The Real US Syria Scandal: Supporting Sectarian War
Published on
Wednesday, August 31, 2016
by
Middle East Eye
The Real US Syria Scandal: Supporting Sectarian War
Senior Obama administration officials were aware from 2012 that a war to
overthrow Assad would inevitably become a sectarian bloodbath
by
Gareth Porter
Then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (2ndR) talks to Saudi Arabia's
Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, next to France's Foreign Affairs
minister Alain Juppe (R) and Qatar's Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign
Affairs Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani (L) during a meeting with Western
and Arab foreign ministers at the ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, on
19 April 2012, focused on the Syria crisis. (Photo: AFP)
The main criticism of US policy in Syria has long been that President Barack
Obama should have used US military force or more aggressive arms aid to
strengthen the armed opposition to Assad. The easy answer is that the whole
idea that there was a viable non-extremist force to be strengthened is a
myth - albeit one that certain political figures in London and Washington
refuse to give up.
But the question that should have been debated is why the Obama
administration acquiesced to its allies funding and supplying a group of
unsavoury sectarian armed groups to overthrow the Assad regime.
That US acquiescence is largely responsible for a horrible bloodletting that
has now killed as many as 400,000 Syrians. Worse yet, there is still no way
to end the war without the serious threat of sectarian retribution against
the losers.
"The Obama administration bears responsibility for this atrocity, because it
could have prevented Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia from launching their
foolishly adventurous war in Syria. None of them did so out of desperate
need; it was a war of choice in every case. And each of the three states is
part of the US security system in the Middle East, providing military bases
to NATO or to the United States and depending on US support for its
security.
But instead of insisting that those three Sunni allies reconsider their
options, the Obama administration gave the green light at a conference in
Riyadh at the end of March 2012 for proceeding with arming those who wanted
to replace the regime, leaving the United States ostensibly free to be a
peacemaker. As Hillary Clinton put it at the Riyadh conference: "Some will
be able to do certain things, and others will do other things."
The policymakers responsible for Syria should have known that the seeds of
violent sectarian conflict had already been planted in Syria by the early
1980s
The policymakers responsible for Syria should have known that the seeds of
violent sectarian conflict had already been planted in Syria by the early
1980s and that the present war was deeply infected by sectarianism from the
beginning. They knew that the Assad regime ruled from the beginning with an
iron hand primarily to protect the interests of the Alawites, but also to
protect the Christian and Druze minorities against Sunni sectarianism.
The faction of the banned Muslim Brotherhood based in Hama adopted a
decidedly sectarian line toward the Alawites, not only referring to the
Ba'athist government as an "apostate regime" and sought its violent
overthrow, but also demonstrated a readiness to kill Alawites, simply
because they were not regarded as true believers in Islam.
After the initial failed armed struggle against the regime, the organisers
were forced into exile, but in 1979 an underground member of the Fighting
Vanguard faction of the Brotherhood named Ibrahim al-Yousef, who had
infiltrated the Syrian army artillery school in Aleppo, separated all the
Alawite cadets from the non-Alawites and then shot 32 of them dead and
wounded 54 before escaping.
In 1980, after the Brotherhood made an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate
Hafez al-Assad himself, the regime took swift and brutal retribution: the
very next morning, between 600 and 1,000 Brotherhood prisoners were killed
in their cells.
Sectarian violence in Syria reached its climax in 1982, when the Syrian army
went into Hama to break the Brotherhood's control over the city. The
operation began when Syrian army troops entered the city to get individuals
on its list of Brotherhood members, but were mowed down by Brotherhood
machine gunners. Thousands more regime troops were sent to the city, and the
Brotherhood mobilised the entire Sunni population to fight. The mosques
blared the message, "Rise up and drive the unbelievers from Hama," as Thomas
L. Friedman recounted in 1989.
After encountering much stiffer guerrilla resistance than it expected in
Hama, the Syrian army used heavy weaponry against the areas of the city
where the Brotherhood's military forces were concentrated. After the
Brotherhood's resistance in the city was finally defeated the military
completed the total destruction of three whole neighbourhoods where the
Brotherhood had been dominant, and the army continued to take retribution
against families with ties to the organisation. At least 5,000 Sunnis were
killed; the Brotherhood itself claimed 20,000 dead.
The sectarian extremism expressed both by the Assad regime and by the Muslim
Brotherhood 30 years earlier was bound to be repeated in the conflict that
began in 2011 - especially in the areas of Aleppo and Hama, where the armed
opposition was especially strong. The initial slogans used by anti-Assad
demonstrators were not sectarian, but that all changed after the anti-Assad
armed struggle was taken over by jihadists and Salafists.
Turkey and Qatar, both of which supported the Brotherhood's exiled leaders,
began funnelling arms to the groups with the strongest commitment to a
sectarian anti-Shiite and anti-Alawite viewpoint. A major recipient of
Turkish funding and arms was Ahrar al-Sham, which shared its al-Qaeda ally
al-Nusra Front's sectarian Sunni view of the Alawite minority. It considered
the Alawites to be part of the Shiite enemy and therefore the object of a
"holy war".
