illusion8
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Al-Qaida's Iraqi affiliate, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, is battling in war-torn Syria to crush rival rebels groups, including fellow Islamists, to take control of the north to set up an operational sanctuary for hard-core jihadists, analysts say.
Indeed, the rival rebel organizations such as ISIS and the other main jihadist group, the al-Nusra Front, spend more time fighting each other than they do the minority Alawite regime in Damascus led by President Bashar Assad.
These and other events have dramatically changed the shape of the 30-month-old war in recent months, much of it to the regime's advantage.
Some regional analysts and intelligence officials say ISIS, and to a lesser extent al-Nusra, seek to tighten control over territory that stretches from Western Iraq, where ISIS has its ideological center, to northern Syria, which includes vital supply routes along the Iraqi and Turkish borders.
Clashes between rebels of the Free Syrian Army, an alliance of nationalist and secular rebel groups backed by the West and Saudi Arabia, and the jihadists have escalated in recent weeks, particularly since ISIS, with its large force of veterans of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Libya, appeared in the spring.
This is a situation that Beirut-based analyst Michael Young said the Assad regime "has welcomed and indirectly encouraged.
"That's because, as many observers have pointed out, the Syrian regime has generally avoided attacking the al-Qaida groups, and has even collaborated with them in certain districts. "This has allowed the jihadists to gain ground and in that way confirm the regime's narrative that it's the last line of defense against extremism," Young observed.
Underlining the multi-tentacled Levantine intrigue that now seems to direct this increasingly complex conflict, a senior officer of an Arab intelligence service postulated the Assad regime hopes the moderates grouped under the FSA "will eventually ask the army for help to fight ISIS."
Meantime, the Islamists have effectively split into two, some aligning with ISIS while more moderate elements have gravitated toward al-Nusra, completely transforming what began in March 2011 as a straightforward rebellion against a brutal dictatorship spawned by the so-called Arab Spring.
These days Saudi Arabia, a longtime U.S. ally, is increasingly pursuing its own strategy in Syria rather than stick to an American game plan.
This has involved boosting the so-called "moderate" Islamists by buying them off with hefty payouts and supplies of weapons to fight the hardcore jihadists who, among other things, want to bring down the House of Saud.
The Sunni monarchy in Riyadh, exasperated by Washington's vacillation about using military force against Damascus, is now more determined than ever to topple the Tehran-backed Assad regime as part of the kingdom's confrontation with Shiite Iran.
This is a regional conflict that has become the predominant focus of the Syrian civil war, with the largely Sunni rebels battling an Iranian-backed autocracy controlled by the minority Alawite sect that's a branch of Shiism.
Washington's current effort to negotiate a rapprochement with Iran's pragmatic new president, Hassan Rouhani, aimed at ending 35 years of hostility, has alarmed the Saudis even more, and they seem determined now to pursue their own plan to eradicate the Assad regime.
Despite the U.S. designation of al-Nusra as a terrorist organization, many now consider the group closer to the mainstream because of its own battles with ISIS.
In recent weeks, the anti-Assad opposition has hardened into two Islamist-led alliances both at odds with the Americans, the ISIS-dominated Azzaz Declaration and the Army of Islam led by al-Nusra.
This has largely marginalized the FSA, once the dominant rebel group under the U.S.-backed Supreme Military Command based in Turkey.
That's left the Americans out on a limb in a highly sectarianized, complex war that threatens to engulf much of the region.
But Moscow has its own reason for wanting to prevent a jihadist takeover since that could have serious consequences for Moscow in its own, largely unseen, war against jihadists in Caucasus.
Islamist extremism is more of a threat to Russia than it is to the United States.
Syria: Al-Qaida group changes shape of civil war
THE TURF WAR KILLING SPREE
Overall total numbers of mercenary fighters in Syria are now estimated at about 45,000 and their previous pretence of unity fighting the haram (unclean) regime of al-Assad has broken apart in a turf war struggle for whatever remaining wealth can be pillaged. Openly fighting between themselves using slogans like Clean out the Impure, the imported young gangstah jihadis mix-and-mingle Islam, Men in Black and video game psychotic war thrills. In recent weeks and increasingly, the main fighting sets this International Brigade of the unemployed and unwanted against the US- and European-backed FSA or Free Syrian Army. Described by its backers as secular-oriented, constitutional-based and non-fundamentalist the FSA above all fears its most dangerous enemy the ISIS.
