Faysal Itani is resident fellow at the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council. Michael Weiss is a columnist for Foreign Policy and NOW Lebanon. He reported from the 2012 siege of Aleppo.

Fareed Zakaria and Leslie Gelb both have made what they think are bold and unfashionable proposals for U.S. policy in Syria without bothering to realize that their prescriptions have become the new conventional wisdom. Both not only advocate that the United States team up with the very regimes responsible for the outbreak of transnational jihad in the Levant and Mesopotamia, but also seem to neglect the mounting evidence that this is exactly what the United States is doing, even as they decry the palpable insufficiencies of Operation Inherent Resolve.

Zakaria warns against any growing U.S. military interference in Syria in his latest Washington Post column, preferring instead a policy of “containment”. Only by “bolstering [Syria’s] neighbors,” the CNN host and foreign policy doyen writes, can President Obama hope to achieve any result from his campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL. Gelb, meanwhile, has just written in the Daily Beast: “Only Assad’s Syria and Iran can and would provide plausible ground forces in short order” — a claim with which Assad’s own Alawite support base apparently disagrees given the proliferation of loyalist protests against the regime precisely for failing to provide what might be called plausible ground forces against ISIL.


Containment, of course, has been President Obama’s Syria strategy all along, beginning in 2011. It has led to the caliphate. It is also the reason why 21 nations, including those Zakaria wants to see enlisted in his old-new strategy, are now committed to what former U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says may be a “30-year war” against ISIL.

But Zakaria’s real purpose isn’t to tell the president what to do; it’s to tell him what not to do: namely, work with or empower the Syrian opposition. This is of course the ancillary component of Obama’s policy to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIL. By 2017, the United States hopes to have trained and equipped some 5,000 Syrian rebels as a kind of counterterrorism strike force in Syria, one that would hopefully coordinate directly with the United States against ISIL. As Zakaria’s colleague David Ignatius noted last week, drawing on discussions with administration officials, many of whom want greater U.S. intervention in Syria, the White House might double that number. Perhaps if only to ensure that half a billion dollars in taxpayer money aren’t immediately wasted, Secretary of State John Kerry also favors imposing a no-fly zone over northern Syria to protect these would-be U.S. assets from slaughter by Syrian Air Force barrel bombs, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey told ABC News’ This Week that he could “anticipate circumstances in the future” where one will be necessary. Thus, just as key decision-makers are finally and rightly concluding that the containment strategy has failed — and advocating the more promising course of helping the United States’ Syrian allies beat ISIL —Zakaria argues for the exact opposite.

Most troubling is Zakaria’s fuzzy math about the opposition, its ideology and the terrain it is said to control. He writes: “The Islamic State controls about one-third of the country, and the other militias control a little less than 20 percent. But the largest and most effective of these non-Islamic State groups are al-Qaeda-affiliated and also deadly enemies of the United States. The non-jihadi groups collectively control less than 5 percent of Syria.”

These data points are dubious and misleading. A look at reliable maps of ISIL-dominant zones in Syria indicates that the terrorist army holds much of the Euphrates River Valley and Raqqa province, as well as parts of Aleppo province. Here is one produced by the Washington-based think tank the Institute of the Study of War, dated September 2014:

This is, self-evidently, hardly “one-third” of Syria’s territory. A glance at the same maps demonstrates that Syria’s non-jihadist rebels — including the Syrian Revolutionaries Front, Harakat al-Hazm, the Southern Front and Division 13 – control more of Syria than “5 percent.”

Even supposing that ISIL might have the upper hand over its rivals in one-third of Syria, which is quite different from “controlling” it, area percentage is not a useful measure of the balance of power in Syria. The meaningful metric is control over major population zones and infrastructure, which are heavily contested by the regime and insurgent groups, but less so by ISIL. The Islamic State is present in Syria’s least populated areas, far from the country’s demographic heartland; their importance lie in their hydrocarbon assets, which the U.S.-led coalition has bombed and which ISIL is now struggling to exploit as a means of self-financing. ISIL has been wholly absent from Aleppo city since January 2014, when many of the rebels Zakaria disdains helpfully expelled it from Syria’s largest city and commercial/industrial capital. ISIL is now struggling to take more valuable terrain from rebel forces that Zakaria dismisses as dominated by extremists.

