tag:theconversation.com,2011:/fr/topics/jabhat-al-nusra-25378/articlesJabhat al-Nusra – The Conversation2018-01-25T14:13:40Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/899472018-01-25T14:13:40Z2018-01-25T14:13:40ZSyria update: why no one is really winning the war<p>As the Syrian conflict enters its eighth year, various commentators, and indeed governments and leaders, are trying to write it off as nearly over. Some are focused narrowly on the <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/isis-was-defeated-syria-end-islamists-767165">territorial defeat</a> of the so-called Islamic State (IS); others have made the simplistic judgement that Bashar al-Assad’s regime is <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/assad-s-victory-what-comes-after-war-in-syria-a-1188244.html">closing in on victory</a>. Both sides are wrong. </p>
<p>The world’s attention has turned away from the hundreds of thousands dead and the millions bombed, displaced and starved under siege. Meanwhile, there is no longer one Syria, just a fragmented country locked in a seemingly intractable state of violence.</p>
<p>With IS greatly diminished, control of Syria is effectively divided between three sides: the Damascus government and its backers, opposition/rebel factions, and Kurdish forces. Here’s my review of where they stand, and what might happen to them in 2018.</p>
<h2>The government</h2>
<p>The Assad regime seemed doomed to defeat in summer 2015, but thanks to the intervention of Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and other foreign militias, it now exercises at least nominal control over most of Syria’s cities and much of the remaining population.</p>
<p>Russian air power headed off a rebel takeover of Damascus, secured the westward route from the capital to the Mediterranean, and helped recapture all of Syria’s largest city, Aleppo. Pro-Assad forces have now regained territory in southern and central Syria, most of the Damsacus suburbs, and the opposition stronghold of Homs. Russian, Iranian, Hezbollah and regime-backed troops and militias <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2017/03/02/middleeast/syria-palmyra-isis/index.html">cleared IS from the ancient city of Palymyra</a>, pushed them away from Aleppo, and then pressed on right up to the Iraqi border.</p>
<p>Yet Assad still does not control large swaths of the country. There are rebel strongholds from the Jordanian border to the holdout East Ghouta area near Damascus to almost all of Idlib province in the north-west, while Kurdish-held territory in the north and east includes most of Syria’s oil and gas fields.</p>
<p>In the areas that it does control, even Aleppo, the regime’s grip is not entirely secure. Assad’s depleted armed forces rely heavily on Iran and Russia. With much of Syria badly damaged and <a href="https://qz.com/741432/the-collapse-of-the-syrian-economy-is-worse-than-germany-after-world-war-ii/">75% of its GDP gone</a>, Assad needs billions in reconstruction assistance. And while far from isolated in the Arab world and <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/16/middleeast/un-syria-chemical-weapons-russia-veto/index.html">shielded by Russia at the UN Security Council</a>, the regime still hasn’t restored secure diplomatic relations with most of the world.</p>
<h2>The opposition</h2>
<p>The prospect of the opposition displacing the Assad regime, or even securing representation in a national government, is long gone. Russia and Iran quashed that ambition, aided by the US’s relegation to the sidelines and by opposition backers, including Turkey, who preferred to cooperate with Moscow. </p>
<p>The opposition’s goal is to keep hold of the areas it still governs, including Idlib province and northern Aleppo province. Rebel groups in East Ghouta are still resisting the Assad regime’s bombardment and siege. Elsewhere, the Southern Front rebel group has been abandoned by the US-led operations centre, but still holds parts of Dara'a province, including a share of Dara'a city, <a href="http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2060788,00.html">where the uprising began</a> in March 2011. </p>
<p>Beyond the threat of pro-Assad offensives and sieges, the opposition is also tackling the rise of hardline Islamist bloc <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-38934206">Hayat Tahrir al-Sham</a> (HTS). HTS was created in January 2017 and includes the faction Jabhat al-Nusra, involved in the Syria conflict since 2012 and formerly linked to al-Qaeda. Throughout 2017, HTS seized the military initiative from other factions, notably Ahrar al-Sham, in Idlib province. It is now trying to run civil affairs through a <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20171103-syria-opposition-groups-form-new-government-in-idlib/">Syria Salvation Government</a>, challenging local councils under the opposition’s Syrian Interim Government.</p>
<h2>The Kurds</h2>
<p>The conflict has given Syria’s Kurdish groups, notably the Kurdistan Democratic Unionist Party (PYD), the opportunity to pursue power, particularly in their Kobani and Cezire cantons in northeast Syria along the Turkish and Iraqi borders.</p>
<p>Having survived IS’s onslaught in 2014-2015, marked by the defence of Kobani city, the Kurds have since defeated the group. In autumn 2015, the US switched its support from rebels to a newly created Kurdish group, the Syrian Democratic Front (SDF).</p>
<p>The SDF’s reach – which includes former IS capital, Raqqa – now extends from eastern Aleppo province – where it faces both pro-Assad and rebel frontlines – across Raqqa and Hasakah provinces to the eastern Deir ez-Zor province, where it is adjacent to advancing pro-Assad units supported by Russia.</p>
<p>The PYD ascendancy is far from secure. For now, the US is continuing to supply arms and special forces, but it is wary of Turkey’s hostility to the SDF and Russia’s backing of the Assad regime against a “federal” Syria. The regime, unsettled by the Kurdish hold on valuable assets such as oil and gas fields, has promised a showdown if there is no SDF withdrawal. </p>
