The Century Foundation: "Desert Base Is Displaced Syrians’ Last Line of Defense"

New from me for The Century Foundation:

“Desert Base Is Displaced Syrians’ Last Line of Defense”

In the Badiyah desert, the Syrian regime’s eastward advance has jammed together America’s covert war in Syria, its overt campaign against the Islamic State, and two camps holding tens of thousands of vulnerable displaced people, all in one shrinking space.

The United States and Russia reached a “deconfliction” arrangement to protect U.S.-led Coalition forces in the Tanf base – but now the Coalition presence at Tanf is all that protects the camps from advancing regime and allied forces.

The Coalition isn’t there to protect civilians, it’s there to fight the Islamic State – and around the base, there’s no more Islamic State. The U.S.-led Coalition won’t stay in this base forever, even if it’s unlikely to leave just yet. Now U.S. planners have to figure out how to safeguard these displaced Syrians and produce a solution for these camps, which have merged with America’s more hard-edged covert and overt efforts to become a single intractable problem.

War on the Rocks: "A Deadly Delusion: Were Syria's Rebels Ever Going to Defeat the Jihadists?"

New from me for War on the Rocks:

“A Deadly Delusion: Were Syria’s Rebels Ever Going to Defeat the Jihadists?”

Whatever else Syria’s rebels were, and whatever the reasons for backing them – they were never going to be a “counter-terrorism force.”

As combating al-Qaeda and the Islamic State gradually subsumed America and the rest of the world’s policy priorities in Syria, opposition boosters increasingly argued for backing Syria’s rebels in “counter-terrorism” terms. But this argument was never real. There were only sao many times rebels could work alongside (or under) jihadists, or stand aside while jihadists liquidated rival factions, before it became clear they would never be a useful counter-terrorism partner.

Yet because of outside policymakers and analysts’ simplistic sectarian logic and unhelpful repetition of opposition tropes, the policy debate on Syria got more and more disengaged from this reality. And in the end, there was no necessary reckoning over the opposition’s entanglements with jihadists until it was too late.

The Century Foundation / Carnegie Middle East Center: "Reform, Revolution, Culture: How to Resist Arab Authoritarianism?"

Below is the video of our panel from the “Arab Politics beyond the Uprisings” launch event, held on July 13, 2017 at Beirut’s Carnegie Middle East Center. The panel featured me, Asya El-Meehy, and Aron Lund, and was moderated by Michael Wahid Hanna.

For a full write-up of the event (including video of the second panel), see “Reform, Revolution, Culture: How to Resist Arab Authoritarianism?”

Carnegie Middle East Center's Diwan: "What’s Next in Idlib?"

I talk to Carnegie Middle East Center’s Diwan – two weeks ago, so before Hayat Tahrir al-Sham / Jabhat al-Nusrah’s outright takeover – about the situation in rebel Idlib:

Carnegie page: http://carnegie-mec.org/diwan/72611

"مركز كارنيغي للشرق الأوسط: "ما الخطوة التالية في إدلب؟

مقابلتي مع "مركز كارنيغي للشرق الأوسط" (باللغة العربية) عن آفاق محافظة إدلب والشمال السوري المحرر:

ملاحظة: تم تسجيل المقابلة قبل الأحداث الأخيرة وفرض هيئة تحرير الشام / جبهة النصرة لسيطرتها على مفاصل الشمال.

والرابط الأساسي: http://carnegie-mec.org/diwan/72613

The Century Foundation: "America Had Already Lost Its Covert War in Syria—Now It’s Official"

New from me at The Century Foundation:

“America Had Already Lost Its Covert War in Syria—Now It’s Official”

President Trump has shut down America’s covert program to arm and train Syrian rebels fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

There’s been some rending of clothing over this, but – let’s be real – the program was doomed. By the time Trump took office, the program no longer made sense, if it ever did. The United States couldn’t just keep fueling a war that had no definable end and feeding a rebel host body from which al-Qaeda could suck blood.

Now it’s over – America’s covert war in Syria is finished. With America’s halfway commitment to regime change behind us, it’s time to look forward.

Foreign Affairs: "Washington's Dead End in Syria"

New from me for Foreign Affairs today:

“Washington’s Dead End in Syria”

In Syria, the United States may have won a victory over the Islamic State that only lasts so long as the U.S. sticks around indefinitely. Because of the specific local partner on which America has relied – the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) – we seemingly can’t withdraw without sparking a Turkish-Kurdish conflagration, a maelstrom that would allow ISIS to resurge. But the alternative is sponsoring a northeast Syria demi-state at odds with all its neighbors, putting American lives on the line to sustain a nexus of regional instability and solidify the effective partition of Syria.

This is… sub-ideal. If possible, we need to find a way out.

Yousef al-Qaradhawi and the "Children Bomb" (Updated)

(Updated below with response from Declan Walsh / the New York Times.)

