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<h1 id="reader-title">Military to Military - US intelligence
sharing in the Syrian war</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">Seymour M. Hersh -
January 7, 2016<br>
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<p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcapslede">Barack
Obama’s</span> repeated insistence that Bashar al-Assad
must leave office – and that there are ‘moderate’ rebel
groups in Syria capable of defeating him – has in recent
years provoked quiet dissent, and even overt opposition,
among some of the most senior officers on the Pentagon’s
Joint Staff. Their criticism has focused on what they see
as the administration’s fixation on Assad’s primary ally,
Vladimir Putin. In their view, Obama is captive to Cold
War thinking about Russia and China, and hasn’t adjusted
his stance on Syria to the fact both countries share
Washington’s anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and
beyond Syria; like Washington, they believe that Islamic
State must be stopped. </p>
<div class=" mpu" id="article-body">
<p>The military’s resistance dates back to the summer of
2013, when a highly classified assessment, put together
by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, then led by General Martin Dempsey,
forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to
chaos and, potentially, to Syria’s takeover by jihadi
extremists, much as was then happening in Libya. A
former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs told me that
the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on
information from signals, satellite and human
intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama
administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and
arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the
CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies
in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods
– to be used for the overthrow of Assad – from Libya,
via Turkey, into Syria. The new intelligence estimate
singled out Turkey as a major impediment to Obama’s
Syria policy. The document showed, the adviser said,
‘that what was started as a covert US programme to arm
and support the moderate rebels fighting Assad had been
co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an
across-the-board technical, arms and logistical
programme for all of the opposition, including Jabhat
al-Nusra and Islamic State. The so-called moderates had
evaporated and the Free Syrian Army was a rump group
stationed at an airbase in Turkey.’ The assessment was
bleak: there was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to
Assad, and the US was arming extremists.</p>
<p>Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA
between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had
sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the
civilian leadership about the dire consequences of
toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control
of the opposition. Turkey wasn’t doing enough to stop
the smuggling of foreign fighters and weapons across the
border. ‘If the American public saw the intelligence we
were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they
would go ballistic,’ Flynn told me. ‘We understood
Isis’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we
also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the
other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic
State inside Syria.’ The DIA’s reporting, he said, ‘got
enormous pushback’ from the Obama administration. ‘I
felt that they did not want to hear the truth.’</p>
<p>‘Our policy of arming the opposition to Assad was
unsuccessful and actually having a negative impact,’ the
former JCS adviser said. ‘The Joint Chiefs believed that
Assad should not be replaced by fundamentalists. The
administration’s policy was contradictory. They wanted
Assad to go but the opposition was dominated by
extremists. So who was going to replace him? To say
Assad’s got to go is fine, but if you follow that
through – therefore anyone is better. It’s the “anybody
else is better” issue that the JCS had with Obama’s
policy.’ The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge
to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of
success’. So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take
steps against the extremists without going through
political channels, by providing US intelligence to the
militaries of other nations, on the understanding that
it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used
against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic
State.</p>
<p>Germany, Israel and Russia were in contact with the
Syrian army, and able to exercise some influence over
Assad’s decisions – it was through them that US
intelligence would be shared. Each had its reasons for
co-operating with Assad: Germany feared what might
happen among its own population of six million Muslims
if Islamic State expanded; Israel was concerned with
border security; Russia had an alliance of very long
standing with Syria, and was worried by the threat to
its only naval base on the Mediterranean, at Tartus. ‘We
weren’t intent on deviating from Obama’s stated
policies,’ the adviser said. ‘But sharing our
assessments via the military-to-military relationships
with other countries could prove productive. It was
clear that Assad needed better tactical intelligence and
operational advice. The JCS concluded that if those
needs were met, the overall fight against Islamist
terrorism would be enhanced. Obama didn’t know, but
Obama doesn’t know what the JCS does in every
circumstance and that’s true of all presidents.’</p>
<p>Once the flow of US intelligence began, Germany, Israel
and Russia started passing on information about the
whereabouts and intent of radical jihadist groups to the
Syrian army; in return, Syria provided information about
its own capabilities and intentions. There was no direct
contact between the US and the Syrian military; instead,
the adviser said, ‘we provided the information –
including long-range analyses on Syria’s future put
together by contractors or one of our war colleges – and
these countries could do with it what they chose,
including sharing it with Assad. We were saying to the
Germans and the others: “Here’s some information that’s
pretty interesting and our interest is mutual.” End of
conversation. The JCS could conclude that something
beneficial would arise from it – but it was a military
to military thing, and not some sort of a sinister Joint
Chiefs’ plot to go around Obama and support Assad. It
was a lot cleverer than that. If Assad remains in power,
it will not be because we did it. It’s because he was
smart enough to use the intelligence and sound tactical
advice we provided to others.’ </p>
<p class="secast">*</p>
<p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcapslede">The public
history</span> of relations between the US and Syria
over the past few decades has been one of enmity. Assad
condemned the 9/11 attacks, but opposed the Iraq War.
