Five Words? Next Year Will Be Worse: Lee Smith, Weekly Standard, Jan. 11, 2016 — It was a great year for the Obama administration’s foreign policy . . . says the Obama administration.
Samir Kuntar’s Death is Part of the Battle for Syria: Mordechai Kedar, Breaking Israel News, Dec. 29, 2015 — About a week ago, Samir Kuntar, a Lebanese Druze who carried out a murderous terror attack in Israel in 1979 and was in an Israeli prison until released in an Israel-Hezbollah prisoner exchange in 2008, was eliminated.
Turkey’s Dangerous Game in Syria: Stuart Rollo, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 28, 2016— When the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, Turkey was one of the earliest countries to invest heavily in the overthrow of the Assad regime.
What to Expect if the U.S.-led Coalition Wins the War Against ISIL’s Self-Declared Caliphate: Terry Glavin, National Post, Dec. 27, 2016 — It is not beyond the realm of possibility that around this time next year, we will be able to look back on 2016 and congratulate ourselves in the defeat of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
Research on the Islamic State, Syria, and Iraq: Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, Middle East Forum, Oct., 2015
Obama’s Mideast Plan Faces a New Hurdle: Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 3, 2016
What It’s Like to Have Russian Jets Bomb the Crap Out of Your Town: Michael Weiss, Daily Beast, Dec. 26, 2015
Hezbollah Fighters Are Fed Up With Fighting Syria’s War: Jesse Rosenfeld, Daily Beast, Dec. 30, 2015
FIVE WORDS? NEXT YEAR WILL BE WORSE
Lee Smith
Weekly Standard, Jan. 11, 2015
It was a great year for the Obama administration’s foreign policy . . . says the Obama administration. The State Department even created a new hashtag to celebrate the White House’s annus mirabilis—#2015in5Words. “Protecting Arctic Climate and Communities” and “Protecting Health of Our Ocean” are among two of the administration’s big wins.
A few of the claims are of course questionable, like “Winning Fight Against Violent Extremists.” Okay, congratulations to the White House for hosting a conference on countering violent extremism in February. But that hardly stopped the Islamic State, the world’s most notorious “violent extremists,” from gaining ground throughout the Middle East and North Africa, waging a major attack in Paris, and inspiring a massacre of Americans in San Bernardino last month.
Then there’s “Iran Peaceful Nuclear Program Ensured.” Yes, the White House went to a great deal of trouble to ink a deal with Iran—subordinating much of the rest of American foreign policy to the goal of keeping the Iranians at the negotiating table—but that hardly merits the boast. Obama himself has explained that Iran will have an industrial-scale nuclear weapons program within 15 years. In the meantime, Iran’s ballistic missile tests and regional aggression suggest the deal has only fueled the Tehran regime’s belligerent ambitions.
There are also egregiously false claims, like “Bringing Peace, Security to Syria.” A State Department spokesman defended the claim thus: “The operative word there is ‘bringing,’ not brought. . . . I don’t think anyone would say that we are there or across the finish line.”
No, what we would say is that the administration’s Syria policy has been a failure of epic proportions. The death toll in Syria over nearly five years has mounted to a quarter of a million, with more than 20,000 civilians killed in the past year alone. The vast majority of these casualties are the work of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, now being propped up by Russia as well as by his Iranian patrons. This massive war has engulfed the Middle East and put Iran and Russia on the border of three important American allies, Israel, Jordan, and NATO member Turkey.
The conflict has displaced millions of Syrians, sending waves of refugees into neighboring countries and also into Europe, where the migrant crisis threatens the security and political order of America’s closest partners. The fact that the continent’s borders are now compromised means that a global crisis may come even closer to American shores. And in 2016 the Syrian war will almost surely get worse.
What will make the next year especially dangerous is the White House itself. Obama is eager to wrap everything up before he leaves office, and John Kerry no doubt clings to the hope that Syrian peace talks could bring him the Nobel Peace Prize he thought he earned with the Iran deal. The administration is in a hurry, and the only way it sees forward is in caving to Iranian and Russian demands—above all, the demand that Assad stay in power. Indeed, as Kerry made clear two weeks ago, the White House has finally come clean and admitted it’s no longer interested in deposing Assad, if it ever was.