Called ISIS for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (the Levant), or in Arabic al-Dawla, the largest but loose-knit group of so-called Defenders of Islam is estimated by US and European analysts as numbering about 10,000 12,000 armed men. Brigade leaders of the FSA say that ISIS, whose core group stems from an al-Qaeda militia fighting US and allied troops in the Iraq war of 2003, has changed the game plan in this vicious civil war.
The FSA is based on regime army defectors, and is a mainly conventional military force able to combat its former colleagues in the regimes fighting forces and its Lebanese Hezbollah allies. But it is unable to handle the insurgents ranging from untrained but dangerous and well-armed young street crime adepts from Europe to ISIS and its core of uber-dangerous djihadi martyrs.
US security sources say that in recent months, ISIS has become a magnet for real jihadis who view the war in Syria not as a means to overthrow the al-Assad regime but as the historic initial battleground for a final world-scale, fundamentalist Sunni Holy War.
Founding a Caliphate or Sunni Islamic state in Syria is the first step to achieving global holy war. The real djihadis for example include Pakistani Jamaat-e-Islami central command fighters. This is of course denied by the organizations Secretary General, Liaqat Baloch on its English-language Internet site which focuses the organizations struggle, which it traces to the Chisti line of saints, inside Pakistan against Islamabad and for the independence of Swat, Balochistan and the NW Tribal Areas.
Afghani and Pakistani Taliban fighters have also set up bases in northern Syria, western security analysts say. FSA commanders now consider the already large, and always growing numbers of what FSA calls extremists of all kinds to be at least as big a threat to its survival as the regular armed forces of President Bashr al-Assad, backed by the Hezbollah, Russia, and Iran.
Witness the long game, or rather, the long con being carried out by Washington, London, and France, jump started with cash coming from the Gulf state monarchies.
Facing up to the reality of what Saudi petrodollars, Dreams of the Caliphate, and local geopolitical posturing have created in Syria makes it necessary to exterminate the Islamic rabble, depose al-Assad, and divide Syria into viable smaller national entities under international control excluding the Gulf states or Turkey, but including Iran and Kurdistan.
Dog Eat Dog: A New Level of Jihadist Chaos Unfolds in Syria’s Dirty War
Indeed, the rival rebel organizations such as ISIS and the other main jihadist group, the al-Nusra Front, spend more time fighting each other than they do the minority Alawite regime in Damascus led by President Bashar Assad.
These and other events have dramatically changed the shape of the 30-month-old war in recent months, much of it to the regime's advantage.
Some regional analysts and intelligence officials say ISIS, and to a lesser extent al-Nusra, seek to tighten control over territory that stretches from Western Iraq, where ISIS has its ideological center, to northern Syria, which includes vital supply routes along the Iraqi and Turkish borders.
Clashes between rebels of the Free Syrian Army, an alliance of nationalist and secular rebel groups backed by the West and Saudi Arabia, and the jihadists have escalated in recent weeks, particularly since ISIS, with its large force of veterans of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Libya, appeared in the spring.
This is a situation that Beirut-based analyst Michael Young said the Assad regime "has welcomed and indirectly encouraged.
"That's because, as many observers have pointed out, the Syrian regime has generally avoided attacking the al-Qaida groups, and has even collaborated with them in certain districts. "This has allowed the jihadists to gain ground and in that way confirm the regime's narrative that it's the last line of defense against extremism," Young observed.
Underlining the multi-tentacled Levantine intrigue that now seems to direct this increasingly complex conflict, a senior officer of an Arab intelligence service postulated the Assad regime hopes the moderates grouped under the FSA "will eventually ask the army for help to fight ISIS."
Meantime, the Islamists have effectively split into two, some aligning with ISIS while more moderate elements have gravitated toward al-Nusra, completely transforming what began in March 2011 as a straightforward rebellion against a brutal dictatorship spawned by the so-called Arab Spring.
These days Saudi Arabia, a longtime U.S. ally, is increasingly pursuing its own strategy in Syria rather than stick to an American game plan.
This has involved boosting the so-called "moderate" Islamists by buying them off with hefty payouts and supplies of weapons to fight the hardcore jihadists who, among other things, want to bring down the House of Saud.
