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The dual advance is on the verge of dealing a potentially fatal blow to mainstream Syrian insurgents, leaving them besieged in the city while ISIS, a group deemed too extreme even by Al Qaeda, faces the Syrian government across a crucial front line at ...
Dual Threat Has Mainstream Syrian Rebels Fearing Demise
Facing Both ISIS Militants and Bashar al-Assad’s Forces in Syria
BEIRUT,
Lebanon — Far from being depleted by its recent sweep into Iraq, the
extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is pressing deeper into Syria,
regaining territory it had lost to the mainstream Syrian insurgents
just as the Syrian Army has come within five miles of encircling the
insurgent-held section of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city.
The
dual advance is on the verge of dealing a potentially fatal blow to
mainstream Syrian insurgents, leaving them besieged in the city while
ISIS, a group deemed too extreme even by Al Qaeda, faces the Syrian
government across a crucial front line at the city and surrounding
province of Aleppo, the linchpin of northern Syria.
The
developments, some of the most strategically important in Syria’s
three-year war, come as the American military for the first time strikes
ISIS fighters in Iraq. The United States says it aims to prevent
massacres of Iraqi civilians, but apparently has no plans to strike the
group in Syria, where it incubated into perhaps the world’s most
dangerous Islamist extremist group.
That
seeming contradiction highlights the messy snarl of conflicts sweeping
the region: The United States now views ISIS as a global threat, a
position that places America notionally on both sides of the bitter
conflict in Syria, where both the insurgents and the government claim to
be fighting the group.
While
most analysts say there is no proof the Syrian government controls or
is formally aligned with ISIS, as some rebels allege, many observers,
including those sympathetic to the government, say it has not attacked
the group as forcefully as it has the insurgents. That, they say, is
because ISIS focuses less on ousting President Bashar al-Assad than on
establishing an Islamic state in areas it controls, and battles Islamist
and nationalist insurgents bent on his removal. Beheadings and other
atrocities by ISIS also bolster the government’s argument that it is
fighting terrorism.
Syrian
insurgents in Aleppo say they are on the verge of a defeat that could
effectively end their fight to unseat Mr. Assad. Rebel villages in
northern Aleppo have fallen in recent days to a new ISIS offensive that
threatens to cut off their supply lines to Turkey. Some insurgents have
joined ISIS rather than fight it, either to save themselves from
beheadings or out of frustration that their own leaders have been unable
to secure weapons and money.
In
Aleppo, insurgents are bracing for a siege like the two-year standoff
that obliterated much of the center of Homs in central Syria, and ended
last May when starved rebels accepted a government deal to evacuate.
Insurgent leaders say about 500,000 civilians, mainly those too poor or
sick to flee, remain in rebel-held Aleppo from a population of several
million before the war, along with fighters’ families and supporters.
Struggling
Western-backed insurgents express frustration that the United States
has not aided them as allies against both ISIS and Mr. Assad, while some
of their rank and file blame the leadership.
For
three years, leaders of the rebel group Free Syrian Army complain, they
have pleaded for increased military aid and humanitarian corridors to
protect against government airstrikes — more than 2,000 in the past
three months in Aleppo alone — that have killed and displaced countless
Syrian civilians. They have received only a modest response, even
recently as they battle ISIS.
“Obama
cannot stop ISIS by just hitting them in Iraq,” Hussam al-Marie, the
Free Syrian Army spokesman for northern Syria, said in an interview from
southern Turkey. He said that ISIS’ core refuges and resources are in
Syria, where the group has long ruled the northeasten province of Raqqa
and recently took control of neighboring Deir al-Zour.
“The
noose is tightening around Aleppo, and everyone is just watching,” Mr.
Marie said, adding that the loss of the city would be “unrecoverable”
and “a blow to our shared goals of a moderate Syria.”
He
recalled President Obama’s declaration that America was “coming to
help,” with airlifted supplies and airstrikes, in response to the cries
of Iraq’s threatened Yazidi minority.
“Millions
of Syrians have been crying, but no one has heard them,” he said,
adding that 8,000 Syrians were displaced by ISIS advances on Wednesday
alone, and hundreds of thousands more by government attacks.
Parallel
complaints can be heard from some residents in government-held Aleppo,
home to a large Christian community. Some of them ask why the United
States is defending Iraqi Yazidis from religiously motivated ISIS
attacks, but not them.
At the same time, some Syrian insurgents blame their own leadership for what they see as impending doom.
Interactive Graphic
A Rogue State Along Two Rivers
The victories gained by the militant group calling
itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria were built on months of
maneuvering along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which define a region
known as the cradle of civilization.
“They
failed politically,” Abu al-Hassan, a longtime spokesman for a rebel
brigade in Marea, north of Aleppo, said as the town came under ISIS
shelling on Thursday. “We don’t have central command, whereas ISIS has
central command and an ideology.”
The
crisis was a long time coming. For months, as government troops inched
toward Aleppo, insurgent leaders failed to provide the province’s many
rebel groups, large and small, with a unified strategy, money or
weapons.
Aleppo
has long stood as a symbol of both the strengths and the weaknesses of
the insurgency. Rebel groups like the Tawhid Brigade surprised the
government by taking over eastern Aleppo two years ago.
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