Planting The Seeds Of Tunisia's Ansar al-Sharia

By Louisa Loveluck



The attack on Benghazi's U.S. consulate propelled a new jihadist organization into the political spotlight: Ansar al Sharia. As a number of groups sharing the same name have emerged across the Middle East and North Africa, pundits now scrabble for details of this little known yet seemingly ascendant force of global jihadism. This week, an interview with Hassen Brik, a spokesperson for Ansar al Sharia Tunisia, offered some clues as to the motivations and personalities behind the organization's development in Tunisia.

As we enter the family home in Tunis, it becomes clear that the lives of Tunisia's vilified jihadists cannot be reduced to the images of pious fanaticism on which the western media relies. We are greeted by his sister; unveiled, she is casually dressed in khaki cut-offs and a vest top. She says she feels under no pressure from Hassen to dress conservatively. His brothers, too, have followed very different life trajectories. Karim, in fact, goes by the stage name "Minissi" and has gained a large domestic following for his self-produced rap music. In contrast, their eldest brother is a military man, having served as an army sniper during the Ben Ali era.

The life of 34-year old Hassen has, of course, taken a different turn. In 2003, he traveled to Iraq as a fighter but ended up stationed across the border in Syria, operating a safe house for potential jihadists as they were vetted and trained for the mission ahead. There, he was arrested and deported back to Tunisia where he was imprisoned under the anti-terrorism law. And it was in these jails, Hassen tells us, that Ansar al Sharia was born. He claims that communal prayer time served as a forum for discussion and refining ideas that would be put into practice on release.

Ansar al Sharia's moment arrived with Tunisia's revolution. In March 2011, the new transitional government pardoned a number of prisoners who had been convicted under the Ben Ali regime's repressive anti-terrorism laws. Among their number was Sayf Allah bin Hussayn (more commonly known as Abu Iyadh), a former Guantanamo detainee who would lead a press conference the following month to announce the public debut of Ansar al Sharia.

A fighter abroad and a preacher at home, Hassen believes that it is now his duty to open da'wa offices across the country, offering a religious education that conforms to Ansar al Sharia's interpretation of Islam. "This is a long-term vision to prepare society," he says, "We are for jihad, armed revolution, but we cannot do this if the people are not with us. It will only be possible when everyone is behind the vision. Look at Libya, the insurrection was only successful once armed and sharing a common vision."

Although little is known about Ansar al Sharia, Hassen emphasizes that its members do not want to stay in the shadows. "Now we want to talk," he says, "We want to be open, even if you are from the CIA."

References to American power run through many of his assertions and he attributes his own imprisonment to the counterterrorism policies of the Bush administration. "It used to be permissible to study the Koran openly," he says, "but after 2004 the government terrorized us on American orders."

He is referring to Tunisia's 2003 Anti-Terrorism Law, legislation that allowed security forces to arrest civilians with alleged links to terrorist organizations drawing praise from the U.S. State Department. Cases were usually held in private court sessions and many defendants claim that their convictions were based on confessions extracted through torture.

Popular reactions to Ansar al Sharia's emergence have been hostile. Described in the Tunisian media as an "Islamist cancer," the secular middle classes have greeted its rise with a mixture of horror and revulsion. Nor has it found favor with more moderate Islamist groups. The ruling Ennahda party has blamed the organization for this month's attacks on the U.S. embassy, and followers of the more moderate "scripturalist" brand of Salafism also distance themselves from the violent tactics of their theological counterparts.

When asked if Ansar al Sharia can realistically attract wider support, Hassen counters that Tunisian society has failed to listen to its message: "We are trying to extend our hand to the Tunisian people but they aren't taking it yet. We bring a new vision of politics for the Arab world, but we know this will take time. After 50 years of Bourgiba and Ben Ali, people have lost their religion and we are feeding it."

References to the broader regional context litter his speech, although he denies that his organization is operationally linked to organizations in Libya, Yemen, Egypt, and Morocco that share the same name.

Turning to the subject of attacks on U.S. targets in Tunis the previous week, Hassen chooses his words carefully. Young Ansar al Sharia followers were involved, he says, but not on the direct instructions of the leadership.

"We do not deny that violent acts were committed in our name. We have made mistakes and many of our number have been behind bars. Now we are rehabilitating them, but this will take time. They need to be educated in the very foundations of Islam.

These boys of the districts follow us because they are tired of politicians' immorality. They appreciate our coherence: our words come straight from the heart."

A visit to Tunis's working class El Khadra suburb the previous day suggested that there is truth in this sentiment. Although few were willing to openly align themselves with Ansar al Sharia, several young men expressed admiration at the organization's piety and its refusal to engage in high-level political squabbles. Abu Iyadh's name commanded particular enthusiasm, in the words of one young man, "he is strong where Ennahda are weak. He is the only man to stand up against the Americans."

Demographic studies of those convicted under Tunisia's anti-terrorism laws show that the jihadists have previously found these neighborhoods to be fertile ground for recruitment. Today their inhabitants remain as socially and economically marginalized as they were under Ben Ali, a reality which continues to escape many who rail against Ansar al Sharia as an aberration within Tunisia's cosmopolitan society.

"We stand in solidarity with the weakest," Hassan says, "and in time we will have local leaders who organize the boys."

Yet the notion that Ansar al Sharia's message has found real resonance within small sections of Tunisian society continues to escape the country's chattering classes. High-level political discussion revolves around constitutional issues with little attempt to address the grievances of the most vulnerable. But this is a social blindness that they cannot afford to maintain. "For us, this is an opportunity to plant our seeds in the sunlight." Hassan concludes, "and we are starting to see the fruit."

-This commentary was published first in Foreign Policy on 27/09/2012
-Louisa Loveluck is a freelance journalist specializing in Middle Eastern affairs and a researcher at the International State Crime Initiative

The Iraq Red Team

A year and a half before the surge, a secret review group in Baghdad recommended a drastic change in U.S. strategy. If that advice had been heeded, might the war have turned out differently? An exclusive excerpt from The Endgame, a new book on America's final days in Iraq.

BY MICHAEL R. GORDON



Seventeen months before George W. Bush announced that he was sending five additional brigades to Iraq for the 2007 "surge," a team of officers and civilian analysts gathered in Baghdad to conduct a classified review of America's military strategy in Iraq.

In a June 2005 speech at Fort Bragg, President Bush had told the nation that the Iraq war was difficult, but winnable. "Our strategy can be summed up this way: As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," Bush said. "We have made progress, but we have a lot more work to do."

But when it convened in August, the Red Team, as the review group was known, came to a very different conclusion. "The perception of many Iraqis is that their government, and by implication, the Coalition has failed the Iraqi people," the report noted. (Read exclusive excerpts from the report.) Not only that, but the strategy Bush so confidently endorsed, the team asserted, would merely burden the Iraqis with a problem they could not handle. Iraqi forces might end up ceding ground to the insurgency in central and western Iraq, and perhaps even in Baghdad. A new counterinsurgency strategy -- one that, in concept though not in resources, bore a striking resemblance to the approach Gen. David Petraeus would oversee two years later -- was needed.

The team's diagnosis and its remedy were both ignored. It was one of the most important -- and until now, unknown -- missed opportunities of the war.

