AS WE GO TO PRESS: TERROR ATTACK WOULD HAVE TARGETED AN URBAN CENTRE AT RUSH-HOUR, RCMP SAY — RCMP say they were given information from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation saying that Aaron Driver was planning a terror attack targeting an urban centre during either morning or afternoon rush hour sometime this week. Mike Cabana, the Deputy Commissioner of Federal Policy with the RCMP, gave the information at a press conference on Thursday afternoon, after Driver was killed during a police confrontation in Strathroy, Ont. on Wednesday evening. “O Canada, you have received many warnings. You were told many times what will become of those who fight against the Islamic State,” Driver says in the video. RCMP say there’s no indication that Driver was working with any accomplices. Cabana said RCMP started investigating Driver in Dec. 2014. During the investigation police found he displayed an interest in travelling abroad, and was known to be communicating with two prominent members of the so-called Islamic State. (Global, Aug. 11, 2016)
War of Attrition: The Syrian Rebellion Grinds on Into its 6th Year, With No End in Sight: Jonathan Spyer, Jerusalem Post, Aug. 11, 2016— It is now five years since the outbreak of the Syrian armed rebellion against the regime of Bashar Assad, and up to 400,000 people have been killed in the civil war that has ravaged and destroyed the country.
What Russia and Turkey Bring to Syria: New York Times, Aug. 11, 2016— President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey are major players on opposite sides of the Syrian civil war.
How Israel Plays Syria’s Civil War: Neri Zilber, Daily Beast, Aug. 2, 2016— Signs of war are clearly evident when peering into Syria from the Israeli side of the Golan Heights: bombed-out villages, forests hastily chopped down for firewood, refugee encampments.
To Win in Syria, Target Hezbollah: Daniel Serwer, New York Post, July 29 4, 2016— The military situation in Syria has turned against the US-supported opposition over the past year, due mainly to Russian intervention.
On Topic Links
Canada has ‘Defaulted’ on its Responsibility to Protect Syrian Civilians, says Irwin Cotler: Michael Petrou, National Post, July 13, 2016
Syria Regime Drafts Prisoners, Teachers to Bolster Depleted Army: Raja Abdulrahim, Wall Street Journal, Aug. 5, 2016
Military Success in Syria Gives Putin Upper Hand in U.S. Proxy War: Mark Mazzetti, Anne Barnard & Eric Schmitt, New York Times, Aug. 6, 2016
Obama’s Worst Mistake: Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, Aug. 11, 2016
WAR OF ATTRITION: THE SYRIAN REBELLION
GRINDS ON INTO ITS 6TH YEAR, WITH NO END IN SIGHT
Jonathan Spyer
Jerusalem Post, Aug. 11, 2016
It is now five years since the outbreak of the Syrian armed rebellion against the regime of Bashar Assad, and up to 400,000 people have been killed in the civil war that has ravaged and destroyed the country. In addition, 13.5 million people have lost their homes and of those, around 6.6 million have left the country. Yet an end to the war seems nowhere near, as a half-decade on, the revolt finds itself at an impasse. Any hopes for a democratic transformation of the country are long gone.
Today, the rebellion is dominated by Sunni Islamist groups of various hues, supported by a variety of regional players. Salafi Islamist groups are the strongest among the armed groups, with Ahrar al-Sham (Free Men of the Levant) perhaps the single strongest group. Jabhat al-Nusra (Support Front) – until recently the official franchise of the Al-Qaeda network in Syria – and Jaish al-Islam (Army of Islam) from the Damascus area are also leading players.
Many analysts throughout the war had assumed that the sheer weight of numbers must eventually, inevitably, lead to a rebel victory. Throughout the fight, the Assad regime has been plagued by a shortage of manpower. The regime has a narrow core base of support. The Alawis, the sect from which the Assads emerged, constituted only about 12 percent of the population of Syria at the outbreak of the war. The rebels, meanwhile, came from Syria’s 60 percent Sunni Arab majority. Hence on the basis of sheer attrition, their eventual victory seemed likely. In 2015, this moment appeared close. But Russian and Iranian mobilization and assistance prevented its realization.