<p>And now Ankara has delivered on its promise of a campaign against the Afrin canton in the northwest and on other Kurdish-held areas such as the city of Manbij.</p>
<h2>What next?</h2>
<p>The Russian-led political process has yielded the declaration of so-called “de-escalation zones” covering opposition territory from the north-west to the south. But Pro-Assad forces (and in some cases, Russian warplanes) have repeatedly subjected the zones to attacks and sieges. </p>
<p>In December 2017, one assault finally overwhelmed an opposition pocket near the <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/assad-may-have-retaken-the-syrian-golan-but-iran-is-pulling-the-strings/">Israeli-occupied Golan Heights</a>. The months-long effort to starve and bombard East Ghouta into submission continues, and the campaign for the big prize of Idlib province is underway.</p>
<p>Russia is still calculating the extent of its support for Bashar al-Assad’s personal rule. Moscow’s intervention comes at a high cost: it saps a fragile Russian economy, Putin’s political capital, and claims Russian lives. </p>
<p>That’s why Vladimir Putin <a href="https://theconversation.com/russias-decision-to-withdraw-from-syria-isnt-about-how-to-leave-but-how-to-stay-89095">declared a token “withdrawal”</a> at the end of 2017 – just before Russia <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-russia-bases/russia-establishing-permanent-presence-at-its-syrian-bases-ria-idUSKBN1EK0HD">confirmed the permanence</a> of its naval base at Tartus in western Syria. Moscow would prefer to share the burden of the billions needed for reconstruction, but the international community is unlikely to sign a cheque to prop up a blood-soaked regime.</p>
<p>Assad, meanwhile, holds a trump card: there is no alternative. His government is demanding that all opposition territory must be surrendered or recaptured before any meaningful political negotiations can commence. </p>
<p>But neither the opposition nor the Kurds are giving up, and there are other forces at work. Turkey is still backing rebel forces in parts of the northwest; Israel is wary of Iran and Hezbollah on the border of the Golan Heights. And even if the Kurds give up their hold on oil and gas fields and even as they face Turkey’s military intervention, their pursuit of autonomous rule in at least a share of Syrian Kurdistan will continue.</p>
<p>The agenda for 2018 looks like more of the same. Bombing and shelling, including of civilians. Sieges, starvation, and deaths from treatable medical conditions. A Russian-backed disinformation campaign to smear medics and rescuers as puppets of both al-Qaeda and the US. Political gatherings which yield little more than platitudes. The more things change, the more they stay the same.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/89947/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Scott Lucas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Outside observers are keen to declare the Syrian conflict almost over. It is anything but.Scott Lucas, Professor of International Politics, University of BirminghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/654272016-09-14T17:26:22Z2016-09-14T17:26:22ZAnthill 5: Reboot – part 1<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137766/original/image-20160914-4948-15ncx3v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=122%2C25%2C760%2C616&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">wavebreakmedia/www.shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>If you’ve ever rung up IT with a problem and been told to try turning your computer off and on again before anyone will take you seriously, you’ll understand the power of a reboot. Just like humans, computers are fallible and they can often do with a restart to wipe the slate clean. </p>
<p>This month we’ve chosen to focus <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/podcasts/the-anthill">The Anthill</a>, the podcast from The Conversation UK, on the theme of rebooting – what happens when people try to start over, or rework old solutions to tackle new problems. And because we’ve got such a lot of stories to share with you, we’re releasing this podcast in two parts, split over two weeks. </p>
<p>To kick us off, Rob Miles, lecturer in computer science at the University of Hull, kicks off the first episode explaining what really happens when you reboot – and why it is the <a href="https://theconversation.com/explained-why-a-reboot-is-the-go-to-computer-fix-65261">go-to computer fix</a>. </p>
<p>For the first time on The Anthill, we’re delighted to be collaborating with the team at <a href="http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/government-society/podcasts/political-worldview.aspx">Political Worldview</a>, the topical news and politics podcast from the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham. </p>
<p>We’re talking to them about Syria – one part of the world that could really do with a reboot. As part of a new ceasefire deal there, the US and Russia are trying <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-37360075">to co-ordinate</a> their air strikes against the so-called Islamic State and other jihadist groups fighting Bashar al-Assad’s government.</p>
<p>One of those groups, Jabhat al-Nusra (aka the al-Nusra Front), is often described <a href="https://theconversation.com/american-obsession-with-al-qaeda-in-syria-is-making-the-conflict-there-worse-63290">as part of al-Qaeda</a> – but it’s a lot more complicated than that. As the conflict has evolved, this group of rebels has taken a pragmatic approach to the situation on the ground, recently <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOJpzGws4mY">rebranding with a new name</a>. Our international editor, Andrew Naughtie spoke to Scott Lucas, professor of international politics at Birmingham, about the history of the group that now calls itself Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and why its leaders decided time was ripe for a reboot. </p>