George W. Bush repeatedly linked Syria to the three
members of his ‘axis of evil’ – Iraq, Iran and North
Korea – throughout his presidency. State Department
cables made public by WikiLeaks show that the Bush
administration tried to destabilise Syria and that these
efforts continued into the Obama years. In December
2006, William Roebuck, then in charge of the US embassy
in Damascus, filed an analysis of the ‘vulnerabilities’
of the Assad government and listed methods ‘that will
improve the likelihood’ of opportunities for
destabilisation. He recommended that Washington work
with Saudi Arabia and Egypt to increase sectarian
tension and focus on publicising ‘Syrian efforts against
extremist groups’ – dissident Kurds and radical Sunni
factions – ‘in a way that suggests weakness, signs of
instability, and uncontrolled blowback’; and that the
‘isolation of Syria’ should be encouraged through US
support of the National Salvation Front, led by Abdul
Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian vice president whose
government-in-exile in Riyadh was sponsored by the
Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood. Another 2006 cable
showed that the embassy had spent $5 million financing
dissidents who ran as independent candidates for the
People’s Assembly; the payments were kept up even after
it became clear that Syrian intelligence knew what was
going on. A 2010 cable warned that funding for a
London-based television network run by a Syrian
opposition group would be viewed by the Syrian
government ‘as a covert and hostile gesture toward the
regime’. </p>
<p>But there is also a parallel history of shadowy
co-operation between Syria and the US during the same
period. The two countries collaborated against al-Qaida,
their common enemy. A longtime consultant to the Joint
Special Operations Command said that, after 9/11,
‘Bashar was, for years, extremely helpful to us while,
in my view, we were churlish in return, and clumsy in
our use of the gold he gave us. That quiet co-operation
continued among some elements, even after the [Bush
administration’s] decision to vilify him.’ In 2002 Assad
authorised Syrian intelligence to turn over hundreds of
internal files on the activities of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Syria and Germany. Later that year,
Syrian intelligence foiled an attack by al-Qaida on the
headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain,
and Assad agreed to provide the CIA with the name of a
vital al-Qaida informant. In violation of this
agreement, the CIA contacted the informant directly; he
rejected the approach, and broke off relations with his
Syrian handlers. Assad also secretly turned over to the
US relatives of Saddam Hussein who had sought refuge in
Syria, and – like America’s allies in Jordan, Egypt,
Thailand and elsewhere – tortured suspected terrorists
for the CIA in a Damascus prison. </p>
<p>It was this history of co-operation that made it seem
possible in 2013 that Damascus would agree to the new
indirect intelligence-sharing arrangement with the US.
The Joint Chiefs let it be known that in return the US
would require four things: Assad must restrain Hizbullah
from attacking Israel; he must renew the stalled
negotiations with Israel to reach a settlement on the
Golan Heights; he must agree to accept Russian and other
outside military advisers; and he must commit to holding
open elections after the war with a wide range of
factions included. ‘We had positive feedback from the
Israelis, who were willing to entertain the idea, but
they needed to know what the reaction would be from Iran
and Syria,’ the JCS adviser told me. ‘The Syrians told
us that Assad would not make a decision unilaterally –
he needed to have support from his military and Alawite
allies. Assad’s worry was that Israel would say yes and
then not uphold its end of the bargain.’ A senior
adviser to the Kremlin on Middle East affairs told me
that in late 2012, after suffering a series of
battlefield setbacks and military defections, Assad had
approached Israel via a contact in Moscow and offered to
reopen the talks on the Golan Heights. The Israelis had
rejected the offer. ‘They said, “Assad is finished,”’
the Russian official told me. ‘“He’s close to the end.”’
