empty handed. But Seymour Hersch reports what we now know, which is that at a working dinner, attended also by Erdogan’s head of national intelligence (MIT), Hakan Fidan, known to be fiercely loyal, and a fervent supporter of the radical rebel opposition in Syria, Fidan dared to wag the finger at Obama. Such an insult to the US President provoked him to point the finger back, declaring “‘We know what you’re doing with the radicals in Syria”.
Erdogan is still playing a double game. The reason for his recent ban on YouTube is because it carried an informant’s recording of a government national security meeting, in which Fidan’s voice could be heard discussing a “false flag” operation that would give the Turkish military the pretext for an incursion into Syria by creating “a provocation”. This was going to be a trick structured along the same lines as the August 21 incident. One of the Islamist rebel factions was threatening to destroy the tomb of Suleyman Shah, the grandfather of Osman I, founder of the Ottoman Empire, on the grounds that it was idolatrous. The Erdogan administration publicly promised retaliation if they did so, but Fidan secretly saw this as the “provocation” they were looking for. When the YouTube clip went viral, Erdogan saw himself caught in a vice of his own making – the only solution was to shut down YouTube!
But Erdogan is not the only one who is too clever for his own good. Assad has also been playing a double game. Despite his father Hafez al Assad’s purge of the Moslem Brotherhood in a three-week battle in the city of Hama in February 1982, which cost many thousands of lives, Bashar, the son, soon became aware that he was fighting an Islamist tide, which he hoped he could turn to his own advantage. By funding religious institutions, creating Islamic banks and relaxing government regulations on headscarves and other public displays of piety, he signalled a more tolerant attitude to the Islamist turn. This did not extend to Jihadis, however, or the Salafist communities springing up in Syria’s deprived suburbs and in the countryside — Dara in the south, Idlib in the north, and the outskirts of Aleppo, as Peter Neumann, a Syrian expert at Kings College London, reports in the New York Times.
Following an ambush in late 1999, Bashar Al-Assad executed his own crackdown on the Salafists, in which 1.200 were arrested. Following 9/11 Assad even offered Syrian assistance for the “war on terror”, which the Bush administration warily agreed to, and Neumann reports the US “rendering ‘high-value’ Jihadist suspects to Syria until at least 2005” under the infamous “extraordinary rendition” programme.
We know from a Wiki-leaked cable that Syria claimed special credentials in dealing with terrorists, which involved overtly cooperating with them, but covertly infiltrating them, a technique it had used with spectacular success against the Moslem Brotherhood in the 1960s and 1970s. But events conspired to turn the tide again, and the US-led invasion of Iraq so outraged the Salafists that it caused Assad government to trim his sails once again. Rather than fight the Salafists it would encourage them, this time by creating a corridor into Iraq, thus killing two birds with one stone – ridding Syria of Salafists by exporting them to fight the Jihadist cause in Iraq, and thus undermining US policy. According to Assad’s biographer David Lesch, Damascus, fearing that Syria’s turn would come next after the US was done with Iraq, “wanted the Bush doctrine to fail, and it hoped that Iraq would be the first and last time it was applied. Anything it could do to ensure this outcome, short of incurring the direct military wrath of the United States, was considered fair game.”
In no time at all Syria went from being a supporter of the “war on terror” to the chief corridor for the export of Jihadis into Iraq, to the point where by 2003 Syrians were the dominant group among foreigners supporting the insurgency. Bashar Al-Assad followed the time honoured strategy of his father Hafez to the letter, encouraging Islamists, only to infiltrate and destroy them. So Bashar encouraged Abu al-Qaqaa, a Salafist cleric from Aleppo who had studied in Saudi Arabia and had thousands of followers committed to fighting the infidel governments of Israel and America, funnelling Syrian recruits to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq. But when in 2007 Bashar felt the Jihadis were escaping his control, al-Qaqaa was shot dead under mysterious circumstances, offering Assad the opportunity for a magnificent state funeral. In 2005 Assad had fathered a double game along similar lines to deal with Jihadis returning from Iraq. This time he exported them to Lebanon, “to return to the Palestinian camps near Sidon and Tripoli where they had started their journey into Iraq”, as Peter Neumann wryly notes, and stir up trouble in the land where Syria was already under indictment for the death of Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri.
Once again the forces he thought he controlled got out of hand, and enough Jahadis from Iraq returned to Syria, wreaking havoc there on an almost a monthly basis. There were further instances of double-crossings that spectacularly failed, like Assad’s policy to have security forces train prisoners from the notorious Sednaya prison outside Damascus to serve in Iraq, only to see them subsequently return to Syria. According to Wiki-leaked State Department cables, “some remained at large … others were sent to Lebanon, and a third group were re-arrested and remanded to Sednaya.” Naturally, those who went back to prison felt cheated and in July 2008 they rioted, taking prison staff and military cadets hostage and creating a stand-off that, despite the deployment of Special Forces, ended only in January 2009 with a ferocious battle that cost the lives of hundreds and that has never been mentioned in the state media.
Assad has never learned that Machiavellianism doesn’t work long term, and that the end rarely justifies the means. So his double-crossings only achieved the internationalization of Jihad, which eventually, like his father’s policy against the Moslem Brotherhood, has only succeeded in creating a viper in his own breast. By making Syria a crossing-point for experienced Jihadists channelled into Iraq from Libya, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Tunisia, Yemen and Morocco, his policy enabled foreign Jihadists to join Syrian Jihadists with connections to al-Qaida in Iraq, and with all the experience necessary to turn Syria into the next battlefront, as Neumann concludes. We can only hope that Assad’s double-crossings are something from which Egypt under al-Sissi may learn, but which for Syria, sadly, it seems too late to learn.