Assad & jihadism

Like Pakistan and Turkey, Syria also played the game of exporting jihadis abroad and using them to weaken moderate opposition at home. Typical case of chickens coming home to roost - 



https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jun/08/iraq-al-qaida
2005: "The call to jihad was openly encouraged by the Syrian government, says Abu Ibrahim (a nom de guerre); it also arranged for buses to ferry fighters, speeded up the issuing of documentation and even gave prospective jihadis a discount on passport fees. Meanwhile, the Syrian media were banging the drum for jihad. (The US has repeatedly accused Syria of involvement in terrorism in Iraq; the Syrian government vehemently denies this.) Eyewitnesses recall Syrian border police waving to the jihadi buses as they crossed into Iraq. From the Grand Mufti of Syria, a man known for his religious tolerance for more than 50 years but who issued a fatwa legitimising suicide bombing just before the outbreak of the Iraq war, to a 16-year-old Christian boy from Damascus whom Abu Ibrahim remembers volunteering to fight alongside radical Muslims in Iraq, much of Syria was galvanised to resist the American invasion next door." 



https://medium.com/@rcolvile/the-blood-of-paris-is-on-assad-s-hands-93f3b5a40cdc#.dvu26wgo5
Blood of Paris on Assad's hands

During Iraq insurgency, Saudi fighters also took the route to Syria.
https://www.ffi.no/no/Rapporter/06-03875.pdf
"Saudis went to Iraq through a number of different routes. The preferred routes varied over time with changes in countermeasures on the various border crossings. Those who went to Kurdistan just before the war travelled through Qatar and Iran. Up until approximately mid-2004, the Saudi-Iraqi border was also porous enough to cross. This was the preferred route for those without travel documents (many well-known radicals had had their passports confiscated by the police).
From mid 2004 onward, Saudis tightened border security, and the majority of volunteers travelled to Yemen, from there to Syria and into Iraq. US forces had problems policing the Iraqi-Syrian border area north of the Euphrates river because most forces were stationed on the south bank and there were few bridges strong enough to carry armed vehicles. 
In mid-2005, the US military conducted a massive operation to gain control of this area, and this reduced the flow of foreign militants across the Syrian-Iraqi border. There have also been cases of Saudis entering Iraq through Jordan and Turkey."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/13/AR2005111300466.html 
14 Nov 2005: BAGHDAD, Nov. 13 -- Top Iraqi defense officials on Sunday accused Syria of allowing foreign fighters to operate training camps on Syrian soil and sneak into Iraq to commit suicide bombings.  "We do not have the least doubt that nine out of 10 of the suicide bombers who carry out suicide bombing operations among Iraqi citizens . . . are Arabs who have crossed the border with Syria," the Iraqi national security adviser, Mowaffak Rubaie, told journalists in Cairo, the Reuters news service reported.  "Most of those who blow themselves up in Iraq are Saudi nationals," he added.  Iraqi Defense Minister Sadoun Dulaimi also criticized Syria.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/islamic-state-files-show-structure-of-islamist-terror-group-a-1029274.html
"In 2003, the Damascus regime was panicked that then-US President George W. Bush, after his victory over Saddam Hussein, would have his troops continue into Syria to topple Assad as well. Thus, in the ensuing years, Syrian intelligence officials organized the transfer of thousands of radicals from Libya, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia to al-Qaida in Iraq. Ninety percent of the suicide attackers entered Iraq via the Syrian route. A strange relationship developed between Syrian generals, international jihadists and former Iraqi officers who had been loyal to Saddam -- a joint venture of deadly enemies, who met repeatedly to the west of Damascus.
At the time, the primary aim was to make the lives of the Americans in Iraq hell. Ten years later, Bashar Assad had a different motive to breathe new life into the alliance: He wanted to sell himself to the world as the lesser of several evils. Islamist terror, the more gruesome the better, was too important to leave it up to the terrorists. The regime's relationship with Islamic State is -- just as it was to its predecessor a decade prior -- marked by a completely tactical pragmatism. Both sides are trying to use the other in the assumption that it will emerge as the stronger power, able to defeat the discrete collaborator of yesterday. Conversely, IS leaders had no problem receiving assistance from Assad's air force, despite all of the group's pledges to annihilate the apostate Shiites. Starting in January 2014, Syrian jets would regularly -- and exclusively -- bomb rebel positions and headquarters during battles between IS and rebel groups.
In battles between IS and rebels in January 2014, Assad's jets regularly bombed only rebel positions, while the Islamic State emir ordered his fighters to refrain from shooting at the army. It was an arrangement that left many of the foreign fighters deeply disillusioned; they had imaged jihad differently."


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6329097.stm
4 Feb 2007: A senior Iraqi official has said half of all insurgent attacks in Baghdad are carried out by militants from Syria.

Ali al-Dabbagh said the Iraqi government has provided Damascus with evidence to back up this claim.

