All of this makes for a pretty dire assessment of US attitudes in relation to the conflict. It almost seems as if the means required to achieve a certain goal superseded the actual goal itself. That goal was “regime change”, let’s not kid ourselves. And the rebels were anti-regime, therefore they had to be supported one way or the other, as violent ouster of Assad was considered the only proper way of achieving the intended result. In plain English, this is called putting the cart before the horse, and that is exactly what US policy has suffered from in Syria.

Put simply, when the rebels had the upper-hand, they were encouraged to go for the whole nine yards and oust the Assad regime. When they seemed in trouble, their sponsors advocated for an increased effort of some sort and usually got what they asked for, except in two instances which could have been possible game changers (but we will get into these in Part 3). This short sighted policy of going with the flow and not thinking ahead is what brought US foreign policy to the dead-end it is at now.

When trying to break down US efforts at building up rebel groups in Syria, three periods can be identified, all of them characterized by specific military, political and diplomatic circumstances. These fluctuations in the US strategy are already a first indicator of the reasons why it failed: there was no strategy as such in the first place, there were only short-term ideological considerations that dictated US policies on the ground.

by Patrick BAHZAD In the testimony he gave on Wednesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. Lloyd Austin – the head of CENTCOM – stated that there was all but a handful of pro-US rebels still operating on the ground in Syria. The rest of that sorry lot had either fled, joined other groups or had been killed. Now, the same eerie question comes up again, like it does every time US policy in Syria faces a new disaster … How could it come to this? How could the US get embroiled in such a calamitous strategy, recording failure, after failure, after failure? The answer to that is simple: what inevitably leads to the same mistakes, is believing your own spin – or rather the spin that the same "think tanks", armchair strategists and pseudo-experts feed a political establishment which already has a partisan agenda. Just to underline this recurring feature, Part 2 of this series will take a good look at various attempts made to support so-called "moderate" Syrian rebels between 2012 and 2015, based on a few case studies.

Relying on regional proxies

In the first months of the war, between early 2011 and mid-2012, things looked like there was a division of labour between the US and its Western European allies (France and the United Kingdom) on the one hand, and regional players like Turkey and the Gulf States on the other. The West provided for the diplomatic and PR-noise, while regional allies enabled and guided the “Free Syrian Army” (FSA) on the ground.



The rebels, which had been organized already before the first peaceful demonstrations by countries such as Saudi-Arabia and Qatar, started off as a joint-venture between exiled Syrian opposition figures, groups close to the Syrian “Muslim Brotherhood” (or what was left of it) and Syrian army defectors, who had been promised either money or influence, or sometimes both. And of course, there were also scores of FSA foot-soldiers who were just ordinary Sunni Syrians, disgruntled by years of economic hardship and political discrimination.



Confidence in the blue-print for the “Arab Spring” distorted the perceived difficulties of the task at hand, as nobody at State or the Pentagon seemed to be wondering whether Syria would not be a tougher nut to crack than Tunisia or Egypt. Not even the Libyan precedent, with its months’ long air campaign, was considered worthy of attention.



After months of guerilla warfare, mostly in the border areas in the North and South, the powers that be came to the realization that the FSA would never be able to topple Bashar al-Assad without serious outside help. Wary of any further military involvement the Middle-East, the US again chose to lead "from behind": rather than doing the job themselves, they provided for the logistics of military support to the rebels and let others do the work. Only this time, they had to rely solely on their allies in Turkey and the Gulf for eyes and ears on the ground.



This major difference to Libya, where US, British and French intelligence and Special Forces were present almost from day one, allowing for at least some sort of monitoring of the arms' flow and fighters' influx, proved fatal to the establishment of "moderate" rebel groups powerful enough to withstand the pressure from the Islamic insurgents.



“Air Qatar” as a new “Air America”



American logistical support started quite slowly, in January 2012, but the US soon approved a growing number of cargo flights carrying small calibre weapons, RPGs and ammunition to the airports of Amman or Ankara. From there, local intelligence and CIA supervisors took it upon themselves to get the weapons to Syrian insurgents. Looking back at this Middle-Eastern version of Vietnam’s “Air America”, the only real surprise is the naïve and irresponsible way the US administration subcontracted the weapons deliveries. Some 4 000 tonnes of military gear were supplied to the insurgents in between January 2012 and April 2013, with almost no direct monitoring by US officials in the border areas, particularly in Turkey.



