Russian involvement in Syrian crisis
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Top ISIS Commander Fought Russians, Was Trained by US
Tarkhan Batirashvili
This article originally appeared at McClatchy
The 15 Chechens looking to cross the border from Turkey to Syria didn’t strike Abdullah as particularly important or unusual.
It was early summer in 2012, and as a smuggler based in the Turkish border town of Killis, Abdullah, who’d fled his home village in Syria because of fighting on the outskirts of Aleppo, was used to secretive groups of foreigners – journalists, aid workers and many recently aspiring jihadists – hiring him to cross Turkish military lines at the border while avoiding what was then still a significant Syrian government presence in northern Syrian.
“In 2012, everyone was coming to Syria and we had too much work leading all kinds of people across the border,” he explained over lunch in Killis, a Turkish town just a few miles from the rebel-held Syrian city of Azzaz. “A lot were Muslims who had come to support the revolution against Bashar Assad from every country. So many from Europe, Russia, Germany, France… .”
The 15 men had reached Abdullah through a network of contacts that were funneling new fighters to northern Syria, and Abdullah recalled they said they were going to Syria to assist in the fight against Assad. They were quiet, disciplined and for the most part spoke only a bit of crude formal Arabic.
Only later did Abdullah realize that the network that funneled these men to him was the beginnings of the Islamic State, and that one of the 15 would turn out to be the most important non-Arab figure in the Islamic State hierarchy, a former American-trained noncommissioned officer in the special forces of the nation of Georgia, who’d led his men heroically during the 2008 Russian invasion of his homeland.
Abu Omar al Shishani, as he’s now known, had been born Tarkhan Batirashvili 27 years earlier in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge, a tiny enclave of ethnic Chechens, known locally as Kists, whose roughly 10,000 residents represent virtually all of the Muslims in predominantly Orthodox Christian Georgia.
But analysts of extremist groups said Batirashvili’s impact has been far greater than the small numbers of Muslims in Georgia would suggest. Since he swore allegiance to the Islamic State in 2013, thousands of Muslims from the Caucasus have flocked to Syria to join the extremist cause.
“More than anything else, Batirashvili has legitimized ISIS in the Caucasus by the power of his exploits, which is amplified by slick ISIS propaganda,” said Michael Cecire, an analyst of extremism for the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Batirashvili’s battlefield successes, including orchestrating the capture of Syria’s Menagh Air Base after two years of failed attempts, “helped to legitimize ISIS in militant circles, including in the North Caucasus,” Cecire said.
“Batirashvili’s ability to demonstrate ISIS’ tactical prowess attracted fighters in droves from other factions and tipped the scales in foreign fighter flow and recruitment,” Cecire said. “In the North Caucasus, young people no longer wanted to fight in Syria with the increasingly marginalized Caucasus Emirate (groups), but wanted to fight with the winners – ISIS.”
Batirashvili’s story also was compelling, Cecire said: “A man with a modest background, sickly and impoverished before he went to Syria,” becomes “a great battlefield commander defying the world” … a “seemingly emulable, rags-to-riches story.”
Those seeking an explanation for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s insistence on sending military supplies and manpower to Syria to bolster the government of President Bashar Assad would do well to consider Batirashvili. Putin not only personally oversaw the Russian push into Georgia, but he has twice waged war against Islamist-led factions in Chechnya whose cause Batirashvili has supported since he was a teenager. Ethnic Chechens are thought to be one of the largest groups of foreign fighters in the Islamic State.
Now 30, Batirashvili is a key figure, reportedly a member of the group’s governing council, is said to be the Islamic State’s supreme military leader in northern Syria and Aleppo, and is perhaps the group’s most fearsome ground commander. His current status is an irony for a man once considered a Georgian soldier with a bright future.
“We trained him well, and we had lots of help from America,” said a former Georgian defense official who asked to not be identified because of the sensitivity of Batirashvili’s role in the Islamic State. “In fact, the only reason he didn’t go to Iraq to fight alongside America was that we needed his skills here in Georgia.”
Even before Georgia and Russia came to blows in 2008, Batirashvili had earned a reputation for fighting Russians. While a part of Georgia, the Pankisi Valley’s northern end abuts Chechnya, where separatists fought a brutal war for independence from Russia in the 1990s. Batirashvili’s mother was Chechen, and his father has told local journalists that young Batirashvili had seen a handful of military operations as a rebel in Chechnya before joining Georgia’s military in 2006 at age 20.
The choice of a military career was natural, say Georgian officials and journalists who knew him and his community. Pankisi is a tiny and isolated sliver of Georgia with little economic activity, and the choices for its youth are narrow: leave home to fight the Russians, become a subsistence farmer, join one of the legendarily nasty Chechen criminal gangs, or join the military.
According to Batirashvili’s ex-comrades in the Georgian military, Batirashvili was tapped immediately upon his enlistment to join Georgia’s U.S.-trained special forces.
“He was a perfect soldier from his first days, and everyone knew he was a star,” said one former comrade, who asked not to be identified because he remains on active duty and has been ordered not to give media interviews about his former colleague. “We were well trained by American special forces units, and he was the star pupil.”
2008 in Georgian uniform (second from left)
Fighting the Russians in Chechnya would not have disqualified him, the former comrade said. “Having fought the Russians as a Chechen is hardly unusual and not the sort of thing that would have meant you were a bad guy,” he said. “It just means you’re from Pankisi.”
None of the people who knew Batirashvili during his military service noted any sort of dedication to Islam or jihadist tendencies, but that’s not considered particularly unusual in a country where Muslims tend to adhere to a moderate strain of Sufi Islam despite Chechnya’s reputation as a incubator of extremism.
“Chechens have a reputation as crazy Islamic warriors, but our Islam has always been moderate,” according to one Pankisi community and clan leader who’s been ordered by the government not to talk about the man many Georgians laughingly refer to as “Pankisi’s most famous son.”
That reputation for moderation, however, began to change in the wake of the Chechen wars, which devastated Chechnya, and by the construction in 2000 of a second mosque to serve the valley’s six small villages.
The new mosque, the community leader said, was built with a donation from Saudi Arabia and “preached a kind of alien Wahhabi-style Islam,” not the Sufi-style Islam that had characterized the regions for hundreds of years. [Attention: @sorcerer, @Rowdy, @rock127]
“It told our people that it was wrong to pray at graves of saints and ancestors, as our people have done for hundreds of years, and even to share our religious rites with our Christian brothers,” he said.
By the mid-2000s, multiple residents say, the situation had split the community, mostly by age, with the original Sufi mosque attended by the older members of the community, while the young people were radicalized by the new mosque. This led to significant tensions with police until it was resolved by a revolution almost 1,000 miles away.
“They all started leaving for Syria,” the community elder said. “Things are safer here now because all the radicals – our children – have gone to Syria.”
American and Georgian intelligence estimates put that number at between 150 and 200 young men who have left Pankisi to fight in Syria.
Batirashvili’s father, who still lives in Pankisi, couldn’t be reached for comment. Local officials who were asked to help contact him said his son had warned them not to let foreigners interview him, and outsiders are easily noticed riding along the single main road that spans the tiny valley.
Batirashvili’s exploits in the 2008 war with Russia are the stuff of local legend. At the time, the region was tense. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and Putin, then Russia’s prime minister, had been waging a verbal war over what Saakashvili called Russian interference in Georgian affairs with its support of South Ossetia, a Georgian region that had declared its independence.
In what is generally seen now as an enormous miscalculation, Saakashvili ordered a Georgian military offensive to retake the autonomous breakaway region. According to his former comrade and the Georgian defense official, Batirashvili led a special forces detachment of forward artillery observers who’d infiltrated deep into South Ossetia to set up an observation post overlooking the Dzara Bypass Road, which connected South Ossetia through the critical Roki Tunnel to Russia.