The annals of military history are replete with intelligence failures -- debacles that were not foreseen as a result of cultural ignorance, wishful thinking, or a lack of sources. But what is striking about the early years of the American war in Iraq are those episodes in which dedicated officials correctly discerned the problem and suggested new strategies -- only to be ignored by generals and Bush administration aides who were wedded to their faltering plan.

These missed turning points might have shortened the conflict and provided more breathing room to establish a more inclusive Iraqi government at a time when the United States had maximum leverage in the country. Nobody can say for certain what might have happened, but it is instructive that some of the spurned recommendations were very effective when belatedly implemented years later.

To this day, some of the missed opportunities are not widely known. For all the partisan debate over the Iraq conflict in Washington, only a handful of insiders seem to know what happened during some of its most fateful moments.

As the insurgency began to develop in 2003, for example, a group of officers in the U.S. military's intelligence cell in Baghdad developed a plan to work with the Sunni tribes in the western province of Anbar that was never carried out. Col. Carol Stewart had met with a group of Anbari sheiks and devised a plan to bring them into the fold. The strife-ridden Ramadi and Fallujah areas would be designated a "tribal security zone." Tribal leaders would be authorized to police their own areas and given vehicles, ammunition, and money to pay their men, who would be dubbed the "Anbar Rangers." The entire program would have cost $3 million for six months, a tiny sliver of the multibillion-dollar reconstruction fund for Iraq, officials said.

But when Stewart briefed the idea to an aide at L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority, she was told that CPA did not plan to make the tribes a formal part of Iraq's security structure. Leaving one meeting in frustration, Stewart muttered, "If the United States was not going to be working with the tribes in the new Iraq, where was this new Iraq going to be? On Mars?" Stewart had no more luck with more senior civilian and military officials in Iraq, and the idea was shelved -- only to be revived when the Anbar Awakening emerged three years later.

The Red Team

But first came the buried Red Team report, in which a select group of mid-level officers and officials who challenged the prevailing orthodoxy were ignored. This account is based on interviews with current and former American and allied officials and military officers -- and access to the 74-page classified report.

The origins of the Red Team go back to the appointment of Zalmay Khalilzad as the United States ambassador to Iraq. A former Pentagon official who was coming to Baghdad from a tour as the American ambassador in Kabul, Khalilzad began to think anew about the military situation in Iraq. Canvassing the experts, he pondered the work of Andrew Krepinevich, who had written a book about the Army's experience in Vietnam and was a proponent of population-centric counterinsurgency.

During Khalilzad's Senate confirmation hearings on June 7, 2005, a skeptical junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, asked Khalilzad if it might take 10 or 20 years to defeat the insurgency. It could be done in much less than that, he responded reassuringly.

After arriving in Baghdad in July, Khalilzad and Gen. George Casey, the commander of multinational forces in Iraq, commissioned an internal review -- one that was to be carried out by an eight-person team of military and civilian officials. Col. Bruce Reider, a strategist who was working on governance issues for General Casey, co-chaired the effort on behalf of the military. Other members of his military team included a British intelligence officer, an Australian officer, and one of General Casey's planners. Marin Strmecki, a conservative defense consultant and an advisor to Khalilzad, led the civilian side of the review. A CIA analyst was part of the team as well.

Khalilzad met with the group and outlined the questions they were to consider, the most important being: What would it take to "break the back" of the insurgency in one year and "defeat" it in three years? The entire review was to be done in 30 days.

Although Casey had signed off on doing the study, the four-star general was convinced his plan was generally on track and not in need of a major overhaul. He was supporting troop-intensive counterinsurgency efforts in the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar and the border town of Al Qaim in western Anbar as a way of interrupting the flow of foreign fighters from Syria. But they were the exceptions to his broader approach to gradually withdraw American forces and hand the fight over to the Iraqis. It was more than an exit strategy for Casey; it was a means to reward, encourage, and prod the Iraqis to step up. The paradox, as Casey sometimes put it, was that the United States had to draw down to win.

As Reider and the rest of the Red Team worked on their assessment in August, they sensed that the general had a different view of the problem. "There is a fundamental issue over what we are trying to achieve," the colonel wrote in his diary. "Gen. Casey believes we are trying to develop ISF so we can hand the fight to Iraqis. The ambassador believes we are here to defeat the insurgency."

The Red Team's diagnosis of the war was, indeed, a far cry from Casey's. The effort to disrupt the insurgents' planning had not been decisive, it concluded, and the enemy had been able to retain freedom of movement. Many Iraqis had no faith in their leaders. What's more, the Iraqi troops who were being trained were not schooled in counterinsurgency. "Iraqi Security Forces have been stood up at great speed," the review noted. "This tremendous achievement to get them ‘in the fight' has not yet delivered sustainable forces with robust leadership." American aid programs were not reaching Sunni areas.

More importantly, the team did not see how the plan could work. "The current plan hinges on an ability to suppress the insurgency to levels that the ISF [Iraqi Security Force] can handle on its own, which implies that the threat will be reduced before the transition," it notes. "Current operations have not succeeded in suppressing the level of the insurgency, and the campaign plan does not provide new or different approaches that offer greater promise in this regard."

And if the Americans were making little headway, the Iraqi security forces would fare worse. "The planned size of the ISF is likely to prove insufficient based on historical cases. The ISF, still an immature force, will be taking on the burden of security in 2006 and 2007 with inadequate funding and less experience, training and equipment than MNF-I," it added, using the acronym for Casey's multinational command.

The political ramifications of a failing strategy, the report concluded, were enormous. The hydra-headed insurgency might be emboldened is it thought that the main American goal was to disengage from Iraq. As a result, the insurgents could be "less likely to cut the political deals that would be needed to shore up the new Iraq."

Iraqis who had stood by the Americans might also lose confidence in their ally. "The fears of abandonment might lead the Iraqis to hedge their bets by developing greater reliance on Iran," the report continued. "If the transition to self-reliance takes place before the defeat of the insurgency, the Iraqi government and the insurgents could seek external support from neighboring states (e.g., Syria and Iran) in order to fight on, potentially leading to civil war along the lines of the one in Afghanistan in the 1990s."

Public support in the United States might be another casualty. "The American public might question whether a muddled outcome was worth the cost, especially since victory was not the goal."

Ink spots

Having assessed the problem, the group proposed an "ink spot" approach in areas that would be secured and developed politically until a patchwork of safe zones was extended across the country. The notion of separating the population from the insurgency was classic counterinsurgency doctrine, the kind Petraeus would later espouse, and ran counter to a Casey strategy that focused on border control and transition to the Iraqis.

The Red Team assumed that the only U.S. forces available were the ones that were already on hand, which meant that there was no way to blanket the country. So it proposed the concentration of forces in specific areas to effect a mini-surge. The command, for example, could use the beefed-up security for the upcoming December elections to establish an initial ink spot, perhaps in Baquba or in the Fallujah-Ramadi corridor. As more ink spots were created in 2006, they would be linked in a "Two Rivers campaign" to control the population centers along the Tigris and the Euphrates.

