Destroying a Nation: The Civil War in Syria by Nikolaos van Dam

Author:Nikolaos van Dam
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Revolutionary, N/A, Social Science, Political Process, Middle Eastern, Islamic Studies, General, Religion, Leadership, Middle East, Political Science, Politics & State, World, Terrorism, History, Islam
ISBN: 9781786722485
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2017-07-29T23:00:00+00:00

SHIFTING MILITARY ALLIANCES

During the Syrian War, military alliances or rather military ‘marriages of convenience’ shifted on various occasions, depending on what was considered to be the most advantageous or least harmful at a particular moment for the parties involved. The cooperation between the more moderate military groups and Jabhat al-Nusrah or other radical Jihadi movements has already been referred to. The groups involved had little in common ideologically speaking, but merely cooperated on certain occasions in order to survive or to be able to win. Generally, such forms of cooperation and coordination were only of a temporary nature.

The regime was on various occasions accused of cooperating with IS, or of condoning IS victories, as for instance in the historic desert city of Palmyra in May 2015.

The reality seemed to be more complicated. In the first place, Western allied airforce units might have been able to prevent the capture of Palmyra by IS, if they had attacked their highly visible military columns, exposed in the open desert on their way to the historic city. It is not really known why the Western military allies ignored such a relatively easy military target. One reason might have been that they did not want to be seen as defending the regime. Their aim was to attack and eliminate IS on their own, but not in cooperation with the regime; that was strongly rejected. After various battles, Palmyra was recaptured by the Syrian army with Russian military support.

IS was an enemy for the regime as well, but as long as IS was fighting the military opponents of the regime elsewhere in the country, it was beneficial to the regime because it could save its urgently needed military capacities for fights in other places. Once the military threat of other opposition groups was eliminated, the ‘marriage of convenience’ with IS would certainly have been over.

On other occasions the regime was accused of threatening not to defend certain towns against IS, like Salamiyah to the east of Hama, and instead condoning its occupation by IS, if the local population refused to provide enough new conscripts for the army. Salamiyah was inhabited by many Isma’ilis and was for some time considered an anti-regime bulwark. As Isma’ilis were considered to be heretics by IS, they ran the risk of being massacred if IS occupied Salamiyah.

The regime was also accused of tacitly cooperating with the YPG, the military arm of the Kurdish PYD, against other opposition forces. In reality the PYD was an enemy of the Syrian regime because of its aim of achieving an autonomous Kurdish status in northern Syria, which had always been anathema to the Ba’th regime, because it wanted a unitarian Arab state. In March 2016, the PYD declared the establishment of a federal system of government in the ‘Federation of Northern Syria – Rojava’. This initiative was strongly rejected by most other Kurdish parties and, of course, by the regime. Nevertheless, in the case of the Syrian War, the PYD was used by the regime as a military counterbalance against other military opposition groups, including IS.

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