As Georgian troops attacked the Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali, Batirashvili’s unit rained artillery on the Russian reinforcements that began pouring in to reinforce the break away republic.
The Russians crushed the Georgians within days, but not before Batirashvili’s unit inflicted serious damage, including an ambush on Aug. 9, 2008, that wounded the commander of the Russian 58th Army, one of the highest ranking Russian military officers wounded since World War II.
“He was a magnificent fighter and one of the best men I have ever known,” said a veteran of that battle who remembered Batirashvili as quiet and dedicated to his men. “He controlled the forward positions and called in the artillery on the Russians. Maybe he more than any other single soldier in the Georgian army fought the Russians the best during that terrible week.”
The story of how Batirashvili left the Georgian army and later ended up in prison for a year on suspicion of arms trafficking is muddled. Georgian military records show that he was discharged for medical reasons in 2010 – he’d contracted tuberculosis, according to the records – but some colleagues and residents of Pankisi say the real reason for the discharge were concerns about his family.
“The guy has two brothers, both of whom fought in Chechnya, and he is known to have helped the rebels before joining the army,” the defense official said. “As good a soldier as he was, there was a lot of concern about the guy’s being radicalized over the Chechen conflict next door.”
By late 2010, Batirashvili was under arrest for weapons possession, which his father told the BBC was merely an old box of ammunition in the house. But prosecutors asked for a significant jail term out of fear that Batirashvili already had been radicalized. Regardless of when this radicalization took place, by the time he left prison 16 months later, Batirashvili reportedly was telling people that prison and his Muslim mother’s death from cancer shortly after his release had convinced him to become religious.
In early 2012, Batirashvili disappeared from Georgia. He told his father he was headed to Istanbul to get away from Georgian military intelligence.
Traveling to Turkey, even before the Syrian civil war, wouldn’t have been an unusual choice. Istanbul had been a destination for Chechen jihadists and gangsters for years. With Turkish roots, Chechens were welcome in Istanbul, able to disappear easily among the ethnic Chechens living in Turkey’s largest city.
“You must understand this about Chechens, they’re really good at two things: Fighting and extorting other Chechens,” said one Pankisi resident. “So if you run a grocery story or a tea shop or some other business anywhere in the world, if you’re Chechen, you will end up having to pay other Chechens to leave you alone.”
“And Istanbul had too many unemployed guys trying to be gangsters all at once,” he added. “But when Syria came along they had something to do.”
A Chechen fighter who spent two years fighting in Syria and currently lives in Istanbul agreed.
“We were all bored and starving here in Istanbul before the Syrian war,” said Ramzan, a huge man with a bushy red beard. He was talking over a cup of tea, buried in the Chechen market on the Asian side of Istanbul.
Ramzan, who asked to not be identified further because of security concerns, had been fighting against the Russians in Chechnya when he was wounded outside of the Chechen capital, Grozny. After members of his family were kidnapped by security forces in the hunt for him, Ramzan decided to flee to Turkey in 2002. For a decade he’d scraped out a living doing low-level extortion and protection rackets.
“Once the jihad in Syria began, people began to tell us, ‘Come to Syria, there’s fighting and paychecks and wives.’ So we started leaving by the hundreds,” he said.
Ramzan fought for nearly two years as a member of Jaysh al Muhajireen, or the “Army of the Immigrants.” Abu Omar al Shishani, aka Batirashvili, was its commander.
“Abu Omar – we never used our Chechen names – was my emir (commander) for two years in Syria,” said Ramzan. “I fought with him in Aleppo and at the capture of the Menagh Air Base. He is an excellent military commander and a very good Muslim. He also helped the Islamic State get many Russian-speaking recruits from Chechnya, Dagestan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and even Afghanistan. He was responsible for bringing them in through a network that I think was controlled by al Qaida.”
Cecire, the analyst, said there’s little doubt Abu Omar found many ethnic Chechens, living in poverty, willing to join the fight. “The ‘poverty’ explanation for foreign fighter flow has taken a lot of flak,” he said. “But in Pankisi and many rural Caucasus regions, that poverty is intertwined with the fame and international demand for the Chechen warrior.” That intersection was a draw for Chechens “in search of means as well as meaning,” Cecire said.
“At rock bottom, it’s no wonder that Batirashvili availed himself of that demand,” he said.
Abu Omar quickly turned Jaysh al Muhajireen into one of the most effective anti-Assad fighting forces, in part by insisting that Syrians be mixed among his primarily Russian-speaking force. The Syrians’ local knowledge and the Chechens’ fighting prowess soon made Jaysh al Muhajireen the leading Syrian rebel unit.
“He was the most brilliant commander in the Syrian revolution,” said Yousef, a Syrian who served as Abu Omar’s deputy and spoke freely of his time with him during lengthy interviews in Gaziantep and Killis, two Turkish cities with large Syrian rebel presences.
Abu Omar’s string of victories included leading broad coalitions of disparate rebel groups to victory in Aleppo. In August 2013, he was the leader of the group that captured the Menagh Air Base, which rebels had been trying to take for two years.
Yousef, who asked to not be identified further because of security concerns, remembers his time with Abu Omar fondly. “I fought with him for two years, he was like a brother to me,” he said. “He would talk about the best military tactics and why we should never be afraid of dying, because we would go to paradise and marry black-eyed virgins and eat with the Prophet Muhammad.”
Ramzan also has warm memories of Abu Omar as a commander. “I fought alongside Abu Omar a lot,” he said. “And I respect him as a person and a leader, he’s a good man.”
But both Yousef and Ramzan said they eventually broke with Abu Omar over his decision in November 2013 to throw in with the Islamic State. At the time, tensions were running high between the Islamic State and other rebel factions, including al Qaida’s Nusra Front. Abu Omar had remained above the fray, but it eventually became apparent that he had sided with the Islamic State.
Yousef remembers a series of suicide bombings that targeted Free Syrian Army units at Tal Rifaat, his hometown, while he was visiting family.
“The FSA unit in Tal Rifaat was made of very good men. They did not have a reputation for being gangsters or foreign spies like many of the other FSA units,” he said. But the Islamic State attacked them anyway.
“I called Omar and told him ‘Stop, these are good men, why is this happening?’” Yousef recalled. “And he told me not to worry and that he would have them stop fighting. He told me wait a day and not to take action.”
The next day, two suicide car bombs dispatched by the Islamic State struck Tal Rifaat, killing a number of Yousef’s friends. A horrified Yousef called Abu Omar again, who denied knowing about the car bombs but said the only FSA units being targeted had ties to Western intelligence.
Yousef found himself the middle man in a negotiation between the FSA and Islamic State representatives, who included Abu Omar’s nephew.
“I thought the meeting was good and that we would resolve things,” Yousef said. That night another suicide bomb struck a command post for the FSA killing several top officials in the local unit.
Yousef called Abu Omar again in a panic only to be told that the car bombs must have been from Assad forces because he had not authorized an operation. “The next day they murdered my cousin in a cemetery,” Yousef said. “He wasn’t even a fighter with the FSA and they shot him to death for being Syrian.”
Yousef visibly teared up as he told of the final text messages he sent Abu Omar, ending their friendship and announcing his split from the group.
“I told him that an enemy is an enemy, but he was a brother who became an enemy and it was much worse. That I would forever oppose him.”
Still, Yousef, who now fights with a moderate Syrian rebel movement outside Aleppo, absolves Abu Omar of the worst crimes of the Islamic State.
