Syria October 29, 2019
By protecting Syria's Idlib, the US created a safe haven for Baghdadi and
ISIS
With the killing of self-proclaimed ISIS "caliph" Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the
shoddy narrative pushed by US government officials and regime change
propagandists about Idlib was blown to pieces as well
By Dan Cohen
October has been a tough month for the motley crew of self-styled Syria
experts and regime-change diehards who spent years cheering on the so-called
"moderate rebels."
First, the "Free Syrian Army" fighters they had long championed were finally
and undeniably exposed as the brutal extremists they always were.
All it took for the curtain to be pulled back was for President Trump to
green-light a Turkish invasion of Syria, and those once-"moderate"
CIA-trained contras that had long terrorized civilians in Syrian government
territory were revealed to be Turkish-backed mercenaries, slaughtering and
beheading their way throughout the Kurdish-majority regions of northeastern
Syria.
As The Grayzone's Max Blumenthal reported, 21 of the 28 former Syrian
"rebel" factions employed in Turkey's invasion of northern Syria were
previously armed or trained by the US.
Almost as soon as that episode was in the rear-view mirror, ISIS leader Abu
Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed by a US-led operation in Idlib, the northwestern
Syrian providence controlled by Syria's local al-Qaeda affiliate, Hayat
Tahrir al-Sham.
Even as US officials acknowledged that Idlib was home to the largest faction
of al-Qaeda fighters since 9/11, supporters of regime change and the US
government itself fiercely protected the province, upholding it as the last
rebel stronghold resisting the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
With Baghdadi's killing, they were forced to contend with the fact that they
helped provide a sanctuary to the bloodthirsty ruler of ISIS.
Following US President Donald Trump's announcement of Baghdadi's death,
mainstream pundits honed in on Trump's hyperbolic commentary - "he died like
a dog, he died like a coward" - and sneered at the president's compliments
to Russia, Turkey, and Syria for not obstructing the operation.
But the proverbial elephant in the room continued to go unnoticed, or
ignored: The US had been using diplomatic leverage and threats of military
force to keep Baghdadi's hosts in power.
Smearing the truth-tellers
Only a few political outliers have dared to state the inconvenient truth
about Idlib. Chief among the marginalized truth-tellers was Democratic
presidential hopeful and congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.
During a Democratic primary debate, Gabbard accused Trump of "supporting
al-Qaeda" by protecting Idlib with threats of military force.
Senator Kamala Harris lashed out at Gabbard, branding her as an "apologist
for an individual, Assad, who has murdered people in his country like
cockroaches." Neoconservative Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin piled on,
writing that Gabbard "helped Assad whitewash a mass atrocity."
After the debate, the supposed fact-checking website Politifact rated
Gabbard's statement as "false."
But it was not only Gabbard who had lifted the mask on the US's disturbing
relationship with Idlib. In July 2017, Brett McGurk, the former special
presidential envoy for the global coalition to counter ISIL, announced that
"Idlib province is the largest al-Qaeda safe haven since 9/11."
While Gabbard was targeted for political destruction, McGurk was simply
ignored.
The US and Europe preserve Idlib as a jihadist haven
Meanwhile, the millions of Syrians living within firing range of Idlib have
had to live next door to some of the world's most vicious extremists,
withstanding constant mortar shelling and threats of genocide against
religious minorities.
Having suffered massive personnel losses throughout the brutal seven-year
war, the Syrian government momentarily acquiesced to international pressure
against a full-scale offensive to retake Idlib.
But in the summer months of 2018, UN-brokered ceasefires between the Syrian
and Russian militaries and insurgents in Idlib fell apart. As mortar shells
continued to rain down on Damascus and kill civilians, the Syrian government
became convinced that it was time to oust al-Qaeda from its stronghold.
Western European governments seemed desperate to preserve Idlib as a holding
pen for foreign fighters who originated from their countries, and who
threatened to return if their jihadist haven collapsed. EU governments thus
implicitly acknowledging the reality of Idlib as a purgatory for the
extremist proxies they had used to wreak havoc on Libya and Syria, and which
threatened to destabilize their own.
The United States vehemently opposed the Syrian government's operation too,
but for a different set of reasons. While the Trump administration claimed
to reject the mission on humanitarian grounds, its stated motive was
contradicted by scenes of ruin only a few hundred miles away, in the Iraqi
city of Mosul, where the US employed what then-Secretary of Defense Jim
Mattis called "annihilation tactics." There, the US carried out 1,250 air
strikes with 29,000 bombs, reducing huge swaths of the city to rubble and
killing at least 9,000 civilians, all in the name of defeating ISIS.
Though Washington refused to say it outright, it clearly saw
al-Qaeda-controlled Idlib as a powerful cudgel that would keep the Syrian
military weak and force Assad to negotiate. This cynical strategy was
employed throughout the dirty war on Syria, and met with little opposition
inside the US government.
A rare piece of dissent was conveyed to Obama in a secret 2012 Defense
Intelligence Agency memo which foresaw the establishment of a "Salafist
principality" or "Islamic state" in eastern Syria. Instead of taking action
against the spread of the Islamic State to Syria, the Obama administration
stood by and watched a jihadist enclave develop, hoping that it would force
increased pressure on Assad to leave.
Their cold calculus was nearly proven right, until Russia intervened and
tipped the scales of the war in Assad's favor.
