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 <
http://world.time.com/contributor/rania-abouzeid-idlib-province/> Rania
Abouzeid / Idlib province | September 19, 2012 |
<
http://world.time.com/2012/09/18/syrias-secular-and-islamist-rebels-who-are
-the-saudis-and-the-qataris-arming/#disqus_thread> 23
Vast swaths of northern <
http://topics.time.com/syria/> Syria, especially
in the province of Idlib, have slipped out of the hands of President
<
http://topics.time.com/bashar-assad/> Bashar Assad, if not quite out of his
reach. The area is now a de facto liberated zone, though the daily attacks
by Damascus' air force and the shelling from the handful of checkpoints and
bases regime forces have fallen back to are reminders that the rebel hold on
the territory remains fluid and fragile.
What is remarkable is that this substantial strip of "free" Syria has been
patched together in the past 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 it 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.
(PHOTOS:
<
http://world.time.com/2012/04/02/syrias-year-of-chaos-photos-of-a-slow-moti
on-civil-war/> Syria's Year of Chaos and Photos of a Slow-Motion War)
As TIME reports here, disorder and distrust plague two of the rebels'
international patrons: <
http://topics.time.com/saudi-arabia/> Saudi Arabia
and Qatar. The two Gulf powerhouses are no longer on the same page when it
comes to determining 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 then to the
rebels. Further reporting has revealed more details of the operation, the
politics and favoritism that undermine the task of creating a unified rebel
force out of the wide array of groups trying to topple the Assad regime.
(The FSA is nominally headed by Riad al-As'aad, who is based in Turkey.
Neither As'aad nor his chief FSA rival General Mustafa Sheikh are party to
the Istanbul control room that 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 Rafiq.) 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, he apparently was 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, the Lebanese
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.
(PHOTOS: <
http://lightbox.time.com/2012/02/15/syria-at-war/> Syria at War)
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 to
distribute armaments (some areas, like Damascus, have more than one
representative) 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 councils scattered 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 want to support only certain
groups within the councils and 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 some areas 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."
(MORE: <
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2108577,00.html>
The Need to Bear Witness in Syria)
The men claim that groups with higher media profiles - those that produce
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
also from private donors including clerics in the Gulf with massive
fundraising 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, a grouping 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 tells
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 strong ties 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 Sakr supported - to the aggravation of
Suleiman - is Jamal Maarouf's Martyrs of Syria Battalion, because it "has a
more neutral view of the Brothers," a U.S.-based activist says.
The other big group in the Idlib military council is Ahmad Abu Issa's Suqoor
al-Sham, an Islamist group based in Jabal al-Zawya. Abu Issa is also no
great friend of the Brotherhood. On Aug. 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, both 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 MB and a founding member of
the Syrian National Council (SNC), the exiled political group that tried to
represent 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 between groups of FSA fighters,
Islamists, Salafists and even the extremist Jabhat al-Nusra group that some
claim has ties to al-Qaeda. The bulk of Ahrar al-Sham's substantial funding
reportedly comes from Kuwait.
(MORE: <
http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20120319,00.html> Cover:
Escape from Syria)
Similarly, some FSA groups, like Suqoor al-Sham, are also part of wider
Islamist networks, 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 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
little sway or credibility. The fact is, the guys with the guns do, although
the State Department denies having any direct contact with members of the
FSA. (The SNC does not have a role in the arming of the rebels inside Syria,
though some individual SNC members are in the Istanbul control room
representing their regions.)
The Obama Administration does not deal directly with the armed opposition,
but it has authorized a nonprofit organization, the Syrian Support Group
(SSG), to fundraise for the FSA. The SSG is composed 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," says 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."
Read more:
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http://world.time.com/2012/09/18/syrias-secular-and-islamist-rebels-who-are
-the-saudis-and-the-qataris-arming/#ixzz26xWcJkgk>
http://world.time.com/2012/09/18/syrias-secular-and-islamist-rebels-who-are-
the-saudis-and-the-qataris-arming/#ixzz26xWcJkgk
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Received on Wed Sep 19 2012 - 19:07:34 EDT