He said the Turks had told Moscow the same thing. By
mid-2013, however, the Syrians believed the worst was
behind them, and wanted assurances that the Americans
and others were serious about their offers of help.</p>
<p>In the early stages of the talks, the adviser said, the
Joint Chiefs tried to establish what Assad needed as a
sign of their good intentions. The answer was sent
through one of Assad’s friends: ‘Bring him the head of
Prince Bandar.’ The Joint Chiefs did not oblige. Bandar
bin Sultan had served Saudi Arabia for decades in
intelligence and national security affairs, and spent
more than twenty years as ambassador in Washington. In
recent years, he has been known as an advocate for
Assad’s removal from office by any means. Reportedly in
poor health, he resigned last year as director of the
Saudi National Security Council, but Saudi Arabia
continues to be a major provider of funds to the Syrian
opposition, estimated by US intelligence last year at
$700 million.</p>
<p>In July 2013, the Joint Chiefs found a more direct way
of demonstrating to Assad how serious they were about
helping him. By then the CIA-sponsored secret flow of
arms from Libya to the Syrian opposition, via Turkey,
had been underway for more than a year (it started
sometime after Gaddafi’s death on 20 October 2011).<a
id="fn-ref-asterisk"
href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n01/seymour-m-hersh/#fn-asterisk"
class="print-show">[*]</a><a
href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n01/seymour-m-hersh/#fn-asterisk"
class="fnx-link print-hide"><span>＊</span></a> The
operation was largely run out of a covert CIA annex in
Benghazi, with State Department acquiescence. On 11
September 2012 the US ambassador to Libya, Christopher
Stevens, was killed during an anti-American
demonstration that led to the burning down of the US
consulate in Benghazi; reporters for the <em>Washington
Post</em> found copies of the ambassador’s schedule in
the building’s ruins. It showed that on 10 September
Stevens had met with the chief of the CIA’s annex
operation. The next day, shortly before he died, he met
a representative from Al-Marfa Shipping and Maritime
Services, a Tripoli-based company which, the JCS adviser
said, was known by the Joint Staff to be handling the
weapons shipments.</p>
<p>By the late summer of 2013, the DIA’s assessment had
been circulated widely, but although many in the
American intelligence community were aware that the
Syrian opposition was dominated by extremists the
CIA-sponsored weapons kept coming, presenting a
continuing problem for Assad’s army. Gaddafi’s stockpile
had created an international arms bazaar, though prices
were high. ‘There was no way to stop the arms shipments
that had been authorised by the president,’ the JCS
adviser said. ‘The solution involved an appeal to the
pocketbook. The CIA was approached by a representative
from the Joint Chiefs with a suggestion: there were far
less costly weapons available in Turkish arsenals that
could reach the Syrian rebels within days, and without a
boat ride.’ But it wasn’t only the CIA that benefited.
‘We worked with Turks we trusted who were not loyal to
Erdoğan,’ the adviser said, ‘and got them to ship the
jihadists in Syria all the obsolete weapons in the
arsenal, including M1 carbines that hadn’t been seen
since the Korean War and lots of Soviet arms. It was a
message Assad could understand: “We have the power to
diminish a presidential policy in its tracks.”’ </p>
<p>The flow of US intelligence to the Syrian army, and the
downgrading of the quality of the arms being supplied to
the rebels, came at a critical juncture. The Syrian army
had suffered heavy losses in the spring of 2013 in
fighting against Jabhat al-Nusra and other extremist
groups as it failed to hold the provincial capital of
Raqqa. Sporadic Syrian army and air-force raids
continued in the area for months, with little success,
until it was decided to withdraw from Raqqa and other
hard to defend, lightly populated areas in the north and
west and focus instead on consolidating the government’s
hold on Damascus and the heavily populated areas linking
the capital to Latakia in the north-east. But as the
army gained in strength with the Joint Chiefs’ support,
Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey escalated their financing
and arming of Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State, which
by the end of 2013 had made enormous gains on both sides
of the Syria/Iraq border. The remaining
non-fundamentalist rebels found themselves fighting –
and losing – pitched battles against the extremists. In
January 2014, IS took complete control of Raqqa and the
tribal areas around it from al-Nusra and established the
city as its base. Assad still controlled 80 per cent of
the Syrian population, but he had lost a vast amount of
territory.</p>
<p>CIA efforts to train the moderate rebel forces were
also failing badly. ‘The CIA’s training camp was in
Jordan and was controlled by a Syrian tribal group,’ the
JCS adviser said. There was a suspicion that some of
