الواشنطن بوست: المجموعة الجهادية تزدهر في سورية/قطر حظيت بموافقة اسرائيلية قبل زيارة أميرها لغزة
Deputy Editorial
Page Editor
A jihadist group prospers in Syria
For more than a year,
the Obama administration has been assuring the world that the downfall of
Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is “a matter of time.”
Yes, its own Middle East experts warned, but how much time matters. The longer
the fighting goes on, they said, the more likely it is that what began as a
peaceful mass opposition movement would behijacked by extremists,
including allies of al-Qaeda.
President Obama
ignored that advice, ruling out measures that could have quickly brought down
the regime — such as a no-fly zone — in favor of a year of feckless diplomacy.
But it turned out the experts were right. So now the consequence of Obama’s
passivity has a name, one that will surely haunt the occupant of the White
House in 2013: Jabhat al-Nusra.
Actually,
the full name of the Middle East’s latest jihadist terror movement, announced
on an al-Qaeda-linked Web site last January, is Jabhat al-Nusra li-Ahl al-Sham
Min Mujaheddin al Sham fi Sahat al Jihad, which means “Support Front for the
People of Syria from the Mujaheddin of Syria in the places of Jihad.” It was
dismissed at first as a hoax, or maybe as a concoction of Assad’s intelligence
service. Now its black flag is recognized, and often cheered,
across Syria, and its bearded, baggy-pantalooned fightersare at the forefront of the critical battle for the city of
Aleppo.
In
the spring Jabhat al-Nusra had maybe 50 adherents, most of them in hiding, and
had claimed credit for only a handful of attacks. Now it may have close to
1,000 core followers, and fighting units around Syria have begun openly
claiming to belong to it. On YouTube, videos show the residents of areas taken
over by the rebels waving its flag and chanting its name.
“They
have been able to take an extremist identity and really give it a popular
following in a context of bloody civil war,” says Elizabeth O’Bagy, the author
of a sobering study of
Syria’s jihadists for theInstitute for the Study of War.
“They have become the most significant threat to long-term stability in Syria.”
No,
Barack Obama’s policies alone did not create this monster. It is, first of all,
a creature of Assad’s own regime, blowback from his years of sponsoring
terrorist networks in Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian territories. For more
than a decade, Syrian intelligence allowed al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups
to establish bases and logistical networks to support attacks on American
troops in Iraq, anti-Syrian politicians in Lebanon, and Israel. Now many of
those rat lines have been reversed, and the extremists are targeting Assad.
They
do so because they were never his natural allies — Assad’s Alawite sect, an
offshoot of Shiite Islam, is considered heretical by the Sunni jihadists — and
because they see an opening to rebuild a movement that was shattered in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
One
of the first contingents to bolster Jabhat al-Nusra, O’Bagy found, came from
Fatah al Islam, a former Syrian intelligence client that launched a battle in
2007 to take over a Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli, Lebanon. “These
individuals,” O’Bagy writes,
“received training in weapons and insurgency tactics from the Syrian government
and gained experience using them in Iraq and Lebanon. They also have knowledge
of and connections to the Syrian intelligence and security apparatus.”
In
fact, the group has specialized in attacks on intelligence facilities. On Oct.
9, it staged a sophisticated, three-stage
assault on an air
force intelligence compound outside Damascus. Earlier in the month, it claimed
credit for a string of bombings in Aleppo that targeted an officer’s club and
other government-held facilities, reportedly killing dozens.
Leaders
of the Free Syrian Army, the mainstream rebel force that emerged from the
original protest movement, don’t support the jihadists or their tactics. But as
the war in cities like Aleppo becomes more desperate, Jabhat al-Nusra has provided precious
reinforcements. Thanks
to generous support from sources in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states,
its units are often better-armed than secular forces, which have been starved
by Obama’s ban on U.S. weapon supplies.
The
result, says O’Bagy, is that the character of Syria’s opposition has changed.
“It’s no longer a pro-democracy force trying to bring down a dictatorship. It
no longer holds the moral high ground. They have muddied the waters.”
If
the war drags on, Jabhat al-Nusra will surely grow stronger. It could begin to
carve out a haven in the Syrian countryside where al-Qaeda operatives from
around the region could gather. It could try to get hold of Syria’s abundant
stocks of chemical weapons. And it could start looking beyond Syria for
targets. You might say it’s a matter of time.
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