The current situation now stands as follows: Russian air power and Iranian proxy manpower have kept the regime in existence, and are now pushing the rebels back. Rebel-controlled eastern Aleppo is surrounded. The fronts in the south remain more static, but the initiative in the war has now passed back to the regime. In the south, too, local ‘de-escalation’ agreements effectively constitute rebel surrenders.
In late 2016, I traveled to the border area between Turkey and Syria in order to interview rebel fighters and leaders. I was among the first foreign journalists to meet the rebels and visit their first areas of control, all the way back in February 2012. I wanted to see what had changed and what remained the same. And, in so doing, perhaps also to get a sense of the current balance of power in the Middle East, as seen through the lens of its most bloody and intractable war. The towns of Gaziantep and Kilis, where I visited, have become centers of the Syrian refugee population. The various rebel groups have hunkered down here, setting up their offices in the echoing apartment blocks of the poorer parts of these cities. There they spend their days waiting, with much time on their hands.
The most immediately obvious change is in the border itself. In the first couple of years of the war, the Syrian-Turkish border was basically open, except for in the areas facing Syria’s Kurdish population. Turkey was a strong supporter of the rebellion. Its imminent victory was expected. Ankara in essence turned the border over to the rebels against Assad in the first years. In those days, the rebels and the many journalists who wanted to write about them crossed over more or less freely. The border fence was an old and flimsy affair. There were many obliging smugglers’ rings willing to trace a path through the minefields for a fee. The Turkish army itself was cheerfully amenable to bribery.
All that is over now. The journalists for the most part no longer come. In the course of 2013, the Salafi jihadis entered the picture, bringing with them their hatred of the kuffar, the infidel. The kidnappings of journalists soon followed. Moreover, since the emergence of the Islamic State in Syria, interest in the destruction of the Assad regime has waned in the West. The rebellion itself is dominated by Sunni Islamists. Any notion of it representing the doorway to some better or more representative future for the region has long since departed. Furthermore, ISIS and its activities have forced the Turks to recalibrate their position.
From Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s point of view, ISIS wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. The jihadis were keen to challenge the Kurdish nationalists of the PKK and its Syrian franchise. These were the forces that Ankara was really worried about. But with the commencement of ISIS’s war against the West, a policy of benign indifference toward the jihadis was no longer possible. Turkey began to act against the ISIS presence in the country, and ISIS hit back – both by shelling the town of Kilis, and by activating its cells within Turkey itself, carrying out the bombing at Ataturk airport in Istanbul on June 28. As a consequence, the border fence has been revamped, and replaced with a wall along some sections of the frontier. The army no longer take bribes; and anyone seeking to make a run to or from Syria now faces a good chance of being shot dead (back in 2012, the soldiers used to just fire in the air).
But the nature of the conflict itself has also changed. There was a moment, in the early days of the rebellion, when it genuinely looked like a popular uprising. This was always perhaps misleading. Today it seems very distant. There is no longer a single war taking place in Syria. Rather, the country has fragmented into a variety of interlocking ‘projects’ and conflicts. As Basam Haji Mustafa of the Islamist Nour al-Din al-Zenki group put it to me, “There are four projects in Syria today: The Assad regime and its allies; the [Kurdish- led, US-supported] Syrian Democratic Forces; the Islamic State; and the rebellion.”…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
WHAT RUSSIA AND TURKEY BRING TO SYRIA
New York Times, Aug. 11, 2016
President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey are major players on opposite sides of the Syrian civil war. Mr. Putin has provided the crucial military support that is keeping Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, in power; Mr. Erdogan has helped arm opposition groups seeking Mr. Assad’s overthrow. So when the two men met in St. Petersburg on Tuesday to patch up their nine-month-long feud over a variety of issues, one question was whether they could make any progress toward ending a conflict that has reportedly killed more than 470,000 Syrians and displaced millions more. Tragically for Syria, the answer was no.
After the meeting, the Turkish foreign minister told the state-run news agency the two sides had “common views” on the need for a cease-fire in Syria, deliveries of humanitarian aid and a political solution to end the crisis. But there was no suggestion they had narrowed their fundamental differences — which include Russia’s bombing of Turkey’s rebel allies as well as Mr. Assad’s fate — even as the situation in Syria continues to deteriorate.
