06 April 2017
The Attack on Khan Sheikhoun.
Assad, sarin gas and the Syrian opposition.
by Neil Tidmarsh
The defeat of rebel forces in Aleppo and their expulsion from that city clearly wasn’t the end of the civil war in Syria. It wasn’t even the beginning of the end. It was, however, the beginning of a new and even nastier phase in this already unbelievably nasty conflict, as this week’s outrage has confirmed.
Assad’s regime has always maintained (surely disingenuously) that the war isn’t a civil war but a simple conflict between a legitimate government and terrorist groups which are trying to destroy it. Thus its insistence that all the rebel groups fighting against it are the same as Isis and al-Qaeda, and that the rest of the world should be helping him to fight them, not just pursuing a separate battle against Isis and al-Qaeda, let alone supporting other groups.
This argument suits its Russian ally, of course, but the rest of the world sees it for what it is – a fig-leaf to cover the regime’s own state-sanctioned terror against its own people. International efforts towards peace have been focused on defining which of the rebel groups are terrorists and which are not – and have broadly agreed that the only groups to be condemned as such are Isis, al-Qaeda and its protégé the Fateh al-Sham Front (which changed its name last year from the Nusra Front in an attempt to distance itself from al Qaeda, an attempt which hasn’t convinced anybody).
But if the regime’s argument has had little success as propaganda, it is nevertheless having some success as a strategy. The ruthlessness of its tactics from the very beginning could be seen as an attempt not just to destroy the moderate opposition groups but also to drive them into the arms of the more extremist groups such as Fateh al-Sham, al-Qaeda and Isis; to radicalise all the rebels and make them throw in their lot with acknowledged terrorists. Then the argument will have become true at last and the rest of the world will have to fall in line behind it.
Something like this appears to have been happening since the last rebel-held areas of Aleppo fell to the regime four months ago. The surrendered rebel forces were allowed – indeed, were encouraged – to leave the city and go to the rebel-held area of the country around Idlib in north-west Syria. Other rebel enclaves (e.g. al-Weir, the last district the rebels held in Homs), have since surrendered, and the rebel fighters have also been allowed to withdraw to Idlib. That area – where the surviving rebel forces are concentrating – is now controlled by the extremist Harakat Tahrir al-Sham, a coalition led by the al-Qaeda associated Fateh al-Sham, which of course everybody – not just the regime – admits is a terrorist organisation. And, lo and behold, the area has become subject to airstrikes not just from the regime and its ally Russia, but also from the USA and its western allies. With predictable consequences. Even before this week’s outrage, there were chilling accounts of civilian deaths: one airstrike killed 21 people, including 14 children, according to local sources; another killed dozens of people in a mosque during evening prayers in the nearby village of al-Jineh.
The USA is concerned that the moderate rebel groups it has always supported are in danger of being subsumed into the more extremist group; last month, alarmed at the disarray and infighting amongst such groups after their defeat at Aleppo, the USA announced that it was temporarily suspending military aid to them to try to encourage them to unite, and because it was afraid that arms given to moderates will find its way to extremist groups. Many US-approved rebel groups have always valued Fateh al-Sham as an ally on the battlefield, in spite of ideological differences, and have protested against US airstrikes on Fateh al-Sham and US insistence that they should distance themselves from the group. Following defeats in Aleppo and elsewhere, and the apparent cooling of US support, they might now be tempted to believe that there is nowhere else to go but to such extremist groups. President Trump’s announcement last week that US resources in Syria were going to be concentrated on the fight against Isis rather than on opposition to the regime in the civil war, and that the US would no longer insist on Assad standing down (even though it still maintains that the Syrian president was a bad man), could only have increased that temptation.
Perhaps Assad feels that at last he has boxed all his enemies into one corner and has convinced the world that they all deserve the label ‘terrorist’, and so is free to resort to the vilest measures against them with impunity. It would otherwise be difficult to understand why he should risk such an outrage as the use of sarin gas on civilians (if indeed it was the regime, and most of the world with the exception of Russia has pointed its finger that way), why he should risk further alienation from the rest of the world, including even his ally Russia (after all, it was Putin’s deal with Assad, promising that the regime wouldn’t use chemical weapons again, which saw the beginning of Russian ascendancy over the USA in this sphere following Obama’s failure to take action the first time such weapons were used, back in 2013). It would also be difficult to understand the tactical purpose of such an outrage. What could such an evil attack on unarmed civilians hope to achieve – unless it was indeed an act of state-sponsored terrorism intended to inflame hatreds to a degree which will drive moderate opposition to the extreme.
This might be the first time the regime has used sarin on its citizens since that attack in 2013, but it isn’t the first time that it has used chemical weapons since then (in spite of the now puzzling statement by the UN and the 2013 Nobel peace prize winning Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in October 2014, that they had completed “the elimination of the declared chemical weapons programme of the Syrian Arab Republic”). In recent months it has used chlorine gas; the USA, France and Britain proposed a UN Security Council resolution to punish the Assad regime for it, but it was blocked by Russia and China.
The UN Security Council is to hold an emergency meeting today. Could the outcome be different this time? Perhaps it could. After all, President Putin must be furious that Assad has apparently torn up the deal which the two of them put together to such applause from the world back in 2013. And that comment from President Trump to the UN last week which seemed to say that the USA was turning its back on the civil war, and which seemed to so embolden Assad, also labelled Assad a war criminal. Secretary of state Rex Tillerson repeated the accusation in Turkey. It’s generally acknowledged that backing down after the regime used illegal chemical weapons in 2013 was President Obama’s one big mistake; President Trump defines himself as his predecessor’s opposite, so the last thing he’ll want is to be seen to be making that same mistake himself.
And even if Assad slips through the fingers of the UN Security Council again today, surely those crimes will catch up with him eventually, whatever the final outcome of the war.
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