It’s worth gaming out a few of the consequences. To begin with, the only opposition groups that can agree to a political process in which Assad is not removed are those that are in fact or in effect pro-Assad. All others will have to be excluded from peace talks, and some will be labeled terrorists, like Jaish al-Islam, one of the most effective anti-Assad units, whose leader Zahran Alloush was recently killed in a Russian airstrike. This drove home the fact that Putin’s campaign was never about fighting ISIS—rather, it was about defending Assad (and securing Moscow’s Syrian bases).
Therefore, in promoting a peace process that protects Assad, the White House is giving political and diplomatic cover to Moscow and Tehran. John Kerry will be acting as Putin’s enforcer, telling America’s traditional regional allies that the war against Assad is over and it’s time to give up. If Kerry can get Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to wave the white flag, then maybe he really is a talented diplomat. But it is very unlikely the Sunni powers will sign terms of surrender and stop supporting their chosen proxies.
Saudi Arabia can ill afford an Iranian victory of that magnitude, and it would be an even worse outcome for Turkey. Ankara is hosting millions of refugees who will never return to Syria so long as the regime that butchered their family and friends is still in power. It’s a major domestic issue for the Turks, and with three unfriendly powers on its border—Russia, Iran, and Assad—the Syrian war is a national security matter. Therefore, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan believes it is vital to keep open his supply lines to anti-Assad groups, even as Putin’s forces are campaigning to close them down. In other words, Kerry’s “peace process” is driving a NATO member toward crisis, and perhaps a shooting war with Russia.
Israel may soon find itself in a similarly dangerous situation. Yes, even with Russian troops present in Syria, Jerusalem has continued to attack arms convoys heading across Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as Iranian assets inside Syria, like Lebanese terrorist Samir Kuntar. However, it’s not clear how long this state of affairs can last, or if the Iranians will press their Russian partners to clarify whose side they’re on.
This was a bad year for American foreign policy and therefore for much of the rest of the world. Instead, of bringing peace and security to Syria, the White House has jeopardized the peace and security of our friends and partners around the world—from the eastern Mediterranean to Western Europe, and from the Persian Gulf to our own shores. What makes the administration’s glib year-end self-assessment even more demoralizing is the near certainty that the White House will continue on this path, and that next year will therefore be even worse.
SAMIR KUNTAR’S DEATH IS PART OF THE BATTLE FOR SYRIA
Mordechai Kedar
Breaking Israel News, Dec. 29, 2015
About a week ago, Samir Kuntar, a Lebanese Druze who carried out a murderous terror attack in Israel in 1979 and was in an Israeli prison until released in an Israel-Hezbollah prisoner exchange in 2008, was eliminated. He had been “adopted” by the Shiite Hezbollah terror organization and when released, promised to return to Palestine to free her from the Zionist “occupation.” In order to attempt to fulfill this promise, he joined the ranks of Hezbollah fighters.
When Hezbollah began its active involvement in Syria in response to the rebellion against Assad that started in 2011, Kuntar was sent to Syria to help Assad hold on to his throne.Kuntar was stationed on the southern front because of his Druze origins, as the southeast slopes of the Hermon mountain range are a Druze enclave. There he served as the communications link between local Druze and Hezbollah, who promised to protect the Druze from the Jihadist knives of Jabhat al Nusra and Islamic State.
Kuntar made a habit of stressing his obligation to fight against Israel and headed a local Druze organization that carried out several terror attacks on the border near Magd al Shams during 2014-15. He worked hand in glove with Hezbollah and the representatives of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to found the Hezbollah infrastructure in southern Syria, and these activities, more than anything else, can help reveal the truth about what is going on in that war torn country.
Syria today is a country that once was and is no more. It has passed into the history books, like the USSR, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Syria will never return to what it was before March 2011, and anyone who is involved in the Syrian catastrophe knows this well. All the words about achieving peace in the country are a waste of time, and all the international conferences that try to bring the fighting to an end and leave Syria a united country are just photo-ops that give politicians a chance to pose for the camera.