Without reinforcements from the United States, it would have been an enormously ambitious undertaking. But one of the main obstacles was bureaucratic. Casey had sponsored previous Red Team efforts and saw the report as a means to draw the embassy more into the war effort. But when the Red Team suggested wholesale changes to his military strategy, it was more than Casey had bargained for, one of his former aides said.

The Red Team approach posited a three-year campaign to defeat the insurgents and advanced a plan for concentrating American forces in insurgent-infested areas, which was inconsistent with Casey's vision of progressively handing over the fight to the Iraqis and making troop cuts in 2006 and 2007.

When it came time for the team to brief some of its conclusions on Aug. 23, Casey made it clear that he did accept the rationale behind much of the report. The team never even got around to presenting its PowerPoint slides. Two weeks later, one of Casey's senior officers approached Reider and said that the general had heard that the Red Team had been pressured to go along with the ink-spot approach by Strmecki. Reider denied it.

In his own post-mortem on the war, which is to be published by National Defense University, it is clear that Casey did not give the Red Team report much weight: he noted only that it made some useful suggestions on how to better integrate the coalition's economic, political, and military efforts.  In December 2005, Casey would hold his own Campaign Progress Review, which concluded that for all the challenges, there were "clear grounds for optimism." (When President Bush opted for a five-brigade "surge" in 2007, Casey still insisted that not all of the forces were needed.)

Still, Khalilzad brought a copy of the Red Team report to Washington and mentioned it to Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security advisor, who suggested that it might be submitted through military channels, a former official recalled. But with Casey opposed to the concept, that was unlikely. A member of the British team passed a copy up his chain of command and it eventually made its way to British Prime Minister Tony Blair. By and large, however, the report vanished from sight.

Too little, too late?

The failure to confront the inconvenient facts about America's faltering strategy in Iraq in 2005 had significant consequences. Bush's eventual decision to begin a military surge in Iraq in 2007 and to appoint Petraeus as commander pulled Iraq out of a worsening civil war. The surge strategy succeeded beyond any reasonable expectation in diminishing Al Qaeda in Iraq and tamping down the sectarian violence. It also served as a catalyst for the Sunni Awakening, which would make its way from Anbar to the area surrounding Baghdad and, finally, to the Iraqi capital itself.

But if the strategy change had come earlier, a longer surge might have led to more progress in establishing a more inclusive Iraqi government and improving the poor performance of Iraq's ministries -- issues that still bedevil Iraq today. Those questions might have been tackled sooner in an improved security environment and when American influence was at its height. An earlier surge might have saved treasure and, more importantly, lives.

The episode also raises some pertinent questions about the Obama administration's strategy today in Afghanistan, where the United States military mounted a surge that ended last week. The transition to an Afghan lead and the closing of American bases is being executed with all of the mechanistic rigidity of the United States' initial Iraq strategy.

I tracked down Reider, who has retired from the Army and teaches at the Army's Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. What lessons, I asked, did he draw from the episode?

"You always hear senior leaders talking about the need to adapt," he said. "The plan we had in Iraq was not working and people who had worked on that plan did not want to accept that. This was an opportunity to adapt, and we did not take that opportunity."

-This article was published first in Foreign Policy on 24/09/2012
-Michael R. Gordon is a correspondent for the New York Times. This article is adapted from his new book, The Endgame: the Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, From George W. Bush to Barack Obama, co-authored with Gen. Bernard E. Trainor. Wesley S. Morgan contributed to this article

Staunching Syria's Wounds

By Walden Bello and Richard Javad Heydarian



Almost 18 months after the onset of popular democratic protests, the Syrian revolution increasingly resembles a bloody marathon with no clear finish line on the horizon. Unlike the "lightning" revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, where strongmen were overthrown in a matter of weeks, the Syrian uprising has instead entailed a slow-motion disintegration of the rich tapestry that has characterized Syrian society for centuries.

There is no way to understate the depth of the unfolding tragedy: An estimated 20,000 civilians have been killed, some 2.5 million are internally displaced, and more than 250,000 have risked life and limb to flee the country just to arrive at cramped refugee camps in Turkey, Jordan, and Iraq. 

As the armed revolution enters the two large cities of Aleppo and Damascus, the humanitarian crisis is set to deepen unless all relevant parties—domestic and international—commit themselves to a peaceful and effective political solution. Thus, the first priority should be the imposition of a UN-administered ceasefire to end the bloodshed and provide necessary space for a genuine political dialogue. There must also be an immediate end to the ongoing proxy war that is fueling an arms race inside the country, with Western and Arab powers (directly or indirectly) arming rebels and extremist elements to topple the regime through sheer violence and terror.

A State of War

What initially began as a non-violent demand for political liberalization and social justice has gradually morphed into a large-scale sectarian conflict, placing varying ethnic and religious groups on a collision course.

Notwithstanding the almost universal demand for democracy among the Syrian population, what we are witnessing is the frightening possibility of a Sunni-dominated opposition—spearheaded by a less-than-moderate Muslim Brotherhood and buttressed by the inflow of armed extremists—waging an all-out war on not only the minority Alawite sect that has stood by President Assad and his regime, but also other minority groups, such as the Christians and Shiites, perceived to be invested in the Baath party.

The Syrian uprisings—similar to those in Egypt and Tunisia—were largely founded upon secular principles of tolerance, justice, and democracy. Yet we are inching closer to the possible emergence of a post-Assad state in which reactionary and radical elements could implement an even less tolerant political system underpinned by undemocratic “majoritarian rule,” ultra-conservative values, and—most ominously—the purging of all remnants of the ancien regime.

As Assad’s forces struggle to hold on to their traditional strongholds in Aleppo and Damascus, the Alawite community—fearing a meltdown in the capital—is already fortifying its positions in the northeastern mountainous regions as well as the coastal cities of Latakia and Tartus (incidentally, the site of numerous visits by Russian and Iranian naval forces). Ultimately, if the regime loses control over the capital, it might choose to withdraw to these areas and create a separate enclave defended by its massive stockpile of WMDs and advanced armaments.

The Kurds, meanwhile, have chosen to stay out of the revolution and extend their networks of cooperation with their Kurdish brethren in Iraq (and possibly in Turkey too), while consolidating their de facto jurisdiction over the oil-rich northeastern regions bordering Turkey and Iraq.

The regime has already lost its political hegemony in much of the countryside, with self-governing revolutionary councils filling in the political vacuum. Meanwhile, rebel groups are expanding and strengthening their operations, denying the regime much-needed mobility and tactical space. They have already been busy blocking the highly strategic Latakia-Aleppo highway to choke off Assad’s forces—forcing the regime to increasingly rely on its air force.

Central cities such as Hama and Homs, traditional hotbeds of anti-Assad sentiment, are anything but under the control of the state, forcing the regime to occasionally resort to artillery shelling, helicopter gunship attacks, and carpet bombardments to exert a semblance of control.

In essence, what one increasingly observes in much of the country are self-governing communities intermittently rocked by massacres and hit-and-run operations—by both the regime and the armed opposition.

With both the opposition and the regime locked in a state of war, the only way to end the bloodshed is for the international community to come to its senses and forge a unified and effective response under the auspices of the UN.

A Divided International Community

But there is hardly an “international community” to speak of as far as Syria is concerned. There are basically three camps on this conflict.