<p>To round off this first of our two reboot podcasts, we turn to medicine – and whether old drugs could be used to treat diseases they were never intended for. Specifically whether one drug, used in the 1980s as an antidepressant before the likes of Prozac came along, could actually help to treat brain tumours. Our science editor, Stephen Harris, spoke to Geoff Pilkington, professor of cellular and molecular neuro-oncology at the University of Portsmouth to find out more. </p>
<p>Tune in next week to hear the second part of this episode, where we’ll be looking at how life on earth could reboot itself after a nuclear apocalypse and how a French politician you might have heard of is positioning himself to make a comeback. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>The Anthill theme music is by Alex Grey for Melody Loops.</em> </p>
<p><em>A big thank you to City University London’s Department of Journalism for letting us use their studios.</em></p>
<p><em>This is the fifth episode of <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/podcasts/the-anthill">The Anthill</a> podcast. Click here to listen to our previous episodes, <a href="https://theconversation.com/anthill-1-about-time-59355">About time</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/anthill-3-rooting-for-the-underdog-62368">Underdogs</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/anthill-4-fuel-64021">Fuel</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65427/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
In this first of two podcasts, listen in to hear about the rebooting of a Syrian rebel group, an old drug and your computer.Will de Freitas, Environment + Energy Editor, UK editionAnnabel Bligh, Business & Economy Editor and Podcast Producer, The Conversation UKGemma Ware, Head of AudioLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/640722016-09-14T11:55:02Z2016-09-14T11:55:02ZYears of fixation on defeating al-Qaeda have stunted US foreign policy<p>In May 2011, <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/05/02/osama-bin-laden-dead">President Barack Obama announced</a> that US special forces had killed Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader who oversaw the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon on <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-catastrophic-legacy-of-9-11-will-define-the-us-for-years-to-come-64067">September 11, 2001</a>. Obama called bin Laden’s death “the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al-Qaeda.”</p>
<p>The problem for Obama is that “defeating al-Qaeda” is no longer a meaningful frame for the struggle to make the world safe from terrorism and violence – and yet the US and its allies still regularly invoke it to make sense of their own actions.</p>
<p>Five years since bin Laden was “taken out”, the world is dogged by far more violence and destruction than he ever caused. Thousands died on 9/11, but hundreds of thousands more have perished in other conflicts, including many with other radical Islamist movements. Millions are displaced with little to no prospect of a return home.</p>
<p>For all the chaos and violence that looms large in its history, al-Qaeda is not the chief culprit. Instead, bin Laden was already a bystander in May 2011, relegated years earlier to the refuge of a Pakistani safe house. And since then, his much-vaunted organisation has been dramatically outpaced by other groups, whose plans and operations are much more dangerous.</p>
<p>The truth is that al-Qaeda was long ago reduced to a mere symbol. It was largely a spent force by the end of 2005. Most of the key figures were dead or locked in limbo at Guantanamo Bay; its international networks had been disrupted, even destroyed. Its leaders were sequestered in their sanctuary in Pakistan, and showpiece attacks directly inspired by bin Laden and his lieutenants were a thing of the past. </p>
<p>Instead, the world was subject to a new breed of terrorist carnage. </p>
<p>This was thanks in part to George W. Bush’s belligerent administration, whose assorted follies created a whole new set of problems still with us today. The US-led invasion of Iraq left that country shattered by insurgency, civil war, and sectarianism. Afghanistan, supposedly “liberated” from the Taliban after 9/11, instead became an arena of competing factions – included the far-from-vanquished Taliban.</p>
<h2>Former glories</h2>
<p>The cottage industry of terrorism analysts and “jihadologists” spawned by 9/11 maintained that al-Qaeda was still the central challenge because of its so-called “franchises” in Iraq, the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa. Since the spectre of al-Qaeda always guaranteed attention and support, this perception held sway in almost all of the world’s media.</p>
<p>But it was an illusion. If local movements had been inspired by al-Qaeda, they had now gone their own way in all but name. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/jun/09/guardianobituaries.alqaida">Abu Musab al-Zarqawi</a>, a petty criminal from Jordan who met bin Laden in Afghanistan, was finally able to create his movement amid the turmoil in Iraq in 2003. He branded it “al-Qaeda in Iraq”, but its approach was very different from Bin Laden’s, concentrating on the “near war” in Iraq rather than the “far war” in the West and elsewhere. It also used even more violent methods than those considered acceptable by the al-Qaeda leader.</p>
<p>In Pakistan, the US’s primary battles weren’t with al-Qaeda but with the Pakistani Taliban and local factions fighting for power and influence in the country’s north-west. In North Africa, a Salafist group made up mainly of Algerians, Moroccans, and Saharan groups styled itself “<a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/al-qaeda-in-maghreb-aqim-terror-group-who-where-a6929276.html">al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb</a>” for the purposes of its local campaigns. <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15336689">Al-Shabaab</a>, meanwhile, has always been grounded in the conflict in Somalia, even if it has claimed “allegiance” to al-Qaeda of some sort.</p>
