I WILL never know when or why Hakim Anza, a Syrian rebel commander whom I had once trusted, decided to betray me.
I would hazard a guess that three years of savage war, combined with reports — rampant in every bazaar of northern Syria — of huge sums paid for the release of Western journalists taken hostage, simply whetted his criminal appetite.
Whatever it was, something had clearly happened to Hakim in the three months since I had seen him. “It seems like 20 years since we last saw one another,” he told me, just hours before blasting two rounds into my ankle as punishment for trying to escape.
The incident last month marked the end of my unlucky detention record in Iraq and Syria. During half dozen or so assignments over the past 15 months, I had been arrested by the Iraqi army outside Fallujah, held briefly by IS in northern Syria, then abducted and shot by Hakim and his gang of Free Syrian Army renegades in the town of Tal Refaat.
Yet these experiences have given me a vital insight into how to deal with Islamic State jihadists, whose savagery makes al-Qa’ida look tame, and their self-styled Islamic caliphate.
First, the US congress should approve President Obama’s request for $US500 million ($528m) to arm and train “moderate” Syrian rebel groups.
I hate to say “I told you so” to those advocating nonintervention in Syria, but not enough to stop me. Where exactly has the policy of inaction in Syria got us? The hundreds of British citizens who have joined IS? The catastrophic overspill into Iraq? The million Iraqis now joining the nine million Syrians displaced from their homes?
Non-interventionists should look to the past for a better way of tackling the insurgents.
The Americans have taken on and beaten IS before, in Iraq between 2005 and 2008, when they funded and co-ordinated a Sunni tribal movement, the Sahwah (or Awakening).
Although those Sunni tribes have subsequently been so antagonised by Nouri al-Maliki’s rule in Baghdad that it is hard to see them rising against IS on behalf of his Shi’ite government, a proven equivalent exists: the dozens of Sunni rebel groups in northern Syria that successfully united against IS in January.
Iraq may be the insurgents’ current theatre, but Syria is where it began, found sanctuary and must be defeated. The US is already training selected FSA cadres in Qatar, who are equipped with anti-tank missiles once back inside Syria. This program needs to be extended as Obama wants — and fast. It is estimated that last month IS had captured from the Iraqi army 1500 US Humvees, more than 50 155mm heavy artillery pieces and 4000 medium machineguns.
The US has thus unwittingly become the jihadists’ main arms supplier and will have to quickly recalibrate its supply of arms to Syrian rebel groups if it expects them to have any hope of holding back an IS offensive there.
The West also needs to upgrade its own image in the eyes of Syria’s Sunnis. At present inaction in Syria has earned us Sunni opprobrium second only in intensity to Sunni hatred of Bashar al-Assad, creating a bedrock of anti-Western sentiment on which IS thrives.
Outside the gates of Ain Jalout elementary school in Aleppo six weeks ago I met a woman who expressed her hatred with a peculiar calm. “We hate the regime, and we hate the West and Arab countries too,” she told me. “For the West watches us being killed by barrel bombs, jet fighters, snipers. They know Assad kills women and children like this and they do nothing. We hate them for it.”
She was a Sunni. She had been wounded along with two of her daughters in a regime airstrike on the school a fortnight earlier.
I walked through the bombed-out school and saw pieces of children still plastered across the rubble. The silhouette of one child’s body, hurled into a wall by the blast, was silhouetted among the ash in a ghostly memorial.
By Aleppo’s standards it was a relatively exceptional bloodbath, but only marginally so. The effect of these killings, which occur daily throughout Sunni areas in Syria, provides another lesson and must scotch any thought of Western rapprochement with Assad.
Those in the West who now argue that the Damascus regime, though bloodstained, may somehow be a necessary ally of circumstance against IS are entirely bankrupt in their logic.
Assad is deeply complicit in the construction of IS, through his own barbarous behaviour as well as the dark machinations of his intelligence services.
Rapprochement with Damascus would be akin to neglecting a primary cancer while treating a secondary tumour.
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