The US response to Russia's military campaign in Syria in support of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad has struck a pose of moral superiority, arguing that the Russians have not been targeting the Islamic State (IS) group but the non-IS Syrian opposition to the Al-Assad regime. The US response is superficially accurate but deliberately misleading. Although the Russians are not focusing on targets in IS-controlled territory, there is a very good reason for this: it is not IS but the forces aligned with Al-Qaeda's Syrian franchise, Jabhat Al-Nusra or Al-Nusra Front, that pose the most immediate threat to the very existence of the Al-Assad regime. In a series of statements on the Russian military campaign, the US Defence Department has hammered the Russians for not targeting IS, as Moscow initially claimed. Later, the Russian rhetoric shifted to its targeting of “terrorists”. The US statements strongly implied that it was the US-backed “moderate” Syrian groups opposed to the Al-Assad regime that were being attacked. Major news media have taken the same line in covering the Russian offensive. In an Associated Press story on 13 October, for example, US journalist Ken Delanian described the CIA as supplying “so-called moderate rebels to oppose Al-Assad” for more than two years, along with its “Arab allies,” saying that American officials “have watched in recent days as the Russian bombs and missiles have targeted those groups.” Delanian even quoted Jeffrey White of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a US think tank that supports Israeli interests, complaining that the United States has abandoned its moderate allies. “We've aligned ourselves with these guys. We trained them and paid them and sent them off to battle, and when the going gets tough, we're not there,” said White. But this framing of the issue fundamentally misrepresents the situation in Syria by conjuring up a non-existent powerful US-backed “moderate” force while diverting attention away from the real threat posed by Al-Qaeda's Syrian franchise. The Russians are not hitting some imaginary set of “moderate” Syrian armed groups opposing the Al-Assad regime: they are overwhelmingly focused on targeting the military command, in which Al-Nusra Front is the central strategic force. Maps pinpointing the locations of the Russian strikes since 30 September published in various newspapers and on the website of the US-based Institute for the Study of War, the original source for other maps, all show very clearly that they are overwhelmingly concentrated in the Idlib province, the area adjoining Hama province, and areas of Latakia province near Idlib. But that fact does not take on any significance unless it is recalled that Al-Nusra Front and the Jaish Al-Fatah (Army of Conquest) linked to it unexpectedly took control of the Idlib province in a major military offensive in March. That victory in Idlib was widely reported at the time to be the biggest turning point in the Syrian war in well over two years, representing the most serious challenge to the Al-Assad regime since the beginning of the war. Although a number of smaller commands were involved in the Idlib offensive, Al-Nusra Front's 3,000 troops represented the majority of the forces involved in the fight. According to a well-informed source, Al-Nusra and its close ally Ahrar Al-Sham accounted for 90 per cent of the troops. We now know that the Idlib campaign was the direct result of a policy decision by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with US approval, to support the creation of the Jaish Al-Fatah and provide it with the new military hardware — including the TOW anti-tank missile — which turned out to be a crucial game-changer in the campaign. US journalist Liz Sly of the Washington Post revealed in a story on 11 October that TOW missiles were delivered to Syrian armed groups under a programme coordinated between the CIA and the Saudis. She further noted that the CIA-supplied TOW missiles were so important to the rebels who have made “gains in northwest Syria” that they have called the missile the “Al-Assad Tamer.” “It is no accident,” Sly reported, “that the first targets of the Russian air strikes in Syria were the locations where rebels armed with TOW missiles have made the most substantial gains and where they most directly threaten Al-Assad's hold on power.” This is an obvious reference to the forces that took over Idlib province in March. But Sly never refers to the Jaish Al-Fatah victory in Idlib or acknowledges that Al-Nusra Front was the main benefactor of the CIA programme. Her story quotes a supporter of the programme, former US ambassador Robert Ford, as assuring us that the system prevented the missiles from “falling into extremist hands,” and that he was aware of only two TOW missiles having been obtained by Al-Nusra. Sly reported a very different story in March, however, after dissolution of the Harakat Hazm, the main CIA-supported “moderate rebel group” remaining in northern Syria, following its total defeat by Al-Nusra Front. The victorious Al-Nusra announced publicly, according to Sly's report, that it seized the TOW anti-tank missiles the CIA supplied to the Harakat Hazm when it occupied the group's headquarters near Aleppo. Moreover, the Saudis reportedly possessed TOW missiles, and they and the Qataris were already funneling arms to Al-Nusra Front, as US Vice-President Joe Biden revealed in October 2014. It is astonishing that at this late date anyone in the media could seriously suggest that the CIA has somehow managed to turn the “moderate” Syrian rebels into a powerful offensive force threatening the Al-Assad regime in the north. Since the Idlib victory, it is generally understood that the primary threat to drive the Al-Assad regime from power comes from Al-Nusra Front and the forces allied with it, and not from IS, and certainly not from the mythical “moderate rebels.” It is easy to understand why the Obama administration is not interested in talking about the role of Al-Nusra in the present Syrian political-military situation. According to Sly's source, the covert operation to provide the TOW missiles to the Jaish Al-Fatah was aimed at putting “sufficient pressure on Al-Assad's forces to persuade him to compromise, but not so much that his government would precipitously collapse and leave a dangerous power vacuum.” The Obama administration's strategy on Syria assumed a degree of control that is so obviously unrealistic that it was inherently risky to the point of recklessness. That is why no one in the administration or the news media is discussing the reality that the Russian offensive is targeting the biggest jihadist threat to the Al-Assad regime. The writer is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism.