For now, the focus is on Aleppo, which was Syria’s largest city until the civil war erupted five years ago and is now split between rebel- and government-held sectors. Mr. Assad’s army and its Russian allies closed the last access roads to the rebel-held eastern sector of Aleppo in July. Then over the weekend, fighting escalated when rebel forces and their jihadist allies — notably the Nusra Front, an affiliate of Al Qaeda — broke the monthlong siege. Their success emboldened the Assad forces to intensify airstrikes on rebel targets. United Nations officials say that two million people have been put at risk and in desperate need of water, food and medicine. Whether the rebels can continue to hold their part of the city is unclear.
On Wednesday, Russia, which has taken part in the bombing of rebel-held areas, said there would be three-hour cease-fires daily to allow aid convoys to enter Aleppo safely, though experts said that amount of time would be too short to be effective. Certainly, skepticism is warranted. Mr. Putin has been a duplicitous partner, failing to fulfill previous commitments. The proposal may have been an attempt to deflect criticism unleashed on Monday when the United Nations Security Council heard testimony from two American doctors who had just returned from treating dying and wounded children in Aleppo. A Russian diplomat immediately attacked the testimony as “propaganda” that would block movement “toward a political settlement in Syria.”
The Security Council’s goal has been a negotiated political solution that would end the war by putting into place a coalition government of pro-Assad and opposition forces to govern the country as Mr. Assad is eased out of power. But years of talk and failed diplomatic efforts have resulted in no progress in reducing civilian suffering, much less an end to the fighting. Now, the United States and Russia are again trying to restart negotiations by proposing a deal under which Syria would end its bombing of rebel forces, there would be a cease-fire and the Americans would share intelligence with Russia for targeting airstrikes against the Islamic State as well as the Nusra Front. Some American officials say intelligence sharing, which comes with its own risks, is necessary to prevent the Nusra Front from gaining control over more territory.
Although President Obama is gradually ratcheting up the battle against the Islamic State, he has refused to involve the United States in a military fight with Mr. Assad, and is expected to maintain that policy until his successor takes office. How Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, might approach the problem is very unclear, but Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, has talked about more military intervention, including a no-fly zone to protect civilians. American voters need to hear much more about their intentions. But the only real hope of ending the carnage is a resumption of negotiations.
HOW ISRAEL PLAYS SYRIA’S CIVIL WAR
Neri Zilber
Daily Beast, Aug. 2, 2016
Signs of war are clearly evident when peering into Syria from the Israeli side of the Golan Heights: bombed-out villages, forests hastily chopped down for firewood, refugee encampments. But above all there is the desolation and quiet. One village sitting almost on the border line seems to be deserted, save for an incongruous shepherd and his flock and, eventually, one or two trucks moving in the distance. This is a change from previous years, when “war tourists,” Israeli and foreign, flocked to this frontier for front-row seats to the worst show on Earth: plumes of gray smoke from mortar shells, sounds of gunfire, multi-vehicle offensives by one Syrian rebel group or another.
Especially at the start of the Syrian civil war, when such things were novel, Israeli military officers would sit at the Coffee Annan café on Mt. Bental, overlooking the vast Golan plain, and through binoculars observe what one officer termed “the laboratory of terror” below. The “experiments” in this laboratory sometimes crossed into the Israeli side, with rockets over villages, roadside bombs on the border fence, and small arms fire; several Israeli army personnel have been seriously injured and at least one civilian has been killed.
Until a few errant mortars and an unidentified drone caused some excitement last month, however, the frontier with Israel appeared to have gone almost wholly quiet—despite the fact that the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) and the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra are known to be on the border. As one senior Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officer from the Northern Command told me during a recent visit, “Lebanon might be the most explosive arena, and Gaza might be the most immediate, but the Golan Heights is the most dynamic.” This “dynamism,” indeed, explains how it is that after years of anarchy and warfare inside Syria, the rebels – whether moderate, jihadist, or ISIS—have yet to fire at Israel in anger. It may also explain the relative quiet of recent months and Israel’s evolving strategy vis-à-vis its Golan front. After half a decade sitting out the civil war, is Israel about to pick a side?