The Sunni monarchy in Riyadh, exasperated by Washington's vacillation about using military force against Damascus, is now more determined than ever to topple the Tehran-backed Assad regime as part of the kingdom's confrontation with Shiite Iran.
This is a regional conflict that has become the predominant focus of the Syrian civil war, with the largely Sunni rebels battling an Iranian-backed autocracy controlled by the minority Alawite sect that's a branch of Shiism.
Washington's current effort to negotiate a rapprochement with Iran's pragmatic new president, Hassan Rouhani, aimed at ending 35 years of hostility, has alarmed the Saudis even more, and they seem determined now to pursue their own plan to eradicate the Assad regime.
Despite the U.S. designation of al-Nusra as a terrorist organization, many now consider the group closer to the mainstream because of its own battles with ISIS.
In recent weeks, the anti-Assad opposition has hardened into two Islamist-led alliances both at odds with the Americans, the ISIS-dominated Azzaz Declaration and the Army of Islam led by al-Nusra.
This has largely marginalized the FSA, once the dominant rebel group under the U.S.-backed Supreme Military Command based in Turkey.
That's left the Americans out on a limb in a highly sectarianized, complex war that threatens to engulf much of the region.
But Moscow has its own reason for wanting to prevent a jihadist takeover since that could have serious consequences for Moscow in its own, largely unseen, war against jihadists in Caucasus.
Islamist extremism is more of a threat to Russia than it is to the United States.
Syria: Al-Qaida group changes shape of civil war
THE TURF WAR KILLING SPREE
Overall total numbers of mercenary fighters in Syria are now estimated at about 45,000 and their previous pretence of unity fighting the haram (unclean) regime of al-Assad has broken apart in a turf war struggle for whatever remaining wealth can be pillaged. Openly fighting between themselves using slogans like Clean out the Impure, the imported young gangstah jihadis mix-and-mingle Islam, Men in Black and video game psychotic war thrills. In recent weeks and increasingly, the main fighting sets this International Brigade of the unemployed and unwanted against the US- and European-backed FSA or Free Syrian Army. Described by its backers as secular-oriented, constitutional-based and non-fundamentalist the FSA above all fears its most dangerous enemy the ISIS.
Called ISIS for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (the Levant), or in Arabic al-Dawla, the largest but loose-knit group of so-called Defenders of Islam is estimated by US and European analysts as numbering about 10,000 12,000 armed men. Brigade leaders of the FSA say that ISIS, whose core group stems from an al-Qaeda militia fighting US and allied troops in the Iraq war of 2003, has changed the game plan in this vicious civil war.
The FSA is based on regime army defectors, and is a mainly conventional military force able to combat its former colleagues in the regimes fighting forces and its Lebanese Hezbollah allies. But it is unable to handle the insurgents ranging from untrained but dangerous and well-armed young street crime adepts from Europe to ISIS and its core of uber-dangerous djihadi martyrs.
US security sources say that in recent months, ISIS has become a magnet for real jihadis who view the war in Syria not as a means to overthrow the al-Assad regime but as the historic initial battleground for a final world-scale, fundamentalist Sunni Holy War.
Founding a Caliphate or Sunni Islamic state in Syria is the first step to achieving global holy war. The real djihadis for example include Pakistani Jamaat-e-Islami central command fighters. This is of course denied by the organizations Secretary General, Liaqat Baloch on its English-language Internet site which focuses the organizations struggle, which it traces to the Chisti line of saints, inside Pakistan against Islamabad and for the independence of Swat, Balochistan and the NW Tribal Areas.
Afghani and Pakistani Taliban fighters have also set up bases in northern Syria, western security analysts say. FSA commanders now consider the already large, and always growing numbers of what FSA calls extremists of all kinds to be at least as big a threat to its survival as the regular armed forces of President Bashr al-Assad, backed by the Hezbollah, Russia, and Iran.
Witness the long game, or rather, the long con being carried out by Washington, London, and France, jump started with cash coming from the Gulf state monarchies.
Facing up to the reality of what Saudi petrodollars, Dreams of the Caliphate, and local geopolitical posturing have created in Syria makes it necessary to exterminate the Islamic rabble, depose al-Assad, and divide Syria into viable smaller national entities under international control excluding the Gulf states or Turkey, but including Iran and Kurdistan.
Dog Eat Dog: A New Level of Jihadist Chaos Unfolds in Syria’s Dirty War