<p>At the same time, deadly and quite unrelated conflicts were brewing elsewhere. In Iraq, the al-Maliki government was pursuing <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20860647">increasingly harsh measures</a> against Sunni communities; in neighboring Syria, Bashar al-Assad and his military were using a variety of methods to kill civilians en masse. </p>
<p>And then there were the decades-old conflicts that had helped propel Bin Laden’s initial vision. While the US had at least <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/22/world/the-struggle-for-iraq-last-american-combat-troops-quit-saudi-arabia.html">removed its troops from Saudi Arabia</a>, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute remained beyond resolution, and would remain so long after bin Laden’s demise.</p>
<h2>The B-team</h2>
<p>All of these demanded a considered approach that took account of the local causes of conflict, not the blunt invocation of “al-Qaeda”. But it was far easier to take refuge in the spectre than to engage with the political, social, and military difficulties that were emerging on the ground.</p>
<p>President Obama made that much clear in a telling and ultimately rather damaging <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/27/going-the-distance-david-remnick">interview with the New Yorker’s David Remnick</a> in January 2014, a few days after the so-called Islamic State (IS) – the descendant of Zarqawi’s Iraq militia – had taken advantage of the Iraqi government’s missteps to capture the city of Fallujah.</p>
<p>Remnick put it to Obama that “the flag of al-Qaeda is now flying in Fallujah in Iraq, and among various rebel factions in Syria, [and] al-Qaeda has asserted a presence in parts of Africa, too”. The president responded with a basketball reference, suggesting that IS was not a top-tier threat:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a [junior varsity] team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them [Lakers superstar] Kobe Bryant.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Within months, IS had shamed Obama’s complacency. It severed its ties to al-Qaeda and embarked on a <a href="https://theconversation.com/is-sweeps-across-borders-and-takes-grip-of-an-iraq-collapsing-back-into-civil-war-27886">lightning offensive</a> which took much of Iraq, including the cities of Mosul and Tikrit, and ultimately seized swathes of cross-border territory. </p>
<p>This was (and still is) beyond al-Qaeda’s ability. But instead of directly grappling with the new reality, Obama simply grafted the label of “terrorist” from the remainder of bin Laden’s men onto IS. He <a href="https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/publications/ia/INTA92_1_04_SiniverLucas.pdf">dislocated the new threat from its local setting</a>, even using an acronym – “ISIL”, for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – which made no reference to Syria at all.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We continue to face a terrorist threat. We can’t erase every trace of evil from the world, and small groups of killers have the capacity to do great harm … One of those groups is ISIL.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Indeed, the bonus for Obama was that he could use “ISIL” and the al-Qaeda spectre to remove himself from other quandaries. His policy towards Syria was in disarray by 2014, as the regime not only defied calls to remove Bashar al-Assad from office but added chemical weapons to its attacks on opposition areas; he vetoed any effective response to Assad’s behaviour and shifted the focus to IS, justifying the course correction by tarnishing much of the Syrian rebellion as “extremist”. </p>
<p>This neatly collapsed the incredibly complex Syrian catastrophe into a simple counter-terrorism problem, and set the stage for two years of disastrously negligent US policy.</p>
<p>Had the spectre of al-Qaeda not dominated the US’s security policy for so long, perhaps the Obama administration would’ve been more imaginative and less blinkered. Instead, the long-standing obsession with the group has worn a deep groove that US foreign policy seems unable to escape.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Scott Lucas can be heard discussing the US’s Syria policy on the latest episode of The Conversation’s podcast, <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/podcasts/the-anthill">The Anthill</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/64072/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Scott Lucas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The US seems stuck in War-on-Terror mode even though reality has moved on.Scott Lucas, Professor of International Politics, University of BirminghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/632902016-08-09T08:09:21Z2016-08-09T08:09:21ZAmerican obsession with ‘al-Qaeda in Syria’ is making the conflict there worse<p>The jihadist organisation Jabhat al-Nusra (aka the al-Nusra Front), involved in Syria’s civil war since 2012, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOJpzGws4mY">announced in a video</a> that it is formally detaching itself from al-Qaeda. The move, which had been negotiated for well over a year, was confirmed on July 28. </p>
<p>In the video, Nusra leader Abu Mohammad al-Joulani said the detachment was “in the necessity of the continuity of the jihad of al-Sham [Syria]”. Renamed as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (the Front for the Conquest of Syria), Nusra will try to bring other rebel factions into a unified body, which al-Joulani says will represent “the masses of the people, liberating their lands, giving victory to their faith, and upholding their testimony of faith”.</p>