“He’s one of the best men and best Muslims I have ever known,” said Yousef. “I am obligated to confront him if he remains with these people, but if he were to leave them or take control of the Islamic State, I would forgive him. If he ran the Islamic State I would have never had to leave.”
- Tarkhan Batirashvili was a natural military star when he joined Georgia’s military
- Fought the Russians during 2008 war, but left Georgia for Turkey in 2012
- In Syria, he’s known as Abu Omar al Shishani, commander in several major victories
Tarkhan Batirashvili
This article originally appeared at McClatchy
The 15 Chechens looking to cross the border from Turkey to Syria didn’t strike Abdullah as particularly important or unusual.
It was early summer in 2012, and as a smuggler based in the Turkish border town of Killis, Abdullah, who’d fled his home village in Syria because of fighting on the outskirts of Aleppo, was used to secretive groups of foreigners – journalists, aid workers and many recently aspiring jihadists – hiring him to cross Turkish military lines at the border while avoiding what was then still a significant Syrian government presence in northern Syrian.
“In 2012, everyone was coming to Syria and we had too much work leading all kinds of people across the border,” he explained over lunch in Killis, a Turkish town just a few miles from the rebel-held Syrian city of Azzaz. “A lot were Muslims who had come to support the revolution against Bashar Assad from every country. So many from Europe, Russia, Germany, France… .”
The 15 men had reached Abdullah through a network of contacts that were funneling new fighters to northern Syria, and Abdullah recalled they said they were going to Syria to assist in the fight against Assad. They were quiet, disciplined and for the most part spoke only a bit of crude formal Arabic.
Only later did Abdullah realize that the network that funneled these men to him was the beginnings of the Islamic State, and that one of the 15 would turn out to be the most important non-Arab figure in the Islamic State hierarchy, a former American-trained noncommissioned officer in the special forces of the nation of Georgia, who’d led his men heroically during the 2008 Russian invasion of his homeland.
Abu Omar al Shishani, as he’s now known, had been born Tarkhan Batirashvili 27 years earlier in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge, a tiny enclave of ethnic Chechens, known locally as Kists, whose roughly 10,000 residents represent virtually all of the Muslims in predominantly Orthodox Christian Georgia.
But analysts of extremist groups said Batirashvili’s impact has been far greater than the small numbers of Muslims in Georgia would suggest. Since he swore allegiance to the Islamic State in 2013, thousands of Muslims from the Caucasus have flocked to Syria to join the extremist cause.
“More than anything else, Batirashvili has legitimized ISIS in the Caucasus by the power of his exploits, which is amplified by slick ISIS propaganda,” said Michael Cecire, an analyst of extremism for the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Batirashvili’s battlefield successes, including orchestrating the capture of Syria’s Menagh Air Base after two years of failed attempts, “helped to legitimize ISIS in militant circles, including in the North Caucasus,” Cecire said.
“Batirashvili’s ability to demonstrate ISIS’ tactical prowess attracted fighters in droves from other factions and tipped the scales in foreign fighter flow and recruitment,” Cecire said. “In the North Caucasus, young people no longer wanted to fight in Syria with the increasingly marginalized Caucasus Emirate (groups), but wanted to fight with the winners – ISIS.”
Batirashvili’s story also was compelling, Cecire said: “A man with a modest background, sickly and impoverished before he went to Syria,” becomes “a great battlefield commander defying the world” … a “seemingly emulable, rags-to-riches story.”
Those seeking an explanation for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s insistence on sending military supplies and manpower to Syria to bolster the government of President Bashar Assad would do well to consider Batirashvili. Putin not only personally oversaw the Russian push into Georgia, but he has twice waged war against Islamist-led factions in Chechnya whose cause Batirashvili has supported since he was a teenager. Ethnic Chechens are thought to be one of the largest groups of foreign fighters in the Islamic State.
Now 30, Batirashvili is a key figure, reportedly a member of the group’s governing council, is said to be the Islamic State’s supreme military leader in northern Syria and Aleppo, and is perhaps the group’s most fearsome ground commander. His current status is an irony for a man once considered a Georgian soldier with a bright future.
“We trained him well, and we had lots of help from America,” said a former Georgian defense official who asked to not be identified because of the sensitivity of Batirashvili’s role in the Islamic State. “In fact, the only reason he didn’t go to Iraq to fight alongside America was that we needed his skills here in Georgia.”
Even before Georgia and Russia came to blows in 2008, Batirashvili had earned a reputation for fighting Russians. While a part of Georgia, the Pankisi Valley’s northern end abuts Chechnya, where separatists fought a brutal war for independence from Russia in the 1990s. Batirashvili’s mother was Chechen, and his father has told local journalists that young Batirashvili had seen a handful of military operations as a rebel in Chechnya before joining Georgia’s military in 2006 at age 20.
The choice of a military career was natural, say Georgian officials and journalists who knew him and his community. Pankisi is a tiny and isolated sliver of Georgia with little economic activity, and the choices for its youth are narrow: leave home to fight the Russians, become a subsistence farmer, join one of the legendarily nasty Chechen criminal gangs, or join the military.
According to Batirashvili’s ex-comrades in the Georgian military, Batirashvili was tapped immediately upon his enlistment to join Georgia’s U.S.-trained special forces.
“He was a perfect soldier from his first days, and everyone knew he was a star,” said one former comrade, who asked not to be identified because he remains on active duty and has been ordered not to give media interviews about his former colleague. “We were well trained by American special forces units, and he was the star pupil.”
2008 in Georgian uniform (second from left)
Fighting the Russians in Chechnya would not have disqualified him, the former comrade said. “Having fought the Russians as a Chechen is hardly unusual and not the sort of thing that would have meant you were a bad guy,” he said. “It just means you’re from Pankisi.”
None of the people who knew Batirashvili during his military service noted any sort of dedication to Islam or jihadist tendencies, but that’s not considered particularly unusual in a country where Muslims tend to adhere to a moderate strain of Sufi Islam despite Chechnya’s reputation as a incubator of extremism.
“Chechens have a reputation as crazy Islamic warriors, but our Islam has always been moderate,” according to one Pankisi community and clan leader who’s been ordered by the government not to talk about the man many Georgians laughingly refer to as “Pankisi’s most famous son.”
That reputation for moderation, however, began to change in the wake of the Chechen wars, which devastated Chechnya, and by the construction in 2000 of a second mosque to serve the valley’s six small villages.
The new mosque, the community leader said, was built with a donation from Saudi Arabia and “preached a kind of alien Wahhabi-style Islam,” not the Sufi-style Islam that had characterized the regions for hundreds of years. [Attention: @sorcerer, @Rowdy, @rock127]
“It told our people that it was wrong to pray at graves of saints and ancestors, as our people have done for hundreds of years, and even to share our religious rites with our Christian brothers,” he said.
By the mid-2000s, multiple residents say, the situation had split the community, mostly by age, with the original Sufi mosque attended by the older members of the community, while the young people were radicalized by the new mosque. This led to significant tensions with police until it was resolved by a revolution almost 1,000 miles away.
“They all started leaving for Syria,” the community elder said. “Things are safer here now because all the radicals – our children – have gone to Syria.”
American and Georgian intelligence estimates put that number at between 150 and 200 young men who have left Pankisi to fight in Syria.
Batirashvili’s father, who still lives in Pankisi, couldn’t be reached for comment. Local officials who were asked to help contact him said his son had warned them not to let foreigners interview him, and outsiders are easily noticed riding along the single main road that spans the tiny valley.
Batirashvili’s exploits in the 2008 war with Russia are the stuff of local legend. At the time, the region was tense. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and Putin, then Russia’s prime minister, had been waging a verbal war over what Saakashvili called Russian interference in Georgian affairs with its support of South Ossetia, a Georgian region that had declared its independence.
