Geopolitics is a murky game. Precisely how murky is reflected in the well-worn saying, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” What happens, though, when you subscribe to the sentiment with the faith of a religious believer? Now that the war on the Islamic State (IS) group is, ostensibly, in full swing, the US is making “friends” out of enemies, old and new. Among its new friends is Al-Qaeda. Except they are supposedly not “our” friends, but friends of our allies. Al-Qaeda and freedom fighters for Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are now working to support Al-Qaeda's official arm in Syria, Jabhat Al-Nusra, to retake Syrian territory from the regime led by Syrian President Bashir Al-Assad. The strategy led to a coalition of rebel groups, led by Al-Qaeda faction, conquering Idlib in April. The three regional powers claim they are hoping to compel Jabhat Al-Nusra to renounce its relationship with Al-Qaeda — but the reality is they are funding the Al-Qaeda affiliate without any meaningful guarantee of control. “Al-Nusra will stay with Al-Qaeda unless the other rebel forces are able to unify into one force,” said one Al-Nusra member. “[Al-Qaeda leader Ayman] Al-Zawahiri says the unification of Muslims is more important than membership in any group.” According to Rami Abdelrahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an NGO, Al-Nusra is “not so different from IS. They want to make an emirate but are looking for the right opportunity.” Publicly, the official line is that the Saudi-Qatari-Turkish strategy is not directly funding Al-Nusra, although the geopolitical coalition is aware that Al-Nusra will benefit from the support to Islamist rebel groups. Privately, a source in the Saudi royal family involved in security policy said that 90 per cent of the rebels receiving military and other aid are members of Al-Nusra and the rival jihadist group Ahrar Al-Sham, whose founding member Mohamed Bahaiah is also a senior Al-Qaeda operative. As much as 40 per cent of the rebels' requirements are supplied by the Saudis, Turks and Qatar, the remainder being self-financed. According to journalist Gareth Porter, the strategy was rubber stamped at the Camp David summit in May. The Gulf states and Turkey agreed to acquiesce to the US-Iran nuclear deal, as long as the US would guarantee containing Iranian influence in the region — part of which would involve turning a blind eye to Saudi, Qatari and Turkish support for Al-Nusra and other Sunni jihadist factions. But according to the Washington Post, the “Gulf leaders who are funding the opposition” were urged by the Obama administration to somehow “keep control of their clients, so that a post-Assad regime isn't controlled by extremists for IS or Al-Qaeda.” Like its allies, Western governments publicly disavow responsibility for the strategy, and claim to be “alarmed” at the initiative as they are firmly opposed to “arming and funding jihadist extremists.” Naïve pundits point to US bombing of Al-Nusra positions in Aleppo during the early phase of the campaign against IS. But privately, several rebel commanders leading the recent Idlib operations told the US Brookings Institute's Charles Lister “that the US-led operations room in southern Turkey, which coordinates the provision of lethal and non-lethal support to vetted opposition groups, was instrumental in facilitating their [Islamists'] involvement in the operation from early April onwards. “That operations room — along with another in Jordan, which covers Syria's south — also appears to have dramatically increased its level of assistance and provision of intelligence to vetted groups in recent weeks.” In other words, Al-Qaeda's official arm in Syria, and another group closely affiliated with Al-Qaeda, are among the “moderate” vetted groups receiving arms and aid from the Gulf states and Turkey under the supervision of US military intelligence operatives in the field. “Whereas these multinational operations rooms have previously demanded that recipients of military assistance cease direct coordination with groups like Jabhat Al-Nusra,” wrote Lister, “recent dynamics in Idlib appear to have demonstrated something different. Not only were weapons shipments increased to the so-called ‘vetted groups,' but the operations room specifically encouraged a closer cooperation with Islamists commanding frontline operations. “The most likely explanation for such a move is pressure from the newly emboldened regional alliance comprising Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The United States also is looking for ways to prove its continued alignment with its traditional Sunni Gulf allies, amid the broader context of its rapprochement with Iran.”
