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ANTAKYA, Turkey — The rebel commander was nervous. He had changed phone numbers and been difficult to reach before finally agreeing to meet in Antakya, a city near the border with war-torn Syria that has long swarmed with rebels, refugees, and spies. On the road to an out-of-the-way hotel, he told the driver to avoid the main route through town. “It’s better not to drive among all the people,” he said.
It was an open secret that the commander had once received cash and weapons from the CIA, part of a covert U.S. program that backs rebel groups against both ISIS and the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.
When his battalion was eventually driven from Syria by its jihadi rivals, like a number of U.S.-backed groups, he pleaded with his U.S. handlers for better support, but it wasn’t enough. So he was, he said, “out of the game.”
Now, he said, sitting at a quiet table at the hotel, he had received an offer that could bring him back in — and potentially make him even stronger than before.
He was being recruited, he said, to work for the U.S.’s rival in Syria: Russia.
“They told me, ‘We will support you forever. We won’t leave you on your own like your old friends did,’” he said. “Honestly, I’m still thinking about it.”
“They told me, ‘We will support you forever. We won’t leave you on your own like your old friends did.’”
The commander said that five years into a war that has killed some 400,000 people and created nearly 5 million refugees, Russia is recruiting current and former U.S. allies to its side. His revelation was confirmed by four people who said they, too, had been approached with offers from Russia and by two Syrian middlemen who said they delivered them.
The moves come as Russia ratchets up its involvement in Syria with troops and airstrikes. Russia says its military campaign is designed to target ISIS — in reality it has targeted all rebels, including some who are still backed by the U.S., while also wreaking havoc on civilians.
The secret outreach shows that as it works to muscle the U.S. out of Syria, Russia isn’t just bombing the U.S.’s current and former rebel allies — it’s also working to co-opt them, launching a shadowy campaign that seeks to highlight U.S. weakness in Syria. Ultimately, Russia wants to help Assad win the war by dividing the opposition, driving a wedge between rebel groups and their traditional backers, and getting them to turn their guns on his enemies.
Years of failed U.S. partnerships have left a long trail of angry rebels, and the commander suspected that there were others being tempted: “Russian intelligence knows all the groups who were fighting ISIS and dealing with the U.S. and not getting enough support.”
The four additional rebel leaders, all with current or past U.S. ties, said they had also been approached with similar offers, either via Russian officials or Syrian middlemen.
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One of Moscow’s main aims, each of them said, was to outmaneuver the U.S. “Their goal is to take control in Syria and kick America out,” one of these rebel leaders said, requesting anonymity to protect his reputation and because he still works with the U.S.
He said he had traveled to Egypt to speak with Russian officials but declined their offer. It included the chance to be part of a military council with the regime along with “money, bullets, weapons, and all that I ask,” he said. “But if I put my hand in theirs it means I will destroy the revolution and the Syrian people along with it.”
The Russian foreign ministry directed requests for comment to the Russian defense ministry, which did not respond.
Louay al-Hussein, a prominent politician who was a member of the regime-sanctioned opposition before fleeing Syria last year, said he had relayed offers of air support, cash, and arms to rebels from officials at “more than one” Russian embassy. “They want to win in Syria against the international countries [backing the opposition], including the U.S.,” he said of Russia. “Moscow wants to find a political solution — but first they want to win.”
Of his own motivation, he added, “I just want to stop the war.”
Russia’s intervention came at a time when the regime seemed in danger of losing, and it has regained the momentum for Assad. Hussein said he thought this gave Moscow leverage to force a potential political solution on the Syrian dictator. “The regime is now just a militia. It is no longer a political regime,” he said. “We don’t care what the regime says anymore — only what Russia says. They are the leaders in Syria right now.”
Another opposition politician who said he had acted as an intermediary, Anas al-Shamy, said that Russia had been working with “some groups that broke away from the Americans,” though he declined to name them. “This information is secret,” he said.
Spokespeople for the U.S. State Department, the CIA, and the Obama administration’s National Security Council declined to comment.
An official with another government that backs the Syrian opposition said he believed the U.S. was aware of the Russian outreach. “If I heard about it and you heard about it, you can bet the Americans also heard about it,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the subject. “This is a turf war.”
Russia’s tactic suggests that Moscow sees an opening to assert greater influence in Syria and undermine the U.S. along the way.
“I think the U.S. is less and less of an influential player in the civil war,” said Robert S. Ford, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington and U.S. ambassador to Syria from 2011 to 2014.
Ford played a key role in the last round of peace talks in Geneva, in March 2014, which were sponsored by the U.S. and Russia and ended without a deal. A new peace process that has been underway since the spring again looks on the verge of collapse, with Assad declaring on Tuesday that it had “failed,” vowing to take back “every inch” of the country.
Washington’s leverage in the talks has been limited, Ford said, as Russia steps up its involvement on the ground while the U.S. steps back. “They’ve pretty much ceded to Russian military action,” he said. “If the Americans wanted to reassert themselves in the process they would have [increased] arms supplies and encouraged the Turks and Saudis to do the same, but as far as I can tell they haven’t.”
“The Americans are showing the Russians that they are weak in Syria and not invested.”
Yet Ford added that Russia’s outreach to rebels also betrays its own weakness. “What it tells me is that the Russians don’t have an exit strategy from Syria, and they’re trying to find one,” he said. “And I think they understand that if they don’t win over some element of the moderate opposition, they’re not going to be able to get a political exit very easily.”
He added: “The Syrian war at this point has such a variety of groups and governments operating in it that there’s really not one country that can control where it’s going. I have the sense that the Russians are finding this much harder than they expected.”
Many of its Syrian allies say the Obama administration, seven months from leaving office, is only going through the motions in its efforts to end the war, and perhaps is even happy to let Moscow take charge. “The Americans are showing the Russians that they are weak in Syria and not invested,” said Obadah al-Kaddri, a Syrian politician working with the opposition’s U.S.-backed negotiating team in Geneva. “The U.S. aim is just to get the opposition to go to Geneva so they can go back and tell the American people and Congress that they tried.”
Kaddri traveled to Moscow for his own meetings with Russian officials this spring, hoping to broker an understanding between rebel groups and the Russian government. The Russians told him they had no love for Assad, he said, but wanted to keep Syria from disintegrating. He also recalled them saying that their attacks on moderate rebels had been cases of mistaken identity, pulling out a map and inviting him to show them where his rebel friends were based. He decided, in the end, that “the Russians are lying.”
Rebels should be wary of the Russian outreach, said Frederic C. Hof, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and former adviser to the Obama administration on Syria. “Russia has a track record, and if I were one of these rebel commanders, that track record would neutralize some of the sweet talk coming from the lips of a Russian operative,” he said. “The Russians have used Jabhat al-Nusra as an excuse for bombing anything they please. And they’ve not been shy about committing war crimes.”
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Some rebels with U.S. ties confirmed they had been approached by Russia but said they had rejected the Russian outreach out of hand.
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“I would never do it. I would never sell my revolution,” said Abdullah Awdah, who was the military commander for Harakat Hazm, one of the most powerful U.S.-backed groups in Syria until it was driven from the country by extremists last year.