Just like in Libya the year before, Qatar was spearheading the war effort. Their C-130 and C-17 aircraft flew to places all over the Mediterranean, where CIA officers would buy off local arms, thus draining the illegal arms market as well (at least that was the idea), before heading back mostly to Esenboga airport near Ankara. With Libya being a country awash with Gaddafi’s weapons, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out which place was the most popular destination for the Qatari Air Force. Soon, Jordan and Saudi-Arabia joined in as well.



To the US, it was more a case of managing operations the best way they could, given that they were not really in a position to undermine the Gulf States’ efforts at arming the rebels. However, what the officials on the ground and in D.C. had probably not factored in, was that things would not stop at weapons deliveries. A growing influx of fighters was registered with every passing month in 2012, and the CIA agents in Turkey in particular must have felt a growing sense of unease at the sight and the sheer number of young men flying to Turkey, arriving on ships or simply by train, to join in the “Syrian revolution”, which was turning more and more into a Sunni "Jihad" against the Shia and Alawi apostates.



Turkish, Saudi and Qatari intelligence in charge



By early 2013, the genie was definitely out of the bottle and there was no way of getting him back in. From the point of view of the US administration, the most worrying feature was not actually the cargo flights and weapons deliveries as such. It was subcontracting the whole operation to Turkish and Gulf countries intelligence and special forces that was the most risky part. Contrary to Libya, and for the reasons explained above, the weapons that were flown into Syria's neighbouring countries with US knowledge and support were dispatched to rebel commanders by local “allies” with an agenda of their own.



Once the weapons had arrived in Turkey – or Jordan – the CIA or DIA operatives almost became simple bystanders, often unable to figure out what was happening exactly with these weapons. For lack of language skills, ignorance of the Syrian rebellion’s "typology", inability to make the difference between a foreign Saudi or Jordanian and a local Syrian, the exercise ended as could be expected. Turkish, Qatari and Saudi intelligence officers cherry-picked the groups they would hand the weapons over, thus making sure the few genuinely moderate groups didn’t get a thing and the increasingly fundamentalist Islamic groups – whether they were influenced by the reborn Syrian branch of the “Ikhwan” or the increasingly popular Salafi groups – got the bulk.



The only region where the weapons were delivered according to a reasonable set of security rules was Jordan, due to the tight cooperation between US intelligence and their Jordanian counterparts and also due to the fact the Jordanian GID had a vested interest in not seeing these weapons get into the wrong hands. Nonetheless, some radical Sunni groups still managed to get around the GID's watchful eye, sometimes buying off gear directly from the FSA units it had been delivered to.

Today, we know that some people within the IC, specifically the DIA, didn’t get fooled by the whole circus the border areas had turned into, but their reports were overruled by the fairytale narrative that was being repeated all over institutional America: the FSA was a “secularist” army fighting to free their country from a bloodthirsty tyrant and there was neither "Al Qaeda" nor any other "Jihadi" group fighting in Syria.



The “No Fly Zone” already mentioned as the panacea



Interestingly, it was already at this point in the war –in the middle of 2012 – that the same D.C. think tanks and PR-agencies which had come up with such a rosy scenario openly discussed another idea, one that would become the most recurring request and “strategic” solution to the crisis: the “No Fly Zone”.



One of its most vocal supporters, Anne-Marie Slaughter, had very clear ideas about the way forward: “Establishing ‘free zones’ would require nations like Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Jordan to arm the opposition soldiers with anti-tank, counter-sniper and portable antiaircraft weapons. Special forces from countries like Qatar, Turkey and possibly Britain and France could offer tactical and strategic advice to the Free Syrian Army forces. Sending them in is logistically and politically feasible; some may be there already.”



This excerpt from an article she wrote for the New York Times in February 2012 is not just symbolic of the way mainstream media saw the conflict and the players involved, but it also gives a few clues about what agenda these interest groups wanted to push all along. Their idea was not to encourage a peaceful settlement to the conflict but to get rid of the regime at any cost, provided there was no US “boots on the ground”. The failure to implement these plans, and the failure of the FSA to seriously challenge the military balance, forced the parties involved to reconsider their involvement. The US in particular, having first chosen to “lead from behind” as in Libya, altered their level of engagement.



The CIA’s covert support programme



The increasingly alarming signs of a take-over of the insurgency by Sunni fundamentalists certainly played a role in this American strategy shift. Turkish, Saudi and Qatari intelligence were controlling most of the groups doing the fighting against the Syrian Arab Army. "Jabhat al-Nusra" had started its recruitment operations in late 2011 and launched its first suicide attacks early in 2012. Other "Jihadi" groups joined the fray and the number of foreign fighters in particular grew very rapidly, as Western NGO members working in Syria identified already by mid-2012.