The first camp is composed of anti-Assad hawks, mainly NATO countries and Sunni powers like Saudi Arabia, which are determined to dislodge the regime in Damascus and checkmate their main regional adversary, Iran. The Assad regime is the strategic node that has allowed Iran to project its influence beyond the immediate Sunni-dominated Persian Gulf neighborhood, establishing the so-called “Shia Crescent” from eastern Afghanistan to the eastern Mediterranean—much to the dismay of Washington and the Sunni powers. Syria is simply their best chance to cripple the core of Iran’s regional network.

Increasingly reducing the Syrian crisis to a simple Shia-Sunni divide, these powers have been among the most vociferous proponents of military intervention, ranging from the imposition of a no-fly zone to the creation of “humanitarian buffer zones” along the Turkish-Syrian border, or even the implementation of a “no-drive zone” to neutralize Assad’s military maneuvering. Some, such as the Qataris, have even floated the idea of placing boots on the ground, with Arab soldiers—together with NATO operational support—implementing peace enforcement or regime change. So far, it seems that the consensus within this camp is to focus on arming the rebels and increasing sanctions and diplomatic pressure to cripple the regime.

The second camp is composed of Eastern powers and Syrian allies such as Russia, China, and Iran. They have been the most vociferous opponents of any form of military intervention in Syria, emphasizing the need for a “managed political transition” without an explicit call for Assad to step down. Russia and Iran have actively supported the regime by providing it diplomatic, political, and financial space. While the Russians have continued to supply the regime with armaments (ostensibly based on prior contracts), the Iranians are said to have played an increasingly prominent role as a source of financial and logistical support. However, none of these powers has ruled out dialogue with the opposition, with each of them either hosting (or expressing an intent to meet with) elements of the opposition to mediate a prospective political compromise with the regime.

The last camp, or the “third way,” is composed of developing countries, from India to Brazil, that are deeply disturbed by the ongoing violence in Syria. They may have already lost their belief in the legitimacy of President Assad, but they are also equally critical of any form of military intervention to resolve the crisis. Their main priority is to kick-start a UN-sponsored political approach, which will combine humanitarian, political, and peacekeeping tools to put a lid on the ongoing violence in Syria and pave the way for a managed political transition.

Toward a Diplomatic Resolution

Among the most prominent in the third camp is Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, who has emphasized the need for a regional Syrian Contact Group composed of all relevant regional powers—including Iran, the external actor that wields the largest leverage over Assad—to build an effective framework for a political resolution of the crisis. The framework would be backed by a UN mediation led by the veteran Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi. Morsi’s proposal has been endorsed by both Russia and Iran.

During the recent Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Summit—which brought about 120 countries, 17 observer nations, and around 30 heads of state to Tehran—the Iranians also proposed the formation of a special NAM committee under the leadership of the organization’s past, current, and future chairs: Iran, Egypt, and Venezuela. This could serve as an institutional bedrock for a coordinated regional and international approach as proposed by Morsi. The key element here is the emphasis on political dialogue, compromise, and pressure on both sides of the conflict to end the ongoing cycle of violence. Of course, it remains to be seen whether Washington, Riyadh, or Ankara will ever agree to such arrangement.

In a recent visit to Moscow, Syrian Deputy Prime Minister Qadri Jamil hinted at the regime’s openness to negotiating Assad’s resignation. This is a potential turning point in favor of a political compromise, but it opens the way for new and wrenching questions. Should Assad be given political asylum? Could guarantees against persecution facilitate the end of violence and kick-start a process of democratic transition? Given the need to put an immediate end to the cycle of violence, we may see growing discussions on sacrificing some measure of justice for the sake of instituting peace before it is too late.

-This commentary was published first in Foreign Policy in Focus on 24/09/2012
-Richard Javad Heydarian is a Middle East expert who has contributed to or been quoted in the Asia Times, Foreign Policy, The Diplomat, United Press International, Tehran Times, Epoch Times, and Russia Today (RT), among many other publications. FPIF columnist Walden Bello is a member of the Philippines House of Representatives and a senior fellow at Focus on the Global South.

Coming To Grips With Impotence

Can we really expect  the US. President  to be able to fix the Middle East?

BY MICHAEL A. COHEN



The Arab world is in the midst of an extraordinary political and social revolution -- authoritarian leaders have been toppled in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya and all three countries find themselves on the bumpy to road to democracy. In Syria, a bloody civil war goes on unabated; in Iraq, the transition from U.S. occupation to political stability continues at an uncertain clip. In short, the region is experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime transition toward representative government and away from autocracy and political suppression.

And yet, in the United States, all anybody seems to want to talk about is "us." Pundit gabfests and editorial pages are full of arguments about how the United States -- or more directly the Obama administration -- screwed up, lost the Arab Spring, or in some manner contributed to the present state of instability. The Romney campaign has, not surprisingly, settled on the narrative that American weakness and mixed messages from the White House are the cause of the current violence. But little of this is supported by evidence and almost all the talk is based on extraordinarily disconnected navel-gazing. 

In reality, events in the Middle East today have little to do with current U.S. policy. When it comes to the seismic shifts that are roiling the region today, Washington is as much a casual onlooker as it is an active participant. The unceasing efforts to pin blame on U.S. politicians elides the fact that the violence and instability in the region right now is largely beyond America's ability to control it. Realizing that reality -- one that has been true for generations -- would go a long way toward creating a more rational and reasonable approach to American foreign policy.

It's certainly true that U.S. embassies have become a focal point of violent protest over the past week. That is due in large measure to a shockingly tasteless video about Mohammed produced by jackass filmmakers (and I use that latter term advisedly) in California and the fact that a small percentage of Muslims are a bit touchy about blasphemy.

But to assert that this violence is exclusively a result of this movie (as the White House has done) or to place blame on current administration policy -- or as Richard Williamson ludicrously suggested, that the presence of Mitt Romney in the White House would have prevented it -- is to ignore the fact that U.S. involvement in the Middle East predates the current crisis. 

Conservatives who are blaming Obama for an alleged lack of will or mixed messages appear to believe that Arab grievances against the United States began when Obama took office and have no antecedents in decades of U.S. policy in the region. As Liz Cheney wrote in the Wall Street Journal, America's adversaries no "longer fear us."

"Ask the mobs in Cairo who attacked our embassy, or the Libyan mobs who killed our diplomats at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Ask the Iranians, who make unhindered daily progress toward obtaining a nuclear weapon," writes Cheney, without a hint of irony about her own tenure as a Middle East diplomat in the Bush administration.

To accept the conservative critique of Obama is to embrace the dubious notion that the Iraq War, U.S. support for non-democratic leaders in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and elsewhere, the support for the Shah and overthrow of Mosaddegh in Iran, and practically uncritical support for Israel for the past two decades has nothing to do with why some individuals of the Arab world might view the United States with a healthy dose of suspicion. That might also explain why Washington doesn't quite have the leverage that the president's critics believe it should.