The warring sides in Syria care only about themselves and the territory they will be able to control once Syria’s official demise is declared. Hezbollah is fighting in order to gain control over the areas populated by Shiites and plans to annex them to Lebanon, thereby increasing the number of Shiites in that country as well as the territory under the terrorist group’s control. This explains its efforts to take over the Druze enclaves south of the Hermon mountains and prevent the Druze declaring autonomy and joining up with the Lebanese Druze community.
The Druze in southern Syria are quite happy to accept Hezbollah protection from Jihadist knives, but do not see themselves as part of a Shiite region. In their way of looking at it, if they are going to become part of Lebanon, they prefer the Druze connection – and this is where Kuntar came in. He was supposed to advance the presence of Hezbollah in southern Syria and ensure Druze loyalty to the Shiite Hezbollah, but unfortunately, for the past year he had begun evincing signs of rapprochement with his Druze origins. Nasrallah suspected that Kuntar was going to cross over to the other side, turn traitor to the Hezbollah that brought about his release from Israel’s prisons and help his Druze brothers establish a Druze entity in southern Syria that would not be loyal to Shiite Hezbollah.
In today’s Syria and Lebanon, it is enough to suspect someone in order to bring about his elimination, and that is, in all probability, what happened to Kuntar. The media have all decided that he was killed by Israel, but Israel has not admitted responsibility for the operation. Without doubt, there is much satisfaction in Israel at Kuntar’s leaving this world, but that does not necessarily mean that it is Israel that brought it about. The scenario described above leads to the conclusion that Hezbollah was behind the operation, this in order to stop Kuntar’s efforts to strengthen the Druze.
Hezbollah, of course, will not admit this openly, but there was a hint in the eulogy Nazrallah gave after the funeral. Nasrallah said that Kuntar was “the chief Lebanese prisoner in the Israeli enemy’s prisons, oppositionaire, Jihad fighter and commander of Islamic opposition, Shaheed brother Samir el Kuntar.” Continuing, Nasrallah called him “brother Samir,” claiming that he was under constant threat from Israel after his release.
Calling a Druze by the term “shaheed” is artificial, as, in contrast to Islam, there is no such concept in Druze theology. It seems that the Nasrallah’s public embrace of Kuntar is a coverup meant to hide the truth about who really eliminated Kuntar and why. Giving Israel the responsibility for the operation releases Hezbollah from that responsibility, while at the same time giving the organization an excuse to hit Israel. The three rockets launched at Nahariya were the immediate result and the IDF reacted with an artillery barrage. A Palestinian organization launched the rockets, but Nasrallah could easily have given them the command to do so. Hezbollah can chalk this up as a job well done: it reacted to Kuntar’s murder but did not give Israel a reason to attack it. Why else would it allow Palestinian organizations to exist in Lebanon at all?
The real revenge on Israel will come later, as Nasrallah pledged, at the time and place that Hezbollah decides are appropriate. This same threatening expression was used after Imad Mugniyah’s elimination in Damascus in 2008…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
TURKEY’S DANGEROUS GAME IN SYRIA
Stuart Rollo
Wall Street Journal, Dec. 28, 2015
When the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, Turkey was one of the earliest countries to invest heavily in the overthrow of the Assad regime. Despite a decade of warming relations with Syria, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was making a bid to become the region’s dominant power. The situation in Syria has since changed dramatically—but the Erdogan strategy has not. The result is that Turkey has become a barrier to resolving the conflict. It wages war on the Syrian Kurds, Islamic State’s most effective opponents. And the country now plays host to an elaborate network of jihadists, including ISIS.
Early on, Turkey wanted to foster a Sunni majority government in Syria, preferably run by the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. This would deprive Turkey’s two historical rivals, Russia and Iran, of an important client state, while allowing it to gain one of its own. The plan was simple and elegant. But the Assad regime proved more resilient than expected, and the West refused to intervene and deliver a coup de grâce. So-called moderate Syrian rebels have either been sidelined by Islamist militants, or revealed to have been Islamist militants themselves. Thanks to Islamic State, the war has spread to engulf half of Iraq. And yet, as a global consensus solidified about the importance of defeating ISIS, Turkey has continued to play the game as if it were 2011.