‘MODERATE' REBELS: But how new, really, is the support for Al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamist rebels? Not very, according to US Vice-President Joe Biden, who last year conceded that the Gulf states and Turkey “poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Al-Assad — except that the people who were being supplied were Al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.” Biden even admitted that this funding went to Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which expanded its operations in Syria under the covert anti-Al-Assad strategy before metamorphosing into IS. “Where did all of this go? All of a sudden everybody's awakened because this outfit called ISIL which was ‘Al-Qaeda in Iraq,' which when they were essentially thrown out of Iraq, found open space in territory in eastern Syria, work[ed] with Al-Nusra, who we declared a terrorist group early on,” he said. But Biden's claim that “we could not convince our colleagues to stop supplying them” conceals the fact that the CIA was directly involved in managing these rebel supply networks. In 2012, as revealed by a declassified raw intelligence report from the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), the US intelligence community was fully aware that IS-precursor “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” was at the core of the anti-Al-Assad rebel movement, supported by the “West, Gulf states and Turkey,” and that the continuation of the covert strategy would likely spawn a Salafi-jihadist “Islamic State.” Neither this grim forecast, nor the alleged US failure to “convince” its allies to cease funding Al-Qaeda, restrained US military intelligence officials from supervising the supply of arms and aid from the Gulf states and Turkey through the very same operational command centres in southern Turkey and Jordan that continue to be jointly coordinated by Western and Arab intelligence agencies to this day. Syrian rebel commanders have previously admitted that they were routinely told by their state benefactors to divert weapons to other extremist groups. Jamal Maarouf, head of the Syrian Revolutionaries Front (SRF), funded largely by Saudi Arabia, admitted that if “the people who support us [namely the US and Saudi Arabia] tell us to send weapons to another group, we send them. They asked us a month ago to send weapons to Yabroud [a city in Syria], so we sent a lot of weapons there. When they asked us to do this, we do it,” he said. Maarouf also admitted to sharing the US-led operations centre in Jordan with the Southern Front, led by Bashar Al-Zoubi, who also received deliveries of heavy weapons coordinated by the Saudis and the CIA. “The Syrian Revolutionaries Front, the Islamic Front, and Jabhat Al-Nusra, Muhajureen and Ansarn — we are all in the fighting front together against the [Al-Assad] regime,” Marouf said in a Twitter post in January 2014. But there is a basic problem here. What happens when the enemy of our enemy, deemed therefore as a “friend,” is not really an enemy of our enemy at all, but their friend and our enemy? Steve Chovanec, a Roosevelt University sociology student who runs the popular US-based blog “Reports from Underground” has collected together a range of evidence demonstrating that by last year there was no meaningful distinction between the “moderate” Free Syrian Army (FSA), Al-Qaeda and even IS. In September last year, for instance, US-backed FSA commander Bassel Idris openly declared, “We are collaborating with the Islamic State and the Al-Nusra Front.” As he said, “We have reached a point where we have to collaborate with anyone against unfairness and injustice.” Another senior Western-funded rebel commander, Col Okaidi, spoke of his admiration for both Al-Qaeda and IS. “My relationship with the brothers in ISIS [IS] is good … I communicate almost daily with brothers in ISIL … The relationship is good, even brotherly,” he said, adding, “They [Al-Nusra] did not exhibit any abnormal behaviour, which is different from that of the FSA.” Syrian fighters are reporting that despite the ideological schism between Al-Qaeda and IS, the two groups are working together in the Yarmouk Refugee Camp outside Damascus to wrest the locality from Al-Assad's control. Some reports suggest Al-Nusra may have even pledged allegiance to IS in Yarmouk. The strategic convergence is accelerating, as illustrated by the increasing number of ad hoc alliances between Al-Qaeda and IS. This June, senior Obama administration officials confirmed that US air strikes had taken out a gathering of “core Al-Qaeda and ISIS [IS] members” in eastern Libya. The gathering was the latest of a series of recent jihadist meetings, according to security officials from both of Libya's rival governments, where the two terror groups planned a joint offensive to conquer the Sirte Basin, home to 80 per cent of Libya's oil.
