SYRIA:
AL QAEDA WANTS A WIDER REGIONAL WAR.
Hugh Graham, May 15, 2012.
Sectarian violence in Lebanon between groups
supporting and opposing Syria’s revolt
against the Assad regime couldn’t come at a more ominous moment.
Last Thursday’s massive suicide bombings
on a government intelligence building in Damascus is almost certainly the work
of the terror group Al Qaeda. And one of Al Qaeda’s strategies is to turn the
insurrection against the Syrian government into a larger, regional war.
The campaign has been going on for some time. The
US government has already said that several such bombings in Syria since
December bear Al Qaeda hallmarks. Al
Nusra, a local affiliate of Al Qaeda has already claimed
responsibility for some of the earlier operations, though there have been
contradictory claims about its role in Thursday’s attacks. However, the
bombings are too sophisticated to have been done by the Free Syrian Army and
they have caused far too much damage and loss of life to Syrian intelligence to
allow for theories of government provocation.
The issues at hand are much larger. The scale
and timing of Thursday’s bombings recalls the situation in Iraq exploited by Al
Qaeda six years ago. There the Sunni terror group successfully fomented civil
war by destroying a major shrine to Shia Islam in the town of Samarra in February,
2006. Al Qaeda’s strategy at the time was to spark a Shia-Sunni conflict that
would make the country impossible to govern, opening the way for a restoration
of Sunni power with an Islamist ideology. That strategy was inseparable from a
larger program to assert Sunni dominance against both Shia and Western influence in neighbouring countries.
And Al Qaeda may be using the
complexity of the situation in Syria to screen its gradual provocation of a
regional war. Whereas in Iraq there were two major ethnic groups, Sunni and
Shia, in Syria there is only one major ethnic group, the Sunnis, who make up
the majority. The remainder are Christian, Islmaili, Shia and other minorities
along with the Alawite Shia, the religion of
President Assad’s governing elite. Ordinary Sunnis, it appears, make up
most of the opposition. As the wise journalist Nir Rosen has pointed out, these
Sunnis, like most Syrians, are devout. But they are not Islamists. The Syrian Sunni
Islamists in the opposition are only a minority and they are called Salafists. It’s the Sunni Islamists, mostly
outside Syria, who want to exploit the plight of ordinary Sunnis inside Syria.
The fact that Al Qaeda in Iraq, a Sunni Islamist organization in an
adjoining country with long experience in exploiting political strife, might
take an opportunistic interest in the Syrian conflict is not surprising. For
one thing, they’ll get a welcome from
that minority of Syrian Sunni Salafist
fighters in the opposition. For another,
Al Qaeda’s co-religionist Sunnis are the main victims of the Assad
regime. Finally, the entire region is mostly Sunni and Al Qaeda’s agenda is
transnational.
Indeed, Al Qaeda doesn’t recognize the
national boundaries made by Western diplomats after World War One. That’s why
the franchise Al Qaeda in Iraq was renamed Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Its
sub-affiliate in Syria is named jabhat al-nusra li-ahl al-sham or The Al
Nusra Front to protect the Levant. The Levant is historical Syria, Jordan,
Lebanon and Palestine. Not surprisingly, Al Nusra was forged in the furnace of
Homs which the Syrian army all but annihilated a month ago. Al Nusra is
probably part of Al Qaeda’s larger plan to bring Al Qaeda and other Sunni
Islamist fighters in from Jordan , Iraq and Lebanon.
The aim is to turn the multi-ethnic
protest against Assad into a war which will eventually realign itself as a
fight between Sunni Islamists and all who oppose them. The goal, of course, is
to bring down Assad and take power in Damascus. But the strategy is wider. Not
only is Al Qaeda in the Levant equal to the government of Bashir al Assad in
sheer villainy, but its ambitions threaten the entire region.
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