ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (16 page)

The camp at which Samer must have trained is called Amir Al-Momenin (Commander of the Faithful), located about fifteen miles outside of Tehran; it’s where the Quds Force’s ballistic missiles are housed. According to an Iranian military officer who spoke to the
Wall Street Journal
in September 2013, the trainees “are told that the war in Syria is akin to [an] epic battle for Shiite Islam, and if they die they will be martyrs of the highest rank.”

Unsurprisingly, the National Defense Force has already been implicated in anti-Sunni pogroms, one having taken place in the town of al-Bayda and a few neighborhoods in the city of Baniyas, in the coastal province of Tartous. In May 2013 eyewitnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch testified that “government and pro-government forces entered homes, separated men from women and young children, rounded up the men of each neighborhood in one spot, and executed them by shooting them at close range. . . . In many cases, the pro-government forces burnt the bodies of those they had just shot.”

Although al-Bayda and Baniyas are home to a minority Christian population, all the Christian witnesses who spoke to the NGO said that pro-regime forces “only killed Sunnis and burned Sunni homes.” The regime, meanwhile, claimed that it had killed “terrorists.”

Iran’s involvement in Syria has strongly mirrored its involvement in US-occupied Iraq, with one stark and ironic exception: now
it
appears to be the occupying military force, desperately trying to hold together a shambolic and undisciplined native army. Suleimani’s militias have taken on more and more military responsibility as al-Assad’s conventional forces have deteriorated, died, or fled. This has resulted in high-profile Iranian fatalities, most famously that of senior Quds Force Commander Hassan Shater, who was killed on a road that connected Damascus to Beirut. Notably, Tehran has relied only on operatives from its foreign intelligence arm of the IRGC to “assist and train” al-Assad’s conventional army, but also ones from the IRGC’s Ground Forces, men with extensive experience in suppressing ethnically driven insurgencies, such as among Azerbaijanis in Iran’s West Azerbaijan province. Several members of IRGC Ground Forces, including a brigade commander, were among forty-eight Iranians captured by Syrian rebels and subsequently released in January 2013 as part of a prisoner swap.

A report published by the Institute for the Study of War found
that in one interesting respect, Iran’s counterinsurgency tactics in Syria may consciously be replicating America’s in Iraq. In Homs, the city known as the “birthplace of the revolution,” to which the Syrian army laid merciless siege in 2012, once the rebels were expelled, the regime constructed a ten-foot-high concrete wall redolent of the one US forces had constructed around Sadr City in 2008. “Iranian observers working with proxies in Sadr City at that time would have seen the effectiveness of the campaign firsthand and could have advised the Assad regime to adopt a similar approach,” the report concluded.

“Syria is occupied by the Iranian regime,” former Syrian prime minister Riyad Hijab declared after his defection in August 2012. “The person who runs the country is not Bashar al-Assad but Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iranian regime’s Quds Force.”

As early as May 2011, Suleimani and his deputy, Mohsen Chizari—the same operative who had been detained by JSOC in 2006 after attending a meeting at SCIRI headquarters—were sanctioned by the US government for their “complicity . . .in the human rights abuses and repression of the Syrian people.” Suleimani was designated specifically as the “conduit for Iranian material support” to Syria’s General Intelligence Directorate. Such support, as later came to light, included the trafficking of arms, munitions, and Quds Force personnel in civilian and military airliners across Iraq’s airspace to Damascus, prompting several demarches from Washington to Baghdad, all met with denials by the al-Maliki government that any such sky corridor existed. (In 2012, when the Iraqis stopped denying it, they claimed it was “humanitarian aid” and that the United States had failed to provide any evidence of weapons being transferred.) According to US intelligence, Suleimani’s helpmeet in smuggling men and arms to Syria via Iraq is Hadi al-Amiri, the head of the Badr Corps, which al-Zarqawi made a lightning rod for AQI’s Sunni recruitment in 2004. By 2013 al-Amiri was Iraq’s Transportation Minister.

This may account for why the “spillover” of one country’s war into another country wasn’t merely confined to movement of Sunni jihadists. In January 2014 the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorist Information Center in Israel calculated that there were actually more foreign Shia fighters helping Assad than there were foreign Sunni fighters trying to overthrow him.

