The incredible ascent of the IS fighters is having us wondering, not only about how they have come so far, so quickly, but how their military exploits have effectively overshadowed other momentous developments in the region, most notably the recent seizure of Sanaa, the capital city of Yemen, by Houthis, who appear to have taken control of ministries and to have forced the resignation of Yemen’s central government — a dramatic turn of events if there ever was one.
But to Arabs at large, the conflict in Syria, involving the dual struggle against the fanatics of IS and the brutes of the Damascus regime, takes a front seat.
And here lies the problem, because Arabs, or at the very least Syrian Arabs, are beginning to wonder whether US’ exclusive focus on the I has not given that regime, if only by default, a free hand to battle indigenous insurgents. Consider how Syrian President Bashar Assad, has become so emboldened by US air raids — which do not target his military — that he has mounted a renewed campaign against rebellious towns and neighborhoods controlled by the Free Syrian Army, campaigns that, as we have known over the last four years, involve dreadful collateral damage — read, heavy civilian casualties.
With the Syrian Air Force able to fly freely, and with the IS combatants no longer carrying out lightning routs of its army bases, the regime is back to its old brutal ways, dropping barrel bombs with explosives on a near daily basis, as happened in the province of Aleppo and the town of Bidama last week, sending residents to dig for the dead and the wounded from the rubble with shovels or their own hands. The spectacle is not new. How many times since 2011 have we watched it on our television screens with a mixture of horror and disbelief?
What is new is that ordinary Syrians opposed to the regime are beginning to ask why the US had not instituted a no-fly zone in their country where no Syrian fighter jets could freely roam the skies, as Washington had done in Iraq in 1991 and in Libya in 2011. Or why the US is leading the fight against IS but is enabling a dictator to have his way with barrel bombs, a dictator responsible for the killing of well over 200,000 of his people.
In recent moths, the Syrian regime focused its attacks on local insurgents, fearing to lock horns with the relentless fanatics of IS. And IS returned the favor, choosing to ignore the regime and in turn to focus on establishing what the group called “Islamic” or “caliphate” rule in territories in Syria and Iraq it has captured. The less Assad’s forces have had to face off against IS, the more these forces intensified their attacks against the Free Syrian Army and other rebels.
The upshot of it is that, since the US launched its campaign, anti-government Syrians have been raising very serious questions about the genuineness of US intentions. Sad, but true.
Given the fact that conspiracy theories in the region are embraced readily whenever ordinary folks are confronted by facts that baffle their conventional paradigm, it was predictable that these folks have gotten to wondering if the simultaneous bombings by the US, against IS, and by Syria, against its opponents, are evidence that Washington and Damascus are in cahoots, coordinating, albeit covertly, their military strikes.
Clearly, that would be absurd. Even were President Obama pursuing such a cynical policy, it is doubtful that it would have been devised so crudely.
That notion is lost on Syrians who have felt, ever since they launched their uprising in 2011, abandoned by the world — certainly by the one big power that could have helped them in a meaningful way in their struggle against the sectarian and dictatorial regime in Damascus. And they certainly feel isolated when they see the US giving priority to fighting IS. In a news report last Thursday, the New York Times correspondent, Ann Barnard, wrote: “Mistrust of the United States is deepening among Syrian opponents of the government, including insurgents whom Mr Obama hopes to train as a ground force against (IS) militants.”
Sure, as the battle for Kobani intensified last week, and the war raged on to “degrade and defeat” the IS, other conflicts in our part of the world have become overshadowed.
But lest we forget, the suffering of the Syrian people is unspeakable — close to a quarter million Syrians have been killed, more than three million have fled their homeland, and countless others have been incarcerated, tortured or “disappeared.” The battle to end that suffering is different from the battle to defeat IS only in kind, but it is the same in degree. Or at least, in an ideal world, it should be.
