WASHINGTON – Three months after averting a military strike against Syria with a last-minute deal to deprive it of its chemical weapons arsenal, U.S. policy toward the world’s most violent conflict appears increasingly at sea.
The weakening of Washington’s favoured rebel faction, dramatically illustrated earlier this month by the Saudi-backed Islamic Front’s takeover of the main headquarters and warehouses of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) along the Turkish border, has deprived it of a viable secular force in the armed struggle against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
At the same time, U.S. efforts to persuade the newly formed Front, whose factions have worked closely with Al-Qaeda’s affiliates in Syria, even as they deny any such association, to return the purloined equipment to the FSA, let alone take part in the Geneva II peace talks scheduled for Jan. 22, 2014 with the government, appear to have been rebuffed.
“The Islamic Front has refused to sit with us, without giving any reason,” Washington’s special envoy on Syria, Robert Ford, said in an interview with al-Arabiya television earlier this week.
“America is paralysed…because they can’t support Assad, but they won’t support these radical Islamists either.” — Joshua Landis
The result, according to analysts here, is that the Jan. 22 conference, if it takes place at all, is unlikely to affect the situation on the ground where the war consists increasingly of two extremes, neither one acceptable to the United States or its western allies.
“What’s really significant about this past year is that any pretence that there are important moderate, secular or liberal forces fighting in Syria has really been swept away,” Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma, told IPS. “What you’re left with are radical forces: those behind Assad and those behind Islamist and jihadist groups.”
“America is paralysed, as well as most of the West, because they can’t support Assad, but they won’t support these radical Islamists either,” according to Landis, whose blog, Syria Comment, has an influential readership here.
That paralysis – as well as a civil war that most analysts believe remains stalemated – is of growing concern here. At least 125,000 people are believed to have been killed over the last two-and-a-half years, while 6.5 million, or a third of the population, are internally displaced.
Another 2.3 million have fled the country to neighbouring countries that are mostly ill-equipped to take them because of the demand on infrastructure and, in the cases of Lebanon and Jordan, the impact on political stability. Of the request for 13 billion dollars in humanitarian aid submitted for 2014 by the U.N.’s top relief coordinator, half is earmarked for Syrians.
In a survey of 1,200 U.S. government officials, academics and other experts released Thursday, the Council on Foreign Relation’s Centre for Preventive Action rated the spillover effects of the Syrian civil war, along with the increased violence in Afghanistan, at the top of 30 possible conflicts that are most likely to escalate and affect key U.S. interests in 2014.
In the past year, the conflict in Syria has contributed to a sharp surge in sectarian violence in neighbouring Iraq, while the influx of predominantly Sunni refugees and the deployment of some Hezbollah units to Syria have exacerbated sectarian tensions in Lebanon.
The Obama administration immediately suspended its non-humanitarian assistance to rebel groups after the Islamic Front took control of the FSA facilities. Washington has continued its humanitarian aid, which now exceeds 1.3 billion dollars since the crisis began.
While neo-conservatives and other strongly anti-Assad voices here still insist the administration should do more to aid secular factions on the ground, including with airstrikes against key government weapon systems, the notion that the alternative to Assad will likely be worse is gaining traction here.
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