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.

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.

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

• A wonky, policy-based argument on delisting the PKK from the US government’s foreign terrorist organization list

• Noam Chomsky’s 1970 essay on being in North Vietnam

• A small town in Idaho has elected an city council composed entirely of Latin@s (pointer from Legal Ruralism)

• A scathing indictment of Bill Clinton’s welfare and crime policies and their devastating impact on Black Americans, written by Michelle Alexander

• Lengthy and in-depth analysis of the economics and technical dynamics of solar energy and energy storage systems, via Vox

Shameless interventionist cheerleaders, coming out once again (this time for Syria)

The 2011 NATO intervention in the Libyan Civil War was launched based on extremely shaky humanitarian justifications–if not outright lies.  As Hugh Roberts sums up in his lengthy critique of the intervention in an essay published in London Review of Books back in November 2011:

Goodies and baddies (to use Tony Blair’s categories) had been clearly identified, the Western media’s outraged attention totally engaged, the Security Council urgently seized of the matter, the ICC primed to stand by, and a fundamental shift towards intervention had been made – all in a matter of hours. And quite right too, many may say. Except that the al-Jazeera story was untrue, just as the story of the Warfalla’s siding with the rebellion was untrue and Hague’s story that Gaddafi was fleeing to Caracas was untrue. And, of course, Dabbashi’s ‘genocide’ claim was histrionic rubbish which none of the organisations with an interest in the use of the term was moved to challenge.

It was these (false and misleading) narratives that lead to NATO justifying its intervention and stepping in and saving the rebels in Benghazi from imminent defeat, and turning the tide of the civil war against the Gaddafi regime–and securing the conditions for the descent of the country into an even bloodier state of civil war and anarchy and social rupture, as argued in journalistic outlets ranging from Jacobin Magazine to Foreign Affairs to The Intercept.

And now, looks like history is repeating itself in Syria, as far as Western media narratives go.  The Assad regime, supported by the Russian air force and Hezbollah, has made huge gains in recent weeks in the Aleppo region, cutting off a critical supply route from Turkey and pushing the remaining rebel forces in the area to the brink of defeat.  Media reports have exploded about the desperation and despair of civilians in Aleppo, the brutality of Russia, how the results of the battle will “shape Europe’s future”.  And the major regional Western allies (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates) are now airing their willingness to intervene with ground troops.

There is no denying the brutality of the Assad regime, or the fact that civilians are and will suffer immensely; but there is also no denying that the most powerful rebel factions in Syria today are hardcore Salafist groups, like Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, who espouse particularly nasty sectarian ideas and have regularly stated–and demonstrated–their intent to engage in ethnic cleansing.  And still, media outlets are somehow still casting the civil war as if it were still a matter of pro-democracy rebels fighting a repressive dictatorship, instead of the brutal sectarian bloodbath that it is (and inexplicably still manage to relegate the Kurdish-lead Syrian Democratic Forces to a virtual footnote).

In other words, its looking dangerously like March 2011.  Except now, there is even less excuse for general ignorance about the realities on the ground in Syria–we’ve had nearly five years worth of reporting, analysis, and leaks to understand how messy and horrific the situation is, and the extent to which the West has already been exacerbating the conflict.

Monday Interesting Links

• On the need for leftists to take right-wing criticism seriously

• Short overview of the ongoing war between Turkey and the PKK in the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir

• Some discussions on non-violent resistance in Palestine; and some insight into the fears of Israeli officials on the potential collapse of the Palestinian Authority

• Gary Brecher the War Nerd on Shias in Saudi Arabia and a forgotten uprising in 2000

• Criticisms of some strategies San Francisco housing activists have engaged in

Tuesday Interesting Links

• Excellent, in-depth piece on Rojava, the PKK and PYD, and on-the-ground observations about local civil society being built in accordance with the ideology of libertarian municipalism

• Reddit AMA with a PKK soldier who has been fighting in Syria

• Summary of a study published last year on the motivation of people fighting for Islamist groups in Syria; its less about religion than one might think

• Malcolm Harris writes, via a book review, on the history and future potential of cooperation between anarchists and Marxists

• Larry Summers on Bernie Sanders and the Federal Reserve

Starting investigations into the underlying complexities of fundamentalist Islam and capitalism

After the terrorist attacks in Paris, my interest in doing in-depth research on fundamentalist Islam, terrorism, and Middle Eastern politics was reinvigorated, so I put aside some of the stuff I was working on and started reorienting my readings to be on the Syrian civil war, Saudi Arabian political economy, etc.  This interest is largely due to the upsurge in Islamophobia and fascist sentiments that I saw in the aftermath of the attacks, and my desire to combat these sentiments with a more compelling and accurate and complex narrative.

A few hypotheses that are guiding my investigations:

1. Fundamentalist Islam is a by-product of imperialism, both through Western support for Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States as well as through the unraveling of the region’s social and economic fabric via neoliberal structural adjustments and outright war
2. Western governments have historically been quite content with the spread of fundamentalism as an ideological bulwark against Marxism
3.  Regimes like that of Saudi Arabia would have collapsed long ago without Western support
4. There is a relationship between Gulf State export of conservative, sectarian Islamic theology, their desire to import cheap, vulnerable migrant labor from South and South-East Asia, and their desire to export their own restive population of unemployed men
5. Private funding of terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State by wealthy Gulf State elites is motivated more by business interests and political rivalries, than it is by an actual identification with fundamentalism

Sunday Interesting Links

• Introduction to a new upcoming issue of Viewpoint Magazine on social reproduction and class struggle outside of the workplace

• A lengthy, critical look at the evolution of MAS and the Morales government in Bolivia, via Jacobin Magazine

• A look at an argument between Venezuela’s minister of culture, and young radical communists

• Insightful article on the potential beginning of a Third Intifada in Palestine

• Some on-the-ground reporting on the YPG’s governance of the formerly ISIS-controlled town of Tal Abyad, via Washington Post

• Some on-the-ground reporting on Adiyaman, a small Turkish town that has produced a key ISIS-linked terror cell, via LA Times

Interesting Links (On Syria)

• Dismal reflections on Salafi-jihadism, Turkish fascism, and the lack of international left solidarity

• An article from April 2015 anticipating tensions between Kurds and Arabs in the Syrian town of Tel Abyad after a successful YPG offensive; meanwhile, Turkey has started bombing YPG positions in the city to contain their forces east of the Euphrates River

• Interview with the co-presidents of the Cezire canton of Rojava–an Arab sheik and a Kurdish ex-guerrilla

• “Ahrar al-Sham’s Revisionist Jihadism“–Fantastic overview of the internal debates and evolution of Salafi Islamic fundamentalism and the position of Ahrar al-Sham (Turkey’s main proxy and the strongest rebel group in Syria)