those who signed up for training were actually Syrian
army regulars minus their uniforms. This had happened
before, at the height of the Iraqi war, when hundreds of
Shia militia members showed up at American training
camps for new uniforms, weapons and a few days of
training, and then disappeared into the desert. A
separate training programme, set up by the Pentagon in
Turkey, fared no better. The Pentagon acknowledged in
September that only ‘four or five’ of its recruits were
still battling Islamic State; a few days later 70 of
them defected to Jabhat al-Nusra immediately after
crossing the border into Syria.</p>
<p>In January 2014, despairing at the lack of progress,
John Brennan, the director of the CIA, summoned American
and Sunni Arab intelligence chiefs from throughout the
Middle East to a secret meeting in Washington, with the
aim of persuading Saudi Arabia to stop supporting
extremist fighters in Syria. ‘The Saudis told us they
were happy to listen,’ the JCS adviser said, ‘so
everyone sat around in Washington to hear Brennan tell
them that they had to get on board with the so-called
moderates. His message was that if everyone in the
region stopped supporting al-Nusra and Isis their
ammunition and weapons would dry up, and the moderates
would win out.’ Brennan’s message was ignored by the
Saudis, the adviser said, who ‘went back home and
increased their efforts with the extremists and asked us
for more technical support. And we say OK, and so it
turns out that we end up reinforcing the extremists.’</p>
<p>But the Saudis were far from the only problem: American
intelligence had accumulated intercept and human
intelligence demonstrating that the Erdoğan government
had been supporting Jabhat al-Nusra for years, and was
now doing the same for Islamic State. ‘We can handle the
Saudis,’ the adviser said. ‘We can handle the Muslim
Brotherhood. You can argue that the whole balance in the
Middle East is based on a form of mutually assured
destruction between Israel and the rest of the Middle
East, and Turkey can disrupt the balance – which is
Erdoğan’s dream. We told him we wanted him to shut down
the pipeline of foreign jihadists flowing into Turkey.
But he is dreaming big – of restoring the Ottoman Empire
– and he did not realise the extent to which he could be
successful in this.’</p>
<p class="secast">*</p>
<p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcapslede">One</span>
of the constants in US affairs since the fall of the
Soviet Union has been a military-to-military
relationship with Russia. After 1991 the US spent
billions of dollars to help Russia secure its nuclear
weapons complex, including a highly secret joint
operation to remove weapons-grade uranium from unsecured
storage depots in Kazakhstan. Joint programmes to
monitor the security of weapons-grade materials
continued for the next two decades. During the American
war on Afghanistan, Russia provided overflight rights
for US cargo carriers and tankers, as well as access for
the flow of weapons, ammunition, food and water the US
war machine needed daily. Russia’s military provided
intelligence on Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts and helped
the US negotiate rights to use an airbase in Kyrgyzstan.
The Joint Chiefs have been in communication with their
Russian counterparts throughout the Syrian war, and the
ties between the two militaries start at the top. In
August, a few weeks before his retirement as chairman of
the Joint Chiefs, Dempsey made a farewell visit to the
headquarters of the Irish Defence Forces in Dublin and
told his audience there that he had made a point while
in office to keep in touch with the chief of the Russian
General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov. ‘I’ve actually
suggested to him that we not end our careers as we began
them,’ Dempsey said – one a tank commander in West
Germany, the other in the east. </p>
<p>When it comes to tackling Islamic State, Russia and the
US have much to offer each other. Many in the IS
leadership and rank and file fought for more than a
decade against Russia in the two Chechen wars that began
in 1994, and the Putin government is heavily invested in
combating Islamist terrorism. ‘Russia knows the Isis
leadership,’ the JCS adviser said, ‘and has insights
into its operational techniques, and has much
intelligence to share.’ In return, he said, ‘we’ve got
excellent trainers with years of experience in training
foreign fighters – experience that Russia does not
have.’ The adviser would not discuss what American
intelligence is also believed to have: an ability to
obtain targeting data, often by paying huge sums of
cash, from sources within rebel militias.</p>
<p>A former White House adviser on Russian affairs told me
that before 9/11 Putin ‘used to say to us: “We have the
same nightmares about different places.” He was
referring to his problems with the caliphate in Chechnya
and our early issues with al-Qaida. These days, after
the Metrojet bombing over Sinai and the massacres in
Paris and elsewhere, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion
that we actually have the same nightmares about the same
places.’</p>
<p>Yet the Obama administration continues to condemn
Russia for its support of Assad. A retired senior
diplomat who served at the US embassy in Moscow
expressed sympathy for Obama’s dilemma as the leader of
the Western coalition opposed to Russia’s aggression
against Ukraine: ‘Ukraine is a serious issue and Obama
has been handling it firmly with sanctions. But our
policy vis-à-vis Russia is too often unfocused. But it’s
not about us in Syria. It’s about making sure Bashar
does not lose. The reality is that Putin does not want
to see the chaos in Syria spread to Jordan or Lebanon,
as it has to Iraq, and he does not want to see Syria end
up in the hands of Isis. The most counterproductive
thing Obama has done, and it has hurt our efforts to end
the fighting a lot, was to say: “Assad must go as a
premise for negotiation.”’ He also echoed a view held by
some in the Pentagon when he alluded to a collateral
factor behind Russia’s decision to launch airstrikes in
support of the Syrian army on 30 September: Putin’s
desire to prevent Assad from suffering the same fate as
Gaddafi. He had been told that Putin had watched a video
of Gaddafi’s savage death three times, a video that
shows him being sodomised with a bayonet. The JCS
adviser also told me of a US intelligence assessment
which concluded that Putin had been appalled by
Gaddafi’s fate: ‘Putin blamed himself for letting
Gaddafi go, for not playing a strong role behind the
scenes’ at the UN when the Western coalition was
lobbying to be allowed to undertake the airstrikes that
destroyed the regime. ‘Putin believed that unless he got
engaged Bashar would suffer the same fate – mutilated –
and he’d see the destruction of his allies in Syria.’</p>
<p>In a speech on 22 November, Obama declared that the
‘principal targets’ of the Russian airstrikes ‘have been
the moderate opposition’. It’s a line that the
administration – along with most of the mainstream
American media – has rarely strayed from. The Russians
insist that they are targeting all rebel groups that
threaten Syria’s stability – including Islamic State.
The Kremlin adviser on the Middle East explained in an
interview that the first round of Russian airstrikes was
aimed at bolstering security around a Russian airbase in
Latakia, an Alawite stronghold. The strategic goal, he
said, has been to establish a jihadist-free corridor
from Damascus to Latakia and the Russian naval base at
Tartus and then to shift the focus of bombing gradually
to the south and east, with a greater concentration of
bombing missions over IS-held territory. Russian strikes
on IS targets in and near Raqqa were reported as early
as the beginning of October; in November there were
further strikes on IS positions near the historic city
of Palmyra and in Idlib province, a bitterly contested
stronghold on the Turkish border. </p>
<p>Russian incursions into Turkish airspace began soon
after Putin authorised the bombings, and the Russian air
force deployed electronic jamming systems that
interfered with Turkish radar. The message being sent to
the Turkish air force, the JCS adviser said, was: ‘We’re
going to fly our fighter planes where we want and when
we want and jam your radar. Do not fuck with us. Putin
was letting the Turks know what they were up against.’
Russia’s aggression led to Turkish complaints and
Russian denials, along with more aggressive border
patrolling by the Turkish air force. There were no
significant incidents until 24 November, when two
Turkish F-16 fighters, apparently acting under more
aggressive rules of engagement, shot down a Russian
Su-24M jet that had crossed into Turkish airspace for no
more than 17 seconds. In the days after the fighter was
shot down, Obama expressed support for Erdoğan, and
after they met in private on 1 December he told a press
conference that his administration remained ‘very much
committed to Turkey’s security and its sovereignty’. He
said that as long as Russia remained allied with Assad,
‘a lot of Russian resources are still going to be
targeted at opposition groups … that we support … So I
don’t think we should be under any illusions that
somehow Russia starts hitting only Isil targets. That’s
not happening now. It was never happening. It’s not
going to be happening in the next several weeks.’</p>
<p>The Kremlin adviser on the Middle East, like the Joint
Chiefs and the DIA, dismisses the ‘moderates’ who have
Obama’s support, seeing them as extremist Islamist
groups that fight alongside Jabhat al-Nusra and IS
(‘There’s no need to play with words and split
terrorists into moderate and not moderate,’ Putin said
in a speech on 22 October). The American generals see
them as exhausted militias that have been forced to make
an accommodation with Jabhat al-Nusra or IS in order to
survive. At the end of 2014, Jürgen Todenhöfer, a German
journalist who was allowed to spend ten days touring
IS-held territory in Iraq and Syria, told CNN that the
IS leadership ‘are all laughing about the Free Syrian
Army. They don’t take them for serious. They say: “The