This development, in conjunction with the failed attempt at building up the FSA under the direct control of Qatari, Saudi and Turkish intelligence, were the main reasons why a covert US programme was finally launched in March 2013, aimed at providing American weapons – either directly from US stocks or from allied countries – to a series of rebel groups that were to be vetted by the CIA. Presented as a small-scale and small-budget operation, it turned out the programme was actually larger than the 500 million dollars Congress would officially provide the Syrian opposition with, one year later.



The CIA operation not only provided for the vetting and arming of specific groups, but also for their training. Needless to say, the training took place in local countries, again giving so-called “allies” of the US another chance at shaping the insurgency in a way they saw fit. The first groups that were approved went through a rigorous screening process, if you believe officials familiar with it. Looking at the groups that benefited from a number of US made TOW anti-tank missiles, one has to wonder however at who actually vetted these groups.



Again, what seems most likely is that the US administration either relied on faulty intelligence, probably cooked up by local “friendlies”, or chose to deliberately disregard whatever proper intelligence the CIA or the DIA had come up with about groups such as “Harakat Hazzm”, the “Syrian Revolutionaries Front” or “Liwa Fursan al-Haq”. Some of the papers that advocated for arming and training these groups definitely make for an interesting reading. WINEP for example talked up “Harakat Hazzm” as “a model for the type of group the United States and its allies can support with meaningful, lethal military assistance”. The reader was spared no hyperbole and as usual, the supporters of violent regime change made it clear that failure to arm these legitimate groups would only make matters worse.



Disaster in the Fall of 2014



There seemed to be another logic at work behind the rationale for arming and training these secularist “moderates”. The “Institute for the Study of War” expressed it best in one of its strategy papers: not only did it make sense to arm groups because they were more sympathetic to the US, but it would also enable the US to cut off the logistics and operational links between these groups and the radical Islamist insurgents, most of all “Jabhat al-Nusra”, which had not yet split up between supporters of al-Baghdadi’s “ISI” and al-Zawahiri’s “Al Qaeda” central.



Separating the core of “Jihad” incorporated from groups having chosen an alliance of circumstance with the Islamists was the secondary goal of arming them. It was basically playing the ”Sons of Iraq” card all over again: buying off what King David recently called the “reconcilables” and turning them loose not just on Assad first but also on the “Jihadis” later.



However, such a crude strategy did not take the “Jihadis” by surprise. Not only that, but it also promoted a sense of jealousy among the other groups that had not been vetted into the covert CIA funding. And while the covert support allowed the delivery of weapons directly to the rebels, without any middlemen, the training of the groups that had been picked took place mostly in Qatar and Jordan, in a way very similar to what had been done for a number of Libyan insurgents three years earlier.



Thus, Qatari intelligence in particular got a very good idea which groups and people were in the good books of the Americans. First results on the ground proved to be promising. The training and the anti-tank missiles enabled the rebels to gain ground in the North-West of Syria (Idlib in particular) and in the South. By the fall of 2014 however, the pipe-dream of arming and supporting the "moderates" was over, when Jabhat al-Nusra crushed the 7 or 8 “Free Syrian Army” groups that had already cost the US over 100 million dollars.



ISIS enters the game



What had changed the equation totally, both for the US and for the Syrian insurgency, was the split that had occurred between “Al Qaeda” central and the “Islamic State in Iraq” over leadership of the “Jabhat al-Nusra” franchise. But more importantly, the spectacular gains ISIS realized in the summer of 2014 forced the US to implement another strategy change and establish its anti-ISIS coalition. Strangely however, one of the first airstrikes the US launched in September 2014 turned out to be a blunder of epic proportions. Indeed, for reasons that may have seemed justified at the time, the Air Force hit the so-called “Khorasan group”, a “Jabhat al-Nusra” outfit that was described as presenting an imminent threat to the US.



If there had been any doubts left among al-Nusra's leadership, that airstrike lifted it. It was not just the “Islamic State” the US were after, but any Salafi insurgency within Syria. The corollary to this verdict was simple: any group getting help from the Americans was a potential collaborator and had to be eliminated. “Jabhat al-Nusra” and groups friendly to it, especially “Ahrar al-Sham” which had also been hit by the US Air Force, cleaned up the house, and they cleaned up good.



