Saudi Arabia and Turkey Rejoin Hands in Syria

by Derek Davison

In their May 3 report on recent rebel successes in Syria’s Idlib Province, McClatchy reporters Roy Gutman and Musab Alhamadee identified a newfound unity between Islamist and moderate rebel groups as the key factor in the success of the Idlib campaign:

Key to the victories, he said, is a willingness of moderates, Islamists and al Qaida’s Nusra to work together.

“After four years of disunity, we came to the conclusion that if we are not united, we will not be able to defeat the regime,” said Ghabi. “So even if we don’t agree in our thoughts or our ideology, we must agree on the military task. We all share the same goal: toppling the Assad regime.”

However, a recent Associated Press report identifies another recent rapprochement that may be working to the rebel coalition’s benefit, in this case between regional powers Saudi Arabia and Turkey. From the report:

The two countries—one a democracy, the other a conservative kingdom—have for years been at odds over how to deal with Assad, their common enemy. But mutual frustration with what they consider American indecision has brought the two together in a strategic alliance that is driving recent rebel gains in northern Syria, and has helped strengthen a new coalition of anti-Assad insurgents, Turkish officials say.

Those two countries, along with a third US ally, Qatar, have been providing support to the rebel coalition known as the “Army of Conquest” (JAF, after its Arabic name, Jaysh al-Fatah) despite two key US concerns. First and foremost, Washington is very concerned that the JAF either includes or has worked closely with the Al-Qaeda linked Nusra Front; indeed, Nusra’s fighters seem to have been at the forefront of most of its advances in Idlib in recent months. US officials are also concerned that the JAF’s war aims, which center on toppling Bashar al-Assad and possibly replacing him with an Islamist government, will conflict with and complicate America’s fight to degrade and ultimately defeat the Islamic State (ISIS or IS):

That is provoking concern in the United States, which does not want rebel groups, including the al-Qaida linked Nusra Front, uniting to topple Assad. The Obama administration worries that the revived rebel alliance could potentially put a more dangerous radical Islamist regime in Assad’s place, just as the U.S. is focused on bringing down the Islamic State group. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issues, said the administration is concerned that the new alliance is helping Nusra gain territory in Syria.

Turkey and Saudi Arabia have been at odds for some time over the fallout from 2011’s Arab Spring movement and, specifically, the status of the Muslim Brotherhood around the Middle East. Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, has been a strong supporter of the Brotherhood, and Ankara was strongly opposed to the July 2013 coup that forced Egypt’s elected Brotherhood government from office. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, has had a rocky relationship with the Brotherhood for decades. Riyadh sent billions of dollars in aid to Cairo after the 2013 coup, and went so far as to declare the Brotherhood a terrorist group in March of last year.

However, that anti-Brotherhood position began to soften under new Saudi King Salman. In February, then-Saudi Foreign Minister Saud bin Faisal told a Saudi journalist that “we do not have a problem with the Muslim Brotherhood; our problem is with a small group affiliated to this organization.” This change in policy may have been motivated by a desire to improve relations with Turkey in order to gain Ankara’s support for efforts to counter what the Saudis perceive to be Iran’s growing regional presence. Tehran’s support for the (weakened but still quite viable) Assad government is one manifestation of that regional presence. Another, at least according to the Saudis, is Iranian support for Yemen’s Houthi rebels. It is thus noteworthy that Erdo?an has publicly supported the Saudi-led, anti-Houthi military operation.

The AP report cites “a Turkish official” who says, contrary to American concerns, that Turkish and Saudi support for JAF is not finding its way to the Nusra Front:

Turkish officials say that Turkey provides logistical and intelligence support to some members of the coalition, but has no interaction with Nusra — which it considers a terrorist group. But the difference with IS, the officials say, is that Turkey does not view Nusra as a security threat and therefore does not impede it.

The Turkish official who touted the Conquest Army’s ability to fight cohesively said, however, that Turkey and Saudi Arabia have moved to bolster Ahrar al-Sham at Nusra’s expense. This strays from the U.S. line that al-Sham is an extremist group, but Turkish officials say they distinguish between international jihadist groups and others with more localized aims. They place al-Sham in the latter category.

Moreover, they hope to use al-Sham’s rise to put pressure on Nusra to renounce its ties to al-Qaida and open itself to outside help.

