Supply-lines for Salafi-jihadist rebel groups in Syria

In a recent episode of Radio War Nerd, the interviewee Elijah Magnier pointed out that there is a massive and ongoing logistical operation to supply Syrian rebels (most of whom are ultra-conservative sectarian Salafi militias).  In order to emphasize the scale of the operation, he pointed out that during the month-long war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, the US had to carry out an emergency re-supply to Israeli military forces after less than two weeks; compare that to the fact that Syria has seen what is more or less a full-blown conventional war effort between standing armies for the last 6 years, with seemingly no limitations on weapons or ammo.  It is relatively clear that Iran and Russia are supplying massive and consistent arms shipments to the Assad regime’s coalition, but what must be an equally massive and consistent military logistics operation on the rebel side is barely discussed at all in the mainstream Western media.

This article published recently in The American Conservative (which, despite its name and supposed political leaning, regularly publishes fantastic critical analysis of US foreign policy) somewhat fills the void, by digging into the details of arms supply operations by the US and its regional allies in the early years of the war, and how these operations were obviously and blatantly boosting up the power of al-Qaeda and other Salafi-jihadist groups.

The level of detail drawn from what appears to be public record is quite striking.  Here is an excerpt on weapons shipments in the summer of 2012, that involved the CIA trafficking weapons from Libyan arms caches:

A declassified October 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report revealed that the shipment in late August 2012 had included 500 sniper rifles, 100 RPG (rocket propelled grenade launchers) along with 300 RPG rounds and 400 howitzers. Each arms shipment encompassed as many as ten shipping containers, it reported, each of which held about 48,000 pounds of cargo. That suggests a total payload of up to 250 tons of weapons per shipment.

And here is an excerpt detailing part of the massive arms corridor between the Balkans and Syria that was established in early 2013, financed by Saudi Arabia and coordinated by the CIA:

One U.S. official called the new level of arms deliveries to Syrian rebels a “cataract of weaponry.” And a year-long investigation by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project revealed that the Saudis were intent on building up a powerful conventional army in Syria. The “end-use certificate” for weapons purchased from an arms company in Belgrade, Serbia, in May 2013 includes 500 Soviet-designed PG-7VR rocket launchers that can penetrate even heavily-armored tanks, along with two million rounds; 50 Konkurs anti-tank missile launchers and 500 missiles, 50 anti-aircraft guns mounted on armored vehicles, 10,000 fragmentation rounds for OG-7 rocket launchers capable of piercing heavy body armor; four truck-mounted BM-21 GRAD multiple rocket launchers, each of which fires 40 rockets at a time with a range of 12 to 19 miles, along with 20,000 GRAD rockets.

And here is an excerpt on the connect between the war in Syria and US-Saudi arms deals:

By far the most consequential single Saudi arms purchase was not from the Balkans, however, but from the United States. It was the December 2013 U.S. sale of 15,000 TOW anti-tank missiles to the Saudis at a cost of about $1 billion—the result of Obama’s decision earlier that year to reverse his ban on lethal assistance to anti-Assad armed groups. The Saudis had agreed, moreover, that those anti-tank missiles would be doled out to Syrian groups only at U.S. discretion. The TOW missiles began to arrive in Syria in 2014 and soon had a major impact on the military balance.

The entire article is excellent and worth spending time on.  Its perhaps the clearest and most well-sourced article I’ve seen on the exact nature of NATO-GCC supply lines to their local proxies.

What should the radical left do about Syria?

First, we need to recognize that this is a bad question.  We need to back up a bit, and recognize that the radical left (specifically, in the US) is in no position to do anything about Syria.  We’re weak, divided, confused, and largely isolated from the American masses.  We have depressingly little influence on domestic policy, let alone on how US imperialism functions abroad.  Most of our debates are academic and abstract.  Our protests — especially our anti-war protests — are reactive, and utterly disconnected to any kind of larger, coherent strategy around fighting imperialism and building a revolutionary movement.

With this in mind, the next step is to consider what would constitute an effective program around Syria.

The core plank of an effective program would be establishing and deepening concrete ties with people in Syria.  I’m not talking about re-Tweeting activists in Aleppo or helping “raise awareness” through interviews or whatever — I’m talking about actual coordination, planning, and resource transfer with organizations on the ground in and around Syria.  From this perspective, the most effective programs thus far have been 1) solidarity efforts with Rojava, such as fundraising for supplies and volunteering to fight, and 2) solidarity efforts with refugees, which have been particularly impressive in southern European countries like Greece.