In what is generally seen now as an enormous miscalculation, Saakashvili ordered a Georgian military offensive to retake the autonomous breakaway region. According to his former comrade and the Georgian defense official, Batirashvili led a special forces detachment of forward artillery observers who’d infiltrated deep into South Ossetia to set up an observation post overlooking the Dzara Bypass Road, which connected South Ossetia through the critical Roki Tunnel to Russia.
As Georgian troops attacked the Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali, Batirashvili’s unit rained artillery on the Russian reinforcements that began pouring in to reinforce the break away republic.
The Russians crushed the Georgians within days, but not before Batirashvili’s unit inflicted serious damage, including an ambush on Aug. 9, 2008, that wounded the commander of the Russian 58th Army, one of the highest ranking Russian military officers wounded since World War II.
“He was a magnificent fighter and one of the best men I have ever known,” said a veteran of that battle who remembered Batirashvili as quiet and dedicated to his men. “He controlled the forward positions and called in the artillery on the Russians. Maybe he more than any other single soldier in the Georgian army fought the Russians the best during that terrible week.”
The story of how Batirashvili left the Georgian army and later ended up in prison for a year on suspicion of arms trafficking is muddled. Georgian military records show that he was discharged for medical reasons in 2010 – he’d contracted tuberculosis, according to the records – but some colleagues and residents of Pankisi say the real reason for the discharge were concerns about his family.
“The guy has two brothers, both of whom fought in Chechnya, and he is known to have helped the rebels before joining the army,” the defense official said. “As good a soldier as he was, there was a lot of concern about the guy’s being radicalized over the Chechen conflict next door.”
By late 2010, Batirashvili was under arrest for weapons possession, which his father told the BBC was merely an old box of ammunition in the house. But prosecutors asked for a significant jail term out of fear that Batirashvili already had been radicalized. Regardless of when this radicalization took place, by the time he left prison 16 months later, Batirashvili reportedly was telling people that prison and his Muslim mother’s death from cancer shortly after his release had convinced him to become religious.
In early 2012, Batirashvili disappeared from Georgia. He told his father he was headed to Istanbul to get away from Georgian military intelligence.
Traveling to Turkey, even before the Syrian civil war, wouldn’t have been an unusual choice. Istanbul had been a destination for Chechen jihadists and gangsters for years. With Turkish roots, Chechens were welcome in Istanbul, able to disappear easily among the ethnic Chechens living in Turkey’s largest city.
“You must understand this about Chechens, they’re really good at two things: Fighting and extorting other Chechens,” said one Pankisi resident. “So if you run a grocery story or a tea shop or some other business anywhere in the world, if you’re Chechen, you will end up having to pay other Chechens to leave you alone.”
“And Istanbul had too many unemployed guys trying to be gangsters all at once,” he added. “But when Syria came along they had something to do.”
A Chechen fighter who spent two years fighting in Syria and currently lives in Istanbul agreed.
“We were all bored and starving here in Istanbul before the Syrian war,” said Ramzan, a huge man with a bushy red beard. He was talking over a cup of tea, buried in the Chechen market on the Asian side of Istanbul.
Ramzan, who asked to not be identified further because of security concerns, had been fighting against the Russians in Chechnya when he was wounded outside of the Chechen capital, Grozny. After members of his family were kidnapped by security forces in the hunt for him, Ramzan decided to flee to Turkey in 2002. For a decade he’d scraped out a living doing low-level extortion and protection rackets.
“Once the jihad in Syria began, people began to tell us, ‘Come to Syria, there’s fighting and paychecks and wives.’ So we started leaving by the hundreds,” he said.
Ramzan fought for nearly two years as a member of Jaysh al Muhajireen, or the “Army of the Immigrants.” Abu Omar al Shishani, aka Batirashvili, was its commander.
“Abu Omar – we never used our Chechen names – was my emir (commander) for two years in Syria,” said Ramzan. “I fought with him in Aleppo and at the capture of the Menagh Air Base. He is an excellent military commander and a very good Muslim. He also helped the Islamic State get many Russian-speaking recruits from Chechnya, Dagestan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and even Afghanistan. He was responsible for bringing them in through a network that I think was controlled by al Qaida.”
Cecire, the analyst, said there’s little doubt Abu Omar found many ethnic Chechens, living in poverty, willing to join the fight. “The ‘poverty’ explanation for foreign fighter flow has taken a lot of flak,” he said. “But in Pankisi and many rural Caucasus regions, that poverty is intertwined with the fame and international demand for the Chechen warrior.” That intersection was a draw for Chechens “in search of means as well as meaning,” Cecire said.
“At rock bottom, it’s no wonder that Batirashvili availed himself of that demand,” he said.
Abu Omar quickly turned Jaysh al Muhajireen into one of the most effective anti-Assad fighting forces, in part by insisting that Syrians be mixed among his primarily Russian-speaking force. The Syrians’ local knowledge and the Chechens’ fighting prowess soon made Jaysh al Muhajireen the leading Syrian rebel unit.
“He was the most brilliant commander in the Syrian revolution,” said Yousef, a Syrian who served as Abu Omar’s deputy and spoke freely of his time with him during lengthy interviews in Gaziantep and Killis, two Turkish cities with large Syrian rebel presences.
Abu Omar’s string of victories included leading broad coalitions of disparate rebel groups to victory in Aleppo. In August 2013, he was the leader of the group that captured the Menagh Air Base, which rebels had been trying to take for two years.
Yousef, who asked to not be identified further because of security concerns, remembers his time with Abu Omar fondly. “I fought with him for two years, he was like a brother to me,” he said. “He would talk about the best military tactics and why we should never be afraid of dying, because we would go to paradise and marry black-eyed virgins and eat with the Prophet Muhammad.”
Ramzan also has warm memories of Abu Omar as a commander. “I fought alongside Abu Omar a lot,” he said. “And I respect him as a person and a leader, he’s a good man.”
But both Yousef and Ramzan said they eventually broke with Abu Omar over his decision in November 2013 to throw in with the Islamic State. At the time, tensions were running high between the Islamic State and other rebel factions, including al Qaida’s Nusra Front. Abu Omar had remained above the fray, but it eventually became apparent that he had sided with the Islamic State.
Yousef remembers a series of suicide bombings that targeted Free Syrian Army units at Tal Rifaat, his hometown, while he was visiting family.
“The FSA unit in Tal Rifaat was made of very good men. They did not have a reputation for being gangsters or foreign spies like many of the other FSA units,” he said. But the Islamic State attacked them anyway.
“I called Omar and told him ‘Stop, these are good men, why is this happening?’” Yousef recalled. “And he told me not to worry and that he would have them stop fighting. He told me wait a day and not to take action.”
The next day, two suicide car bombs dispatched by the Islamic State struck Tal Rifaat, killing a number of Yousef’s friends. A horrified Yousef called Abu Omar again, who denied knowing about the car bombs but said the only FSA units being targeted had ties to Western intelligence.
Yousef found himself the middle man in a negotiation between the FSA and Islamic State representatives, who included Abu Omar’s nephew.
“I thought the meeting was good and that we would resolve things,” Yousef said. That night another suicide bomb struck a command post for the FSA killing several top officials in the local unit.
Yousef called Abu Omar again in a panic only to be told that the car bombs must have been from Assad forces because he had not authorized an operation. “The next day they murdered my cousin in a cemetery,” Yousef said. “He wasn’t even a fighter with the FSA and they shot him to death for being Syrian.”
Yousef visibly teared up as he told of the final text messages he sent Abu Omar, ending their friendship and announcing his split from the group.
“I told him that an enemy is an enemy, but he was a brother who became an enemy and it was much worse. That I would forever oppose him.”