<p>Some US-based observers quickly reacted with suspicion and derision. Thomas Joscelyn in the <a href="http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2016/07/analysis-al-nusrah-front-rebrands-itself-as-jabhat-fath-al-sham.php">Long War Journal</a> dismissed the statement as propaganda with no substance: “Even if Joulani did say that his group had really split from al-Qaeda (which he didn’t), there is no good reason to believe him.” White House spokesman Josh Earnest <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/al-nusra-leader-jolani-announces-split-al-qaeda-160728163725624.html">commented</a>: “There continues to be increasing concern about Nusra Front’s growing capacity for external operations that could threaten both the United States and Europe.” Earnest’s State Department counterpart John Kirby was <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/al-nusra-leader-jolani-announces-split-al-qaeda-160728163725624.html">more dismissive</a>: “They are still considered a foreign terrorist organisation. We judge a group by what they do, not by what they call themselves.”</p>
<p>These reactions were all too predictable. They were also misguided, and the thinking behind them is damaging.</p>
<p>For most Western onlookers, dealing with Nusra (like the Syrian conflict at large) is above all a matter of counter-terrorism that is somewhat distinct from the fundamental and still primary cause of the Syrian conflict: a challenge to Bashar al-Assad’s regime, whose violent response has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions.</p>
<p>At the root of the problem is that most pundits and officials outside the Middle East generally have a poor sense of the way the forces active in Syria are related to each other. The reactions to Nusra’s announcement duly made no reference to the group’s years of battle against Assad’s regime and now the Islamic State (IS), which originally spawned the group but which is now its bitter rival. They also overlook the anti-Assad movement’s bitter internal fight over who can wield authority and legitimacy.</p>
<p>Uncertain about what to do and caught up in its own simplistic vision of the terrorist enemy in Syria, the Obama administration is ploughing on with its counter-terrorism-first strategy of focused aerial attacks on IS and other groups – regardless of whether its approach might actually prolong the Syrian catastrophe.</p>
<h2>A Syrian force</h2>
<p>It’s certainly true that Nusra developed out of al-Qaeda. In 2012, IS, <a href="https://theconversation.com/islamic-state-vs-al-qaeda-a-rivalry-that-dates-back-to-old-personality-clashes-43893">then affiliated with al-Qaeda</a>, sent al-Joulani and others into Syria to establish the movement in the fight against the Assad regime. </p>
<p>But as al-Joulani also says in the “divorce” video, Nusra has always considered itself a Syrian rather than a transnational movement. This is a crucial point. Most of Nusra’s recruits were and are local Syrian men looking to join a well-armed faction that could take on Assad’s military. Where it sees common cause, Nusra fights alongside rebel factions, and it seeks influence in the governance and legal systems being set up across much of rebel-controlled Syria. This puts it at odds with IS, which is primarily a “foreign” movement of fighters and leaders from outside Syria. </p>
<p>And yet, the Obama administration has stuck to its mantra that “Nusra is al-Qaeda” – and this has become a rationale for withholding and even withdrawing support for Syrian rebel forces challenging the Assad regime. </p>
<p>Reducing the Syrian issue to “counter-terrorism” underpinned the US’s September 2014 decision to bomb not only IS, but Nusra as well. The first strikes were carried out on the pretext that a mysterious “<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-29350271">Khorasan Group</a>” was working within Nusra to plan attacks on the US and Europe, and later under the umbrella of the fight against Islamist extremist groups in general. But those raids didn’t just kill terrorists; they killed men from Syrian communities. Their families and neighbours probably don’t share Nusra’s ideology, but do see the virtue of the continuing fight against the Assad regime. </p>
<p>As activists and rebel officers <a href="http://www.ibtimes.com/us-airstrikes-syria-weaken-isis-strengthen-support-al-qaeda-offshoot-1697346">said</a> from the outset of the US strikes: “People are becoming more sympathetic to al-Nusra because they were targeted in the attacks.”</p>
<p>The conflation of Nusra with al-Qaeda is having an even greater political effect. Russia has exploited this premise to bounce the US into accepting its intense aerial intervention, which has propped up the Assad regime since September 2015. Even though Moscow is in fact targeting Syria’s opposition and rebels – killing thousands of civilians and <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-missiles-idUSKCN0VO12Y">destroying infrastructure</a> such as hospitals, water plants, bakeries, and schools – it can justify hitting areas where Nusra is present because the group’s forces cannot be “separated” from other rebel factions.</p>
<p>Far from taking any action to curb Russia’s campaign, the US has moved to co-operate with it. US Secretary of State John Kerry is now pursuing a <a href="http://www.thenational.ae/world/middle-east/will-us-and-russia-work-together-to-end-war-in-syria">joint command-and-control centre</a> to co-ordinate US and Russian aerial operations. This has replaced any real effort to find a political solution, since Assad has <a href="http://english.alarabiya.net/en/2016/04/14/Assad-departure-ruled-out-ahead-of-talks.html">ruled out</a> a proposal that he cede power to a transitional governing authority.</p>
<p>Again, the response from the US and foreign policy thinkers, Charles Lister among them, is to advocate building up a “moderate” political and military force against Assad. But this “moderate” alternative is a vague, even abstract confection. </p>
