There is a dangerous policy vacuum about how to support the secular opposition in Syria. There is a deep reluctance from many regional and western supporters of change in Syria to get involved with the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and its political wing, the Syrian National Coalition (SNC).
This reluctance was in part due to the ineffectiveness of FSA in the field and for fear of losing trained troops and valuable military equipment to religious extremist groups including Daesh (self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). But it now appears that any lingering support for the Syrian secular opposition is about to be sacrificed in favour of the single priority of defeating Daesh. This is good news for Bashar Al Assad.
Nonetheless, as the civil war continues into its forth year, it is clear that rebel soldiers are still fighting, most obviously in Aleppo, where the fighting has continued for years. Senior rebel leaders argue that if they had received the same level of backing from the West and their Arab allies that the Al Assad forces have had from Russia and Iran, they would be in a much stronger position today, and both the government and the Islamists would be much weaker.
This ambivalence from the Americans was further emphasised this week when US Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the US was ready to talk to Al Assad, while the same US military is ramping up its support for the rebels. On March 16, Kerry abandoned the previous US line that Al Assad had lost all legitimacy and had to go and said that the US would have to negotiate with Al Assad for a political transition in Syria and explore ways to pressure him into agreeing to talks.
It maybe that the US wants to support the rebels into a position of strength from which they can start to negotiate with the government as equals, but that is not what Kerry or US President Barack Obama has said. If they did speak up for the Geneva ideas of an inclusive transitional administration, it would remove the fear that they were preparing to do a deal with Al Assad and walk away from the rebels, while making fighting Daesh their sole military priority in the region.
Despite the Obama administration’s refusal to seek Congressional authority to fight Al Assad’s regime, some modest facts on the ground are continuing. The US has been giving training support to Syrian rebels since March 2013 in a covert programme led by the CIA, and in October 2014, this was expanded by the Congress and a parallel Pentagon programme was established.
This January, Pentagon said that as many as 1,000 US troops and support personnel would be sent to sites in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to help train select Syrian rebels, training more than 5,000 rebels annually for three years. The problem is that this will offer the secular rebels a small force of 15,000 trained people, which will neither be enough to give them a dominant position in the fighting nor at a future negotiating table.
The shift in US thinking has been very clear. Last May, Obama said during his major foreign policy speech in West Point that he wanted to help the rebels to fight the Al Assad regime, but by September 2014, when US started air strikes in Syria, it was fighting Daesh, not Al Assad’s forces.
On March 11, 2015, Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Authorisation to Use Military Force (AUMF) being considered by Congress is “[Daesh] specific. There are those who wish it would include Al Assad, but it does not”. This despite US Secretary of Defence Ashton Carter telling reporters on the same day that, “we will have some obligation to support the forces that we train in Syria after they’re trained. Even if they are trained and equipped to combat [Daesh], they could come into contact with forces of the [Al] Assad regime”.
The administration has specifically ruled out fighting Al Assad’s forces in its on-going request for military force, which was solely focused on “against [Daesh] or associated persons or forces”, by which it means individuals or organisations fighting alongside Daesh or any closely-related successor against the US or its coalition partners.
The administration’s draft AUMF imposes two limitations on US forces. One prohibits the use of US armed forces in “enduring offensive ground combat operations” and the other limits the authorisation to three years. But it does not include any geographical limitation, which gives the US authority to move against Daesh or its allies in any state in the Arab region, or even as far away as northern Nigeria if needed.
All this is profoundly depressing for the hard fighting rebels in Aleppo who are desperate for proper arms and support. Obama has not even agreed to a Turkish proposal for an air exclusion zone over Aleppo to stop the regime bombing its own people. It is also deeply depressing for the millions of Syrian refugees who do not see the West coming to their help or wanting to end the civil war, which is causing their suffering.
