The New Middle East (63 page)

Even a bomb in the heart of its security headquarters in July 2012 didn’t stall the military establishment. It killed the defence minister and three other senior officials, one of whom was Bashar al-Assad’s brother-in-law. Other top officials, including the intelligence chief and interior minister, were injured. Bashar al-Assad appointed a new defence minister, General Daoud Rajha, and the killing just carried on. That may have been because the real military power was concentrated in the hands of the extended Assad family, including on his mother’s side the Makhloufs, not the public officials. But there was another possible explanation. The talk in the capital Damascus was that the men might have been plotting a coup, and were assassinated by the regime before they could carry out their plan.

President Obama opposed acting without international sanction, and that sanction was not forthcoming. The State Department under Hillary Clinton was ready to push harder, but President Obama made it clear that he was not. He told them America would participate but he did not want to take the lead on Syria because he could not see a happy ending. He was also conscious of a sense of American overreach with regard to Afghanistan and Iraq, and he wasn’t ready to do that again in Syria. Another key factor though was that he did not want to own a problem in an election year when success would be measured by differing degrees of failure. But even when the election was over, his view that there was no good outcome in getting too involved didn’t change. Syria festered, and so did the mood in the Security Council.

‘It’s very poisonous,’ said a United Nations official to me of the atmosphere Syria had created. There was huge frustration among the UN people working on the Syrian issue, because while it was obvious that all the Permanent members wanted to avoid the inevitable consequences of doing nothing, still they ‘couldn’t get their act together’. The entire Security Council feared the nightmare scenario that Israel was talking up, but bad blood, big egos and first the Russian and then the US electoral cycles were all factors in not wanting to be seen to be conceding ground.

When Kofi Annan resigned his role in August 2012 as the joint envoy he blamed everyone involved. The Europeans and Americans privately briefed that when Annan said everyone he really meant the Russians. He did not. He said everyone because he meant everyone. His most enduring achievement before, as one UN official put it, the ‘Security Council members dumped him’ was the agreement reached in Geneva in June 2012. It at least established agreement within the Security Council that a political transition should occur. Assad’s supporters in Iran said he should remain in power until presidential polls were held in 2014.
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Annan’s replacement as joint UN–Arab League envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, tried to build out from the Geneva agreement. It was an impossible task. Eight months later he was ready to quit. ‘I haven’t resigned,’ he said. ‘Every day I wake up and think I should resign. One day perhaps I will resign.’
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A few months after the uprisings began a group of army deserters announced the formation of the Free Syrian Army. As the conflict moved into its third year the ‘Free Syrian Army’ was still little more than a label for the mass of people who were fighting against the government but who were not part of the Salafist trend. The title existed in splendid isolation from any kind of real central command and control structure, even though it had what was called its headquarters across the northern border in Turkey. The US and Europeans had tried to help the fighters coordinate better by providing among their non-lethal assistance the same type of communication equipment I’d seen suddenly appear in the hands of Libyan rebels during the height of the fighting there. But two years after it was supposed to have been created the Free Syrian Army was still more of an aspiration.

In July 2012 the Red Cross formally declared that the entire country was embroiled in a ‘civil war’, which meant both sides were now subject to the Geneva convention regarding war crimes.
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That drew more attention to the actions of the rebels. Videos began to emerge of opposition fighters abusing and executing captured government soldiers, though the UN said their abuses ‘did not reach the gravity, frequency and scale of those committed by Government forces and the Shabbiha’.
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But what they did do in the eyes of opponents to the regime was something worse. They started abusing the people they were supposed to be fighting for.

By the early winter months of 2013 the war-ravaged northern city of Aleppo was largely in the hands of the opposition fighters, despite the army’s use of air power and Scud missiles to try to hold on. That ancient city, which had been inhabited for millennia, was in parts reduced to rubble. Having taken control the rebels had no idea what to do with it. Inflation had gone sky-high and no one had a job. There was no electricity, water was scarce and rubbish was piling up in the streets. Families were forced to sell their possessions for food and heating oil as the bitter winter set in. People stood for hours in bread queues, leaving them vulnerable to incoming government rounds. So, faced with these challenges, some of the fighters from the Free Syrian Army decided to rob the city. They stole Aleppo’s flour supplies for themselves.
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‘Welcome to Free Syria’ said a resident sarcastically to one of my colleagues, pointing at the destruction in the city.
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The contest for Aleppo was a disaster for the Syrian opposition. They fought a totally uncoordinated battle that did as much damage to their credibility as it did to the city. Many of the fighters came from the surrounding rural areas, not the city itself, and saw Aleppo as a prize to capture, not to protect. The chaotic failures of the FSA enhanced the reputation of the much more disciplined Islamist fighters. If Homs was where the opposition realised they were going to have to fight this war alone, then Aleppo was where they realised what fighting a war actually meant. They learned the lesson Makdissi had finally grasped, that it is hard to rule an angry people. And the citizens of Aleppo were furious with the mess the FSA had made of their city. There was anger too across the northern provinces because of the fractious nature of the opposition. Criminal gangs flourished. The Islamist fighters became a law unto themselves. The FSA could not seem to get its act together.

In October 2012 Lakhdar Brahimi tried to organise a brief truce to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. The UN hoped to use that pause to send around seventeen truckloads of aid to the city of Homs. They wanted to get to three areas of the city, starting with the al-Khalidiya district. They spent fourteen hours trying to gain access, but nobody on the opposition side could guarantee the safety of the convoys. That was because there were twenty-one disparate FSA brigades inside this small quarter alone. ‘You had to deal with twenty-one chiefs, and each of those twenty-one had totally different ideas and policies. And each one of them wanted to dictate the rules,’ an aid worker told me. The trucks had to turn back.

