Syrian conflict becoming a clearer binary choice at Aleppo

Yesterday, August 6, the Syrian rebels at least tentatively broke through a three-week-old siege of Aleppo. Considering the seemingly desperate straits that the whole anti-Assad insurgency had fallen into in the preceding weeks, the victory was a huge propaganda coup, as pro-rebel media pounced on opposition rejoicing in the beleaguered east of the city.

Per today's updates, it's still to be seen whether this breakthrough will translate into a sustainable supply corridor being opened up to the rebel-held enclave; some aid has apparently gone through already, but clearly not enough to significantly tip the scales against the regime:

But little has changed for the besieged residents of rebel-held eastern Aleppo neighborhoods, who have been enduring acute shortages of food and medicine, as the fighting remains too fierce for aid to be delivered, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and humanitarian workers operating in the area say.

Perhaps more significantly, at least some remaining residents in opposition sectors are treating the rebel advance as an opportunity to flee, not hold out longer:

An official from Syrian Civil Defense, a voluntary search-and-rescue group also known as the White Helmets, confirmed that this was the case, adding that many residents wanted to leave eastern Aleppo once a secure road out was opened.

That's likely because the rebel victory has already come at a political cost: it has solidified Al Qaeda affiliate Al Nusra Front as the central fighting force in the entire effort against the regime of Bashar al-Assad and his Russian, Iranian, and Lebanese Hezbollah allies in the north of the country. At the rate things are going, the terrorist group of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri will before long effectively run the opposition government, ensuring that it will be an international pariah. Many, probably most Aleppoans, don't want to die for such implacable extremists.

That's despite the fact that about ten days ago, Al Nusra Front had rebranded itself as Fatah al-Sham (Conquest of Syria) Front, severing its official ties with parent group Al Qaeda in an apparent move to exempt itself from proposed joint US-Russian airstrikes on ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria. In the immediate wake of the schism, the whole motley collection of jihadist outfits throughout Idlib and western Aleppo provinces seemed to quickly coalesce around the new Fatah al-Sham to launch a new combined offensive effort to relieve their besieged allies in the east of Aleppo city - though this joint force still operated, as before, under the Islamist umbrella banner of the "Army of Conquest."

Nobody should have any illusions as to what this really means: with a minor tactical, largely cosmetic organizational adjustment, Al Qaeda in Syria has effectively removed the target sign for US airpower hanging on its back, and has thereby taken virtual command of the anti-Assad insurgency - comprised as it predominantly is of other militant Islamist groups which have long colluded with it, but not overtly so as to remain in Washington's good graces themselves.

While it's long been known that the lines between moderate Islamist militants and their more extreme jihadist cousins like Al Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham are blurry, Washington, with its intransigence in pursuing regime change against Assad since 2011, has for years misled the American and Western public into thinking that the Syrian civil war isn't in fact essentially a binary choice between a ruthless secular dictatorship and a violent reactionary theocracy.

In fact, this was the widely unacknowledged reason that three years ago this month, Barack Obama's infamous "red line" against Damascus on the use of chemical weapons proved to be a monumental bluff: as soon as Washington actually started drawing up war plans against Assad, it became crystal-clear to the deep state of the CIA and Pentagon that they were essentially being drafted to become Al Qaeda's air force in Syria. Realizing the political unacceptability of such a military intervention, Obama conveniently punted the decision to use force to a notoriously gridlocked Congress.

In lieu of direct action, the Obama administration opted for a halfhearted and ultimately fruitless program to train and equip a rebel proxy force to fight both Assad and, from early 2014, the rising threat of a particularly virulent Al Nusra offshoot, Islamic State (ISIS). More significantly, it stepped up lethal and non-lethal aid alike through various back channels in its regional Sunni allies to any number of vetted rebel outfits - in the full knowledge that this materiel could end up in the hands of extremists who just so happened to be better at killing pro-Assad personnel. This enabled the CIA and Pentagon to perpetuate the myth that there was still a credible non-jihadist alternative to the Assad regime: whether on the battlefield or at the negotiating table. In fact, the vaunted Free Syrian Army (FSA) was by then past its operational prime: without the infusion of fanatical jihadist blood into the insurgency's ranks throughout 2013-14, it's probable that the Iranian and Hezbollah-bolstered Assad regime would have been able to grind it into the dust with ruthless attrition.