However, beyond these long-standing frustrations (and it's worth noting that, while the United States is not exactly brimming with popularity in the Arab world, it doesn't mean that all Arabs hate us -- only an exceedingly small percentage do enough to actively protest), what is happening today in the Arab world reflects a tension far larger than one's views about America's role in the region. There are emerging fault lines between Salafists and more secular reformers in Egypt, between various factions in both Libya and Tunisia, between democrats and those with more authoritarian belief systems. For generations, politics in the Arab world have been suppressed and channeled into anger against outsiders while these societies ossified and regressed. In the last year, the region underwent an extraordinary and much-needed reformation -- with Arab citizens being allowed for the first time in modern history to express a political opinion about and cast a ballot for the leaders who rule their land.

This is the sort of democratic awakening that leads occasionally to instability and even less than salutary results for the United States, but it's one that is necessary and long overdue. That it may lead to situations in which long-standing anger toward the United States is used as a political tool is hardly surprising or unusual. Indeed, it's worth remembering that the onset of the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 was driven in large measure by internal Iranian politics.

To be sure, America is not a complete bystander in these disputes. It clearly has a few levers at its disposal -- and certainly in the case of Libya it played a critical role in toppling Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi from power. In Egypt, U.S. foreign assistance gives America greater influence then it would have otherwise. But short of military intervention or covert operations, America is hardly able to play a lead role -- in large measure, because U.S. policymakers, utilizing the traditional tools of diplomacy and foreign assistance, have little ability to directly shape political outcomes. That Americans continue to believe -- and that our political leaders continue to foster the fiction -- that we can mold events happening in countries roiled by political change in ways that benefit our interests is the highest form of political narcissism.

Indeed, this weekend on ABC's This Week we were provided with a fascinating insight into how this is issue is discussed at elite levels. Jake Tapper scolded U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, asking "Why does the U.S. seem so impotent, and why is the U.S. even less popular today in some of these Muslim and Arab countries than it was four years ago?"

Rice shot back, "Jake we're not impotent," to which Tapper asserted: "It just seems that the U.S. government is powerless as this maelstrom erupts."

The reality is that the United States is, for the most part, impotent to control events thousands of miles outside its borders in sovereign nations that have their own belief systems and discrete sources of information. And not just in the Middle East, mind you. To suggest otherwise is as wrong-headed as the assertion that if President Obama only said nice words about the Green Movement in Iran or more aggressively spoke up in support of U.S. power, then ... magically, democratic, pro-U.S. events would occur.

The reality is that even in places where the United States has intervened militarily, like Iraq and Afghanistan our ability to affect outcomes is, at best, limited. But the abiding conceit in both Rice and Tapper's statement is that idea that we're anything but powerless.

Of course, the exceptional notions of U.S. power and influence that shape so much of our political discussions on foreign policy don't lead to these sorts of conclusions. We are as the expression goes, the world's "indispensable nation" -- and it's a notion that is voiced regularly by those who seek to be president. And it's certainly true that Washington plays an outsized role on the global stage -- one able to influence global events far more than Sweden or Swaziland. But there are limits to that power and influence and we're seeing them right now in the Middle East.

But unless we are prepared to meddle more directly and flagrantly in the region the United  States is not going to be able to, as the New York Times complained last week, decisively "help the transition to democracy from autocracy" or "draw a hard enough line against Islamic extremists." Instead, America's best approach is to try and shape events around the margins -- and support those groups that share large U.S. interests and values. And it's the sort of work the United States should be doing: supporting civil society groups, providing assistance and diplomatic support to countries moving in a more open and democratic direction, but with the humility to understand that there is only so much the United States can accomplish and that too much meddling and intervention can result in blowback.

That's a message you're not going to hear on the campaign trail. Republicans will keep on insisting that Obama should be do more and Obama officials will insist that their policies for the region are working in shaping positive outcomes.

But don't believe a word of it. We're more impotent then we think and the sooner we realize it, the better our foreign policy will be.

-This commentary was published first in Foreign Policy on 19/09/2012
-Michael A. Cohen is a columnist for Foreign Policy's Election 2012 channel and a fellow at the Century Foundation

What's Non-Lethal About Aid To The Syrian Opposition?

 By Louisa Loveluck



As pressure increases on western governments to bring an end to the bloodshed in Syria, "non-lethal" assistance has become the promise of the hour. The term is ubiquitous, cropping up in White House press briefings and the European Union's arms embargo on Syria.

Yet despite the pervasive nature of the term, it does not yet have a widely accepted legal definition. Broadly speaking, it is used to describe equipment and intelligence that cannot be directly used to kill. This can encompass anything from helmets and body armor to more facilitative assistance such as encrypted radios and satellite imagery. In practice, the lines between non-lethal equipment and its lethal counterparts are more blurred. In fact, both are required for a soldier to maximize the use of his weapon. As Pieter Wezeman, a senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, points out, "a guy with a helmet and a radio is more likely to use his gun effectively because his protection increases his survivability and his radio [improves] his targeting through better communication."

Nevertheless, the distinction between lethal and non-lethal weapons is a crucial one for the governments involved in their supply. According to Wezeman, any move toward arming the rebels would be "very politically sensitive indeed." As Britain's Foreign Secretary William Hague has emphasized, the British position is "not about taking sides." How the move toward assisting the rebels will be seen within the Assad regime's inner chambers is perhaps another story.

To date, the bulk of the formalized non-lethal assistance deliveries to Syria's loosely organised rebel fighting brigades are coming from the United States, Britain, and France. The U.S. State Department has set aside $25 million to supply Syria's opposition with non-lethal assistance, distributing 900 pieces of equipment through its Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO). The British government has currently set aside £1.9 million for its own deliveries, distributing these through a slowly expanding network of vetted contacts. The French approach has been slightly different. Focusing instead on targeted areas, Francois Hollande's administration has identified five specific "rebel held" areas within which to concentrate its assistance. These are all within Deir Ezzor, Aleppo, and Idlib, governorates that have faced waves of intense bombardment from regime forces in recent months.

Tracing the passage of western non-lethal assistance is a tricky endeavor. As with the rebel's growing arsenal of weapons, it is often difficult to establish whether a single item was sourced from a British shipment, smuggled across the border, or looted internally from regime stocks. However, several known types of assistance have found their way to Syria through British, U.S., and French efforts: body armor, communications equipment, intelligence support, and satellite imagery.

Emphasizing that arming the Syrian rebels would involve breaching the EU's arms embargo on the country, the British government has focused instead on providing body armor and helmets as part of its assistance package. Hague told the press that this is viewed as "lifesaving protective equipment for civilians to help those carrying out vital work in the crossfire." Similar commitments have also come from the United States and France. Body armor is, of course, a vital part of any soldier's tool kit. For many, this will be the difference between life and death.

One of the most widely documented forms of non-lethal assistance has been communications equipment. This includes encrypted radios, satellite phones, and SIM cards. The United States, Britain, and France have publicly committed to providing such assistance. Although justified on humanitarian grounds -- British assistance can be used to warn civilians of impending regime assaults according to Hague -- these can also be used by rebel brigades to enhance their fighting capabilities. As Wezeman points out: "The rebels have [increasingly] got the kind of firepower they require but then need the means to organize their fighting. This is where [communications] equipment is essential in a military campaign on this level." In the case of Libya, it has been argued that similar efforts to organize rebels with command-and-control equipment played a significant role in enhancing their coordination and fighting capabilities.