best arms sellers we have are the FSA. If they get a
good weapon, they sell it to us.” They didn’t take them
for serious. They take for serious Assad. They take for
serious, of course, the bombs. But they fear nothing,
and FSA doesn’t play a role.’</p>
<p class="secast">*</p>
<p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcapslede">Putin’s</span>
bombing campaign provoked a series of anti-Russia
articles in the American press. On 25 October, the <em>New
York Times</em> reported, citing Obama administration
officials, that Russian submarines and spy ships were
‘aggressively’ operating near the undersea cables that
carry much of the world’s internet traffic – although,
as the article went on to acknowledge, there was ‘no
evidence yet’ of any Russian attempt actually to
interfere with that traffic. Ten days earlier the <em>Times</em>
published a summary of Russian intrusions into its
former Soviet satellite republics, and described the
Russian bombing in Syria as being ‘in some respects a
return to the ambitious military moves of the Soviet
past’. The report did not note that the Assad
administration had invited Russia to intervene, nor did
it mention the US bombing raids inside Syria that had
been underway since the previous September, without
Syria’s approval. An October op-ed in the same paper by
Michael McFaul, Obama’s ambassador to Russia between
2012 and 2014, declared that the Russian air campaign
was attacking ‘everyone except the Islamic State’. The
anti-Russia stories did not abate after the Metrojet
disaster, for which Islamic State claimed credit. Few in
the US government and media questioned why IS would
target a Russian airliner, along with its 224 passengers
and crew, if Moscow’s air force was attacking only the
Syrian ‘moderates’.</p>
<p>Economic sanctions, meanwhile, are still in effect
against Russia for what a large number of Americans
consider Putin’s war crimes in Ukraine, as are US
Treasury Department sanctions against Syria and against
those Americans who do business there. The <em>New York
Times</em>, in a report on sanctions in late November,
revived an old and groundless assertion, saying that the
Treasury’s actions ‘emphasise an argument that the
administration has increasingly been making about Mr
Assad as it seeks to press Russia to abandon its backing
for him: that although he professes to be at war with
Islamist terrorists, he has a symbiotic relationship
with the Islamic State that has allowed it to thrive
while he has clung to power.’</p>
<p class="secast">*</p>
<p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcapslede">The</span>
four core elements of Obama’s Syria policy remain intact
today: an insistence that Assad must go; that no anti-IS
coalition with Russia is possible; that Turkey is a
steadfast ally in the war against terrorism; and that
there really are significant moderate opposition forces
for the US to support. The Paris attacks on 13 November
that killed 130 people did not change the White House’s
public stance, although many European leaders, including
François Hollande, advocated greater co-operation with
Russia and agreed to co-ordinate more closely with its
air force; there was also talk of the need to be more
flexible about the timing of Assad’s exit from power. On
24 November, Hollande flew to Washington to discuss how
France and the US could collaborate more closely in the
fight against Islamic State. At a joint press conference
at the White House, Obama said he and Hollande had
agreed that ‘Russia’s strikes against the moderate
opposition only bolster the Assad regime, whose
brutality has helped to fuel the rise’ of IS. Hollande
didn’t go that far but he said that the diplomatic
process in Vienna would ‘lead to Bashar al-Assad’s
departure … a government of unity is required.’ The
press conference failed to deal with the far more urgent
impasse between the two men on the matter of Erdoğan.
Obama defended Turkey’s right to defend its borders;
Hollande said it was ‘a matter of urgency’ for Turkey to
take action against terrorists. The JCS adviser told me
that one of Hollande’s main goals in flying to
Washington had been to try to persuade Obama to join the
EU in a mutual declaration of war against Islamic State.
Obama said no. The Europeans had pointedly not gone to
Nato, to which Turkey belongs, for such a declaration.
‘Turkey is the problem,’ the JCS adviser said.</p>
<p>Assad, naturally, doesn’t accept that a group of
foreign leaders should be deciding on his future. Imad
Moustapha, now Syria’s ambassador to China, was dean of
the IT faculty at the University of Damascus, and a
close aide of Assad’s, when he was appointed in 2004 as
the Syrian ambassador to the US, a post he held for
seven years. Moustapha is known still to be close to
Assad, and can be trusted to reflect what he thinks. He
told me that for Assad to surrender power would mean
capitulating to ‘armed terrorist groups’ and that
ministers in a national unity government – such as was
being proposed by the Europeans – would be seen to be
beholden to the foreign powers that appointed them.