It comes after the deadliest single bombing since the US-led invasion of 2003 killed 130 people in Baghdad.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has vowed to put an end to such attacks, which he blamed on followers of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.




http://www.france24.com/en/20090901-maliki-blames-syria-attacks-assad-denies-claim-
1 Sep 2009: "Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said Monday that 90 percent of foreign terrorists who infiltrate Iraq did so via Syria, a charge likely to worsen already fractured relations between the neighbouring states."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/11/-sp-isis-the-inside-story 
"When I first met him in 2009, he was poring over transcripts of recordings that had been made at two secret meetings in Zabadani, near Damascus, in the spring of that year. The attendees included senior Iraqi Ba’athists who had taken refuge in Damascus since their patron Saddam was ousted, Syrian military intelligence officers, and senior figures in what was then known as al-Qaida in Iraq. The Syrians had developed links to the jihadists since the earliest days of the anti-US insurgency and had used them to unsettle the Americans and their plans for Iraq."




http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/syria-isis-have-been-ignoring-each-other-battlefield-data-suggests-n264551
"Syria's military and ISIS may be sworn enemies but instead of wiping each other off the battlefield they have been delicately dancing around each other, according to new data exclusively obtained by NBC News. Both sides in the bloody conflict appear to be eliminating smaller rivals ahead of a possible final showdown. Around 64 percent of verifiable ISIS attacks in Syria this year targeted other non-state groups, an analysis of the IHS Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Center's (JTIC) database showed. Just 13 percent of the militants' attacks during the same period — the year through Nov. 21 — targeted Syrian security forces. That's a stark contrast to the Sunni extremist group's operations in Iraq, where more than half of ISIS attacks (54 percent) were aimed at security forces."

"Some rebels suspect coordination between the Syrian regime and ISIS. Yusuf Abu Abdullah, one of the leaders of the Al-Mujaheddin Army in Aleppo, said when his fighters have attacked regime bases, they have come under separate attacks from ISIS. That's forced them to withdraw and battle the other militants instead of Assad's forces.
"Most of the front lines between ISIS and the regime are very quiet — you wouldn't even hear the sound of firing," he said. "The exact opposite is on our frontlines, which are very dangerous and where the fights don't stop for 24 hours."
If ISIS was interested in fighting the regime, he said, they would have gone to Aleppo — a city besieged by Assad's forces. Instead, they chose to fight for Kobani where there is no Syrian army presence."


http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n07/peter-neumann/suspects-into-collaborators
"Allowing the Salafists to go to Iraq was thought to be a good idea for two reasons: first, it got rid of thousands of the most aggressive Salafists with a taste for jihad, packing them off to a foreign war from which many would never return to pose a threat to Assad’s secular, minority-dominated government; second, it destabilised the occupation of Iraq and thwarted Bush’s quest to topple authoritarian regimes (everyone in Assad’s inner circle feared that Syria would be next). According to Assad’s biographer David Lesch, ‘Damascus wanted the Bush doctrine to fail, and it hoped that Iraq would be the first and last time it was applied. Anything it could do to ensure this outcome, short of incurring the direct military wrath of the United States, was considered fair game.’
Practically overnight, Syria became the principal point of entry for foreign jihadists hoping to join the Iraqi insurgency. Inside the country, Assad’s intelligence services activated their jihadist collaborators. The most prominent among them was Abu al-Qaqaa, a Salafi cleric from Aleppo who had studied in Saudi Arabia and whose sermons attracted hundreds – sometimes thousands – of people. Before the invasion of Iraq, Abu al-Qaqaa’s followers acted as religious vigilantes, meting out punishments for ‘indecent behaviour’ and stirring up hatred against the infidel governments of Israel and America. After the invasion, his group turned into a hub which provided Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq with Syrian recruits. Qaqaa’s efforts were so successful that for most of 2003 Syrians constituted the largest foreign fighting contingent of the (emerging) insurgency. Four years later, when the political calculus had changed and the Syrian government wanted to slow down the traffic, Qaqaa was shot dead in mysterious circumstances. His funeral was attended by members of the Syrian parliament along with thousands of Islamists. According to a Lebanese media report, ‘his coffin was draped in a Syrian flag and the affair had all the trappings of a state occasion.’"


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/putin-assad-isis_560d7db0e4b0dd85030b2368
"Western officials point to evidence that the Islamic State and the Assad regime have at least tacit cooperation on the battlefield: They rarely attack each other, the regime buys oil from Islamic State territory, and the Islamic State cleared the way for regime forces to capture the city of Aleppo last year."




http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/17/why-isis-fight-syria-iraq

On the same day that Abu Issa and many of his friends were released, the Lebanese government, which is supported by Damascus, also freed more than 70 jihadis, many of whom had been convicted of terrorism offences and were serving lengthy terms. The release puzzled western officials in Beirut who had been monitoring the fates of many of the accused jihadis in Lebanon’s jails for more than four years. Some had been directly linked to a deadly jihadi uprising in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in July 2007, which led to 190 Lebanese soldiers being killed in battle and much of the camp destroyed. The claim that the Syrian regime aided the rise of extremism to splinter the opposition and reaffirm its own narrative that the war was all about terrorism in the first place has been widely repeated throughout the past five years. It is a central grievance of the mainstream opposition in Syria’s north, which says it lost more than 1,500 of its men ousting Isis from Idlib and Aleppo in early 2014. At the same time as the opposition was fighting the jihadis, the Syrian regime, which did not intervene, was able to advance around the city for the first time in the war. “There was no other reason for Salafi jihadis to be in that jail, and for the students to be with us,” said Abu Issa, who now lives in exile in Turkey. “They wanted them to be radicalised. If this stayed as a street protest, it would have toppled [the regime] within months, and they knew it.”

Among the jihadis, there was initially no talk about why they were being freed, Abu Issa said. Just relief to have somehow made it out of a system that had swallowed other accused terrorists for decades. “Nobody wanted to acknowledge it, at first,” he said. “But in time everyone knew what was happening. There were some very important terrorists freed that day. They did what was expected of them and went straight to join the fight against the regime. That was the first moment when the war stopped being about civil rights.”