Another favourite of the US allies was Jaish al-Islam, the Salafist
organisation in the Damascus suburbs whose former leader Zahran Alloush
talked openly about cleansing Damascus of the Shiites and Alawites, both of
whom he lumped together as "Majous" - the abusive term used for pre-Islamic
non-Arabic people from Iran.
If there was any doubt that the anti-Alawite sectarianism of the past is
still a major part of the thinking of the armed opposition, it should have
been eliminated after what happened during the "Great Battle for Aleppo".
The newly renamed al-Qaeda franchise Jabhat Fateh al Sham, which planned and
led that offensive to break through Syrian government lines around Aleppo,
named the offensive after Ibrahim al-Yousef, the Muslim Brotherhood officer
who had carried out the cold-blooded murder of Alawite recruits at the
artillery school in Aleppo in 1979. And as Syria expert Joshua Landis
tweeted on 4 August, a video statement by a masked militant posted by the
newly named al-Qaeda organisation threatened to do the same thing to the
Alawites in Aleppo after taking over the city.
Could senior Obama administration officials have been unaware that a war to
overthrow Assad would inevitably become an enormous sectarian bloodbath?
Could senior Obama administration officials have been unaware that a war to
overthrow Assad would inevitably become an enormous sectarian bloodbath? By
August 2012 a US Defense Intelligence Agency report intelligence warned that
"events are taking a clear sectarian direction," and that the "the
"Salafist[s], Muslim Brotherhood and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq]" were "the major
forces driving the insurgency". Furthermore, the Obama administration
already knew by then that the external Sunni sponsors of the war against
Assad were channeling their money and arms to the most sectarian groups in
the field.
But the administration did nothing to pressure its allies to stop it. In
fact, it actually wove its own Syria policy around the externally fuelled
war by overwhelmingly sectarian forces. And no one in the US political-media
elite raised the issue.
It took a remarkable degree of denial and self-deception for the Obama
administration to believe that it was somehow acting to rescue the Syrian
people from the bloodletting when it was doing precisely the opposite.
No matter how brutal its rule and its war tactics have been, a war to
overthrow the Assad regime could only plunge the country into a terrible
sectarian bloodbath. And the consequences of the sectarian war will continue
for years into the future. The Obama administration's failure to firmly
reject that war should be viewed as one of the worst of the long parade of
American transgressions in the Middle East.
C 2015 Middle East Eye
Gareth Porter
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The Real US Syria Scandal: Supporting Sectarian War
Published on
Wednesday, August 31, 2016
by
Middle East Eye
The Real US Syria Scandal: Supporting Sectarian War
Senior Obama administration officials were aware from 2012 that a war to
overthrow Assad would inevitably become a sectarian bloodbath
by
Gareth Porter
. 11 Comments
.
. Then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (2ndR) talks to Saudi
Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, next to France's Foreign
Affairs minister Alain Juppe (R) and Qatar's Prime Minister and Minister of
Foreign Affairs Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani (L) during a meeting with
Western and Arab foreign ministers at the ministry of Foreign Affairs in
Paris, on 19 April 2012, focused on the Syria crisis. (Photo: AFP)
. The main criticism of US policy in Syria has long been that
President Barack Obama should have used US military force or more aggressive
arms aid to strengthen the armed opposition to Assad. The easy answer is
that the whole idea that there was a viable non-extremist force to be
strengthened is a myth - albeit one that certain political figures in London
and Washington refuse to give up.
. But the question that should have been debated is why the Obama
administration acquiesced to its allies funding and supplying a group of
unsavoury sectarian armed groups to overthrow the Assad regime.
. That US acquiescence is largely responsible for a horrible
bloodletting that has now killed as many as 400,000 Syrians. Worse yet,
there is still no way to end the war without the serious threat of sectarian
retribution against the losers.
. "The Obama administration bears responsibility for this atrocity,
because it could have prevented Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia from
launching their foolishly adventurous war in Syria. None of them did so out
of desperate need; it was a war of choice in every case. And each of the
three states is part of the US security system in the Middle East, providing
military bases to NATO or to the United States and depending on US support
for its security.
But instead of insisting that those three Sunni allies reconsider their
options, the Obama administration gave the green light at a conference in
Riyadh at the end of March 2012 for proceeding with arming those who wanted
to replace the regime, leaving the United States ostensibly free to be a
peacemaker. As Hillary Clinton put it at the Riyadh conference: "Some will
be able to do certain things, and others will do other things."
The policymakers responsible for Syria should have known that the seeds of
violent sectarian conflict had already been planted in Syria by the early
1980s
The policymakers responsible for Syria should have known that the seeds of
violent sectarian conflict had already been planted in Syria by the early
1980s and that the present war was deeply infected by sectarianism from the
beginning. They knew that the Assad regime ruled from the beginning with an
iron hand primarily to protect the interests of the Alawites, but also to
protect the Christian and Druze minorities against Sunni sectarianism.