Although communications equipment remains sparsely distributed, those who receive it gain an important tool with which to counter extensive regime surveillance and signal-jamming efforts. It also allows brigades to communicate securely across different areas, opening channels that can be used to give prior warning of government attacks.

Another significant avenue for non-lethal support is through intelligence. Syrian opposition officials report that British intelligence officers are stationed in two Cyprus military bases. Here they collect information that is then passed on to rebel commanders. This allows opposition fighters to preempt the regime's movements. It also provides the means to plan surprise attacks, a tactical necessity for fighters so outgunned by the state's extensive arsenal.

According to the Syrian officials, intelligence support has facilitated a number of successful ambushes in Idlib and Saraqib, including an attack on 40 army tanks. The assault on two large columns of government troops as they moved toward Aleppo was well documented when it happened in early August, although the source of the intelligence was not revealed at the time.

The men of the rebel Farouk Brigade, tasked with defending the town of Talbiseh, appear lightly armed in the face of the regime's firepower as they face daily incursions from government forces. But their M16s and worn anti-aircraft guns are aided by more high-tech paraphernalia: high-resolution satellite imagery. Access to recent images of the areas in which they are operating provides a small but significant advantage to the groups who possess them. Not only can they get a better picture of areas they may not be able to easily reach in person, but they also receive prior warning of regime troop build-ups.

The U.S. Department of Defense is believed to be one source of such images. This would be consistent with previous non-lethal assistance to fighting groups in Libya. In addition, the United States is currently the only country with the technological capacity to conduct regular satellite photography missions over Syria.
Western non-lethal assistance is not solely confined to the battlefield. Governments are also providing software in an attempt to help the rebels circumvent the regime's extensive internet surveillance efforts. This offers an important level of security for the beneficiaries, allowing them to leave their communication channels open. To this end, the U.S. State Department is distributing software as part of its assistance package to the opposition. According to Professor Philip Howard, a fellow at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy, the State Department has been investing in "circumvention tools" for several years now. A range of tools for making internet users anonymous have also been developed by the New America Foundation and the University of Toronto. As well as specific software packages, the United States is already likely to be providing direct satellite link-ups and internet radios. As Professor Howard explains, these are "important tools that make for direct connections to the internet."

Western non-lethal assistance will be of varying significance for different fighting groups in Syria. Although the United States, Great Britain, and France are encouraging greater coordination between countries providing external assistance, the passage of equipment remains slow. It is also sparsely distributed, and British officials admit privately that assistance packages only reach small groups within any given rebel brigade. Furthermore, the equipment's usefulness will vary according to the size and strength of each brigade's arsenal. Tactics are only as strong as the tools that implement them. If a Free Syrian Army foot soldier uses a gun that lacks the key constituent parts to function properly -- a common problem with weapons that have been looted internally -- then command-and-control equipment simply cannot be used to the same effect.

Current levels of assistance are unlikely to hasten the final stage of Syria's bloody crisis. Nor are they expected to increase significantly in the near future as the United States, Great Britain, and France remain committed to solving the conflict through diplomatic means. But as this high diplomacy continues apace, the devastating reality of Syria's war gouges deeper into the collective memory of a nation. Many will be questioning why such grand promises of assistance have done little to avert the unfolding tragedy.

-This commentary was published in Foreign Policy on 20/09/2012
- Louisa Loveluck is a freelance journalist specializing in Middle Eastern affairs and a researcher at the International State Crime Initiative

Bibi's Blunder

How Netanyahu killed the Israel lobby.

BY DAVID ROTHKOPF


Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu

Starting Sunday evening, we marked the beginning of the Jewish New Year. Numerologists with too much time on their hands noted that the digits of the year 5773 add up to the same numerical value as the word tovah, meaning good. That is supposed to be an omen, I suppose. But ever since Madonna embraced Kabala, I've been dubious about it. I like my omens more concrete and, where possible, drenched in irony.

Fortunately, this New Year has begun auspiciously even for skeptics like me -- because it has been ushered in by a fierce debate that may finally have done in one of the most pernicious and enduring myths of our time: that of the existence of an all-powerful Israel Lobby. Neatly, providing just enough irony to offer the honey sweetening we Jews look for to start off each year, the myth has been done in by the most unlikely of perpetrators: Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel.

The irony and even the deed may have been cloaked for many by the circumstances under which they occurred. That is due in part to the fact that there have been so many other stories dominating the headlines recently. For example, last week's story of Netanyahu's decision to publicly confront his most important ally and the resulting further decline in U.S.-Israel relations would have dominated the news at virtually any other time. But the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the riots that spread across the Middle East forced it into the background. (Indeed, the confrontation between China and Japan over the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands would have been and should have been big news in any week in which those other two stories did not occur.)

But even the story of the murder of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans did not end up dominating the news last week. Instead, that story was partially elbowed aside by the self-inflicted wounds Mitt Romney delivered to his campaign when he precipitously offered up a critique of the Obama administration in the middle of the breaking news of the tragic attack. Barack Obama would have had a bad week indeed if Romney had simply kept his mouth shut. Very real questions exist about embassy security and the intelligence that could have led the United States to secure its compounds in the region differently. The Israel rift is ill-timed. In fact, there is virtually not one single area of U.S. foreign policy in Middle East that is moving in the right direction at the moment. And all that would have had the president on the defensive if his luck in being confronted by one of the most inept challengers in recent presidential campaign history had not kicked in once again.

The bad advice Romney is getting and, more importantly, acting upon, brings us back to our exquisite New Year's irony. Because at least one of those giving bad advice to the Romney campaign is Dan Senor, former mouthpiece of the United States in Baghdad, "Morning Joe" talking head, and one of the original shoot-first, aim-later neocon functionaries who has undermined the GOP's once-solid claim to national security competence. In Sunday's New York Times, columnist Maureen Dowd cited Senor among others in her attacks on Romney for falling, as he has, under the thrall of the discredited far right of his party's foreign policy establishment. This triggered an avalanche of criticism from some, like my good friend Jeff Goldberg, who attacked her for her use of imagery that he asserted was anti-Semitic.

Goldberg is invariably smart, often witty, and typically right. But in this instance, he, like Romney, should have stood back and let silence do its work. Because the imagery to which he objected, that of "an old stereotype, that gentile leaders are dolts unable to resist the machinations and manipulations of clever and snake-like Jews," while tiresome, was really secondary to the bigger issue at stake. Through what seems to be careful if ill-considered collaboration, Netanyahu, Romney, Senor, and Co. were in the midst of blowing up one of the overarching myths of which the Jewish snake/Gentile dolt imagery was just one component.

And here we see the perils of believing your own hype -- apparently Bibi and friends actually believed the idea of the all-powerful Israel Lobby. Whether through Romney's bald-faced pandering to that perceived lobby with his ugly comments about the cultural inferiority of Palestinians or, more shockingly, through Netanyahu's decision to take sides in the 2012 presidential campaign, they seem to think that if they can portray Obama as "weak on Israel" they will materially advance their own causes. It's worth noting, of course, that those interests are different. For Romney, the approach only works if it undermines Obama in key states, notably Florida. For Netanyahu, it would work if the fear of losing Jewish support pushed Obama to get visibly tougher on Iran, to accept, for example, the Israeli leader's call for clearly demarked and more aggressive "red lines" with Iran.