• • •

Jaafar Athab, a member of Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, the group responsible for killing five American servicemen in Karbala in 2007, was killed in Syria in 2012, whereupon his body was brought back to Baghdad and given a funeral in Tahrir Square under the supervision of the Iraqi Security Forces. Kata’ib Hezbollah has also lost Shia militiamen in Syria. Ditto Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, which formed a Shia-Alawite Special Group made up of “[five hundred] Iraqi, Syrian, and . . .other nationalities” called the Abu al-Fadhal al-Abbas brigade. Phillip Smyth, an expert on the Special Groups, documented in August 2013 how the Badr Corps’s own Facebook page had announced a 1,500-strong presence in Syria and public funerals for its members slain in Iraq. Most of these fighters couched their participation in al-Assad’s war in strictly defensive language; they were going off, they said, to “protect holy shrines.” Though it is true many Shia-Alawite militants were deployed to religious sites, notably the Sayyida Zeinab mosque in the Damascus suburbs, this custodianship of sacred architecture became a sectarian euphemism or code for what was, in effect, Shia Islamist holy war—or counterinsurgency à la Suleimani.

Iran has even sent thousands of Afghani refugees to fight on al-Assad’s behalf, offering them residency rights and as much as $500 per month. Others are allegedly ex-Taliban fighters who became Iranian mercenaries to fight “against those who are being assisted by Americans in Syria.”

No IRGC-run subsidiary has been more integral to Assad’s survival thus far than Lebanese Hezbollah, which was almost
single-handedly responsible for expelling Syrian rebels from the town of al-Qusayr, which lies along a vital Syrian-Lebanese supply corridor. “Hezbollah is leading operations in Qusayr,” one Party of God paramilitary confessed to NOW Lebanon. “The Syrian army is only playing a secondary role, deploying after an area is completely ‘cleaned’ and secured.”

Of course, what he meant by “clean[ing]” areas is more accurately described as ethnic cleansing. “There have been obvious examples of denominational cleansing in different areas in Homs,” a Syrian activist named Abu Rami told the
Guardian
in July 2013. “It is . . .part of a major Iranian Shia plan, which is obvious through the involvement of Hezbollah and Iranian militias. And it’s also part of Assad’s personal Alawite state project.”

The project alluded to was the supposed creation of an Alawite rump state on the Syrian coast. For a time, when it was still suffering territorial losses, the regime subtly put out indications that this would be its fallback plan if Damascus fell, a way to telegraph to the West that it would remain guarded of a vulnerable Alawite minority in the face of what it originally and consistently portrayed as the rebel cause: a Sunni supremacist plan for extermination.

BASHAR’S SECOND INTERVIEW

In marked contrast to his serene
Wall Street Journal
interview in 2011, al-Assad’s first post-uprising interview with a Western newspaper was a forecast of Armageddon. “Syria is the hub now in this region,” he told the
Sunday Telegraph
. “It is the fault line, and if you play with the ground you will cause an earthquake. . . . Do you want to see another Afghanistan, or tens of Afghanistans? Any problem in Syria will burn the whole region.” The fire metaphor again. Absent, of course, from this apocalyptic forecast was any mention of whom the original arsonists was. But that was of little consequence, because it worked.

Not only did NATO and Washington rule out active military intervention in Syria in the form of a no-fly zone or the establishment of “safe areas” in parts of the country, but they were equally wary and dismissive of al-Assad’s enemies, in a manner that can only have pleased al-Assad. When Hillary Clinton left government, she chastised President Obama for not collaborating with nationalist or secular rebels sooner—a supposed policy failure to which she attributed the rise of ISIS. But in February 2012, when she was still secretary of state, she told CBS: “We know al Qaeda—Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria. Are we supporting al Qaeda in Syria? Hamas is now supporting the opposition. Are we supporting Hamas in Syria?” Not knowing who or what the opposition was would remain the public posture of the White House for years thereafter, until it solved this mystery and professed itself unimpressed with its discovery. “This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists, and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards,” President Obama told the
New York Times
as late as August 2014, even after the CIA began arming and training a small number of rebels.

The president’s assessment suffered from two problems, however. First, his characterization of the rebels was untrue. The Violations Documentation Center, a Syrian opposition source but one trusted for its empiricism, conducted a survey of rebel deaths in the war and found that doctors accounted for a statistically negligible 1 percent, while teachers and farmers even less than that. Soldiers, on the other hand, constituted the majority of fatalities, at 62 percent. As Ambassador Frederic Hof, Obama’s former special adviser on Syria at the State Department, has reminded the president, Syria
has a conscript army, meaning that most adult males have some prior military experience. Based on our reporting from Antakya, Turkey, we can attest a single refugee camp houses thousands of low- and mid-level defectors from the Syrian military.