These powers could remind the new president ‘that they
could easily replace him as they did before to the
predecessor … Assad owes it to his people: he could not
leave because the historic enemies of Syria are
demanding his departure.’</p>
<p class="secast">*</p>
<p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcapslede">Moustapha</span>
also brought up China, an ally of Assad that has
allegedly committed more than $30 billion to postwar
reconstruction in Syria. China, too, is worried about
Islamic State. ‘China regards the Syrian crisis from
three perspectives,’ he said: international law and
legitimacy; global strategic positioning; and the
activities of jihadist Uighurs, from Xinjiang province
in China’s far west. Xinjiang borders eight nations –
Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan,
Afghanistan, Pakistan and India – and, in China’s view,
serves as a funnel for terrorism around the world and
within China. Many Uighur fighters now in Syria are
known to be members of the East Turkestan Islamic
Movement – an often violent separatist organisation that
seeks to establish an Islamist Uighur state in Xinjiang.
‘The fact that they have been aided by Turkish
intelligence to move from China into Syria through
Turkey has caused a tremendous amount of tension between
the Chinese and Turkish intelligence,’ Moustapha said.
‘China is concerned that the Turkish role of supporting
the Uighur fighters in Syria may be extended in the
future to support Turkey’s agenda in Xinjiang. We are
already providing the Chinese intelligence service with
information regarding these terrorists and the routes
they crossed from on travelling into Syria.’</p>
<p>Moustapha’s concerns were echoed by a Washington
foreign affairs analyst who has closely followed the
passage of jihadists through Turkey and into Syria. The
analyst, whose views are routinely sought by senior
government officials, told me that ‘Erdoğan has been
bringing Uighurs into Syria by special transport while
his government has been agitating in favour of their
struggle in China. Uighur and Burmese Muslim terrorists
who escape into Thailand somehow get Turkish passports
and are then flown to Turkey for transit into Syria.’ He
added that there was also what amounted to another ‘rat
line’ that was funnelling Uighurs – estimates range from
a few hundred to many thousands over the years – from
China into Kazakhstan for eventual relay to Turkey, and
then to IS territory in Syria. ‘US intelligence,’ he
said, ‘is not getting good information about these
activities because those insiders who are unhappy with
the policy are not talking to them.’ He also said it was
‘not clear’ that the officials responsible for Syrian
policy in the State Department and White House ‘get it’.
<em>IHS-Jane’s Defence Weekly</em> estimated in October
that as many as five thousand Uighur would-be fighters
have arrived in Turkey since 2013, with perhaps two
thousand moving on to Syria. Moustapha said he has
information that ‘up to 860 Uighur fighters are
currently in Syria.’</p>
<p>China’s growing concern about the Uighur problem and
its link to Syria and Islamic State have preoccupied
Christina Lin, a scholar who dealt with Chinese issues a
decade ago while serving in the Pentagon under Donald
Rumsfeld. ‘I grew up in Taiwan and came to the Pentagon
as a critic of China,’ Lin told me. ‘I used to demonise
the Chinese as ideologues, and they are not perfect. But
over the years as I see them opening up and evolving, I
have begun to change my perspective. I see China as a
potential partner for various global challenges
especially in the Middle East. There are many places –
Syria for one – where the United States and China must
co-operate in regional security and counterterrorism.’ A
few weeks earlier, she said, China and India, Cold War
enemies that ‘hated each other more than China and the
United States hated each other, conducted a series of
joint counterterrorism exercises. And today China and
Russia both want to co-operate on terrorism issues with
the United States.’ As China sees it, Lin suggests,
Uighur militants who have made their way to Syria are
being trained by Islamic State in survival techniques
intended to aid them on covert return trips to the
Chinese mainland, for future terrorist attacks there.
‘If Assad fails,’ Lin wrote in a paper published in
September, ‘jihadi fighters from Russia’s Chechnya,
China’s Xinjiang and India’s Kashmir will then turn
their eyes towards the home front to continue jihad,
supported by a new and well-sourced Syrian operating
base in the heart of the Middle East.’</p>
<p class="secast">*</p>
<p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcapslede">General
Dempsey</span> and his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs
of Staff kept their dissent out of bureaucratic
channels, and survived in office. General Michael Flynn
did not. ‘Flynn incurred the wrath of the White House by
insisting on telling the truth about Syria,’ said
Patrick Lang, a retired army colonel who served for
nearly a decade as the chief Middle East civilian
intelligence officer for the DIA. ‘He thought truth was
the best thing and they shoved him out. He wouldn’t shut
up.’ Flynn told me his problems went beyond Syria. ‘I
was shaking things up at the DIA – and not just moving
deckchairs on the <em>Titanic</em>. It was radical
reform. I felt that the civilian leadership did not want
to hear the truth. I suffered for it, but I’m OK with
that.’ In a recent interview in <em>Der Spiegel</em>,
Flynn was blunt about Russia’s entry into the Syrian
war: ‘We have to work constructively with Russia.