And all along, self-proclaimed Syria experts nested in Beltway think tanks
insisted that more arms had to be handed over to the so-called "moderate
rebels" - including among local al-Qaeda allies - in order to defeat ISIS.
Regime change propagandists duck and cover
As soon as Trump blasted out his late night tweet declaring "SOMETHING VERY
BIG JUST HAPPENED" and reports that Baghdadi had been killed began to
spread, the pro-regime change think tank crowd went into damage control
mode, feigning astonishment that the leader of ISIS could have been hidden
inside al-Qaeda's Idlib stronghold, which they had insisted rejected Takfiri
ideology.
"This is shocking," declared former Israeli soldier and think tank fellow
Elizabeth Tsurkov, who has long run a veritable Israeli-jihadist pen pal
program.
Daily Beast editor and longtime neoconservative operative Michael Weiss
called Baghdagi's location "bizarre." Weiss's co-author Hassan Hassan
assured his readers that "under no circumstances would al-Qaeda or other
jihadists help ISIS hide Baghdadi."
Middle East Institute think tank fellow Charles Lister declared he would "be
amazed if Baghdadi had made Idlib a semi-permanent hiding place," and even
denied that al-Qaeda controlled Idlib.
Jennifer Cafarella, a neoconservative Institute for the Study of War
researcher whose predecessor was fired after she was found to have faked her
PhD, pontificated that "Baghdadi in Idlib would be wow."
Emma Beals, a think tank fellow based in southern Turkey and Beirut, called
Baghdadi's appearance in Idlib "something of a surprise."
One of the few academic experts on terrorism and jihadist groups who was not
surprised to see Baghdadi flee to Idlib was Northeastern University
professor Max Abrahms.
"The think tank crowd gets an F for ISIS and Syria analysis," he told The
Grayzone. "These same pundits who got the main points about ISIS and Syria
so obviously wrong are now shocked that Baghdadi was hiding in Idlib, the
opposition stronghold. This is because they have been arguing since day one
that ISIS is not part of the opposition to Assad, but rather his ally. And
they have been trying to minimize the portion of the opposition seen as
extreme."
Since the fall of the Islamic State's capital in the eastern Syrian city of
Raqqa in late 2017, Baghdadi's whereabouts were unknown. But it was no
secret that thousands of his fighters had escaped to Idlib. There, they
joined forces with their jihadist brethren and strengthened Idlib's al-Qaeda
rulers. The presence of ISIS militants in Idlib was even reported in
Anglophone media, and referred to as "sleeper cells."
"For those of us who understood that ISIS and Assad are not friends and that
the rebels have been al-Qaeda-tainted for some time, it's no surprise that
the ISIS leader would set up shop in the heart of the opposition, where
al-Qaeda and friends are the dominant groups," Abrahms explained.
He added, "Why did Baghdadi go there? Not because he's irrational. Baghdadi
went there for a simple reason: This is the best place for him to find
sympathizers to recruit and rebuild the Caliphate."
Whitewashing al-Qaeda as "moderate"
The same pundits who were shocked by Baghdadi's presence in Idlib have
sought to downplay the extremist nature of al-Qaeda's rebranded local
affiliate, known as HTS, portraying it as the arch-nemesis of ISIS. In
effect, they were marketing the extremist group responsible for the 9/11
attacks as a bunch of "moderate rebels."
"HTS was once as extreme as they come, with roots in al Qaeda. But with
Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad's victorious Russian-aided forces bearing
down, and mindful of the collapse of the ultra-hard-line Islamic State, the
group's leaders are taking a more lenient, pragmatic approach to
enlistment," Elizabeth Tsurkov wrote in Foreign Policy in September.
Among all the pundits seeking to remake al-Qaeda's image, Charles Lister has
been perhaps the most energetic. During a 2017 meeting on Capitol Hill,
Lister proclaimed that "al-Qaeda has really got it right."
Then, this August, he wrote that HTS "continues to evolve in intriguing ways
- into a more politically mature & intelligent jihadist movement," in an
apparent effort to have the group's designation as a terrorist organization
lifted.
Michael Weiss, a self-styled Syria and Russia expert who has never visited
Russia and speaks neither Arabic nor Russian, forcefully dismissed a
November 2018 warning from Russia's FSB intelligence agency that al-Qaeda
and ISIS could merge, denouncing it a false justification for an assault on
Idlib.
The whitewashing of al-Qaeda extended to the opinion pages of the New York
Times, where neoliberal columnist Thomas Friedman has urged the US to arm
and create a no-fly zone around the "moderate rebels in Idlib" and to "back
off fighting territorial ISIS in Syria."
While such thinking may sound absurd, outrageous, and even treasonous to the
average American, Friedman's thinking underscored the prevalent mindset
among policymakers in Washington.
Among them was former CIA director David Petraeus, who was a driving force
behind President Obama's 2012 decision to enact a multi-billion dollar
covert CIA train-and-equip program. In fact, Petraeus was shopping a plan as
late as 2015 for the US to directly arm al-Qaeda fighters.
After protecting Idlib as a haven for the jihadist fighters the US has
depended on for years, Trump is gleefully exploiting Baghdadi's death for
election season fodder. Meanwhile, the regime-change propagandists who
whitewashed the rulers of Idlib are ducking for cover.
With the explosion that killed the longtime ISIS leader, their fraudulent
narrative was blown to pieces as well.
