U.S. charges Syria helping ISIS advance on Aleppo, Turkish border crossings

There are three reasons for the moderate rebels’ recent battlefield successes.

• The regional backers of various non-ISIS rebels – Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and Jordan – have been coordinating their efforts much more closely, and imposing a greater degree of cooperation on the Syrian militias they support. A new coalition of rebel forces has been created, and an offer has been made to the Islamist Jabhat al-Nusra to join it on condition that it severed its ties to a-Qaeda.
• The United States and Turkey have been increasing the quantities and quality of the arms they provide the moderate rebels groups. The most decisive new weapon system in the rebels’ arsenal is the TOW anti-tank missile, 2,000 of which have so far been provided to the rebels, with devastating effects on Syrian military’s tanks and armored personnel carriers. The TOWs given to the rebels are from old military surplus stocks (the TOW was first produced in 1970s), but on the Syrian battlefield the anti-tank weapon has been a game changer.
• The Syrian army has been under growing pressures. It no longer has enough fighters: the Alawite community in Syria is small, and after four years of nonstop war there are no more recruits to be drafted into the army; Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi’a organization, has also reached the limit of what it is willing to do for Assad – and critics of the organization’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, charge that by sacrificing so many of the organization’s best units in the Syrian war, he has now left the Shi’a community in Lebanon exposed to attacks by the community’s Sunni opponents (in three desperate speeches in the last two weeks, Nasrallah called on all Shi’as in the region to come and fight in support of the Assad regime, a fight which Nasrallah described as a “do or die” war for all Shi’as); and Russia, in late February, has stopped shipping military supplies to the Syria army, and pulled its military technicians out of the country, so that maintenance work on the Syrian air force’s Sukhoi jets is no longer being done.

On Sunday, following the Syrian air force’s attacks on the moderate rebel position around Aleppo, Islamic State fighters were able to push back the moderate rebels from some positions north of the city, near the Turkish border. Haaretz reports that the Syrian military’s attacks and Islamic State’s move on the ground had a strategic purpose: to cut the supply lines between Turkey and the moderate rebels, thus preventing Turkey from rushing additional military aid to the rebels.

Leaders of the Levant Front – one of the new alliances of secular and moderate Islamic rebels created as a result of the growing coordination among the regional Sunni powers backing the rebels – said it appears that Islamic State was heading for the Bab al-Salam crossing between Aleppo and the Turkish province of Kilis.

The Jerusalem Post notes that the United States suspended operations in its embassy in Damascus in 2012 but still publishes messages on the embassy Twitter feed.

“With these latest reports, (the Syrian military) is not only avoiding ISIL lines, but, actively seeking to bolster their position,” one of the twits said.

The account said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had long lost legitimacy and “will never be an effective counterterrorism partner.”

Western intelligence agencies say that President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, in a complex double game, has, from the beginning of the anti-regime rebellion in 2011, provided funds to and cooperated with Islamist extremists in Syria – first with al-Qaeda-affiliated organizations and, since spring 2014, with ISIS — even as these organizations fight the Syrian military. The regime has had two goals in pursuing this policy. The first is to persuade the West that the anti-regime uprising is inspired and led by Islamist militants, including al-Qaeda and its affiliates and, more recently, Islamic State, in order to weaken, and even stop, Western support for the moderate rebels. The second is to allow the jihadists to gain the upper hand in the internal fighting among anti-regime groups. The regime has believed that if the rebellion is seen to be led by Islamist fundamentalists rather than secular and moderate Syrians, more non-Alawite Syrians would side with the regime against the rebels, even if grudgingly (see Assad bolsters al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria with secret oil deals, prisoner release: Western intelligence,” HSNW, 21 January 2014).