<h2>The so-called solution</h2>
<p>Who is it actually supposed to be made up of? Groups based in Turkey, who have claimed leadership since 2012 but <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/syrian-opposition-groups-stop-pretending">have long been criticised</a> for being distant from the battlefield? Is it the disparate elements of the <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/11/free-syrian-army-decimated-desertions-151111064831800.html">Free Syrian Army</a>? Is it <a href="http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/ahrar-al-sham-s-apocalyptic-vision-syria-and-beyond-455405201">Ahrar al-Sham</a>, an Islamist group that’s one of the most important actors inside Syria? Or is it <a href="http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/jaish-al-islam-piece-918366283">Jaish al-Islam</a>, the leading rebel group in central Syria? So far, no answers are forthcoming. </p>
<p>Instead of working with long-established groups inside Syria, the US military and CIA have tried a series of programmes of vetting, training and equipping <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/27/world/middleeast/cia-arms-for-syrian-rebels-supplied-black-market-officials-say.html?_r=0">“moderate” fighters</a> outside the country, all of which have failed. Meanwhile, the US is now blocking any assistance to anti-Assad factions in southern Syria, and is detached from the critical battlefront in the north-west, where Russia and the Assad regime are have laid siege to opposition-held areas of Aleppo city.</p>
<p>Less than 24 hours after Nusra released al-Joulani’s video, the power of the blended rebel forces was made clear when a rebel-JFS offensive turned the tide in the battle for Aleppo. On August 6, after only eight days, the rebel coalition group <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/02/world/middleeast/syria-russia-airstrikes-rebels-army-conquest-jaish-al-fatah.html">Jaish al-Fatah</a> (which Nusra has joined in various offensives) not only <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-37000570">broke the joint Russian-regime siege</a> but also threatened to isolate the Syrian military in the areas of the city it controls.</p>
<p>This makes it plain just how arbitrary the West’s categorisations are. For now, whatever label the US and analysts put on Nusra, the rebels need it as a battlefield ally, and any distinction between “moderate” and “extremist” is a political imposition. The US could belatedly recognise the folly of its artificial labels and establish lines of co-operation with the groups inside Syria, or it can continue to obsess over “al-Qaeda in Syria” without considering the situation on the ground.</p>
<p>If it chooses the latter, it will implicitly give way to the Russian-Assad-Iran-Hezbollah alliance’s attempt to bomb, besiege, and starve the opposition and rebels into submission – all in the name of counter-terrorism. </p>
<p>And as the recent events in and near Aleppo have shown, in doing so it accepts the risk of being shoved aside. Giving up on any support from the US, the opposition and rebels will work with Nusra not only to survive, but continue their challenge to the Assad regime.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/63290/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Scott Lucas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>When it comes to the Syrian opposition, it’s practically impossible to separate ‘moderates’ from ‘extremists’.Scott Lucas, Professor of International Politics, University of BirminghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/554372016-03-02T19:05:50Z2016-03-02T19:05:50ZOut of the ashes of Afghanistan and Iraq: the rise and rise of Islamic State<p><em>Since announcing its arrival as a global force in June 2014 with the declaration of a caliphate on territory captured in Iraq and Syria, the jihadist group Islamic State has shocked the world with its brutality.</em></p>
<p><em>Its seemingly sudden prominence has led to much speculation about the group’s origins: how do we account for forces and events that paved the way for the emergence of Islamic State? In the final article of <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/understanding-islamic-state">our series examining this question</a>, Greg Barton shows the role recent Western intervention in the Middle East played in the group’s inexorable rise.</em></p>
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<p>Despite precious little certainty in the “what ifs” of history, it’s clear the rise of Islamic State (IS) wouldn’t have been possible without the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. Without these Western interventions, al-Qaeda would never have gained the foothold it did, and IS would not have emerged to take charge of northern Iraq.</p>
<p>Whether or not the Arab Spring, and the consequent civil war in Syria, would still have occurred is much less clear. </p>
<p>But even if war hadn’t broken out in Syria, it’s unlikely an al-Qaeda spin-off such as IS would have become such a decisive actor without launching an insurgency in Iraq. For an opportunistic infection to take hold so comprehensively, as IS clearly has, requires a severely weakened body politic and a profoundly compromised immune system. </p>
<p>Such were the conditions in Goodluck Jonathan’s Nigeria from 2010 to 2015 and in conflict-riven Somalia after the fall of the Barre regime in 1991. And it was so in Afghanistan for the four decades after conflict broke out in 1978 and in Pakistan after General Zia-ul-Haq declared martial law in 1977. </p>
<p>Sadly, but even more clearly, such are the circumstances in Iraq and Syria today. And that’s the reason <a href="http://economicsandpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Global-Terrorism-Index-2015.pdf">around 80% of all deaths due to terrorist attacks</a> in recent years have occurred in five of the six countries discussed here, where such conditions still prevail.</p>