In addition to relying on empirically flawed data, Zakaria’s argument is syllogistic — although quite common among anti-interventionists. The mainstream rebels who were never seriously helped by the United States, this logic goes, are atomized, weak and promiscuous in their allegiances. Ergo, they should never be seriously helped by the United States. Not only does this guarantee that the problems besetting those rebels, and by extension America’s anti-ISIL strategy, will only grow worse, it also completely misconstrues the nature of fluid warfare and the Syrian conflict itself, as does Zakaria’s supporting argument.

For one thing, Zakaria claims that the Free Syrian Army (FSA) doesn’t actually exist: “The director of national intelligence has testified,” he writes, “that the opposition to the Bashar al-Assad regime is composed of 1,500 separate militias. We call a bunch of these militias — which are anti-Assad and also anti-Islamist (we hope) — the Free Syrian Army.” This is a canard. The “Free Syrian Army” label has always been used as a shorthand or catchall encompassing a number of disparate groups fighting the regime, and now also ISIL. Syria-watchers prefer the more exacting terms “mainstream,” “nationalist” and “non-jihadist” to characterize the more Western-amenable factions. Zakaria’s point about the FSA is irrelevant, and says nothing about whether particular fighting groups are worthy of our support. It is more useful and rigorous to assess rebel groups based on their actual behavior. Harakat al-Hazm, for instance, is a mainstream, non-jihadist fighting group that has received a modest supply of U.S. TOW anti-tank missiles. So far there is no credible evidence to suggest that they have found their way into the hands of extremists.

U.S. allies appear to have grasped the point that eludes Zakaria. France, which backs Kerry's call for a no-fly zone in Syria, is also arming mainstream rebel groups. So, it seems, is another unlikely country. According to Ehud Yaari of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, moderate rebel factions in southern Syria have received small consignments of rocket-propelled grenades from the Israel Defense Forces, which has decided to partner with certain rebels as a counterterrorism deterrent against the rise of Jabhat al-Nusra, al Qaeda’s Syria affiliate, near its border with Syria. The Israelis are reportedly coordinating intelligence with these fighters on jihadist positions in southern Syria, and offering them medical and humanitarian aid as needed. If a country whose leadership openly equates ISIL with Hamas has found in the Syrian opposition actors worthy of material support, then what becomes of the argument that Washington has no credible or trustworthy partner in this pool of alleged extremists?

Zakaria also recycles a longstanding and intellectually disingenuous complaint that the “largest and most effective of these non-Islamic State groups are al-Qaeda-affiliated and also deadly enemies of the United States.” It is true that almost every mainstream non-jihadist faction in Syria, including the ones listed above, has fought alongside Jabhat al-Nusra at some point - either against regime forces or against ISIL. However, “al-Qaeda-affiliated” is a misleading term, as these groups have tended to forge alliances of convenience or wartime exigency with some jihadists. All too often, observers of the Syria conflict employ a shallow, decontextualized approach to appraising fighters on the ground. YouTube video proclamations designed to drum up badly needed funds from Gulf Arab states, to pressure or blackmail the West into offering adequate support, or to triangulate between and amongst competitive rebel interests, are given to be copper-bottom proof of a brigade or battalion’s permanent ideological coloration. In reality, fighters migrate fluidly to and from ideologically divergent camps; we have spoken with rebels who have gone from nationalist to Islamist to outright jihadist alignments, all based on the need for ammunition, food or money. ISIL, for instance, pays its fighters $400 per month; most FSA units pay theirs around $100, according to FSA spokesman Hussam al-Marie. As a matter of simple economy, this disparity could be altered overnight. The perception, too, of who is “winning” versus who is “losing” on the battlefield also drives recruitment efforts, which is why, following ISIL’s seizure of Mosul last June, its numbers skyrocketed.

Col. Derek Harvey, a retired military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army — and someone who helped lure actual al Qaeda affiliates away from al Qaeda in Iraq during the Awakening and surge periods of the Iraq War — told one of us several weeks ago that Syria’s rebels are now fighting as many as six distinct enemies all at once. It is unrealistic to expect them not to prioritize their campaigns, or to avoid cutting pragmatic short-term truces with unsavory elements to do so. It is especially unfair to advocate abandoning these groups — as Zakaria does —while at the same time bemoaning their cooperation with extremists due in large part to inadequate U.S. support.

