It’s not strictly accurate to say there are no moderate Syrian rebels who abhor Bashar Assad and Islamic extremists. However, those two guys don’t stand much of a chance against either side, although they are much beloved by the Obama administration, neocons, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. From Gareth Porter at antiwar.com:
If the tentative agreement on a Syrian ceasefire negotiated by the United States and Russia falls apart before it can be implemented, the reason will be the Obama administration’s insistence that Russian airstrikes are targeting “legitimate opposition groups.”
That is how Secretary of State John Kerry defined the issue on Saturday, repeating a propaganda theme that began, in a different form, as soon as the Russian air offensive in Syria began in late September of 2015. The Obama administration portrayed the Russian campaign in support of Syrian operations as hitting “moderate” opposition forces, suggesting that only strikes against ISIS would be legitimate.
Now Kerry insists that the “legitimate” armed organizations being hit by Russian airstrikes are separate from ISIS and Al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, the Nusra Front, both organizationally and physically. But the reality on the ground in Idlib and Aleppo provinces is that there is no such separation.
Information from a wide range of sources, including some of the groups that the United States has been explicitly supporting, makes it clear that every armed anti-Assad organization unit in those provinces is engaged in a military system controlled by Nusra. All of them fight alongside the Nusra Front and coordinate their military activities with it.
This reality even slips into mainstream US news accounts on occasion, such as Anne Barnard’s New York Times article last Saturday about the proposed Syrian cease-fire in which she reported, “With the proviso that the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria, can still be bombed, Russia puts the United States in a difficult position; the insurgent groups it supports cooperate in some places with the well-armed, well-financed Nusra in what they say is a tactical alliance of necessity against government forces.”
At least since 2014 the Obama administration has armed a number of Syrian armed groups even though it knew the groups were coordinating closely with the Nusra Front, which was simultaneously getting arms from Turkey and Qatar. The strategy called for supplying TOW anti-tank missiles to the “Syrian Revolutionaries Front” (SRF) as the core of a client Syrian army that would be independent of the Nusra Front.
However, when a combined force of Nusra and non-jihadist brigades including the SRF captured the Syrian army base at Wadi al-Deif in December 2014, the truth began to emerge. The SRF and other groups to which the United States had supplied TOW missiles had fought under Nusra’s command to capture the base.
And as one of the SRF fighters who participated in the operation, Abu Kumayt, recalled to The New York Times, after the victory only Nusra and its very close ally Ahrar al-Sham were allowed to enter the base. Nusra had allowed the groups supported by the United States to maintain the appearance of independence from Nusra, according to Abu Kumyt, in order to induce the United States to continue the supply of US weapons.
To continue reading: Obama’s ‘Moderate’ Syrian Deception