<h2>An unique opportunity</h2>
<p>The myth of modern international terrorist movements, and particularly of al-Qaeda and its outgrowths such as IS (which really is a third-generation al-Qaeda movement), is that they’re inherently potent and have a natural power of attraction. </p>
<p>The reality is that while modern terrorist groups can and do operate all around the globe to the point where no country can consider itself completely safe, they can only build a base when local issues attract on-the-ground support. </p>
<p>Consider al-Qaeda, which is in the business of global struggle. It wants to unite a transnational <em>ummah</em> to take on far-off enemies. But it has only ever really enjoyed substantial success when it has happened across conducive local circumstances. </p>
<p>The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s provided an opportunity uniquely suited to the rise of al-Qaeda and associated movements. It provided plausible justification for a defensive jihad – a just war – that garnered broad international support and allowed the group to coalesce in 1989 out of the Arab fighters who had rallied to support the Afghans in their fight against the Soviets. </p>
<p>Further opportunities emerged in the Northern Caucasus, where local ethno-national grievances were eventually transformed into the basis for a more global struggle. </p>
<p>The declaration of independence by Chechnya in 1991 led to all-out war with the Soviet military between 1994 and 1996, when tens of thousands were killed. After a short, uneasy peace, a decade-long second civil war started in 1999 following the invasion of neighbouring Dagestan by the International Islamic Brigade. </p>
<p>The second civil war began with an intense campaign to seize control of the Chechen capital, Grozny. But it became dominated by years of fighting jihadi and other insurgents in the Caucasus mountains and dealing with related terrorist attacks in Russia. </p>
<p>In Nigeria and Somalia, Boko Haram and al-Shabaab now share many of the key attributes of al-Qaeda, with whom they have forged nascent links. But they too emerged primarily because of the failure of governance and the persistence of deep-seated local grievances.</p>
<p>Even in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda struggled to transform itself into a convincing champion of local interests in the 1990s. After becoming increasingly isolated following the September 11 attacks on the US, it failed to gain support from the Afghan Taliban for its global struggle.</p>
<p>But something new happened in Iraq beginning in 2003. The Jordanian street thug <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/07/the-short-violent-life-of-abu-musab-al-zarqawi/304983/">Musab al-Zarqawi</a> correctly intuited that the impending Western invasion and occupation of Iraq would provide the perfect conditions for the emergence of insurgencies. </p>
<p>Al-Zarqawi positioned himself in Iraq ahead of the invasion and deftly rode a wave of anger and despair to initiate and grow an insurgency that in time came to dominate the broken nation. </p>
<p>Initially, al-Zarqawi was only one of many insurgent leaders intent on destabilising Iraq. But, in October 2004, after years of uneasy relations with the al-Qaeda leader during two tours in Afghanistan, he finally yielded to Osama bin Laden’s request that he swear on oath of loyalty (<em>bayat</em>) to him. And so al-Zarqawi’s notorious network of insurgents became known as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). </p>
<h2>From the ashes</h2>
<p>Iraq’s de-Ba'athification process of May 2003 to June 2004, during which senior technocrats and military officers linked to the Ba'ath party (the vehicle of the Saddam Hussein regime) were removed from office, set the stage for many to join counter-occupation insurgent groups – including AQI.</p>
<p>Without the sacking of a large portion of Iraq’s military and security leaders, its technocrats and productive middle-class professionals, it’s not clear whether this group would have come to dominate so comprehensively. These alienated Sunni professionals gave AQI, as well as IS, much of its core military and strategic competency.</p>
<p>But even with the windfall opportunity presented to al-Zarqawi by the wilful frustration of Sunni interests by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouri_al-Maliki">Nouri al-Maliki’s</a> Shia-dominated government from 2006 to 2014, which deprived them of any immediate hope for the future and confidence in protecting their families and communities, AQI was almost totally destroyed after the Sunni awakening began in 2006. </p>
<p>The Sunni awakening forces, or “Sons of Iraq”, began with tribal leaders in Anbar province forming an alliance with the US military. For almost three years, tens of thousands of Sunni tribesmen were paid directly to fight AQI, but the Maliki government refused to incorporate them into the regular Iraqi Security Force. And, after October 2008 – when the US military handed over management of these forces – he refused to support them.</p>
<p>The death of al-Zarqawi in June 2006 contributed to the profound weakening of the strongest of all post-invasion insurgent groups. AQI’s force strength was reduced to several hundred fighters and it lost the capacity to dominate the insurgency.</p>
<p>Then, in 2010 and 2011, circumstances combined to blow oxygen onto the smouldering coals. </p>
<p>In 2010, the greatly underestimated Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a local Iraqi cleric with serious religious scholarly credentials, took charge of AQI and began working to a sophisticated long-term plan.</p>
<p>Elements of the strategy went by the name “breaking the walls”. In the 12 months to July 2013, this entailed the movement literally breaking down the prison walls in compounds around Baghdad that held hundreds of hardcore al-Qaeda fighters. </p>
