The Jihadis Return: Isis and the New Sunni Uprising by Patrick Cockburn

Author:Patrick Cockburn
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: e9781939293602
Publisher: OR Books
Published: 2014-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

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Many mistakes have been made about Syria by both the outside world and the opposition since 2011, but perhaps the most serious was the belief that President Assad was going to go down in defeat like Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Both the rebels and their foreign backers forgot that Gaddafi was largely overthrown by the NATO air campaign. Without NATO, the rebels would not have lasted more than a few weeks. But the belief that Assad was weak only began to be treated skeptically in 2013. In 2012, foreign governments and foreign journalists were speculating what place he might choose for exile, even though he still held all fourteen Syrian provincial capitals. ISIS now controls one of them, Raqqa on the Euphrates, but the main population centers are still held by the government. A problem here for the non-jihadi opposition was that their whole strategy, insofar as they had one, was based on creating another Libya-type situation. When that failed to materialize, they had no plan B.

Though Assad—like the opposition in 2011 and 2012—may overestimate the strength of the cards he holds, the political and military terrain today looks much more positive from his point of view. The army, the pro-Assad militias, and allies like Hezbollah are extending their grip on Damascus, on the Qalamoun Mountains along the Lebanese border, and in Homs City and province. They are, however, achieving these gains very slowly, which betrays the government’s shortage of effective combat troops and its need to avoid casualties. The overweight draftees manning checkpoints do not look as if they want to fight anybody. Rather than taking over rebel-held areas, the government simply bombards them so that the civilian population is forced to flee and those who remain are either families of fighters or those too poor to find anywhere else to live. Electricity and water is then cut off and a siege is mounted. In Adra on the northern outskirts of Damascus in early 2014, I witnessed JAN forces storm a housing complex by advancing through a drainage pipe which came out behind government lines, where they proceeded to kill Alawites and Christians. The government did not counterattack but simply continued its siege.

There are many local ceasefires in these areas which are not far from being surrenders. I was in one district called Barzeh where the FSA fighters kept their weapons, and where a rebel commander told me “we were expecting them to release 350 prisoners from Barzeh but all we have got so far is three dead bodies.” He asked me, rather despairingly, if I knew anybody in Syrian military intelligence who might know what had happened to them.

The political landscape of Syria is much more variegated than it looks from the outside. For instance, in February 2014 in a town called Nabq on the Damascus-Homs road, which had just been recaptured, government forces organized a victory celebration guarded by their militia, the National Defence Force (NDF). However, local people told me that the rebels, who

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