Brian M Downing
A new chapter in the Syrian resurrection is opening in the form of a wave of bombings. It comes on the heels of the Free Syrian Army’s (FSA) failure to mount a significant defense of key cities and the outside powers’ indecision as to what to do beyond sanctions and diplomacy. The bombing campaign is decisive, bold and portentous. Its authorship is unclear, but signs point to Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
The Syrian opposition last autumn bruited the rise of the FSA – a force of defectors from the army and civilian volunteers. It was thought they’d form an effective opposition to President Bashar al-Assad’s government ‘s forces, much as the Libyan militias did in time.
Over the past few weeks, however, Assad’s army has systematically and rather easily reduced the rebels’ putative strongholds in Homs, Idlib and Deraa. FSA resistance was token at best. Nor was it able to put up attacks elsewhere to draw off regular troops and interdict convoys to besieged cities. Today, it engages in occasional skirmishes and sets up short-lived roadblocks on byroads.
Efforts by defectors to lure away friends and relatives serving in the regular army have had only limited success. Assad’s army is largely intact and has sufficient cohesion and skill to prevent the sort of defeat that Muammar Gaddafi faced in Libya.
The repression has been performed by security forces and elite army units whose sectarian and political loyalties are largely above question and likely more steadfast than in non-elite units. The reliability of much of the army is in at least some doubt. If the insurrection flares and requires the use of non-elite units, defections may increase and become problematic for Assad.
Assad has a new problem. With the FSA crushed and the shadow government in disarray, a bombing campaign has opened. Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have struck army convoys and car bombs have struck Aleppo, Deraa and most recently the capital Damascus. Though such bombings have taken place over the previous six months, the past two weeks have been especially noteworthy and lethal.
There is no compelling evidence of who if anyone is directing the campaign. The opposition blames the Assad regime, but the government has no interest in underscoring an image of helplessness in the face of bombings. The regime blames the opposition and points to their ties to world terrorism, but the opposition purports to eschew such acts.
More importantly, however, the opposition has shown little ability to accomplish much of anything inside Syria, let alone direct a concerted bombing effort in several cities. Bombmaking, while seemingly random and anarchic and requiring neither organization nor skill, is a distinct craft, as are setting up IEDs along convoy routes and recruiting and training suicide bombers.
Those talents have been repeatedly and chillingly demonstrated just to Syria’s east, in Iraq, and suspicion might well fall on the Sunni insurgents there. They fought the US with such methods and have more recently set loose a bombing campaign against Shi’ite targets in Iraqi cities. They may have imparted their talents to Syrians impatient with FSA limitations and livid over army repression. Alternately, they themselves are operating inside Syria, perhaps at the behest of Gulf states.
During the anti-US insurgency, Sunni fighters used Syria as a haven and brought supplies and foreign fighters through it. Hundreds of thousands of Sunni Iraqis fled to Syria as the insurgency raged and their dominance of the Shi’ites ended. They have maintained ties back home and now see an opportunity to exact revenge upon the Shi’ites and their Persian backers by ousting Assad, an Alawite Shi’ite and ally of Iran. Tribal, familial, military and Salafi networks straddle the Syrian-Iraqi frontier.
The goal of ousting Assad, and perhaps the means as well, have broad support in the region, chiefly to the south in the Gulf. Hostility to Iran has flared since the Arab Spring unrest in Gulf countries was, on little evidence, attributed to Iranian intelligence operations.
The crisis over Iran’s nuclear program has worsened matters, giving hostility the feel of an obsession – one that their attention and considerable wealth must resolve, regardless of Western counsel and regional impact.
Support from the Gulf states seek to detach Syria from Iran thereby breaking the Shi’ite arc that extends from Iran through post-Saddam Hussein Iraq then into Syria and Hezbollah-ruled Lebanon. Their goal has far less to do with the regional push for democracy than to the struggle for mastery of the Persian Gulf. In the absence of an effective FSA to oust Assad, a bombing campaign may have to do.
The bombings may firm support for the Assad regime as the specter of Syrian cities resembling Fallujah and Baghdad begins to loom. But opposition to Assad is too widespread and deep to mute the opposition.
Turkey, Israel, the United States and the European Union see another specter: Assad’s sizable arsenal of chemical weapons and shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles falling into the hands of Iraqi militants, Salafi militants, and various merchants of dubious scruples.
This brings to mind the admission of a Saudi intelligence director who said that his organization wasn’t very good at conducting operations; its forte was writing checks. [1]
Those grim prospects will fire the concerns of more responsible outside powers who are less obsessed with the Saudi-Persian rivalry and sectarian squabbles than are their Gulf-state allies. These powers will not call off the mission to oust Assad. There’s little more that sanctions and diplomacy can bring.
These powers may further their efforts to make the FSA into an effective fighting force, with conventional formations seeking to establish bastions in cities and mountainous areas and guerrilla formations seeking various targets of opportunity. Meanwhile, the specter hangs over Syrian cities.
Note
1 Quoted in Alex Strick Van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban/Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, 1970-2010. (London: Hurst Publications, 2012), p 77.
Brian M Downing is a political/military analyst and author of The Military Revolution and Political Change and The Paths of Glory: War and Social Change in America from the Great War to Vietnam. He can be reached at brianmdowning@gmail.com.