Ironically, as Zakaria should well be aware, these alliances of convenience are exactly what the United States has opted for against ISIL, while “de-conflicting” with a Syrian regime that, as Colonel Harvey knows, formerly ran al Qaeda operatives into Iraq to kill American troops. (As if to reemphasize this conventional wisdom, on Friday, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Syrian regime officials and supporters on the grounds that the regime “played an important role in the growth of terrorist networks in Syria due to the Assad regime’s permissive attitude toward al-Qaida’s foreign fighter facilitation efforts during the Iraq conflict.”) And although the Pentagon and White House will deny it, U.S. Central Command also now finds itself in a de facto partnership or alliance with Assad- and Iran-affiliated Shiite militias in Iraq. Shall we be as moralistic about this strategic calculation, which Zakaria supports, as we are in our assessment of the underfunded and under-equipped rebels in Syria?

Zakaria also neglects to mention that the tenuous category problem he has with the name “Free Syrian Army” now also applies to Assad regime’s own military, which stands to gain most from a containment strategy. Assad’s Army no longer exists in any meaningful sense except on paper and in regime propaganda, thanks to two and a half years of attrition warfare, defections and desertions. His conventional military capability has leaned heavily on the Fourth Armored Division and Republican Guard — his two praetorian divisions, tasked with defending Damascus, both of which seem to be doing less and less these days — and overwhelmingly on a similarly ragtag consortium of brutal militias, almost all of them trained, financed and armed by Iran’s expeditionary arm, the Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QC). These Shiite militias — some of whom are indeed jihadist groups themselves — are just as terroristic and sectarian as the worst Sunni extremists on the other side, ISIL not excepted. They have committed ethnic cleansing, beheadings, car and mosque bombings and extrajudicial killings of prisoners. Their victims, nearly all Sunnis, have included children.

Both Zakaria and Gelb believe that we should essentially gift Syria not only to Assad’s quasi-state, but to other groups far worse — and with more American blood on their hands — than the Syrian rebels. These pro-Assad forces include the National Defense Forces, which, according to the Wall Street Journal, helped maintain a months-long starvation siege of Moadamiyah, a Damascus suburb the regime targeted with sarin gas attacks in August 2013; Lebanese Hezbollah; the Baqir al-Sadr Force (a Shiite militia created by Iraq’s Badr Organization. During the height of the Iraqi civil war, Badr ran notorious death squads); and Asaib Ahl al-Haq, yet another Shiite militia built by the IRGC-GC and formerly known for using sophisticated IEDs to devastating effect against U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

The U.S. strategy in Iraq, which would be a critical component of any “containment” strategy, has employed many groups that, by Zakaria’s standards, are our enemies rather than allies. The U.S. lists three of Asaib Ahl al-Haq’s top leaders as Specially Designated Global Terrorists, an awkward fact that apparently didn’t stop the group from acting as the vanguard fighting force in the recent ground offensive to retake the town of Amerli, Iraq, from ISIL as U.S. fighter jets conducted sorties overhead. (Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the infamous IRGC-QC commander, was shown smiling on the ground in Amerli with cheering Asaib Ahl al-Haq militants at the close of that campaign.)

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have both recorded evidence showing that Asaib Ahl al-Haq, among many other Iranian proxies in Iraq, is guilty of war crimes. In mid-August, the Guardian interviewed a Kurdish Iraqi Air Force pilot who said that Iran had brought in its own planes, pilots and mechanics to an air base south of Baghdad: “the Iranians make barrel bombs and then use Antonov and Huey planes to drop them in Sunni areas.”

One wonders, then what Gelb can mean when he writes, “If a deal can be arranged, Tehran’s ground forces should be restricted to Baghdad and southern Iraq. Going northward would antagonize Iraqi Sunnis whom Washington and Baghdad are currently wooing.” Tehran’s ground forces are already well north of Baghdad committing atrocities against the Iraqi Sunnis whom Washington and (nominally) Baghdad are currently wooing; its intelligence services are coordinating Baghdad’s campaign against ISIL, with America’s undeclared assistance.

Zakaria and Gelb’s arguments, based as they are on bad data, faulty analysis and selective moralizing, have become all-too-common in the Syria debate. The standard practice is to unfairly and disingenuously misrepresent the Syrian opposition, while judging the United States’ potentially useful allies by far stricter standards than its sworn enemies. A containment strategy that empowers Syrian and Iraqi Shiite militias and disregards Syrian rebels can only court failure. The sad fact is, until wiser heads like General Allen and Colonel Harvey are heeded, Zakaria and Gelb needn’t opine very hard to see the fruits of their strategy. They need only open their eyes. It’s the strategy Obama has been following all along.