Still, Yousef, who now fights with a moderate Syrian rebel movement outside Aleppo, absolves Abu Omar of the worst crimes of the Islamic State.
“He’s one of the best men and best Muslims I have ever known,” said Yousef. “I am obligated to confront him if he remains with these people, but if he were to leave them or take control of the Islamic State, I would forgive him. If he ran the Islamic State I would have never had to leave.”
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@pmaitra : This doesn't comes as a surprise.
The timings were very important in the emergence of this ISIS.... so the story is...
First US wanted to do Iraq-II on Syria and Russia put cold water on US plan.
US got frustrated and whining.
US invented ISIS with consultation with Saudis+Hollywood to start Syria Proxy-war, ISIS plays Mujahiddin-II
US was hesitant attacking ISIS and after too much world pressure did half-hearted attempt.
The result is that Syria war turned more devastating and prolonged than Iraq war and almost 300,000 already dead and millions running to EU and serious chaos and riots in EU.
US is not much vocal about Refugee Crisis and letting Europeans suffer and fight among themselves.
EU fighting among themselves on Refugee Crisis where rape/crime epidemic by Muslims is major issue now.
Russia is setting foot in Syria as per reports...
Story continues...
Fact Sheet: 1. Iran/Iraq/Syria/Yemen/Afg/Pak have big Shia population and this is where "war" is going on.
2. Shias are just 13% and 87 % is Sunni worldwide.
The timings were very important in the emergence of this ISIS.... so the story is...
First US wanted to do Iraq-II on Syria and Russia put cold water on US plan.
US got frustrated and whining.
US invented ISIS with consultation with Saudis+Hollywood to start Syria Proxy-war, ISIS plays Mujahiddin-II
US was hesitant attacking ISIS and after too much world pressure did half-hearted attempt.
The result is that Syria war turned more devastating and prolonged than Iraq war and almost 300,000 already dead and millions running to EU and serious chaos and riots in EU.
US is not much vocal about Refugee Crisis and letting Europeans suffer and fight among themselves.
EU fighting among themselves on Refugee Crisis where rape/crime epidemic by Muslims is major issue now.
Russia is setting foot in Syria as per reports...
Story continues...
Fact Sheet: 1. Iran/Iraq/Syria/Yemen/Afg/Pak have big Shia population and this is where "war" is going on.
2. Shias are just 13% and 87 % is Sunni worldwide.
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Few practical things to consider:-
- India need not to intervene in Middle-East affairs since we got our own things to manage.
- Only 2 countries have military capabilities to invade Arabia ie. US/Russia/NATO.
- India can't manage such invasions(at least now) militarily.
- India has own huge Muslim population ie. 180 Million(about 30% Shias and 70% Sunnis)
pmaitra
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Good point. Perhaps we can have a dedicated thread some other day.
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I guess we can have a dedicated thread for US elections... just reading some news about this outspoken Donald Duck(Ok ok Donald Trump) who has given some straight faced answers to "Muslim" terrorist camps and how Pakistan needs to be dried of all it's Nukes or else aid would stop.
pmaitra
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I created this thread just now: http://defenceforumindia.com/forum/threads/2016-us-presidential-elections.70411/
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Well Russian Flankers spotted in Syrian port Latakia
Well Russian Flankers spotted in Syrian port Latakia
pmaitra
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Is This the Russian Syria-Bound Cargo US Had Bulgaria Block?
Russia sets up a 25-tent refugee camp for 500 people in the Syrian city of Hama
(Sputnik - Russian news agency) | Russia Insider
HAMA (Sputnik) – Russia has established the first refugee camp for 500 people in the central Syrian city of Hama.
“I’d like to thank the Russian Federation for delivering the camp and all the necessary equipment. We really need this camp to place the temporarily relocated citizens of the province torn by war,” Hama Governor Hassan Omar Halaf said during the opening ceremony.
The camp was built on the territory of an hippodrome almost in the center of the city of Hama. It includes 25 tents with beds and heaters, four kitchens, and several storage facilities.
Russian aircraft have delivered 15 tons of food and 50,000 sets of single-use kitchenware, anticipated to be enough for 30 days.
Over the two years, Russia has sent more than 30 aircraft filled with humanitarian aid to Syria’s Lattakia international airport. Last week, two planes delivered 80 tons of humanitarian assistance, including food and tents.
According to UN estimates, some 7.6 million people have been internally displaced in Syria and another four million are living as refugees outside the country as a result of the four-year-long civil war between the government and opposition forces, including the violent Islamic State group.
Russia sets up a 25-tent refugee camp for 500 people in the Syrian city of Hama
(Sputnik - Russian news agency) | Russia Insider
HAMA (Sputnik) – Russia has established the first refugee camp for 500 people in the central Syrian city of Hama.
“I’d like to thank the Russian Federation for delivering the camp and all the necessary equipment. We really need this camp to place the temporarily relocated citizens of the province torn by war,” Hama Governor Hassan Omar Halaf said during the opening ceremony.
The camp was built on the territory of an hippodrome almost in the center of the city of Hama. It includes 25 tents with beds and heaters, four kitchens, and several storage facilities.
Russian aircraft have delivered 15 tons of food and 50,000 sets of single-use kitchenware, anticipated to be enough for 30 days.
Over the two years, Russia has sent more than 30 aircraft filled with humanitarian aid to Syria’s Lattakia international airport. Last week, two planes delivered 80 tons of humanitarian assistance, including food and tents.
According to UN estimates, some 7.6 million people have been internally displaced in Syria and another four million are living as refugees outside the country as a result of the four-year-long civil war between the government and opposition forces, including the violent Islamic State group.
pmaitra
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Al Qaeda-Loving Neocons Furious With Russia in Syria
Never happened
Originally appeared at Consortium News
Typical of the incoherence now common among U.S. foreign policy pundits discussing the Syrian crisis is Jeffrey Lewis, who took to the pages of the prestigious journal Foreign Policy to venture his opinion. He started out reciting the usual “group think” narrative about the need to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and denounced Russia’s President Vladimir Putin for stepping up support for the Syrian military in the face of gains by Sunni terror groups.
But Lewis, who is billed as an arms-control specialist at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, then admitted that he doesn’t have a clue what to do, which at least is an improvement over all the other “experts” who say the U.S. must do something – anything! – to counter Russian intervention.
Lewis begins his article with a lot of scary talk about satellite photos confirming that Russia is expanding an air base near Latakia with the goal of increasing military aid to the evil Bashar al-Assad so as to give his doddering regime another lease on life.
“The satellite image shows far more than prefabricated housing and an air traffic control station,” Lewis observed. “It shows extensive construction of what appears to be a military canton … designed to support Russian combat air operations from the base and [which] may serve as a logistical hub for Russian combat forces.”
U.S. officials, he said, “believe Russia will base combat aircraft at the site.” The photos show that “construction crews have completed a taxiway that connects the runway to the construction area,” which in turn “means aircraft shelters for Russian aircraft.” Bottom line: “Russia is substantially expanding its involvement.”
In other words, the Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! After all, alarmism and drumbeating are de rigueur nowadays for U.S. pundits, so Lewis was doing what he had to do to remain in good standing with an increasingly bellicose – and delusional – foreign-policy establishment.
Lewis then accused Moscow of preventing a U.S.-favored regime change that would somehow please “moderate” Syrians so much that they would rally and defeat Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. That notion of an easy and seamless “regime change” is one of the favorite fantasies of neoconservatives and liberal interventionists who were equally confident that they could neatly transform Iraq by installing think-tank favorite Ahmed Chalabi to replace Saddam Hussein.
But now with the Russian intervention in Syria, at least Lewis and his fellow pundits have an excuse for why their best-laid plans didn’t work out this time. It’s Putin’s fault!