Potential imperial co-option of the radical left in Syria

This interview with Josha Landis, an academic studying the Middle East and an expert on Syria, is quite a good dissection of the contradictory and incoherent nature of US foreign policy in the region.  I disagree with some of his points — particularly when he downplays the radical and democratic dimensions of the initial uprising by sidelining the importance of unarmed factions — but his analysis of the tensions in the US foreign policy and military establishments are spot-on.  There are strong desires to both 1) contain and roll back Iranian regional hegemony, and 2) contain and roll-back Salafi-jihadist organizations, but the kicker is that these goals can’t be accomplished at the same time since these two forces are primarily fighting one another.

These aren’t the only forces at play, however, and this passage from the interview raises the question of how the US relationship with the radical leftists of the Syrian Kurds and their allies will evolve.

The present critique among some think tankers in Washington is that Assad is too weak to reconquer Syria, so the United States will have to step in, particularly if it wants to defeat ISIS quickly. They argue that Syria is a land of many different social and cultural environments. The Century Foundation, the New America Foundation, and the Center for a New American Security have published policy papers advocating in one way or the other that the United States keep special forces on the ground and reinforce regional rebel groupings. They envision carving out autonomous areas that would give the U.S. leverage and presumably force both the Russia and Assad to the negotiating table. They refuse to say that they are for partitioning Syria. Instead, they talk about a framework of autonomous regions. But in the end, it is all pretty much the same thing. It’s about retaining control over areas of Syria to give the US leverage.

This rhetoric of Syria’s diversity of “social and cultural environments” and “a framework of autonomous regions” sounds a whole lot like the ideology of the Syrian Kurds and their allies, derived from Marxist and anarchist thought, which emphasizes a decentralized political system, local governance, and respect for religious and linguistic and ethnic diversity.  How much the US would actually be willing to support such a system is deeply questionable, of course, especially considering that there have been plenty of cool rhetoric from both rank-and-file members and officers in Syria about abstaining from any long term alliance with US imperialism.  But it is still very likely that the political vision of the Syrian Kurds and their allies will get rolled up into the US plan for the region, at least to the extent that it hampers the ability of the Assad-Iran-Russia alliance from pushing the US and the Gulf monarchies back out of Syria.

Opportunistic support is hardly a new thing for DC foreign policy and military elites.  Consider the fact that many of the ghouls and goblins in the incoming Trump administration have deep ties with a self-styled “Marxist Islamist” Iranian rebel group, which sounds like a caricature of what American right-wingers are supposed to have nightmares about.  One wouldn’t think that US elites would have any interest in such a group ideologically — but in geopolitics, ideology is easily trumped by whether one can poke at an enemy.

Monday Interesting Links

• Alberto Toscano writes on Joshua Clover’s Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings

• Kelley Vlahos writes on Clinton’s plans for Syria

• Interview with a UC Berkeley sociologist on Louisiana, Trump, and conservative environmentalism

• Blog post by an Italian cyber-security worker on when the UAE tried to recruit him for a massive surveillance project

• Essay on the rise and fall of Theranos and Elilzabeth Holmes

Sunday Interesting Links

• History of the theory and practice of social reproduction, from Black Marxist-feminists to Althusser, from Issue 5 of Viewpoint

• Notes on “Fortress Los Angeles”

• Book reviews on the modern, violent history of Eritrea

• Interview with RadAzns TC on Black Lives Matter, community organizing, and communication

• Aron Lund on the recent SAA-YPG clashes and the Turkish invasion

Remembering radical civil society in Syria

With the Assad regime and the Islamist rebels currently laying siege to one another in the major city of Aleppo, its worth looking back at the beginnings of the civil war, and remembering the radical roots of what once looked like a genuine revolution.

Consider the influence of the Damascus-born anarchist Omar Aziz, whose ideas of “local self-governance, horizontal organization, cooperation, solidarity and mutual aid” contributed heavily to the creation of a sprawling network of locally-based organizations — the Local Coordination Committees — that created a system of dual power that reorganized political, economic, and social life outside of the regime’s authoritarian neoliberal boundaries.

In stark contrast to liberal and Islamist elites in exile, the LCC resisted calls in late 2011 to militarize the unrest or to advocate for foreign military intervention, arguing that such turns would undermine the democratic and popular nature of the revolution.  They were, of course, correct.