Netanyahu, who dug in deeper this weekend with a high-profile showing on Meet the Press, seems to have swallowed the myth of the power of the Jewish Lobby so completely that he has bet his reputation and his country's future relationship with its most important ally on it. But here's the problem: Whatever lobby exists for Israel, it neither lives up to its press clippings nor to what it may have been in the past. And this week before Rosh Hashanah proved it.

In the first, instance, the Obama administration bravely kicked off last week with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's outright rejection of the idea of red lines, a strong message that they would not be bullied, even in an election year, regardless of the political consequences. This was further underscored later in the week when the Obama administration allegedly rejected a meeting with Netanyahu. The rejection was leaked by the Israelis hoping the lobby would be outraged. The administration held its ground, in part because they knew something that Netanyahu did not: American Jews do not vote as a monolith, they don't vote Israel's interests first, they don't like foreign leaders trying to meddle in U.S. elections, and the polling results show it.

Since Romney and Netanyahu first started making their play to harness the power of "the lobby," their standing in the polls has slipped. In Florida, Obama has gained ground since this effort started and is up by as much as 5 points in the most recent NBC News poll for that state. In fact, even with Netanyahu making the rounds of the Sunday morning television shows this past weekend, he found his points being publicly rebuffed by U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, showing yet again that the Obama team is not giving in to the power of the approach -- or that somehow AIPAC's puppet masters have lost their touch. Michele Bachmann may be calling for Obama to meet with Netanyahu. Paul Ryan may be howling. But here's the problem: Romney and Ryan and their cheerleader Bibi are very likely to end up on the wrong side of the November results.

In short, this year is getting off to a good start for those of us who have always found the notion of some dark Jewish conspiracy of super-K Streeters to be laughable. Jews are just as divided, just as sometimes impotent and sometimes successful as anyone else. Of course, if I said it, the list of commenters suggesting that somehow I was part of the cover operation for this lobby would be long. But when it is none other than the prime minister of Israel who proves once and for all the limitations of the lobby and, by November, will have proved that estimations of Jewish political influence of all types are overstated, well, then that's something worth celebrating.

And if the myth survives the drubbing the facts are giving it this fall, well, then it will at least prove once and for all that it is what many of us, like Jeff Goldberg and I, have been arguing for a long, long time: The Israel Lobby is just another boogie monster cooked up to serve the nasty agenda of people all too eager to sacrifice the truth on the altar of their prejudices.

Happy New Year, everybody.

-This commentary was first published in Foreign Policy on 18/09/2012
- David Rothkopf is CEO and editor at large of Foreign Policy

Syria’s Secular And Islamist Rebels: Who Are The Saudis And The Qataris Arming?

Out of Istanbul, the two Gulf states play a game of conflicting favorites that is getting in the way creating a unified rebel force to topple the Assad regime

By RANIA ABOUZEID / IDLIB PROVINCE- Syria


Syrian rebels take position during clashes with regime forces in the northern city of Aleppo, Sept. 14, 2012.

Vast swathes of northern Syria, especially in the province of Idlib, have slipped out of the hands of President Bashar Assad, if not quite out of his reach. The area is now a de facto liberated zone, though the daily attacks by Damascus’s air force and the shelling from the handful of checkpoints and bases regime forces have fallen back to are a reminder that the rebel hold on theterritory remains fluid and fragile.

What is remarkable is that this substantial strip of ‘free” Syria has been patched together in the last 18 months by military defectors, students, tradesmen, farmers and pharmacists who have not only withstood the Syrian army’s withering fire, but in some instances repelled them using a hodgepodge of limited, light weaponry. The feat is even more amazing when one considers the disarray among the outside powers supplying arms to the loosely allied band of rebels.

As TIME reports here, disorder and distrust plague two of the rebels’ international patrons — Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The two Gulf powerhouses are no longer on the same page when it comes to who among the plethora of mushrooming Syrian rebel groups should be armed. The rift surfaced in August with the alleged Saudi and Qatari representatives in charge of funneling free weaponry to the rebels clearly backing different factions among the groups – including various shades of secular and Islamist militias–under the broad umbrella that is the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

The middlemen of the two countries operate out of Turkey, the regional military power. Ankara has been quite public with its denunciation of Assad even as it denies any involvement in shuffling weapons across the border to Syrian rebels. It claims its territory is not being used to do so. And yet, as TIME reported in June, a secretive group operates something like a command center in Istanbul, directing the distribution of vital military supplies believed to be provided by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and transported with the help of Turkish intelligence to the Syrian border and across to the rebels. Further reporting has revealed more details of the operation, the politics and favoritism that is undermining the task of creating a unified rebel force out of the wide array of forces trying to topple the Assad regime.

(The FSA is nominally headed by the Turkey-based Riad al-As’aad. Both As’aad and his chief FSA rival General Mustafa Sheikh are not party to the Istanbul control room which supplies and arms rebels who operate under the FSA banner. The two men each have their own sources of funding, and are independently distributing money and weapons to selected FSA units.)

According to sources who have dealt with him, Saudi Arabia’s man in the Istanbul control center is a Lebanese politician named Okab Sakr. He belongs to the Future Movement, the organization of former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, which has a history of enmity with Damascus (Syria was accused of complicity in the 2005 assassination of Hariri’s father Rafik). The party has not made Sakr available to TIME, denies his involvement in any weapons deals and insists that Sakr is in Belgium “on leave” from his political duties.

However, Sakr appears to have been in the southern Turkish city of Antakya in late August. A TIME inquiry with an Antakya hotel confirms Sakr was in the area at the time. According to rebel sources who dealt with him, theLebanese politician was there overseeing the distribution of batches of supplies — small consignments of 50,000 Kalashnikov bullets and several dozen rocket-propelled grenades – to at least four different FSA groups in Idlib province as well as larger consignments to other areas including Homs. The FSA sources also say he met with some commanders but not others – a selectivity that led to much chagrin.

That kind of favoritism has caused problems on the ground in many ways. According to FSA sources, prominent activists and members of the Istanbul control room, Sakr was mainly responsible for designating the representatives in Syria’s 14 provinces to whom the Istanbul center would funnel small batches of light weapons — Kalashnikov rifles, BKC machine guns, rocket propelled grenade launchers and ammunition – to reach FSA groups operating in each area. But the 20 or so Syrians selected (some areas like Damascus have more than one representative) to distribute armaments were not all effective. These representatives were “supposed to deliver the support inside but they did not have a presence on the ground, they weren’t known,” says an influential U.S.-based Syrian activist with wide contacts inside Syria who played a role in setting up the Istanbul operations room. “I saw this weak point, so I connected Okab to people I knew were working on the ground, and I wasn’t the only one to do this, others did too because we wanted the room to succeed.”

But the selectivity has bred further favoritism in the distribution of arms. “Those who received goods would distribute them as they wanted. They started sending to people and saying, ‘this is a gift from me to you,’” a member of the control room representing eastern Syria told TIME. Other representatives were blunter, seeking pledges of loyalty from FSA groups inside the country before delivering the goods. To try to alleviate the problem, the provincial representatives were cycled in and out of the room’s operations but the problems remained. “The weapons are all being distributed in secret,” says one fighter inside Syria angrily, “and what is secret will stay unclear.”