“What Russia has done,” Lewis wrote, “is make it clear that it will not let Assad fall. He can’t win, but Russia won’t let him lose. That dooms Syria to what looks like endless war. … So this column does not have a neat and tidy ending. And that is because I am not sure that it is now possible to save Syria. There is no path to resurrect a state that is failing, not so long as Putin has decided to do whatever it takes to preserve Assad’s awful regime and condemn Syria to endless conflict.
“We can, of course, make it difficult for Russia to resupply its forces in Syria. … But these measures won’t replace Bashar al-Assad with a figure who could rally moderate Syrians to restore a stable government, let alone stop the bloodshed.”
In Lewis’s view, Putin’s insertion of Russian forces to defend the Syrian government and fight Al Qaeda and the Islamic State has checkmated U.S. plans for overthrowing Assad and neutralizing his military.
Lewis wrote: “There is now little hope of establishing a no-fly zone over Syria unless Washington wants to be in the business of shooting down Russian aircraft. From a broader perspective, U.S. efforts to arm the opposition to Assad mean fighting a proxy war with Moscow either by trying to down the Russian planes or helping Syrian opposition forces kill Russian combat troops on the ground.”
World War III, Anyone?
Unless President Obama thinks that Syria is a good place to start World War III, he has no choice but to back off. But Lewis’s conclusion rests of two dubious claims that he makes no effort to prove. The first is that Assad is uninterested in fighting the Islamic State and is indeed happy to see ISIS (or ISIL or Daesh as it is also know) open up a “second front” against rebel groups with whom his troops are engaged.
The second claim is that Assad is weak and unpopular yet at the same time so Machiavellian as to foster the growth of an ultra-violent Salafist group that scares the pants off the West and encourages ordinary Syrians to seek shelter in areas under his control.
But these assertions are a variation on the right-wing conspiracy theory that the evil genius in Damascus encouraged the growth of ISIS by springing jihadi elements from prison in the belief that they would rush out to join the opposition and thus bring discredit on the rebels. If you believe this, then you might as well believe that the CIA wired the World Trade Center with explosives in order to provide George W. Bush with a pretext for the War on Terror.
The facts in Syria are otherwise. According to no less an authority than Vice President Joe Biden, Saudi Arabia and the other Arab gulf states “poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of military weapons into … Al Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world,” groups that eventually morphed into ISIS.
As early as August 2012, the Defense Intelligence Agency noted that Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other such groups were driving the anti-Assad movement, that they were seeking to establish a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria as part of an international anti-Shi‘ite crusade, and that their backers in the U.S., Turkey, and the gulf states were all comfortable with such an outcome. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “On Syria, Incoherence, Squared.”]
So it wasn’t Assad and the Baathists who fostered the growth of ISIS, but their enemies in the super-rich oil sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf. Needless to say, the gulf states declared war on Assad not because he is undemocratic – the totalitarians in Riyadh couldn’t care less about anything so trivial – but because he is an Alawite, which is to say a member of the Shi‘ite branch of Islam that the Saudis, as even The New York Times recognizes, are obsessed with fighting.
Consequently, the Saudis, Qataris and other gulf state sheikdoms are sponsoring a reign of terror in Syria for the same reason they are imprisoning democratic protesters in Bahrain and conducting nightly bombing raids in Yemen – because they are engaged in a growing all-Sunni jihad against a “Shi‘ite crescent” that is supposedly enveloping their countries.
As for Assad’s weakness and lack of popular support, the case is not as proven as Lewis wants us to believe. As the French geographer Fabrice Balanche notes, anywhere from 55 to 72 percent of the Syrian population lives in areas under government control, which suggests that the majority has voted with its feet in favor of the Baathist regime in Damascus.
Moreover, Assad received 88.7 percent of the vote in June 2014 in multi-party elections that the State Department predictably denounced as a “disgrace,” but which 30 other countries certified as “free, fair, and transparent.” These include not just Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela, but also India and South Africa, whose opinion the U.S. usually takes more seriously.
This is not to say that the results would not be different under more normal circumstances. But it strongly suggests that the mass of ordinary Syrians prefer Assad to either ISIS, the Nusra Front (Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria), or any of the “moderate” rebels backed by the U.S. So Assad’s unpopularity is at best unproven.
How to Restore Stability
As for Lewis’s contention that “Assad must leave” for Syrian unity to be restored, it is a pure non-sequitur. The only thing that Assad’s departure would create under present circumstances is a power vacuum that only ISIS and other jihadists could fill. The result would be unity all right, but unity under a black banner of religious obscurantism that would send millions more refugees fleeing to Europe.
If that’s what President Obama wants, then he should by all means continue with the present policy of ousting Assad at all costs. If not, then he should think very carefully about heeding a U.S. foreign-policy establishment that unanimously backed the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Still, Lewis’s conclusion is telling – in a backwards sort of way. As he puts it: “Moscow’s apparent commitment to Damascus raises fundamental questions about what U.S. strategy, if any, can succeed. … There are those who see Syria as a quagmire for Putin, a kind of matched pair to our own folly in Iraq; just as Washington collectively saw Afghanistan as payback for Vietnam. …
“While Charlie Wilson’s war [in Afghanistan] helped popularize the idea of bleeding Moscow, I don’t think that can be the basis of U.S. policy either. The moral cost is far too high. Aylan Kurdi, the 3-year-old boy whose corpse washed up on a Turkish beach, was fleeing Syria’s civil war, as are hundreds of thousands of the refugees now in Europe. More than half of Syria’s 17 million people have been displaced. Bleeding Moscow means bleeding these people. It may sound strategic in a Pentagon war room, but not when children’s bodies wash up on shore.”
According to this thinking, Obama can’t let Moscow prevail in bolstering the Syrian government since that would mean prolonging Syria’s agony. But Obama can’t prevent it either, so the only thing that Lewis foresees is an endless vista of washed-up bodies and desperate refugees. It’s a vision of hell straight out of Hieronymus Bosch.
But if we were to turn Lewis’s argument upside-down – or, rather, right side up given his skewed viewpoint – it might go something like this:
If true, Moscow’s decision to step up support for Assad means that America and its Arab gulf partners will now have a harder time removing him after all. This raises fundamental questions about what U.S. strategy, if any, can succeed. Conceivably, America and its allies could admit defeat and go home. But “surrender” is not in the imperial lexicon.
Or the West could cooperate with Russia and Iran in organizing a power-sharing “unity government” in Damascus that would allow Assad to remain in office for the time being while adopting democratic reforms. Obama could also put the squeeze on Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the gulf states to stop the flow of money and weapons to Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and ISIS. That multinational cooperation might reestablish at least some stability inside Syria.
But that would require Washington’s foreign policy establishment – both the neocons and the liberal interventionists – to get down off their high horses and admit their “regime change” approach was wrongheaded and destructive. Instead, they will almost certainly respond by demanding that Obama match Moscow’s move and raise it one higher, more support for the anti-Assad rebels, up to and including Al Qaeda and perhaps even secretly aiding ISIS as well. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Neocons Urge Embrace of Al Qaeda.”]
The aim will not only be to topple Assad and the Baathists, but to bleed Russia the same way that U.S. and Saudi-backed mujahedeen bled the Soviets in Afghanistan (a strategy that destroyed a pro-Moscow secular regime in Kabul but also led to the rise of the Taliban and the formation of Al Qaeda). Likewise, in Syria, the human cost for upping the ante will be immense, but Washington’s vast corps of laptop bombardiers will tell themselves that it’s all Assad and Putin’s fault. These foreign policy pundits will feel good about themselves and more bellicose toward Russia.