This summer, for example, the Erdogan government came to an important agreement to let the U.S. use two of its air bases for strikes against ISIS. Yet Turkey has used the same bases to attack Kurdish forces in Iraq and Syria. The Erdogan government remains more concerned with limiting the power of the Kurds in Syria than with defeating ISIS.
Turkey has gone from being viewed by Western government officials, media and academics as an influential, moderating force for regional stability and economic growth, to a tacit supporter, if not outright sponsor, of international terrorism. It is also viewed as a dangerous ally that risks plunging NATO into an unwanted conflict with Russia.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin labeled the Erdogan government “accomplices of terrorists” after its fighter planes downed a Russian jet on Nov. 24, he was bluntly rewording an accusation that has been made repeatedly, but more diplomatically, in the West. The accusation: Turkey allows oil and artifacts looted by Islamic State to flow across its border in one direction, while foreign jihadists, cash and arms travel in the other.
Speaking last year of the porous Turkey-Syria border, Vice President Joe Biden let slip, in a moment of candor, that the biggest problem the U.S. faced in confronting ISIS was its own allies. More recently, on Nov. 27, a senior Obama administration official described the situation to this newspaper as “an international threat, and it’s all coming out of Syria and it’s coming through Turkish territory.”
Turkey has figured that its important position in NATO as a bulwark against Russian power would shield it from criticism by its Western allies, and buy it enough time to shape the Syrian conflict in its favor. But Russia has effectively turned the international sympathy over the downing of one of its jets into increased sway in Syria. Mr. Putin has promised to “immediately destroy” anything that threatens Russian forces in the country. He also upgraded the local Russian arsenal to show that he can make good on his promise.
Mr. Erdogan’s best chance of achieving his goals is as a committed member of the U.S.-led coalition. He can then help the coalition remain in a strong position to negotiate, with Russia and Iran, a settlement of the Syrian conflict and the future of Mr. Assad. Turkey also needs to accept the move toward Kurdish autonomy in Syria as a fait accompli. The Kurdish Democratic Union Party, which Turkey officially categorizes as a terrorist organization, now fights ISIS alongside the U.S. and receives arms and training from a swath of Western countries. Through its bravery and effectiveness, this group now has substantial international political capital.
Kurdish autonomy in Syria does not necessarily mean increased separatist activity in Turkey, any more than the creation of the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq did. But Mr. Erdogan does need to negotiate peace with the Syrian Kurds, with clear terms for territorial integrity and respect for Kurdish rights. Turkey did so with the Kurds in northern Iraq, and now enjoys robust relations with them. Failure to redirect its policy in Syria can only lead to Turkey’s further isolation and reputation as a reactionary pariah—and the continuation of a horrendous conflict. This is not the ascendant trajectory that the country has sought over recent decades.
WHAT TO EXPECT IF THE U.S.-LED COALITION WINS THE WAR
AGAINST ISIL’S SELF-DECLARED CALIPHATE
Terry Glavin
National Post, Dec. 27, 2015
It is not beyond the realm of possibility that around this time next year, we will be able to look back on 2016 and congratulate ourselves in the defeat of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Stranger things have happened. ISIL’s self-declared caliphate didn’t even exist until 18 months ago, and its demise could come in several ways.
Maybe it will be French Mirage and Rafale jets, striking a Raqqa conclave of ISIL godfather Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi in session with the network of former Baathist intelligence commanders who have so efficiently solidified the terror regime. Or maybe the U.S.-led coalition will carry out exceptionally heavy and extraordinarily effective airstrikes along the ISIL-held corridor between Hasaka and Mosul, prompting emboldened Kurdish forces to mount an all-or-nothing advance from the north, while Free Syrian Army militias roar out of the west. If, by some miracle everything comes together, ISIL defences could crumble and the nightmare might collapse in mutiny and mayhem. But we might be careful about what we wish for.
In any such unlikely event as ISIL’s demolition, the loudest boasts should be expected to come from the catastrophically inept foreign-policy coterie around U.S. President Barack Obama. Credit where it’s due, though. The Obama administration has proved adept at persuading a vast body of American public opinion that even the most meagre breadcrumbs of a geostrategic deliverable – Washington’s creaking concordat with Tehran over its nuclear program is just one example — constitute a whole loaf.