FRIENDS AND ENEMIES: This ambiguous nexus of shifting friend-enemy relationships is mirrored in the relationship between the US, Al-Assad and IS. US and British officials have recently pointed to growing evidence that despite the threat posed to his regime by IS, Al-Assad has been not just purchasing oil from IS strongholds in eastern Syria to keep the lights on, but is even jointly running some oil and gas installations with the terrorist movement. The US State Department has also accused Al-Assad of directly aiding IS fighters to undermine popular support for Syria's rebellion by further weakening already marginalised “moderate” forces. The strategy, which has bolstered IS's advance on Aleppo, appears to be designed to foster divisions amongst the rebels. Simultaneously, despite official denials, US air strikes on IS are being coordinated with the Al-Assad regime. The US Air Force is operating inside Syrian airspace with Al-Assad's express approval. According to veteran investigative journalist Robert Parry, formerly of Associated Press and Newsweek, a source familiar with the secret arrangement explained that it had been secured by the Obama administration through Russian intelligence. “Yet this secret collaboration may go even further and include Syrian government assistance in the targeting of the US attacks, according to the source who spoke on condition of anonymity,” wrote Parry. “That is another feature of US military protocol in conducting air strikes — to have some on-the-ground help in pinpointing the attacks.” In some cases, this has resulted in Al-Assad and US air strikes against IS targets mirroring one another in lockstep. And, according to another senior US official, Al-Assad regularly receives targeting intelligence from the US government through its ally, Iraq. The White House publicly pretends that this is Baghdad's fault, rather than US policy. But the Iraqi Air Force is not operating in Syrian airspace and has no need of such targeting information — which means the reason the US is sharing such Syrian targeting information with Iraq is precisely to pass it onto Al-Assad while maintaining “plausible deniability.” So on the pretext of fighting Al-Assad, the US armed and funded extremist Syrian rebels through its regional allies, including Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which went on to spawn the “Islamic State.” The US is now intent on fighting Al-Assad's enemy, IS, in turn bolstering Al-Assad. Simultaneously, Al-Assad's ambiguous strategic and energy relationship with IS is empowering the movement, and the US is coordinating with Al-Assad to execute air strikes against his chief regional enemy, IS. But the US is also still working with its allies to arm a coalition of “moderate” rebels to fight both IS and Al-Assad. That “moderate” coalition, however, includes Al-Qaeda's Syria arm, Jabhat Al-Nusra, which is being supported due to its rivalry with IS. Yet Al-Nusra maintains tactical alliances with IS, while other FSA “moderates” also coordinate with IS to counter Al-Assad, to the point that Western, Gulf and Turkish supplies to “moderates” are at risk of being systematically diverted to Al-Nusra and IS. If you have difficulty understanding this, don't worry. I don't understand it either. But what's clear is that the shape-shifting US war on Al-Qaeda, IS and Al-Assad is propping up Al-Qaeda, IS and Al-Assad. On top of all this, the general Syrian population is increasingly cognisant of these contradictions and are disillusioned about the US-led strategy and its motives, not to mention angered at ongoing civilian casualties from air strikes. These, too, are driving ordinary people into the arms of extremists. It doesn't really matter whether you think all this is a result of incompetence or conspiracy or a bit of both. The upshot is unequivocal: this strategy is not going to eliminate terrorism or make the world safer. On the contrary, it is a perfect recipe for endless war. The losers from this endless war are the Syrian and Iraqi people, along with people across the Muslim and Western world: we are now all inhabiting a global surveillance regime of constant fear, self-generated by a geopolitical quagmire of state terrorists and non-state terrorists, locked into a deepening cycle of mutual, self-righteous violence, like a snake whose chief survival tactic is to eat its own tail. The good news is that there are some winners, apparently: namely, giant Western defence contractors whose profits are at record levels in the wake of the regional crisis, even as governments push through brutal austerity measures targeting the general public. “Wall Street's betting that this war's going to go on for a while,” said William Hartung of the US Centre for International Policy's Arms and Security Project. “It's going to be a gravy train.”
The writer is an investigative journalist, international security scholar and bestselling author. He follows what he calls the “crisis of civilisation” and was the winner of the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his UK Guardian reporting on the intersection of global ecological, energy and economic crises with regional geopolitics and conflicts.
