The pretense that the so-called Syrian opposition-in-exile speaks for those inside the country, never firm to begin with, was further exposed late on Tuesday, in a two-minute video statement called “Communiqué No. 1,” which was issued by eleven armed rebel groups that are influential in northern Syria. Their message was simple: the Western-backed hotel revolutionaries jetting from capital to capital, claiming leadership in the political National Coalition and an interim government-to-be, don’t speak for them—and they won’t listen to them. The new coalition, which has yet to announce its name, also said it wants Islamic Sharia law to be the basis of any future government, and that the various opposition parties should unite within “an Islamic framework.”
There has long been a disconnect between those fighting and bleeding inside Syria and the political and diplomatic machinations of those in exile. What is new here is that at least three of the eleven groups—Liwa al-Tawhid, Liwa al-Islam, and Suqour al-Sham—are aligned with the military wing of the National Coalition, the Supreme Military Council, which is supported by the West and is what passes for the leadership of the loose franchise outfit known as the Free Syrian Army (F.S.A.). Now they have publicly thrown in their lot with Jabhat al-Nusra, which also signed on to the statement and is connected to Al Qaeda.
This public alliance of affiliates of the F.S.A. and of Al Qaeda, however, is more of a shift on paper than a marked change in how things work on the ground. There has long been operational coördination on a local level—for a particular battle or in a certain geographic area. All that has really happened at this stage is that a fig leaf has dropped.
The fighting men within Syria have long despised their political and military leaders-in-exile. It’s common to hear them say, “We are in the khanadik”—trenches—“and they are in the fanadik,” hotels. In late August, four of the leaders of the F.S.A.’s five fronts said that the National Coalition—their own political counterparts—had no legitimacy. They threatened to resign from the Supreme Military Council because of, among other things, “the lying promises of those states who claim to be friends of Syria,” who have not provided assistance “worthy of the sacrifices of the Syrian people.”
The disunity goes deeper. Colonel Abdul-Jabbar Agaydee, the top F.S.A. commander in the northern city of Aleppo and a man who doesn’t spend his time in hotel lobbies, has lambasted the Supreme Military Council, of which he himself is a member, saying it is “completely disconnected from reality.” (Still, on Thursday, he issued a video statement calling for unity.) In August, after the fall of the Menagh air base in the countryside near Aleppo, Colonel Agaydee was videotaped standing in front of a damaged helicopter, thanking all of the fighters who took part, including “the foreign fighters, the sons of the city, and of the area.” He then invited the man on his left, “our brother Abu Jandal,” to speak. Abu Jandal was the local commander of al-Nusra’s even fiercer parent organization, Al Qaeda’s Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS (which was not one of the eleven signatories).
I remember sitting in a schoolyard in a town in Idlib province last year. The school was being used as a shared Free Syrian Army/Jabhat al-Nusra outpost. The Jabhat fighters were in the classrooms across the courtyard, a good seventy-five metres from where I was sitting with Free Syrian Army men. I was wearing conservative Muslim attire, and there was a concrete wall between us. Despite that, an Algerian fighter crossed the courtyard and told me, without looking at me, “Excuse me sister, do you mind going inside?” He said his men might see me. I obliged, not wanting to cause a fuss or a fight. I asked the F.S.A. men what kind of Syria their comrades across the courtyard were fighting for and if it was the same kind of Syria they wanted to see. The F.S.A. men were embarrassed, apologetic, and repeated a sentiment I have often heard when I ask that question: “We’ll deal with them later, but right now we need them.” One man said, “If the Army attacks us, will I tell them, ‘Don’t fight the Syrian Army’? No. I won’t say that. I will thank them. Who else is helping us?”
That kind of pragmatism is in large part born out of necessity. Western and Arab capitals are all looking for friends among the so-called moderate elements. And yet the Free Syrian Army command is only as strong as its international backers allow it to be. Within the rebellion, strength comes from receiving weapons and ammunition that can be distributed to the men on the ground, to build credibility and leverage. But the current situation has emerged because the supplies either never came or were inconsistent and small, prompting fighters to buy weapons inside Syria, smuggle them from abroad, or manufacture their own.
They also turned to more hardcore Islamist elements, who—with their superior funding, supplies, and discipline—have been pivotal in securing many rebel victories. This contributed to a vicious circle: the United States has long expressed fears that any weapons it might send to Syria’s rebels will end up in the hands of extremists; the lack of weapons shipments has made the extremists stronger.
It wasn’t hard to see that it would come to this. The Syrian people have long dubbed theirs a revolution of orphans because of the lack of robust foreign support. The chants of “God, we have nobody but you” were common even in the early days of the protest movement, when the daily death tolls were still in the low double digits, before they pooled into more than a hundred thousand dead in the span of some two and a half years.
People who are being shot at are likely to try and shoot back, to plead for support—from any quarter. There is a reason why Jabhat al-Nusra only announced its presence almost a year into the uprising, in January, 2012, and why it felt that it could do so then without fear of being rejected by the Syrian opposition. When Washington declared the group a terrorist organization that December, some Syrians who weren’t part of the group marched under the banner “We are all Jabhat al-Nusra.”
But that didn’t mean that Syrians in the opposition necessarily accepted their more radicalized associates’ world view. In the past week or so, there have been clashes between elements of the Free Syrian Army and ISIS in several parts of Syria. The intensity of the clashes is new. The feud has been going on in some areas for more than a year now, playing out in assassinations of key leaders or the overrunning of particular outposts. There has been pushback, military and non-violent, against attempts by hardcore Islamist groups to impose some of their ideas on Syrians at large.
Syrians have historically been moderate and cosmopolitan. Even within a group like Jabhat al-Nusra, there is a difference between the foreign fighters and the Syrians, who tend to be more pragmatic. The signatories of Tuesday’s statement all want an Islamic state in Syria. But what kind of an Islamic state? After all, the label applies to both Turkey and Saudi Arabia, yet they couldn’t be more different from one another. Do Jabhat al-Nusra and the more moderately Islamist Liwa al-Tawhid, for example, now see eye to eye? That’s unlikely.
There are signs of fights among the various Islamist groups, too, both those within the F.S.A. and those outside its broad umbrella. In a recent audiotape to mark the twelfth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri told ultraconservative Islamist factions fighting in Syria to avoid alliances with Western- and Gulf-backed rebel fighters—an instruction that Jabhat al-Nusra has now failed to heed. This move could be viewed through the prism of its own recent dispute with the leadership of ISIS. Jabhat al-Nusra has chafed against ISIS’s attempts to envelop it into its organization, and the feud has splintered Al Qaeda’s affiliates in Syria. The new alliance, should it last, might be the seeds of a coalition that opposes ISIS. By stressing its strong Islamist character, it is trying to preëmpt any claims by ISIS that it is made up of “unbelievers.”
The National Coalition, for its part, issued a statement Thursday bemoaning the timing of the coalition announcement, as its political leaders were in New York to press international leaders for more support. It said that “the brigades that signed the statement do not represent the most important Free Syrian Army brigades on the ground; there are large brigades that did not sign the statement.” The latter part is true, if only for the moment. The sense of abandonment and frustration is deep.
Photograph: AP.