No one knows where it will end, though one can bet that there will be many more dead Syrian children along the way as well as worsening instability reaching into Europe. But the U.S. attempts to counter the Russians will sound strategic both in Pentagon war rooms and Washington think tanks. As Madeleine Albright once said about the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to U.S. sanctions, the price in terms of toppling Assad will be “worth it.”
[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Climbing into Bed with Al-Qaeda.”]
- America’s neocons are so wedded to 'regime change' in Syria that they've urged the embrace Al Qaeda
- They are now upset over Russia’s expanded diplomatic engagement in support of Syria’s secular government which frustrates long-held neocon desires
Never happened
Originally appeared at Consortium News
Typical of the incoherence now common among U.S. foreign policy pundits discussing the Syrian crisis is Jeffrey Lewis, who took to the pages of the prestigious journal Foreign Policy to venture his opinion. He started out reciting the usual “group think” narrative about the need to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and denounced Russia’s President Vladimir Putin for stepping up support for the Syrian military in the face of gains by Sunni terror groups.
But Lewis, who is billed as an arms-control specialist at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, then admitted that he doesn’t have a clue what to do, which at least is an improvement over all the other “experts” who say the U.S. must do something – anything! – to counter Russian intervention.
Lewis begins his article with a lot of scary talk about satellite photos confirming that Russia is expanding an air base near Latakia with the goal of increasing military aid to the evil Bashar al-Assad so as to give his doddering regime another lease on life.
“The satellite image shows far more than prefabricated housing and an air traffic control station,” Lewis observed. “It shows extensive construction of what appears to be a military canton … designed to support Russian combat air operations from the base and [which] may serve as a logistical hub for Russian combat forces.”
U.S. officials, he said, “believe Russia will base combat aircraft at the site.” The photos show that “construction crews have completed a taxiway that connects the runway to the construction area,” which in turn “means aircraft shelters for Russian aircraft.” Bottom line: “Russia is substantially expanding its involvement.”
In other words, the Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! After all, alarmism and drumbeating are de rigueur nowadays for U.S. pundits, so Lewis was doing what he had to do to remain in good standing with an increasingly bellicose – and delusional – foreign-policy establishment.
Lewis then accused Moscow of preventing a U.S.-favored regime change that would somehow please “moderate” Syrians so much that they would rally and defeat Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. That notion of an easy and seamless “regime change” is one of the favorite fantasies of neoconservatives and liberal interventionists who were equally confident that they could neatly transform Iraq by installing think-tank favorite Ahmed Chalabi to replace Saddam Hussein.
But now with the Russian intervention in Syria, at least Lewis and his fellow pundits have an excuse for why their best-laid plans didn’t work out this time. It’s Putin’s fault!
“What Russia has done,” Lewis wrote, “is make it clear that it will not let Assad fall. He can’t win, but Russia won’t let him lose. That dooms Syria to what looks like endless war. … So this column does not have a neat and tidy ending. And that is because I am not sure that it is now possible to save Syria. There is no path to resurrect a state that is failing, not so long as Putin has decided to do whatever it takes to preserve Assad’s awful regime and condemn Syria to endless conflict.
“We can, of course, make it difficult for Russia to resupply its forces in Syria. … But these measures won’t replace Bashar al-Assad with a figure who could rally moderate Syrians to restore a stable government, let alone stop the bloodshed.”
In Lewis’s view, Putin’s insertion of Russian forces to defend the Syrian government and fight Al Qaeda and the Islamic State has checkmated U.S. plans for overthrowing Assad and neutralizing his military.
Lewis wrote: “There is now little hope of establishing a no-fly zone over Syria unless Washington wants to be in the business of shooting down Russian aircraft. From a broader perspective, U.S. efforts to arm the opposition to Assad mean fighting a proxy war with Moscow either by trying to down the Russian planes or helping Syrian opposition forces kill Russian combat troops on the ground.”
World War III, Anyone?
Unless President Obama thinks that Syria is a good place to start World War III, he has no choice but to back off. But Lewis’s conclusion rests of two dubious claims that he makes no effort to prove. The first is that Assad is uninterested in fighting the Islamic State and is indeed happy to see ISIS (or ISIL or Daesh as it is also know) open up a “second front” against rebel groups with whom his troops are engaged.
The second claim is that Assad is weak and unpopular yet at the same time so Machiavellian as to foster the growth of an ultra-violent Salafist group that scares the pants off the West and encourages ordinary Syrians to seek shelter in areas under his control.
But these assertions are a variation on the right-wing conspiracy theory that the evil genius in Damascus encouraged the growth of ISIS by springing jihadi elements from prison in the belief that they would rush out to join the opposition and thus bring discredit on the rebels. If you believe this, then you might as well believe that the CIA wired the World Trade Center with explosives in order to provide George W. Bush with a pretext for the War on Terror.
The facts in Syria are otherwise. According to no less an authority than Vice President Joe Biden, Saudi Arabia and the other Arab gulf states “poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of military weapons into … Al Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world,” groups that eventually morphed into ISIS.
As early as August 2012, the Defense Intelligence Agency noted that Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other such groups were driving the anti-Assad movement, that they were seeking to establish a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria as part of an international anti-Shi‘ite crusade, and that their backers in the U.S., Turkey, and the gulf states were all comfortable with such an outcome. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “On Syria, Incoherence, Squared.”]
So it wasn’t Assad and the Baathists who fostered the growth of ISIS, but their enemies in the super-rich oil sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf. Needless to say, the gulf states declared war on Assad not because he is undemocratic – the totalitarians in Riyadh couldn’t care less about anything so trivial – but because he is an Alawite, which is to say a member of the Shi‘ite branch of Islam that the Saudis, as even The New York Times recognizes, are obsessed with fighting.
Consequently, the Saudis, Qataris and other gulf state sheikdoms are sponsoring a reign of terror in Syria for the same reason they are imprisoning democratic protesters in Bahrain and conducting nightly bombing raids in Yemen – because they are engaged in a growing all-Sunni jihad against a “Shi‘ite crescent” that is supposedly enveloping their countries.
As for Assad’s weakness and lack of popular support, the case is not as proven as Lewis wants us to believe. As the French geographer Fabrice Balanche notes, anywhere from 55 to 72 percent of the Syrian population lives in areas under government control, which suggests that the majority has voted with its feet in favor of the Baathist regime in Damascus.
Moreover, Assad received 88.7 percent of the vote in June 2014 in multi-party elections that the State Department predictably denounced as a “disgrace,” but which 30 other countries certified as “free, fair, and transparent.” These include not just Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela, but also India and South Africa, whose opinion the U.S. usually takes more seriously.
This is not to say that the results would not be different under more normal circumstances. But it strongly suggests that the mass of ordinary Syrians prefer Assad to either ISIS, the Nusra Front (Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria), or any of the “moderate” rebels backed by the U.S. So Assad’s unpopularity is at best unproven.
How to Restore Stability
As for Lewis’s contention that “Assad must leave” for Syrian unity to be restored, it is a pure non-sequitur. The only thing that Assad’s departure would create under present circumstances is a power vacuum that only ISIS and other jihadists could fill. The result would be unity all right, but unity under a black banner of religious obscurantism that would send millions more refugees fleeing to Europe.