Furthermore, the expectation that Syria’s rebels could not defeat a battered and depleted Syrian army, even backed by Iranian proxies and Russian matériel, seemed odd given that the policy Obama ultimately adopted was to have them trained to defeat ISIS, the heirs to an insurgency that battered the most powerful army on earth in Iraq for nearly a decade. Given that these rebels’ raison d’etre
was fighting the regime, not ISIS, America’s proxy counterinsurgents—Free Syrian JSOCs, basically—were bound to cause resentment and disaffection. “The Americans are using the lies to get information [about jihadists],” one rebel told
Newsweek
in February 2013. “If you ask any rebel in Syria right now, he will say America is our enemy.” This was hyperbole, but became less so after al-Assad’s sarin gas attack on rebels and civilians in Damascus in August 2013. When the United States failed to respond militarily, according to Obama’s own “red line,” many had had their fill of empty or broken promises. Not long after Obama inked a deal with Vladimir Putin to decommission Syria’s chemical weapons program, scores of Western-backed rebels either quit the field, mutinied, or invited ISIS to raid their Syrian warehouses filled with US-sent aid and supplies.

THE JIHADISTS’ AMNESTY

While rebel disillusionment with the United States and its true prerogatives in Syria took time to come about, al-Assad wasted little time guaranteeing that extremists dominated the insurgency. On May 31, 2011, only a few months into the uprising, he issued a general amnesty as part of his package of “reforms,” mostly symbolic gestures aimed at placating the protest movement. In reality, the am
nesty was more of a booby trap than a salve. Although meant to free all of Syria’s “political prisoners,” it was applied selectively—plenty of protestors and activists were kept in jail, while an untold number of Salafist-Jihadists were let out. Of these, many had not long ago been on rat lines to Iraq, only to return to Syria and be collared and locked up by the very Mukhabarat that had sent them there in the first place.

Muhammad Habash, the former Syrian parliamentarian, has said that the regime can only have known that at least some of the Islamists it was releasing would take up arms against the state. Three men did: Zahran Alloush, Hassan Abboud, and Ahmad Issa al-Sheikh, the current or former Salafist leaders of the best-organized rebel brigades in Syria. There’s a famous photograph of them standing in a row, all smiles, not long after being decreed free men by al-Assad. Future ISIS members were also amnestied, including Awwad al-Mahklaf, who is now a local emir in Raqqa, and Abu al-Ahir al-Absi, who served time in Sednaya prison in 2007 for membership in al-Qaeda.

In August 2012, after his brother Firas was killed near the Turkish border, al-Absi took charge of the Mujahideen Shura Council, a group that Firas had started. As of mid-July 2014, according to the US State Department, al-Absi became ISIS’s provincial leader for Homs, in the Aleppo region.

Habash, as mentioned earlier, had been in charge of the de-radicalization program at Sednaya in 2008 after proposing himself for the role to Syria’s National Security Bureau. “Salafism could have been controlled or reformed,” he told us. “The regime drove Salafists and Sufis to violence. Ideology was part of the reason, but let me tell you: if Gandhi spent three months in Syria, he would be a jihadi extremist.”

Prisons in Syria are bywords for Islamization—terrorist universities in the heart of the Middle East, albeit where the faculty often encourage their students to learn. A revealing anecdote
was relayed to the authors by Fawaz Tello, a longtime Syrian dissident who was arrested by the regime on September 11, 2001, when, understandably, the world’s attention was diverted elsewhere. He had been an activist associated with the Damascus Declaration, a pro-reform political movement that enjoyed a brief flowering in the initial days of the dauphin’s “reformist” presidency, only to be summarily crushed thereafter. Tello was sent to Adra prison, northeast of Damascus, where he made the acquaintance of Nadeem Baloosh. “He was a young man from Latakia,” Tello said. “He had been in Turkey, and when he returned to Syria, Turkish intelligence informed the Mukhabarat and they arrested him. He spent more than a year in Adra.” Baloosh was in a neighboring cell to Tello’s, and during that time, the two had discussions at night, “shouting” through the doors. “I found that there was nothing compatible with this man. He had very extremist views. But he was also talking to other Islamists in the other cells and he was spreading his ideology. He hadn’t been a member of al-Qaeda, nor had he attended any military training camps. He was just a Salafist, but nonviolent. A lot of people put into prison were like this. During their time in the jail, it was as if they were attending jihadist college—including Baloosh.”