By Dan Murphy, CS Monitor, November 2, 2012
If US officials think they’re going to find Syrian allies to prevent war atrocities, or be able to take swift control of Syria in the event of Assad’s defeat and steer it in a pro-US direction, they are going to be sorely disappointed.
As evidenced by a graphic video uploaded to YouTube yesterday that shows a terrified group of at least a dozen men, defeated fighters for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, huddled together on a bare concrete floor in a battle-scared building in the market town of Saraqeb, Syria, the other day as their scowling captors kicked and cursed them into a pile before executing them.
The jumpy footage shows the following: Men in rags, many stripped of their shoes. Some appear dazed from the wounds of a battle they’d just lost. Others appear to be hyperventilating out their last prayers and thoughts. One pleads for his life. A rebel walks among the prisoners, getting in a few last kicks to the head of one of them.
Then, the cries of “God is great” from the triumphant murderers are drowned out by a buzzsaw of automatic rifle fire.
This latest atrocity is hardly out of character for Syria’s civil war. (Both sides have been guilty of atrocities. War is man at his worst. It´s man´s inhumanity to man.)
Looking for good guys in this war? They are few and far between.
The execution appears to have been carried out by one of the jihadi militias that have grown ever more prevalent in the fight against Assad. Even the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based group that supports the uprising against Syria’s Baathist regime, suggests that the murders were carried out by an Al Qaeda-inspired rebel group. Rami Abdelrahman of the observatory told Reuters that the killings were carried out by the Jabhat al-Nusra militia.
But what happened at Saraqeb is about more than the prevalence of jihadis in Syria’s civil war. The “Free Syrian Army” is a nice concept. In practice, however, the fighters against Assad are a loosely affiliated patchwork of militias, with no unified command.
The behavior of these irregular units varies widely, as do their sources of funding. Some groups have received a trickle of communications and non-lethal aid from the likes of the US. Others have received weapons from states like Qatar or right private donors in fellow Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia.
The influence of the exiled Syrian National Council—which Secretary Clinton declared a failure Wednesday when she announced that the US was withdrawing support—over fighters on the ground is near zero.
So in that sense, the Obama administration is right to look to spend its money and political influence elsewhere. But if Clinton or anyone else in the government thinks they are going to find Syrian allies to steer it in a pro-US direction, they are going to be disappointed.
You have only to look to Libya to understand how difficult it is to exert influence after a triumphant rebellion in states where politics has merely been another word for patronage for decades, where the lust for revenge is strong, and where the rebellion itself is backed with Islamist militants who not very long ago were fighting US forces in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Libyan militias, it turns out, have ideas of their own about the future. They have fought among themselves over the spoils of victory, and continue to wield guns in what was hoped to be Libya’s emerging democratic politics.
Scott Peterson wrote for us yesterday from Aleppo:
In the final debate last week, President Obama said that the US was doing “everything we can” to help the opposition, but warned that “to get more entangled militarily in Syria is a serious step,” and that the US had to be “absolutely certain that we know who we are helping.” Likewise, Republican candidate Mitt Romney said he would “make sure they have the arms necessary to defend themselves,” as long as weapons don’t get into “the wrong hands. Those arms could be used to hurt us down the road.”
But on the ground, many Syrians say the US reluctance to support their cause is yielding more jihadists, and more radical ones. And it’s questionable whether American reluctance is significantly hampering the flow of weapons to jihadists.
The Syrian war, its factions and regional implications, grow more entangled and complicated by the day. Can the intervention of outside powers tip the outcome in favor of the rebels, in a general sense? Certainly. Will the weapons provided end up being used in further atrocities? Quite likely.
Atrocities happen in war, and far more frequently when there aren’t accountable officers to stop it. Perhaps that’s a price worth paying to be rid of Assad. (This type of callous comment shows this writer has no first hand knowledge of war nor compassion on those caught in its midst. What is the agenda of this writer? Is he a neutral? War is hell and those that promote it will suffer some day as God´s word warns us. We will reap what we have sown. Are you sowing love or hate? Are you supporting the war mongers? Dennis)
But trying to shape what comes next is another matter. Recent history indicates that usually eludes the grasp of America and its allies. ("Man purposes, but God disposes," said the Ambassador from Russia to Napolian before his "conquest" of Russia.)
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