<p>Islamic State, as the group now called itself, also benefited from the inflow of former Iraqi intelligence officers and senior military leaders. This had begun with de-Ba'athification in 2003 and continued after the collapse of the Sunni awakening and the increasingly overt sectarianism of the Maliki government. </p>
<p>Together, they developed tactics based on vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices and the strategic use of suicide bombers. These were deployed not in the passionate but often undirected fashion of al-Qaeda but much more like smart bombs in the hands of a modern army. </p>
<p>And the US military withdrawal from Iraq in late 2011, well telegraphed ahead of time, provided an excellent opportunity for the struggling insurgency to rebuild. As did the outbreak of civil war in Syria.</p>
<h2>A helping hand</h2>
<p>Al-Baghdadi initially dispatched his trusted Syrian lieutenant, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, to form a separate organisation in Syria: the al-Nusra front. </p>
<p>Jabhat al-Nusra quickly established itself in northern Syria. But when al-Julani refused to fold his organisation in under his command, al-Baghdadi rebranded AQI (or Islamic State in Iraq) Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham/the Levant (ISIS/ISIL).</p>
<p>Then, a series of events turned IS from an insurgency employing terrorist methods to becoming a nascent rogue state. These included: the occupation of Raqqa on the Syrian Euphrates in December 2013; the taking of Ramadi a month later; consolidation of IS control throughout Iraq’s western Anbar province; and, finally, a sudden surge down the river Tigris in June 2014 that took Mosul and most of the towns and cities along the river north of Baghdad within less than a week.</p>
<p>IS’s declaration of the caliphate on June 29, 2014, was a watershed moment, which is only now being properly understood. </p>
<p>In its ground operations, including the governing of aggrieved Sunni communities, IS moved well beyond being simply a terrorist movement. It came to function as a rogue state ruling over around 5 million people in the northern cities of the Euphrates and the Tigris, and defending its territory through conventional military means.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113520/original/image-20160302-25918-q1pucr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113520/original/image-20160302-25918-q1pucr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=745&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113520/original/image-20160302-25918-q1pucr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=745&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113520/original/image-20160302-25918-q1pucr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=745&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113520/original/image-20160302-25918-q1pucr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=936&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113520/original/image-20160302-25918-q1pucr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=936&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113520/original/image-20160302-25918-q1pucr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=936&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In 2010, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi took charge of AQI and began working to a sophisticated long-term plan.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Furqan Media</span></span>
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<p>At the same time, it skilfully exploited the internet and social media in ways the old al-Qaeda could not do – and that its second-generation offshoot, al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), had only partially achieved. </p>
<p>This allowed IS to draw in tens of thousands of foreign fighters. Most came from the Middle East and Northern Africa, but as many as 5,000 came from Europe, with thousands more from the Caucasus and Asia. </p>
<p>Unlike the case in Afghanistan in the 1980s, these foreign fighters have played a key role in providing sufficient strength to take and hold territory while also building a global network of support.</p>
<p>But without the perfect-storm conditions of post-invasion insurgency, this most potent expression of al-Qaedaism yet would never have risen to dominate both the region and the world in the way that it does. </p>
<p>Even in its wildest dreams, al-Qaeda could never have imagined that Western miscalculations post-9/11 could have led to such foolhardy engagements – not just in Afghanistan but also in Iraq. </p>
<p>Were it not for these miscalculations, 9/11 might well have precipitated the decline of al-Qaeda. Instead, with our help, it spawned a global jihadi movement with a territorial base far more powerful than al-Qaeda ever had.</p>
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<p><em>This is the final article in our series on the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/understanding-islamic-state">historical roots of Islamic State</a>. <a href="http://bit.ly/UnderstandingIS">Download our special report</a> collating the whole the series.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/55437/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Greg Barton is co-director of the Australian Intervention Support Hub, a CVE capacity-building initiative supported by the Australian government and based at the ANU and Deakin University. He previously led an ARC Linkage grant project researching radicalisation and disengagement from violent extremism. He is currently a research professor at the Alfred Deakin Institute.</span></em></p>The final article of our series on the historical roots of Islamic State examines the role recent Western intervention in the Middle East played in the group’s inexorable rise.Greg Barton, Chair in Global Islamic Politics, Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation; Co-Director, Australian Intervention Support Hub, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.