On August 25, Bashar al-Assad’s Foreign Minister, Walid al-Muallem, said: “Syria is ready for co-operation … to fight terrorism.” The week before Assad’s PR guru, Bouthaina Shaaban, told CNN that an “international coalition,” including Russia, China, America, and Europe, should intervene to defeat the “terrorists,” whom she says make up the rebellion in Syria.
Back in March I wrote a long post laying out the evidence that the Assad regime was deliberately empowering then-ISIS, now the Islamic State (IS), helping it destroy moderate rebels and even Salafist and Salafi-jihadist forces, with the intention of making-good on its propaganda line that the only opposition to the regime came from takfiris, which would frighten the population into taking shelter behind the State, seeing this madness as the only alternative, and would at the very least keep the West from intervening to support the uprising and might even draw the West in to help defeat the insurgency. These statements represent the culmination of that strategy.
At the time of that post, it was rather a minority view to say that Assad was bolstering IS but since then this view seems to have gone mainstream to the point where the French President called Assad “the de facto ally of jihadists.” People struggled to believe a regime could be that canny or cynical; to some it sounded too much like a conspiracy theory. But what Assad has done is not unique.
This tactic is called provocation (provokatsiya in Russian), and “simply means taking control of your enemies in secret and encouraging them to do things that discredit them and help you.” The KGB perfected this tactic, beginning with Operation TRUST, though Russia had invented it under the Tsar. The KGB’s successors have employed provocation in the last few months with the Ukrainian far-Right, which has done so much to discredit the new government in Kyiv; a sanguinary version of this policy was employed by the KGB-trained authorities in Algeria in the 1990s; and it has even been used in democratic countries, such as in America by the FBI against the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panthers, and in Germany against the far-Right. (Germany is so good at this that the last time the effort to ban the neo-Nazi “National Democratic Party” got to court it was a fiasco because so many of the NDP’s leaders and members were German intelligence agents that it was impossible to say what the group’s true beliefs were.)
The best evidence that something of the kind has happened in Syria, a State where the security apparatus was schooled by the KGB, comes from Bassam Barabandi, a defector from Assad’s Foreign Ministry, who described the regime’s strategy in dealing with the uprising this way:
ISIS’s role in Syria fits into a plan that has worked for Assad on several occasions. When a crisis emerges, Assad pushes his opponents to spend as much time as possible in developing a response. … His favorite diversion is terrorism, because it establishes him as a necessary force to contain it. …
Assad renewed a version of this approach after non-violent protestors took to the streets demanding freedom and reform in 2011. … Assad needed to take steps that would pass time and prove himself as indispensable, both to the international community and to Syrians who fear retaliation from the Sunni majority. …
Assad first changed the narrative … to one of sectarianism, not reform. He then fostered an extremist presence in Syria … [and] facilitated the influx of foreign extremist fighters to threaten stability in the region. … The resulting international paralysis allowed Assad to present himself as an ally in the global war on terror, granting him license to crush civilians with impunity. …
Once the unrest shifted to an armed conflict, Assad’s choice of allies promoted sectarianism. … Today, the conflict has morphed into a sectarian regional proxy war. This is precisely how Assad envisioned it, and creates a dynamic that the internationals can dismiss as too complex or dissonant to Western interests.
The Assad plan also included allowing extremist Sunni groups to grow and travel freely in order to complicate any Western support for his opponents. The Assad regime and Iran have meticulously nurtured the rise of al-Qaeda, and then ISIS, in Syria. … Assad released battle-hardened extremists from the infamous Sednaya prison; extremists with no association to the uprisings. These fighters would go on to lead militant groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra.
In conjunction with the terrorist-release policy, Assad was sure to imprison diverse, non-violent, and pro-reform activists by the thousands … so that the influence of extremists would fill their absence. Assad was careful to never take any steps to attack ISIS as they grew in power and strength. …
Now that ISIS has fully matured, the Assad regime and Iran offer themselves as partners to the United States. For the first time, Assad is striking ISIS in Raqqa and locations inside Iraq, in a perverse harvest of the terrorist seeds he planted to quash the civilian-led reform movement. Assad will continue to make himself appear helpful by offering intermittent air strikes, details of fighters released from prison, and intelligence. …
The rise of ISIS in Iraq and events in Gaza and Ukraine have placed Assad’s war safely outside the headlines. Once again, the world is convinced it has higher priorities and may again conclude that Assad is a problematic, yet stabilizing dictator in a troubled region.
The Assad regime has perfected the role of being “at once an arsonist and a fireman,” as Fouad Ajami once put it; of creating problems and then exacting concessions from the West to solve them.
The simplest way of demonstrating that the Assad regime wanted to strengthen the Islamic State is to follow the money. IS has essentially five streams of revenue, which are:
1.Oil. IS controls the zones where Syria has oil—Raqqa and Deir Ezzor—and has added oil-producing regions of Iraq around Mosul to this. Estimates of daily intake vary between $1m, $1.8m, and $3m, but this is clearly one of IS’s most important revenue streams. It is also agreed by everybody, from our best journalists to the French Foreign Minister, that a not insignificant portion of this comes from the Assad regime buying the oil—handing over millions of dollars to IS that allow it to fund its fighters and military campaigns, and propagate its ideology to the captive population (estimated at between six and eight million people), while letting IS avoid the necessity of looting, a feature of the desperate FSA-branded rebels that has damaged their cause. IS also takes over other resources—notably grain silos in Syria and the wheat fields around Mosul—giving it total control of the population and allowing it to sell the excess.
2.Extortion (“Tax”). IS controls some non-Muslim minorities who pay the jizya, which is essentially a protection-racket. Other tribute is drawn as taxes from businesses (in the guise of zakat) and farmers. There are also charges for services like public transport. In total this is thought to bring in $5m per month or $60m per year. The Assad regime has avoided bombing IS-held areas as it does with rebel-held territory, allowing IS to exploit this revenue stream.
3.Kidnappings. The U.S. and Britain refuse to pay for the release of their citizens taken hostage but many European States do pay. Some estimates say IS has taken in $65m (£40m) from ransoms. This is plausible. (Al-Qaeda gained $165 over the last six years from European ransom payments.)
4.Antiquities. While IS has attracted attention for its obliteration of the region’s cultural heritage, it has a sideline in the sale of artefacts, specifically those looted from Nabuk in Qalamoun, which have given it at least $60m (£36m).
Continued.......
Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
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