Further, as ISIS became a more prominent regional threat, especially in Iraq, the US then ratcheted up the pressure through its Sunni allies, especially Turkey and Saudi Arabia, to force a decisive conclusion to the Syrian civil war by securing, at long last, Assad's ouster. In early 2015, the newly formed Army of Conquest effectively combined the Islamist resistance forces of northwestern Syria into a single loose constellation, allowing the rebels to make such threatening advances on the regime's traditional strongholds in coastal Latakia province that Assad had to concede additional territory to ISIS and at the same time subcontract such a large chunk of his fighting to Hezbollah and other Iranian-sponsored Shia militias that Damascus was effectively reduced to a satrap of Tehran (a condition unacceptable to the Baath government and one of the main reasons it lobbied Putin for Moscow's intervention).

At this juncture, Washington was drawing up its coup de grâce: a no-fly zone in northern Syria that would ground Assad's air force and ensure a speedy insurgent takeover of the remainder of Idlib province and even much of Latakia province (the prize being the port of Latakia itself). Needless to say, this is where American leaders and policymakers underestimated so badly the extent of Russia's determination to not let its sole naval access point in the eastern Mediterranean fall to a Sunni fundamentalist Western proxy.

Through all these developments, the Syrian conflict had steadily morphed from a democratic revolution to a radical Islamic insurrection. Such a plain fact was lost on no one, but from the get-go it has presented the world's sole superpower with a vexing dilemma: it couldn't countenance any future for Syria with Assad in the picture in any way, shape, or form; yet as the war dragged on, the strongest impetus for eliminating the Baath regime came increasingly from forces who were no less hostile to Western liberal democratic values. The Obama administration walked a tightrope: it absolutely needed the battlefield pressure that extremists like Al Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham were applying on Damascus, yet it had to minimize their ultimate political role in Syria's transition. As the fight for Aleppo intensifies to a crescendo, it becomes clear that this practically impossible balancing act has always depended to a large extent on the ultimate fate of that city in particular.

Without control of a major urban center, the Syrian opposition has little credible leverage in the political settlement sponsored by the UN at Geneva: it thus follows that not only must it retain control of its sector of Aleppo, but it must also keep itself as free of radical jihadist influence as possible. The embattled remnants of the Syrian revolution - still defiantly clinging to a vision of the country free of both Assad and Islamic extremism - have essentially staked all their bets on riding out the long storm engulfing the country's second city and longtime commercial hub.

For this reason, rebel forces in and around Aleppo city have been disproportionately of the secular revolutionary variety - FSA and similar outfits - for much longer than most anywhere else in Syria. Even the local Islamist units are fiercely opposed not merely to ISIS, but have battled Al Nusra and its affiliates as well.

The latest developments in Aleppo could therefore be at best a Pyrrhic victory for the Syrian opposition: the return of Al Qaeda and its kindred Salafist spirits - even under a new local name - means that acknowledged terrorist bands are playing a key, even central, role in shaping the outcome of the most critical battle of the war. That could throw a monkey wrench into the opposition's hopes for a united front at the Geneva talks.

The immediate situation is that the battle appears far from over: the independent Russian strategic news service Southfront reports that the jihadists haven't truly secured the supply route they've claimed to open, as they must first clear varied pockets of regime regulars and pro-regime militias in their immediate vicinity. Given Russo-Syrian airpower, it may be difficult to utilize the corridor even if they do.

Moving further on out from here, even if the jihadists prevail and genuinely lift the siege, one must wonder how kindly they and their sympathizers (who have probably grown exponentially within Aleppo city in the last couple of weeks) will take to being undercut by the politically favored yet militarily toothless secular elements of the opposition during peace negotiations under watchful US sponsorship.

Obama doubtless hopes that even if US aims in Syria are subjected to the desires of radicals who are cut from the same cloth as those that murdered 3,000 Americans on 9/11 - not to mention those whose head-chopping and child-molesting exploits have earned a name for themselves - that yet somehow the world and the American public can still be led to believe that the five-and-a-half year Syrian civil war could end in a democratic third way.

The US left Afghanistan over a quarter-century ago because it was assumed that just because our friends in Kabul wore Western suits and ties and had the right "free-market capitalist" inclinations, then it didn't matter that so many heavily armed warlords who actually ruled the vast countryside were such irreconcilable antitheses to the very notions of secularism and liberalism. In the years since, you'd think our richly checkered experiences of nation-building in the Islamic world would've instilled the hard lesson at Langley, the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom, and so on that maybe, just maybe, certain countries simply can't stay in one piece except through coercion - and that the only alternative to the centralized coercion of a single strongman is the fragmented coercion of multiple strongmen.

But as always, the worst heresy inside the Beltway is any hint of belief that political power flows from the barrel of a gun. Long after the rest of the world - including the American people themselves - have shed their last illusions about the unchanging realities of human nature, one day even our own ruling class might not merely get it, too, but actually admit it.