The situation is compounded by Qatar’s man — a major who defected from Assad’s army who has not yet responded to TIME’s request for comment. The Qataris want to focus on aiding the regional military councils, FSA groupings within Syria set up earlier this year partly in order to get around the favoritism of the representatives. (There are at least 10 military councilsscattered throughout the country.) Goods would be delivered to a council, and then distributed to the brigades under its umbrella. In practice, it wasn’t quite as easy, or smooth. “We were given lists by brigade leaders of their men, but we stopped believing the numbers,” says a member of the Istanbul room from Syria’s Idlib province. However, the Saudis – via Okab Sakr – appear to only want to support certain groups within the councils, but not others.

“We felt that the sides giving us support weren’t on the same page,” says the control room member from eastern Syria. “They started having side meetings with some groups.” Still, he says, “what is most important is that the guys receive weapons, whether that is via an operations room or directly, we don’t care. Nobody knows the truth from the talk,” he says. “We have been lied to [by the international community] and we have lied to the guys inside, saying weapons would arrive in a week, in 10 days, and months have passed and someareas haven’t received supplies. So, unless I see it, and see it distributed, even I don’t believe it.”

In the town of Bdeeta in Idlib province—which happens to be the hometown of Riad al-As’aad–rebel fighters complain bitterly about the lack of assistance. “We are licking our plates, we beg for salt,” says Abu Mar’iye, who heads the Martyrs of Ibditha group in the tiny town, home to some 2,000 people. “It’s not enough, even the weapons that arrive, it’s like a drop, just enough so the fighting continues, so we can kill each other but not win.”

The men claim that groups with higher media profiles, those thatproduce the most sensational snippets of amateur video, the ones with the most Youtube hits, receive the largest share of the spoils, regardless of the strategic importance of their operations. The videos serve as advertisements to solicit funding and weapons, not only from the Istanbul command center, but from private donors including clerics in the Gulf with massive fund-raising abilities. “They taught us; hit, film it, I’ll support you,” says a fighter named Nasr.

Colonel Afif Suleiman, the head of the Idlib Military Council, agrouping of 16 military units from across the vast province, is unhappy with the support he gets from the control room. He is angry with Sakr who he says “got involved in the issue of weapons to split our ranks, to divide the revolutionaries.” Sakr, he says, recently “chose three people on our council and supported them, I won’t name them. They are not the largest units. There is one big group but the others are just regular ones,” Suleiman told TIME. “He formed a rift within the council and we are working to heal this rift. We clarified the issue to our Saudi brothers about Okab. They promised that there will be no support, either military or financial, except via the councils. This is what they recently promised us.”

To complicate things further, the Qataris reportedly have strongties to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood while the Saudis “don’t want any ties to anything called Muslim Brothers,” says Ahmad Zeidan, the nom de guerre of a member of the Idlib military council. According to several sources, the large group in the Idlib military council that Sakrsupported – to the aggravation of Colonel Suleiman — is Jamal Maarouf’s Martyrs of Syria Battalion, because it “has a more neutral view of the Brothers,” a U.S.-based activist said.

The other big group in the Idlib military council is Ahmad Abu Issa’s Suqoor al-Sham, an Islamist group also based in Jabal al-Zawya. Abu Issa is also no great friend of the Brotherhood. On August 19, he announced his withdrawal from an Islamist coalition because he said the Brotherhood politicized it by naming it after their party, rather than calling it something that reflected the diverse nature of the grouping.

It’s debatable how much support the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) has within Syria – politically and militarily – given that since the 1980s it has been a capital offense to be a member of the party. There has been much talk that the MB has little influence on the ground, and that it will provide military and logistical support only in exchange for pledges of loyalty, part of its attempt to beef up its numbers. It’s a claim vigorously denied by Molham Aldrobi, an executive member of the Muslim Brotherhood and a founding member of the Syrian National Council (SNC), the exiled political group that tried torepresent the opposition early on. “This is absolutely not true. We do not discriminate based on loyalty to the MB,” he told TIME from his home in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. “The MB does exist in the ground, we work under the FSA umbrella,” he said, although he would not disclose the number of units, nor where within Syria the MB’s military groups were strongest. He did say, however, that there was at least one member of the MB in the Istanbul operations room.

Still, the Brotherhood is only one of the many Islamist groups operating in Syria. Some, like the Salafi group Ahrar al-Sham are not strictly part of the FSA, although in Idlib the group is part of the Military Council and therefore gets a smattering of support from the Istanbul control center  as well. It’s a reflection of the fact that in most cases in Idlib at least, rebel offensives are joint operations betweengroups of Free Syrian Army fighters, Islamists, Salafists and even the extremist Jabhat al-Nusra group that some claim has ties to al-Qaeda. Still, the bulk of Ahrar al-Sham’s substantial funding reportedly comes from Kuwait.

Similarly, some FSA groups, like Abu Issa’s Suqoor al-Sham, are also part of wider Islamist networks. It’s largely to maximize the amount of support they can get. In a major development, Abu Issa has joined a powerful new pan-Syrian Islamist coalition called the Jabhat Tahrir Syria, or the Syrian Liberation Front, which groups several formidable, battle-hardened rebel outfits including the famed Farouk Brigades of Homs.

Abu Issa insists that he will remain part of the Idlib Military Council and that the Liberation Front will not overshadow anyone, even though it will likely be the most powerful armed body in Syria. “We acknowledge the others just as they acknowledge us. The military councils can be a part of it,” he said. But the rebel leader bristled when asked about the influence of foreign players like Sakr. “We will not accept becoming tools for anyone, nor do we accept any living being, whether foreign or from within the revolution, acting in a manner to divide revolutionaries,” he told TIME.

Abu Issa, Suleiman and Maarouf, along with other high-profile rebel leaders from other provinces, spent much of August shuttling between Syria and Turkey to attend high-level meetings with diplomats and senior Syrian opposition. But U.S. diplomacy has yet to grasp the full complexity of the Syrian crisis. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s decision to snub the SNC during an August trip to Istanbul was widely viewed as belated recognition by many activists inside Syria that the exiles comprising the body have littlesway or credibility. The fact is, the guys with the guns do, although the State Department denies any direct contact with members of the FSA. (The SNCdoes not have a role in the arming of the rebels inside Syria, though some individual SNC members are in the Istanbul control room, representing theirregions.)

The Obama administration does not deal directly with the armed opposition but it has authorized a non-profit organization, the Syrian Support Group, to fundraise for the FSA. The SSG is comprised of Syrian exiles in the U.S and Canada as well as a former NATO political officer.

Zeidan of the Idlib Military Council doesn’t seem to differentiate between official U.S. policy and that of the SSG. He says he’s been in contact with members of the SSG for months. “I know that they are afraid of something called Al-Qaeda, it’s all a big lie,” said Zeidan. “They talk about Ahrar al-Sham and Suqoor al-Sham. They are conservative Islamists, but they are not extremists. Many of these groups just want support.” He adds, “We are fighting to have a democratic country, not so that we can install people with American or European or Saudi agendas… We want to topple the regime, so whoever offers us help, we will call our units whatever they want as long as they support us. We just want to finish.”

-This report was published first in TIME on 18/09/2012