But this defense of the Turkey-Saudi mission actually raises more concerns than it answers. The idea that aid to Ahrar al-Sham could “pressure” Nusra to cut ties to al-Qaeda obviously poses the question of whether the US could accept a Nusra-led Syrian regime organized around an al-Qaeda-influenced ideology so long as it foreswore any overt ties to al-Qaeda’s core network (whose increasing weakness may render it irrelevant anyway). Moreover, Ahrar al-Sham’s immediate concerns may be local rather than regional or international, but its ideology is only marginally more moderate than Nusra’s, and it too has had high-level ties to the core al-Qaeda network. Its human rights record is also questionable. The Assyrian Monitor for Human Rights reported that Ahrar al-Sham fighters executed two Christian civilians in Idlib in late March, though it should be noted that The New York Times reported that Nusra carried out the executions.

In their McClatchy report, Gutman and Alhamadee noted that moderate rebels are concerned that Islamists will become harder to hold in check if the campaign (which seems to now be targeting the city of Ariha, also in Idlib Province) continues to have success:

But both [moderate rebel commanders Jemiel] Raddoon and [Mohamad] Ghabi acknowledge concerns about what will follow if Ariha falls. Radoon says he’s managed to keep the Islamists and Nusra out of the Ghab valley offensive, but whether he can do that after Ariha falls is unclear. They worry the Islamists and Nusra will attack Christians and Alawites who’ve backed Assad.

“We are expecting trouble after Ariha,” he said. “Where will the Fateh group go after Ariha falls? They will go to our areas, mixed areas.”

Already, said Radoon, the Islamists and Nusra have far more weaponry, and the booty from Ariha will strengthen them further.

One thing the Turkey-Saudi effort has clearly done is to make America’s central Syrian plan, training an army of moderate Syrian rebels that can take on IS and, ultimately, other extremist rebels and Assad, seem almost completely irrelevant to events within Syria. That plan, finally under way,initially will involve training a few hundred fighters at most. It will be years before that force is large enough to conceivably take on any of the major players in Syria. In the meantime America’s key regional allies appear to be taking matters into their own hands.

Photo: Secretary of State John Kerry meets with the foreign ministers of Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.

Derek Davison

Derek Davison is an analyst covering U.S. foreign policy and international affairs and the writer/editor of the newsletter Foreign Exchanges. His writing has appeared at LobeLog, Jacobin, and Foreign Policy in Focus.

SHOW 2 COMMENTS

2 Comments

  1. There’s a problem with the analysis, based as it is on the AP story. The Turkish Foreign Ministry denied the essence of the AP story, saying there is “no new agenda in this coalition.” That may just be so many words, but you can be sure if Turkey is going its own way, you’ll hear about it from the USG. What’s missing from the AP story, as well as others, is facts: that is demonstrable evidence of a step-up in arms, funds, or other forms of support. I cannot include the link to my own McClatchy story of last Monday, but the title is “Rebels Worry how to control Islamists” and I’m sure you can find it on the Web. I spent several days at the border area last week interviewing (moderate) commanders to find out exactly how rebels carried off their major advances and no one could indicate any sign that a Turkish-Saudi connection had facilitated the capture of Idlib or Jisr ash Shughour. As for Turkey supporting Nusra or Ahrar Al Sham in any substantive way, this is a question I’ve been looking into for more than a year. Again I could find no evidence. Nor am I aware of any colleagues who have found it.

  2. I agree on the FSA being inadequate, but I think that’s by design, a diversion to the US strategy of bringing Saudi and Turkey together to down Syria and divide Iraq. The US goal, recognizing that Operation Iraqi Freedom converted Iraq into an Iran ally, pure stupidity, is now to revert to the Yinon Plan, the Zionist plan for the ME toward breaking up Iraq into Shia, Sunni and Kurdish regions. We see this now in the US plans to bypass Baghdad and to fund these Iraqi dissident groups.

    The US goal is to do everything possible to weaken Iran, if not by attacking Iran directly then to destroy Iran’s allies, Iraq and Syria. It’s all about Iran, even to the US support of al Qaeda (which it has done before, in Libya and probably elsewhere).–” put pressure on Nusra to renounce its ties to al-Qaida and open itself to outside help”–hah–pure BS.

Comments are closed.