The faction of the banned Muslim Brotherhood based in Hama adopted a
decidedly sectarian line toward the Alawites, not only referring to the
Ba'athist government as an "apostate regime" and sought its violent
overthrow, but also demonstrated a readiness to kill Alawites, simply
because they were not regarded as true believers in Islam.
After the initial failed armed struggle against the regime, the organisers
were forced into exile, but in 1979 an underground member of the Fighting
Vanguard faction of the Brotherhood named Ibrahim al-Yousef, who had
infiltrated the Syrian army artillery school in Aleppo, separated all the
Alawite cadets from the non-Alawites and then shot 32 of them dead and
wounded 54 before escaping.
http://commondreams.org/because-you-we-have-chancehttp://commondreams.org/be
cause-you-we-have-chance
In 1980, after the Brotherhood made an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate
Hafez al-Assad himself, the regime took swift and brutal retribution: the
very next morning, between 600 and 1,000 Brotherhood prisoners were killed
in their cells.
Sectarian violence in Syria reached its climax in 1982, when the Syrian army
went into Hama to break the Brotherhood's control over the city. The
operation began when Syrian army troops entered the city to get individuals
on its list of Brotherhood members, but were mowed down by Brotherhood
machine gunners. Thousands more regime troops were sent to the city, and the
Brotherhood mobilised the entire Sunni population to fight. The mosques
blared the message, "Rise up and drive the unbelievers from Hama," as Thomas
L. Friedman recounted in 1989.
After encountering much stiffer guerrilla resistance than it expected in
Hama, the Syrian army used heavy weaponry against the areas of the city
where the Brotherhood's military forces were concentrated. After the
Brotherhood's resistance in the city was finally defeated the military
completed the total destruction of three whole neighbourhoods where the
Brotherhood had been dominant, and the army continued to take retribution
against families with ties to the organisation. At least 5,000 Sunnis were
killed; the Brotherhood itself claimed 20,000 dead.
The sectarian extremism expressed both by the Assad regime and by the Muslim
Brotherhood 30 years earlier was bound to be repeated in the conflict that
began in 2011 - especially in the areas of Aleppo and Hama, where the armed
opposition was especially strong. The initial slogans used by anti-Assad
demonstrators were not sectarian, but that all changed after the anti-Assad
armed struggle was taken over by jihadists and Salafists.
Turkey and Qatar, both of which supported the Brotherhood's exiled leaders,
began funnelling arms to the groups with the strongest commitment to a
sectarian anti-Shiite and anti-Alawite viewpoint. A major recipient of
Turkish funding and arms was Ahrar al-Sham, which shared its al-Qaeda ally
al-Nusra Front's sectarian Sunni view of the Alawite minority. It considered
the Alawites to be part of the Shiite enemy and therefore the object of a
"holy war".
Another favourite of the US allies was Jaish al-Islam, the Salafist
organisation in the Damascus suburbs whose former leader Zahran Alloush
talked openly about cleansing Damascus of the Shiites and Alawites, both of
whom he lumped together as "Majous" - the abusive term used for pre-Islamic
non-Arabic people from Iran.
If there was any doubt that the anti-Alawite sectarianism of the past is
still a major part of the thinking of the armed opposition, it should have
been eliminated after what happened during the "Great Battle for Aleppo".
The newly renamed al-Qaeda franchise Jabhat Fateh al Sham, which planned and
led that offensive to break through Syrian government lines around Aleppo,
named the offensive after Ibrahim al-Yousef, the Muslim Brotherhood officer
who had carried out the cold-blooded murder of Alawite recruits at the
artillery school in Aleppo in 1979. And as Syria expert Joshua Landis
tweeted on 4 August, a video statement by a masked militant posted by the
newly named al-Qaeda organisation threatened to do the same thing to the
Alawites in Aleppo after taking over the city.
Could senior Obama administration officials have been unaware that a war to
overthrow Assad would inevitably become an enormous sectarian bloodbath?
Could senior Obama administration officials have been unaware that a war to
overthrow Assad would inevitably become an enormous sectarian bloodbath? By
August 2012 a US Defense Intelligence Agency report intelligence warned that
"events are taking a clear sectarian direction," and that the "the
"Salafist[s], Muslim Brotherhood and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq]" were "the major
forces driving the insurgency". Furthermore, the Obama administration
already knew by then that the external Sunni sponsors of the war against
Assad were channeling their money and arms to the most sectarian groups in
the field.
But the administration did nothing to pressure its allies to stop it. In
fact, it actually wove its own Syria policy around the externally fuelled
war by overwhelmingly sectarian forces. And no one in the US political-media
elite raised the issue.
It took a remarkable degree of denial and self-deception for the Obama
administration to believe that it was somehow acting to rescue the Syrian
people from the bloodletting when it was doing precisely the opposite.
No matter how brutal its rule and its war tactics have been, a war to
overthrow the Assad regime could only plunge the country into a terrible
sectarian bloodbath. And the consequences of the sectarian war will continue
for years into the future. The Obama administration's failure to firmly
reject that war should be viewed as one of the worst of the long parade of
American transgressions in the Middle East.
C 2015 Middle East Eye