That same public-opinion cohort has been similarly persuaded ISIL and Syrian dictator Bashar Assad are bitter enemies. As a consequence, an ISIL defeat could be spun to lend an air of decency to Obama’s unseemly collaborations with Moscow that anticipate the persistence of Assad’s brutal regime in Damascus. Unfortunately, the real world has a way of intruding into the most reassuring propaganda fictions.
ISIL is only the most recent and most obscene eruption of barbarism to be visited on the Arabs of Syria and Iraq. It was incubated and more or less conjured into existence by the Assad regime so Assad could present the revolution against him as jihadist, and himself as ISIL’s sworn enemy and an indispensable ally in the global war on jihadist terrorism. The removal of ISIL as a battlefield force would certainly strengthen the hand of the revolutionary Syrian forces arrayed against him and that would be a good thing. But there’s a catch. The Syrian opposition is nearly friendless in NATO capitals. With ISIL gone, it would likely be much more difficult for them to secure the win they need to get out from under Assad’s war against Syrian civilians.
There’s another catch. After five years of “anti-interventionist” paralysis in NATO, many Syrian “fighting-age males” have been left to surmise, not unreasonably, the world has abandoned them, and all that’s left is Allah. That deep sense of betrayal, followed by an ISIL collapse, would leave one significant battlefield force in the region with convincing bragging rights: al-Qaida. Two years ago, al-Qaida’s Ayman al-Zawahiri renounced Al Baghdadi and his caliphate after a serious schism centring on strategic, tactical and “theological” questions.
Al-Qaida wanted to stick to hijacking the Syrian revolution, slaughtering “Crusaders and Jews,” and going easy on the huge Sunni Muslim populations taken as hostages in jihad. But Al Baghdadi had to go and make a huge pornographic deal about enforcing “hudud” — the Wahhabi barbarism that relies on coercion by slavery, mass executions, and so on.
Among otherwise secular young revolutionaries who have given up hope of help from the United States or any other democracy, Jabhat Al-Nusra, al-Qaida’s proxy in Syria, has built a reputation as a serious and disciplined fighting force, squaring off against ISIL and Assad. With any defeat of ISIL, particularly a crushing, final defeat, what you would hear from al-Qaida and Jabhat Al-Nusra would run along the lines: of “See? We told you so.”
In this way, owing in no small part to American indifference and the myopic “anti-interventionist” calamities of White House policy, even the crushing defeat of ISIL could lead us all right back to the horror from which Barack Obama, the antithesis of George W. Bush, promised to extricate us all: al-Qaida, in strength, rooted in vast Islamist badlands, unrepentant and ascendant.
Research on the Islamic State, Syria, and Iraq: Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, Middle East Forum, Oct., 2015
Obama’s Mideast Plan Faces a New Hurdle: Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 3, 2016—The sudden upheaval that shattered ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia over the weekend also saddled the Obama administration with unexpected complications in what already was a long-shot bid to ease the crises of the Middle East.
What It’s Like to Have Russian Jets Bomb the Crap Out of Your Town: Michael Weiss, Daily Beast, Dec. 26, 2015—“When I’m sitting here and we hear a plane, which is a lot now, I know from the sound. If the plane is above us—you can tell if it’s above you, because that’s when it’s the loudest—and if it’s a Russian plane, then it doesn’t attack where we are. It attacks two or three kilometers away.”
Hezbollah Fighters Are Fed Up With Fighting Syria’s War: Jesse Rosenfeld, Daily Beast, Dec. 30, 2015 —They joined to fight Israel in Lebanon, but after multiple combat tours in the Syrian cities of Aleppo, Idlib, Latakia, and around Damascus, Hezbollah reservists tell The Daily Beast that they are no longer willing to die in Syria’s unending, bloody civil war.fight Israel in Lebanon, but after multiple combat tours in the Syrian cities of Aleppo, Idlib, Latakia, and around Damascus, Hezbollah reservists tell The Daily Beast that they are no longer willing to die in Syria’s unending, bloody civil war.