By Shashank Joshi World Last updated: August 1st, 2012
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(Shashank Joshi Shashank Joshi is an Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). He is also a doctoral student of international relations at Harvard University’s Department of Government. Read more about Shashank here.)
Anti-Assad rebels
It’s rare that foreign policy issues unite left and right, but there’s an interesting alliance emerging on the subject of Syria.
John Bradley, in the Daily Mail, fumed that “the anti-Assad opposition … are masters of manipulative propaganda aimed at gullible Western politicians, broadcasters and protest groups”. The Guardian ran a frothing-at-the-mouth piece portraying the Syrian opposition as neo-con stooges of the Bilderberg group. I was particularly struck by a claim made by security analyst Charles Shoebridge, that a BBC report “shows Syria rebel fighters bringing chaos, terror, death, and [the] fear of Islamist extremism to Aleppo”.
All of these people have a point, even if – in the case of the Guardian – it’s buried deep in the gibberish. The rebels have made use of propaganda. The prominence of the exiled opposition has worried many Syrians. And Syrian rebels have committed abuses. But we need to keep this in perspective.
Do the rebels have non-violent alternatives to guerrilla war? No. Anyone who persists in thinking that peaceful protest is a viable means of change should try holding up an anti-Assad poster around central Damascus (and, let us be clear: regime violence pre-dates the arming of the opposition, it is not a response to it).
Have outsiders hijacked Aleppo? No. Although the majority of fighters are from rural areas around the city, students from Aleppo University have also joined the Free Syrian Army. Several people who have spent time in Aleppo over the past few weeks have told me that the general population in the city, apart from some wealthier segments, is not especially resentful.
Should the rebels have fought on different terrain, to insulate civilians? Yes. But they did exactly that: "We attacked them in rural areas. We tried to avoid fighting close to civilian populations”. When rebels were attacked in the suburbs of Damascus, they engaged in tactical withdrawals. Unfortunately, neither peaceful protesters nor armed rebels get to choose the way the regime responds to their tactics.
Is it true that the Western media is only interested in one side of the story? Not really. On more than one occasion, the BBC (and other outlets) have prominently covered rebel abuses, including allegations of war crimes.
Just as in Libya, all of us who support Syrian rebels have a particular obligation to highlight and condemn such abuses, rather that pretend that they don’t exist, but these are simply not on the scale of regime actions. Rather than write off an entire national movement, we should think about ways to blacklist and punish abusive rebel individuals and units.
Finally, the greatest fallacy is that we face a choice between secular authoritarianism from the Assad regime, and sectarian theocracy from the rebels. It’s an interesting sort of secularism that draws on viciously violent, anti-Sunni sectarian militias to enforce its rule, and that sponsors Islamist movements like Hamas and Hezbollah. And, if the cost of preserving this sham secularism is mass violence, then count me out. It’s curious that those who profess such concern for minorities in Syria seem to think that “torture on an industrial scale” is preferable to a post-Assad government.
As for the rebels, yes, I have consistently noted that we should be concerned about both illiberal Islamist influences and more extreme jihadist ones. But, as counterterrorism expert Brian Fishman observes, “the prevalence of jihadists within the Libyan uprising has often been exaggerated in American commentary”.
For a start, jihadists don’t have a foreign occupation to mobilise support, like they did in Afghanistan in the 1980s or Iraq more recently. Moreover, the jihadists’ counterparts in Libya – where the sceptics also issued these dark warnings – were trounced in largely free and fair elections. So was Qatar-backed Islamist commander Abdul Hakim Belhaj, whose party failed to win a single parliamentary seat. Of course we should be worried about despotic, sectarian Saudi Arabia pumping in arms – but Arab powers can’t simply hijack a revolution that easily.
If the presence of abusive rebels and dubious foreign backers was enough to annul the right to rebellion, then virtually every revolution in history would be deemed illegitimate. Large swathes of Syria’s opposition are fighting for a state that is more democratic and humane than that which stands today, and – even if they face steep odds – they deserve, at the very least, our qualified support.
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