Part of the issue though was that the UN personnel in Syria were bearing the brunt of the abuse from the opposition fighters, which should have been directed at the Security Council members. But those members were not present on the ground, and the UN were, and were constantly hampered by a mixture of suspicion and FSA incompetence when trying to get aid for civilians into rebel-held areas.

Meantime the opposition in the capital looked with dread at the mess in Aleppo and beyond. They believed the regime would have no qualms about smashing their own ancient city. This meant that the battle for the heart of Damascus was much more protracted and less gung-ho. The opposition tried to wear the regime down with tactical strikes to cut the city off. That did not mean there was not misery and destruction. When I drove around the suburbs of Damascus in February 2013 I saw that large areas of the city had been flattened by artillery fire. Checkpoints choked the roads, manned by members of the seventeen different internal security services operating in the capital. They also sealed off the rebellious neighbourhoods that I had been able to drive around freely the year before. There was the regular ‘crump’ of shells landing and puffs of smoke dotted the skyline. People queued in hundreds for bread. Electricity was sporadic and the people were exhausted. The slow capture of the outskirts of the city from the regime followed a regular pattern. The security services would fight the FSA with small arms until they began to lose ground. Then they pulled out, surrounded the area and shelled it. By this time the Shabiha had been formed into a single fighting force, which was much more hated and feared than the army.

In the capital these men ran their local fiefdoms under the banner of newly created ‘Popular Committees’, though they were not popular with anyone outside their membership. ‘Area 86’ is the Alawite suburb where many of the security personnel and Shabiha live with their families. It sprawls its way across the base of Mount Qasioun, which towers over the city. Higher up the mountain was where the army placed its artillery. It then fired across the city into the suburbs on the other side. To get to the heavy weapons the opposition would have to fight their way through the Alawite security forces who were not only protecting the state but also their own families. The regime had put its soldiers’ women and children in front of their last line of defence.

The United Nations had hoped it would never reach this stage. They had been trying from the start to resolve the conflict before the civil war became ‘destructive beyond the point of repair’. The problem was that they really had no idea who to talk to, because the so-called unified opposition represented by the SNC spoke only for themselves. They never had any control over the people fighting under the banner of the ‘Free Syrian Army’. So by the end of 2012 the Obama administration abandoned the SNC. By then the SNC had received forty million dollars, half from Libya and the rest from the Qataris and the UAE. There was nothing to show for it.
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‘We’ve made it clear that the SNC can no longer be viewed as the visible leader of the opposition,’ Hillary Clinton said in October 2012. She then acknowledged, obliquely, that the international community had wasted a full year on a group of exiles who were totally divorced from the reality on the ground. She said the opposition group that came next ‘must include people from inside Syria and others who have a legitimate voice that needs to be heard’.
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It felt as if, now the US election season was over, the Obama administration was suddenly aware as 2012 drew to a close what a terrible mess it had allowed to fester around the Syria crisis while its attention was focused elsewhere. In November it oversaw the formation of a new opposition grouping, the ‘National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces’. The leader of the coalition was Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib, a former imam of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus and one of the few figures outside Syria who had credibility within the opposition forces who were doing the fighting. In December President Obama announced: ‘We’ve made a decision that the Syrian Opposition Coalition is now inclusive enough, is reflective and representative enough of the Syrian population that we consider them the legitimate representative of the Syrian people in opposition to the Assad regime.’ ‘It’s a big step,’ he said.
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It made little difference. This coalition included the old SNC as a block, so it still held huge sway. The new grouping often ended up being referred to in shorthand as the ‘Syrian National Coalition’ or SNC. The name barely changed, nor did its nature. The reorganisation did little to stem the infighting among the exiles. The coalition was still seen by opposition activists and fighters on the ground as a Trojan horse, backed by Qatar, for the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood’s domination of the post-Assad political arena.

In March 2013 the National Coalition chose Ghassan Hitto, a Damascus-born IT specialist who had the spent the previous decades living in the US, as the prime minister to head a government in rebel-held areas. ‘I’ve met him twice,’ the US ambassador to Syria Robert Ford told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that month. ‘He struck me as more Texan than Muslim Brotherhood, frankly.’
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Neither was much of a qualification to unite a divided nation or a divided opposition. His appointment prompted more infighting and infuriated al-Khatib, who said he would resign. A few days later the National Coalition was formally given Syria’s seat at the Arab League, which had been vacant since its suspension from the group in November 2011, until new elections were held in the country. The decision was pushed through by the Qataris just days before the League’s annual summit, which was being held in their capital Doha. It was hailed at the time as a hugely symbolic moment, but when you stood back it was clear the excitement just reflected how little else had been achieved. It was interpreted by Brahimi as an attempt by the Arab League to close the door on a negotiated solution with the regime.
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Maintaining stability within Syrian society after the civil war is not going to be easy. There is no doubt that the system under Assad was hugely skewed towards the Alawite community, but that didn’t make the vast majority wealthy. In Damascus there are large Alawite slums. They did get government jobs, but these paid only a minimum wage. People in the capital complained that government institutions were often packed with the people from the Alawite community. They also dominated the army officer class and eventually the government militia, the Shabiha. But when the conflict deepened no effort was made by the opposition to make the Alawites feel they had a future in the Syria that emerged from the conflict, so many came to take it for granted that on the ‘day after’ they would simply lose everything.