When it comes to the Golan Heights, dynamism for the IDF takes many forms, but none perhaps so personal for many officers as the imposing mountain of Tel Hara, which rises out of the Golan plain several kilometers inside Syria. Tel Hara was, for decades, a strategic command position for the Syrian army and a major focal point for Israeli war planners. “I trained for years to take that hill, a lot of sweat went into it,” the senior IDF officer told me, pointing at it wistfully from the border line. “And the [Syrian] rebels took it with a few dozen people” in late 2014 after a protracted siege.
After Israel conquered the territory in the 1967 war, the Golan Heights remained for nearly 40 years Israel’s calmest border. Limited Syrian and Israeli forces eyed each other warily across a demilitarized zone presided over by a UN peacekeeping force (UNDOF, or UN Disengagement Observer Forces). Yet the Assad government in Damascus as well as successive Israeli governments in Jerusalem kept a tenuous quiet, if not peace, as proxy conflagrations raged in neighboring Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories. On several occasions in the last two decades it seemed like an actual peace deal was in the offing, with Israel purportedly ready to trade the Golan for a full normalization of ties with Syria. The 40,000-or-so Israeli citizens and Druze residents living in the territory are thankful these efforts ran aground. Indeed, those days of peacemaking seem like a strange vestige of a bygone era, given the charnel house Syria has become.
The IDF forces responsible for the Golan were, prior to the Syrian civil war, made up of an armored division that mostly focused on training. With its live-fire zones, farmland, and old fenced-in minefields, the Golan’s wide open spaces were an ideal location for large-scale maneuvers. “There are more mines than cows, and more cows than people,” a local once quipped to me. If rusty reservists were for decades responsible for securing the border, since 2014 a dedicated regional division (the “Bashan”) was set up on the Golan, consisting of armored and artillery units, special intelligence-gathering elements, and elite combat infantry (most recently from the Paratroopers Brigade). The old rickety border fence was replaced with a formidable high-tech barrier, replete with advanced sensors and thick metal.
Standing close to the new border fence, the senior IDF officer remarked upon these changes—and more recent ones. “You haven’t seen one [IDF] patrol, have you?” he asked rhetorically. “Patrols are exposed and vulnerable. We’re now ‘off the fence.’” This was a shift in the IDF’s force posture. On previous visits such patrols were clearly visible, driving up and down the dirt access roads adjacent to the fence. And they were vulnerable. According to official Israeli data, on at least six occasions since 2011 patrols were targeted by improvised explosive devices (IEDs); deliberate shooting and mortar attacks were also relatively common.
The IDF these days trusts its intelligence-gathering capabilities and control of the high ground, yet more traditional measures are being taken against what Israel now sees as the most serious threat on the Golan: a strategic cross-border attack via a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED), similar to one undertaken by an ISIS-affiliate on the Israeli-Egyptian border in August 2012. Underlining this threat, in late June on the Syrian-Jordanian border, a van packed with explosives broke through the border fence at high speed and detonated near a Jordanian military post, killing six soldiers. To combat such an eventuality, the senior IDF officer pointed out the dirt anti-tank berms and metal swing barriers behind us, vestiges of a time—“the old days”—when the gravest concern was an advance by a Syrian armored column. Syrian government tanks have been replaced by the 4×4’s, pickup trucks and tractors of extremist rebel groups. The IDF’s new vigilance aside, a rebel attack on Israel has yet to occur. And this isn’t only because of the imposing desert-beige Merkava battle tank stationed a few dozen feet to our right, silently looking out onto Syria below…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
TO WIN IN SYRIA, TARGET HEZBOLLAH
Daniel Serwer
New York Post, July 29, 2016
The military situation in Syria has turned against the US-supported opposition over the past year, due mainly to Russian intervention. Without some rebalancing now in favor of the opposition to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, the prospects for a satisfactory negotiated political transition are dim. In a dissenting internal memo last month, 51 State Department diplomats advocated attacks on Syrian government forces to end their aggression against the country’s civilian population, alter the military balance and bring about a negotiated political solution. President Obama has focused instead on fighting terrorism in Syria, but US targets are limited to Sunni extremists such as the Islamic State and al Qaeda affiliates. There is also a Shiite terrorist organization in Syria: Lebanon-based Hezbollah. It should not be immune.