If that’s what President Obama wants, then he should by all means continue with the present policy of ousting Assad at all costs. If not, then he should think very carefully about heeding a U.S. foreign-policy establishment that unanimously backed the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Still, Lewis’s conclusion is telling – in a backwards sort of way. As he puts it: “Moscow’s apparent commitment to Damascus raises fundamental questions about what U.S. strategy, if any, can succeed. … There are those who see Syria as a quagmire for Putin, a kind of matched pair to our own folly in Iraq; just as Washington collectively saw Afghanistan as payback for Vietnam. …
“While Charlie Wilson’s war [in Afghanistan] helped popularize the idea of bleeding Moscow, I don’t think that can be the basis of U.S. policy either. The moral cost is far too high. Aylan Kurdi, the 3-year-old boy whose corpse washed up on a Turkish beach, was fleeing Syria’s civil war, as are hundreds of thousands of the refugees now in Europe. More than half of Syria’s 17 million people have been displaced. Bleeding Moscow means bleeding these people. It may sound strategic in a Pentagon war room, but not when children’s bodies wash up on shore.”
According to this thinking, Obama can’t let Moscow prevail in bolstering the Syrian government since that would mean prolonging Syria’s agony. But Obama can’t prevent it either, so the only thing that Lewis foresees is an endless vista of washed-up bodies and desperate refugees. It’s a vision of hell straight out of Hieronymus Bosch.
But if we were to turn Lewis’s argument upside-down – or, rather, right side up given his skewed viewpoint – it might go something like this:
If true, Moscow’s decision to step up support for Assad means that America and its Arab gulf partners will now have a harder time removing him after all. This raises fundamental questions about what U.S. strategy, if any, can succeed. Conceivably, America and its allies could admit defeat and go home. But “surrender” is not in the imperial lexicon.
Or the West could cooperate with Russia and Iran in organizing a power-sharing “unity government” in Damascus that would allow Assad to remain in office for the time being while adopting democratic reforms. Obama could also put the squeeze on Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the gulf states to stop the flow of money and weapons to Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and ISIS. That multinational cooperation might reestablish at least some stability inside Syria.
But that would require Washington’s foreign policy establishment – both the neocons and the liberal interventionists – to get down off their high horses and admit their “regime change” approach was wrongheaded and destructive. Instead, they will almost certainly respond by demanding that Obama match Moscow’s move and raise it one higher, more support for the anti-Assad rebels, up to and including Al Qaeda and perhaps even secretly aiding ISIS as well. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Neocons Urge Embrace of Al Qaeda.”]
The aim will not only be to topple Assad and the Baathists, but to bleed Russia the same way that U.S. and Saudi-backed mujahedeen bled the Soviets in Afghanistan (a strategy that destroyed a pro-Moscow secular regime in Kabul but also led to the rise of the Taliban and the formation of Al Qaeda). Likewise, in Syria, the human cost for upping the ante will be immense, but Washington’s vast corps of laptop bombardiers will tell themselves that it’s all Assad and Putin’s fault. These foreign policy pundits will feel good about themselves and more bellicose toward Russia.
No one knows where it will end, though one can bet that there will be many more dead Syrian children along the way as well as worsening instability reaching into Europe. But the U.S. attempts to counter the Russians will sound strategic both in Pentagon war rooms and Washington think tanks. As Madeleine Albright once said about the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to U.S. sanctions, the price in terms of toppling Assad will be “worth it.”
[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Climbing into Bed with Al-Qaeda.”]
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Russian deployment to Syria includes four Russian Navy Su-30SMs at Latakia. Normal base is Belbek, Crimea.
Russian deployment to Syria includes four Russian Navy Su-30SMs at Latakia. Normal base is Belbek, Crimea.
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Four Russian Flanker derivative have arrived at Latakia airport.
Satellite images prove Russian combat planes have eventually deployed to Syria.
The deployment, anticipated by an air bridge from Russia that involved several An-124 Condor airlifter flights saw the aircraft arrive at al-Assad International Airport, near Latakia, the main Syrian port city, on Sept. 18.
As the satellite imagery shows, the aircraft were parked next to the threshold of runway 17L, on the northern side of the airport: this is quite interesting as the airbase has no hardened shelters and the aircraft are in the open air, exposing them to satellites and spyplanes, and making them a possible target to attacks from outside the airfield.
The arrival of the Russian Navy Su-30s (possibly a contingent from those already deployed to Crimea) and the official confirmation by the Pentagon, brought speculations that Russians may already be operating in Syria to an end: according to the U.S. defense officials, so far, four Su-30s, two Mi-24 gunship helicopters and two Mi-17 Hip utility choppers have deployed to Latakia.
http://theaviationist.com/2015/09/20/su-30sm-exposed-on-the-ground-latakia/
Satellite images prove Russian combat planes have eventually deployed to Syria.
The deployment, anticipated by an air bridge from Russia that involved several An-124 Condor airlifter flights saw the aircraft arrive at al-Assad International Airport, near Latakia, the main Syrian port city, on Sept. 18.
As the satellite imagery shows, the aircraft were parked next to the threshold of runway 17L, on the northern side of the airport: this is quite interesting as the airbase has no hardened shelters and the aircraft are in the open air, exposing them to satellites and spyplanes, and making them a possible target to attacks from outside the airfield.
The arrival of the Russian Navy Su-30s (possibly a contingent from those already deployed to Crimea) and the official confirmation by the Pentagon, brought speculations that Russians may already be operating in Syria to an end: according to the U.S. defense officials, so far, four Su-30s, two Mi-24 gunship helicopters and two Mi-17 Hip utility choppers have deployed to Latakia.
http://theaviationist.com/2015/09/20/su-30sm-exposed-on-the-ground-latakia/
pmaitra
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So, @SajeevJino comes in whining, and now, what used to be a thread on Russian involvement in Syria, is completely derailed.
I am going move these posts to the Chit Chat Thread.
Edit: Moved here: http://defenceforumindia.com/forum/threads/chit-chat-thread.4046/page-484#post-1078937
I inform @Zebra and @jouni, quit whining and post on topic, or your posts will begin to disappear.
I am going move these posts to the Chit Chat Thread.
Edit: Moved here: http://defenceforumindia.com/forum/threads/chit-chat-thread.4046/page-484#post-1078937
I inform @Zebra and @jouni, quit whining and post on topic, or your posts will begin to disappear.
Last edited:
pmaitra
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The ISIS controls much of the desert and cities in the desert. Most people have moved to government controlled areas, or were living in the coastal regions, which was under government control. Who wants to live under a bunch of raping and head chopping zombies? This further adds credence to the fact that Bashar al-Assad won with overwhelming majority in the last elections.
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New video may show Russian Il-78 tanker escorted by Su-24 Fencer jets over Syria today
Although the quality of the footage is quite scarce, the video seems to show four Su-24 Fencer attack planes trailing an Il-78 tanker aircraft (or an Il-76 cargo plane) probably heading towards al-Assad IAP, south of Latakia, where four Russian Su-30SM multirole planes are already based.
If genuine (it must remembered that some pictures exposed earlier this month proved to be fake), the clip may prove that Russia is deploying more combat planes to Syria to sustain the air war against ISIS (even though we can’t rule out other possibilities, for instance, that those depicted in the video are Syrian Su-24s escorting a Russian cargo/tanker – we have just to wait until a new satellite image emerges)
http://theaviationist.com/2015/09/2...corted-by-su-24-fencer-jets-over-syria-today/
Although the quality of the footage is quite scarce, the video seems to show four Su-24 Fencer attack planes trailing an Il-78 tanker aircraft (or an Il-76 cargo plane) probably heading towards al-Assad IAP, south of Latakia, where four Russian Su-30SM multirole planes are already based.
If genuine (it must remembered that some pictures exposed earlier this month proved to be fake), the clip may prove that Russia is deploying more combat planes to Syria to sustain the air war against ISIS (even though we can’t rule out other possibilities, for instance, that those depicted in the video are Syrian Su-24s escorting a Russian cargo/tanker – we have just to wait until a new satellite image emerges)
http://theaviationist.com/2015/09/2...corted-by-su-24-fencer-jets-over-syria-today/