Within a couple of days, in November 2014, they did away with the main recipients of US military training and equipment: “Harakat Hazzm” and the “Syrian Revolutionaries Front” were done, even though the first managed to survive more or less until March 2015, when it was finally dissolved following another “Jabhat al-Nusra” assault.

As an unintended consequence of these groups' destruction, the rebels that the covert CIA programme was specifically designed to avoid found themselves in possession of the TOW missiles and other US gear that had been earmarked for the secularist insurgents… A new feature at the time, but one that would become very familiar one year later in Iraq. And cherry on top, none of the other FSA or “independent” brigades moved a finger, when “Jabhat al-Nusra” destroyed the US backed “moderates”.



Stumbling into an old friend



Thus, in the fall of 2014, it should already have been clear to officials in charge that being labelled a “moderate” was only another way of saying these groups were on the US’ payroll. And in a war like Syria, when you got "Jabhat al-Nusra" at your side, and the "Islamic State" in front of you, you don’t want to be on anybody’s payroll, least of all the US. None other than the leader of the “Syrian Revolutionaries Front”, Jamal Maarouf, exemplifies this any better. A famous leader of the FSA in the early days of the civil war, Maarouf’s reputation soon was tarnished by various accusations of corruption and oil smuggling in the group he led back then, the “Syrian Martyrs’ Brigade”.



This "brigade" has already made the headlines for one of its most astonishing accomplishments: revealed by a German newspaper, it was allegedly Maarouf's "Martyrs" who shot and killed the Islamic State's chief strategist, Hajji Bakr, in a small house in Northern Syria, early in 2014. A trove of intelligence about ISIS' strategy of terror was allegedly recovered from Hajji Bakr's hideout and found its way into German newspaper "Der Spiegel". When you consider that all of this is supposed to have happened at a time when Maarouf was already on the CIA's payroll, there are a number of still unanswered questions that spring to mind about the circumstances in which this intelligence was discovered and how it got to a German newspaper crew.



There we have it though: one of the most important recipients of CIA help between 2013 and 2014, a group which had been screened thoroughly, turned out to be led by a corrupt, drug smuggling leader, whose men were most famous for their "diesel checkpoints" than for fighting the Syrian army. When you enquire about why such a man and his fighters were even approved, you always get the same answers. "Maarouf was a nationalist, not an ideologue", for example. Or, it was important to arm these people because US over-caution about who to fund was only making the radicals stronger in the end.



That a man such as Maarouf, who was definitely interested in US funding and support for more than just one reason, might have exaggerated the number and skills of his fighters just to get on the CIA list in the first place seems to be beyond comprehension for the advocates of that covert programme. That supporting a group such as “Syrian Revolutionaries Front” wouldn't make the moderates any stronger also seems to evade these people's minds.



A massive failure



The other group that benefited most from US money, “Harakat Hazzm” doesn't resist closer scrutiny either. Introduced as paragons of democratic virtue by WINEP and other Neo-Con or Wilsonian think tanks, any decent investigation on the ground would have proven beyond any doubt that this wasn't a homogeneous leadership with a unified "command and control", but a vast conglomerate of local militias with diverging affiliations. Sometimes, they even cooperated with the most extreme "Jihadi" insurgents, "tier one" Jabhat al-Nusra allies as the ISW would label them, like "Jaish al-Muharijeen wal Ansar", an outfit featuring a large number of foreign fighters, most of them Chechens.



What remains of the covert programme is a large pile of rubble. The fact it was terminated early this year by the House Intelligence Committee bears testimony to its utter failure. In all fairness, one needs to recognize that the CIA and US Special Forces managed to achieve reasonable success in the Kurdish areas. The support given to YPG militias in their fight against the "Islamic State" can be considered a success up to a certain degree, but this is another matter.



As far as arming "moderate" rebels involved in the war against Bashar al-Assad is concerned, the programme has failure written over it, from start to finish. The only thing that was actually achieved, contrary to what the ISW suggests in its December 2014 paper on "Jabhat al-Nusra", is that the groups on whose cooperation the US were counting in order to isolate the "Al Qaeda" franchise in Syria were totally annihilated.



After such a blunder, you might have thought that lessons would have been learnt and that a different approach - both more subtle and more realistic - would now be implemented. Far from it. The year 2015 and the debacle of "Division 30" would prove again that there are no "lessons learnt" when ideological stubbornness overrules tactical and operational considerations.