Covertly since 2012, and overtly since 2013, Hezbollah has deployed forces inside Syria, where its thousands of fighters are aligned with Assad’s army and mainly Shiite and Alawite militias against mainly Sunni forces that Assad regards as terrorists. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps pays Hezbollah’s bills and provides its command-and-control operations. Hezbollah forces have been particularly effective along the border with Lebanon, which provides it with strategic depth and supply lines. Along with the Russian air intervention begun last September and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Hezbollah’s fighters have enabled Assad to make progress against his opponents, especially those associated with the Free Syrian Army fighters backed by the United States. That progress has hardened Assad’s negotiating stance and blocked the UN search for a political solution. A shift in the military balance is essential to ending the war, which is what Washington says it wants. But Obama has steadfastly refused to go to war against the Syrian, Iranian or Russian government. Even if he wants to, it is doubtful he has authorization from Congress to do so.
But Hezbollah is a non-state actor. It’s also a US-designated terrorist group that has murdered Americans, among many others. Most Republicans and Democrats would applaud an attack on Hezbollah, even if some in both parties would bemoan a move that suggested widening commitments overseas. Washington could inform Tehran, Moscow and Beirut that Hezbollah should withdraw from Syria by a certain date or the United States would target any of its troops attacking non-extremist opposition forces in and around Aleppo and elsewhere. If Hezbollah failed to withdraw, the United States would then need to be ready to attack as soon as the ultimatum expired. Hezbollah’s withdrawal or US targeting of Hezbollah would send a strong but still limited message to the Syrian opposition and its allies in Turkey and the Persian Gulf, as well as to Iran and Russia. How would the players in Syria react? Hezbollah would likely try to strike at accessible US assets or citizens in neighboring countries, most likely in Lebanon or Iraq. It might also launch rockets into Israel. The Islamic State, which uses Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria as a recruiting tool, would be undermined.
Russia and Iran could in theory up the ante, escalating their involvement in Syria, but in practice they both appear to be close to the limit of lives and treasure they are willing or able to expend there. Assad would be outraged and promise revenge, but the Syrian government is even more clearly at the limit of its capabilities. Meanwhile, the non-extremist Syrian opposition would applaud and press hard against the territory where Hezbollah is deployed. Gulf states would likewise welcome the US action and redouble their efforts to support the opposition. In short, US targeting of Hezbollah would mostly please and embolden Washington’s friends and discomfit its antagonists. It would also reassert US commitment to fighting terrorism of all sorts, renew Washington’s commitment to holding Hezbollah accountable, hasten an end to the Syrian civil war and make a political settlement more likely.
Canada has ‘Defaulted’ on its Responsibility to Protect Syrian Civilians, says Irwin Cotler: Michael Petrou, National Post, July 13, 2016—Liberal statesman Irwin Cotler says Canada has “defaulted” on the “Responsibility to Protect” principle his party once championed by not backing intervention in Syria to stop the slaughter of civilians at the hands of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.
Syria Regime Drafts Prisoners, Teachers to Bolster Depleted Army: Raja Abdulrahim, Wall Street Journal, Aug. 5, 2016—Prisoners in the sweltering, overcrowded Adra prison on the outskirts of Damascus were presented in June with an unusual offer from the Syrian regime, which promised amnesty if they agreed to fight on the front lines.
Military Success in Syria Gives Putin Upper Hand in U.S. Proxy War: Mark Mazzetti, Anne Barnard & Eric Schmitt, New York Times, Aug. 6, 2016—The Syrian military was foundering last year, with thousands of rebel fighters pushing into areas of the country long considered to be government strongholds. The rebel offensive was aided by powerful tank-destroying missiles supplied by the Central Intelligence Agency and Saudi Arabia.
Obama’s Worst Mistake: Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, Aug. 11, 2016—A crazed gunman’s attack on an Orlando club in June, killing 49 people, resulted in blanket news coverage and national trauma. Now imagine that such a massacre unfolds more than five times a day, seven days a week, unceasingly for five years, totaling perhaps 470,000 deaths. That is Syria. Yet even as the Syrian and Russian governments commit war crimes, bombing hospitals and starving civilians, President Obama and the world seem to shrug.