Whether we like it or not, Russia made a decision to be
there and to act militarily. They are there, and this
has dramatically changed the dynamic. So you can’t say
Russia is bad; they have to go home. It’s not going to
happen. Get real.’</p>
<p>Few in the US Congress share this view. One exception
is Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat from Hawaii and member of
the House Armed Services Committee who, as a major in
the Army National Guard, served two tours in the Middle
East. In an interview on CNN in October she said: ‘The
US and the CIA should stop this illegal and
counterproductive war to overthrow the Syrian government
of Assad and should stay focused on fighting against …
the Islamic extremist groups.’</p>
<p>‘Does it not concern you,’ the interviewer asked, ‘that
Assad’s regime has been brutal, killing at least 200,000
and maybe 300,000 of his own people?’</p>
<p>‘The things that are being said about Assad right now,’
Gabbard responded, ‘are the same that were said about
Gaddafi, they are the same things that were said about
Saddam Hussein by those who were advocating for the US
to … overthrow those regimes … If it happens here in
Syria … we will end up in a situation with far greater
suffering, with far greater persecution of religious
minorities and Christians in Syria, and our enemy will
be far stronger.’</p>
<p>‘So what you are saying,’ the interviewer asked, ‘is
that the Russian military involvement in the air and
on-the-ground Iranian involvement – they are actually
doing the US a favour?’</p>
<p>‘They are working toward defeating our common enemy,’
Gabbard replied.</p>
<p>Gabbard later told me that many of her colleagues in
Congress, Democrats and Republicans, have thanked her
privately for speaking out. ‘There are a lot of people
in the general public, and even in the Congress, who
need to have things clearly explained to them,’ Gabbard
said. ‘But it’s hard when there’s so much deception
about what is going on. The truth is not out.’ It’s
unusual for a politician to challenge her party’s
foreign policy directly and on the record. For someone
on the inside, with access to the most secret
intelligence, speaking openly and critically can be a
career-ender. Informed dissent can be transmitted by
means of a trust relationship between a reporter and
those on the inside, but it almost invariably includes
no signature. The dissent exists, however. The longtime
consultant to the Joint Special Operations Command could
not hide his contempt when I asked him for his view of
the US’s Syria policy. ‘The solution in Syria is right
before our nose,’ he said. ‘Our primary threat is Isis
and all of us – the United States, Russia and China –
need to work together. Bashar will remain in office and,
after the country is stabilised there will be an
election. There is no other option.’</p>
<p>The military’s indirect pathway to Assad disappeared
with Dempsey’s retirement in September. His replacement
as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Joseph Dunford,
testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in
July, two months before assuming office. ‘If you want to
talk about a nation that could pose an existential
threat to the United States, I’d have to point to
Russia,’ Dunford said. ‘If you look at their behaviour,
it’s nothing short of alarming.’ In October, as
chairman, Dunford dismissed the Russian bombing efforts
in Syria, telling the same committee that Russia ‘is not
fighting’ IS. He added that America must ‘work with
Turkish partners to secure the northern border of Syria’
and ‘do all we can to enable vetted Syrian opposition
forces’ – i.e. the ‘moderates’ – to fight the
extremists.</p>
<p>Obama now has a more compliant Pentagon. There will be
no more indirect challenges from the military leadership
to his policy of disdain for Assad and support for
Erdoğan. Dempsey and his associates remain mystified by
Obama’s continued public defence of Erdoğan, given the
American intelligence community’s strong case against
him – and the evidence that Obama, in private, accepts
that case. ‘We know what you’re doing with the radicals
in Syria,’ the president told Erdoğan’s intelligence
chief at a tense meeting at the White House (as I
reported in the <a
href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line"><em>LRB</em>
of 17 April 2014</a>). The Joint Chiefs and the DIA
were constantly telling Washington’s leadership of the
jihadist threat in Syria, and of Turkey’s support for
it. The message was never listened to. Why not?</p>
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