But given their lack of friends outside of Syria (the West conveniently upheld the pro-intervention exile lobby as the true voice of “the Syrian people”), the descent into a violent sectarian civil war fueled by regional and international geopolitics was perhaps inevitable.  What could have been done about Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s intense desire to pour billions of dollars into Salafi-jihadist paramilitary groups loyal to them, absent a significant leftist anti-imperialist movement in those countries that could resist such turns?  And the same goes for US cooperation with the efforts and desires of the Gulf States.

Radical civil society was the spine of the uprisings in 2011; but the lack of strong leftist anti-imperialist movements in the US and the Gulf arguably meant that they were doomed from the start, as there were no obstacles to the inevitable efforts by regional and global powers to exploit the chaos for their own benefits.  Those of us who live in these areas need to be ruthlessly self-critical about the consequences of our failures in this regard.

The only seeming bright spot is Rojava, which seems to be continuing its radical projects — but this is largely because of the temporary alliance of convenience between the military forces of Rojava and the US military in their fight against Islamic State.  It remains to be seen how this alliance will affect the politics and future of libertarian municipalism in the region.

Saturday Interesting Links

• Lengthy reportage on the Ambedkar Student Association in Hyderabad, in the context of Rohith Vemula’s suicide and the subsequent political drama

• Transcript of a lecture by Naomi Klein on Edward Said, imperialism, environmentalism, and climate change

• A radical leftist polemic against Jacobin Magazine and its politics

• Lengthy reportage on the ongoing war in south-east Turkey/north Kurdistan between the Turkish state and the PKK, from New York Times

• Analysis of the role that organized crime plays in the selection process for Supreme Court judges in Guatemala

Saturday Interesting Links

• Book review by the Communist Party of India (Maoist) of Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country (2008), with the author’s response in the comment section

• A liberal critique of shoddy anti-capitalist analysis of the role and functions of capitalists/managers/bosses

• Lengthy analysis of Hillary Clinton’s development as an aggressively pro-military foreign policy hawk, based on the author’s new book Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle Over American Power (2016)

• Essay on the history of boxing in Filipino-American culture in Los Angeles

• Analysis on how rebels in the Damascus suburbs are violently fracturing

• Reportage on researchers across the world pirating research papers and bypassing paywalls via the website Sci-Hub

Sunday Interesting Links

• Analysis from Viewpoint Magazine of Bolivia’s socialist movements, their relationship to the Morales administration, and the constitutional referendum on allowing Morales to run for a fourth term (which he lost)

• Interview on housing and anti-gentrification activism in a Latino district of New York City, from The New Inquiry 

• Patrick Cockburn’s analysis in London Review of Books on the military, economic, and geopolitical prospects for Rojava, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Islamic State

• Argument for Donald Trump representing the backlash of the White rural working-class against the condescension of the metropolitan liberal elite

• On the importance of Eddie Huang’s television series Fresh Off the Boat for Asian America

Samer Abboud on the Syrian Civil War

Earlier this week, I listened to an hour-and-a-half interview with Samer Abboud, featured on Jadaliyya a couple of months ago.

In his new book Syria, professor Samer Abboud provides an in-depth analysis of Syria’s descent into civil war. He unravels the complex and multi-layered causes of the current political and military stalemate, the destructive role of international and regional actors, and the rise of competing centers of power throughout the country. He say that as “this situation persists, the continued fighting is reshaping Syria’s borders and will have repercussions on the wider Middle East for decades to come.”

It was all around a fascinating and insightful interview.  A few points that Abboud made that stood out to me:

• Discussions and debates around the war seem to consistently ignore and marginalize the role and potential of Syrian civil society, in favor of focusing on the various armed groups and their territorial holdings; Abboud argues that Syrian civil society, particularly those organizations and networks which sprung up in the wake of the 2011 protests, are still resilient and ought to be given a role in peace talks
• Both the Assad regime and the rebels are highly fragmented, and this is largely due to the large role that international actors (specifically Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and Iran) are playing in backing their preferred proxies within Syria and preventing any real consolidation or centralization process from taking place on the ground
• The Assad regime is increasingly losing control of militias on the ground (i.e. the National Defense Forces), and is politically dominated by Iran
• The international liberal model of peace-making relies on creating a strong central state; but it makes a lot more sense to take the potential for decentralization and partition seriously in cases like Syria

Abboud also made an amusing comment on how exasperated he became when trying to understand Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy in Syria:

…Saudi Arabia, for me, for example…if I spent the rest of my life trying to think of this, I can’t distill any interest they have in Syria, any specific interest…this or that, A or B, I don’t know.  I’m really at this point where I believe that what Saudi Arabia wants is to just foster chaos and instability.  There’s no coherency in anything that is going on.

All in all, very worthwhile interview to listen to.