It all started with calls for freedom and peaceful street demonstrations against the Assad regime. Four years on, Syria’s nightmare continues unabated. We watch from afar. We dread the jihadi radicalism that seeps from the Middle East into Europe. But Islamic State is the monster we confront. Not the Assad regime.
In March 2011 when the Syrian uprising began, there were no jihadis in the country. Four years on, Isis controls a third of Syrian and Iraqi territory, and is growing branches in other countries of the Arab and Muslim world – most recently in Nigeria. But the current western strategy of bombing Isis on the one hand and appeasing Bashar al-Assad on the other is not only a losing strategy – it is making things worse.
This week I listened to a talk given at the London School of Economics by Jean-Pierre Filiu, a French Arabist, academic, former diplomat and long-time specialist on violent jihadi movements. He is also a stark and eloquent defender of the Syrian revolutionaries who set out to overthrow Assad back in 2011, first through civic resistance and later taking up arms to defend themselves from the onslaught of Assad’s army and torturers. Unlike many commentators and analysts, he has travelled to Syria during the war.
Filiu believes the west has contributed to creating the monster it is fighting. Not in the way some proponents of anti-western conspiracy theories like to suggest (no, Isis is not a creature of the CIA), but by abandoning the Syrian revolutionaries and failing to provide them with the support that would have allowed them to change the balance of forces on the ground.
Filiu identifies wasted opportunities, including President Obama’s August 2013 decision to give up on airstrikes against Assad’s military after its use of chemical weapons. In early 2014 there was another lost chance when Syrian rebels expelled Isis from Aleppo, but still didn’t receive the outside help they hoped for. Filiu is convinced that by creating a vacuum, the west let radical Islamic networks based in the Gulf states become enmeshed in the Syrian quagmire – thus helping spread the ideology Isis thrives on.
While we bomb Isis, Assad spares it and prefers to barrel-bomb Syrian civilians in the pockets of territory still controlled by the rebels fighting his rule. Filiu says Isis is winning because, unlike the west, it has a strategy – and it has galvanised many young Sunnis. Isis is proactive, the west reactive. The actions of Isis draw us into kneejerk military operations with no political strategy whatsoever.
The west started a bombing campaign after its citizens were beheaded last year in Iraq – the images of these crimes were intolerable. Yet the west failed to do anything decisive after 200,000 people were killed in Syria. If you dwell on this fact for a minute, it is hardly surprising that many young Muslims – wherever they are – are likely to conclude that western policies are racist.
The Isis narrative is what needs to be fought before they are fought with hard power. Yet, by letting Assad largely off the hook while his army continues to massacre civilians, we are losing the narrative battle. Even by the standards of realpolitik, under which the west only acts on the basis of its own security concerns, this is a lose-lose situation.
By conservative estimates, there are 3,000 to 4,000 European jihadis with Isis. On current trends, says Filiu, there will be 5,000 by the summer and possibly 10,000 by the autumn. It is legitimate to worry about how young British or French girls can be indoctrinated and drawn to Syria. But that does nothing to address the deeper underlying reasons as to why Isis has grown. Assad has been a key factor in making the Middle East the volcano it now is. Yet the west has all but given up on reducing his ability to sow chaos and death.
Is it too late? Filiu says not – an assertion which will certainly be contested by those who conclude that in Syria today, only Assad and Isis forces remain. That point of view certainly fits with Assad’s propaganda. Filiu says the best hope against Isis, as demonstrated in Aleppo a year ago, is the anti-Assad rebel forces.
Giving them what they need would change the bigger picture. Filiu points to what the west did in Afghanistan in the 1980s: delivering Stinger missiles to the mujahideen, which allowed them to win. As for the assertion that anti-tank or anti-aircraft weaponry, if delivered by the west, would fall into Isis hands, well, Filiu responds that this risk fades considerably compared to the huge quantity of American military equipment given to Isis last year when Mosul fell: the US equipped Iraqi army abandoned all its hardware to the assaillants.
It is perhaps not surprising that British diplomats and defence officials who attended Filiu’s conference expressed some disagreement: after all, they have to defend current western policies.
But as I heard all this, I couldn’t help thinking of how comfortable it is, in a way, for most of us in the west to look at the catastrophe in the Middle East and take the fatalistic view that events have taken on a momentum that is beyond our influence. Yet we still haven’t heard from our political leaders about how they think letting Assad get away with what he is doing will contribute to any decent outcome, or to prevent more terrorist acts taking place in Europe.
The appeasement of Assad, like other appeasements in history, will cause more nightmares. It is more than symbolic that the lights over Syria have largely gone out, as a coalition of international NGOs has just shown. The lights in our collective thinking are also at risk of going out.