In Declan Walsh’s 16 July New York Times article on Qatar’s tendency to host politically iffy guests, he illustrates the controversy surrounding Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradhawi with a particularly inflammatory quote:

I don’t love this quote, which I think is over-truncated and probably unfair. It’s from an April 2002 episode of Qaradhawi’s religious question-and-answer show on Al Jazeera, “Shari’ah and Life.” The original quote, in Arabic:

And the English translation below. For clarity: Qaradhawi is being asked about Palestinian minors carrying out suicide attacks, despite Hamas’s call for them to refrain.

“I say that even though this shows, of course, a lack of discipline, it also shows that these youth have had enough, and that they want to die as martyrs on the path of God. This desire for martyrdom is a tremendous spiritual strength, one the Israelis don’t possess. The Israelis have the nuclear (al-dhariyyah) bomb, but we have the bomb of these offspring (al-dhuriyyah) – these offspring who desire martyrdom and this death, that’s what we possess. So these human bombs need to continue until… until liberation. That is, from men, from women. We salute these heroes, male and female: Wafaa Idris and Ayat al-Akhras, and Andalib and Nidhal and Fulanah. I don’t remember all their names. I salute them and congratulate them and call for more of these heroic acts of martyrdom from our brothers and sisters, from our sons and daughters. And I ask these youth to obey the orders of the commanders so their lives don’t go to waste. Maybe if they entered into an organization that can organize things, so things are put in their place.”

The quote has also featured and been clipped elsewhere. But it’s typically at least included the “nuclear bomb” reference that completes Qaradhawi’s rhetorical contrast, even if the Arabic pun is lost in translation – see here, for example.

I honestly can’t decide how much I object to the New York Times version of the quote. At a minimum, it excises the quote’s middle section without the use of ellipsis, so it’s not technically accurate.

But my gut sense is that this quote implies – without context – that Qaradhawi is specifically advocating the use of child suicide bombers as a tactic, as opposed to hailing suicide attacks more broadly and making a rhetorical point about how Palestinian youths’ spirit of resistance and sacrifice is evidence of the Palestinian people’s moral strength.

Obviously, this is hair-splitting. And it’s not like Qaradhawi’s not saying some out-there stuff. As the full quote shows, Qaradhawi’s still super-in on suicide bombings. And he’s sympathetic to the motivation behind minors’ suicide attacks, even if he advocates that they should yield to the directives of Hamas commanders.

Anyway, I just wanted to register a minor objection to what I thought was a minor (I assume inadvertent) distortion by Walsh and the Times.

Update: Below is Declan Walsh / the Times‘s response:

We have gone back over this in detail. The question Qaradawi is asked is specifically about 12 and 14 years olds participating in attacks.

— Declan Walsh (@declanwalsh) July 20, 2017

In direct response Q talks approvingly about their desire for martyrdom, etc. The word 'offspring' is synonymous with children, so there is

— Declan Walsh (@declanwalsh) July 20, 2017

... some ambiguity. Neither are age-specific, and usually derive that specificity from context. Here, the context seems pretty clear.

— Declan Walsh (@declanwalsh) July 20, 2017

So, like a lot of clerical language, it's pretty broad, and I understand how it can be taken otherwise. But this does not seem an inaccurate

— Declan Walsh (@declanwalsh) July 20, 2017

translation to me. Scholars may differ ;)

— Declan Walsh (@declanwalsh) July 20, 2017

The Century Foundation: "Geneva Peace Talks Won’t Solve Syria—So Why Have Them?"

New from me for The Century Foundation:

Geneva Peace Talks Won’t Solve Syria—So Why Have Them?

Ahead of the latest round of Syria’s Geneva talks, the most pressing question seems to be: Why?

That is, why is the Geneva process still ongoing? And why go?

In interviews, participants told me there are specific rationales to keep attending Geneva, as well as for the continued existence of Geneva itself. For them, Geneva is a vessel for a possible future deal, a platform for Syrian civil society, and – bluntly – – something other than rival, Russian-engineered Astana talks.

What Geneva talks are not, it seems, is a real chance to negotiate an end to the war.

War on the Rocks: "The Signal in Syria's Noise"

New from me on War on the Rocks:

The Signal in Syria’s Noise

Syria’s war isn’t about Syria’s hundreds or thousands of moving parts, it’s about how they fit together. Whether in terms of the real dynamics of power and control within the war’s opposing camps or the country’s more holistic strategic picture, it’s how the war’s elements relate to each other that tends to actually explain the conflict.

U.S. Syria policy needs to be calibrated to these second-order connections and linkages if the United States is going to selectively, productively engage in Syria – and then, ideally, leave.

Abu Mariya al-Qahtani: "So do you leave [your enemy] and just say, 'In the end, we lose?'"

Below is a translated excerpt from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s Abu Mariya al-Qahtani’s (Myassar al-Jubouri) May 30 appearance on the latest season of Abdullah al-Muheisini’s Ramadan interview show, Daimeh, in which Qahtani touches again on something that's been on my mind: The line between defeatism and realism.

This is something on which Qahtani has also commented recently on his Telegram channel. Qahtani is Jabhat al-Nusrah’s former supreme religious official and its emir for the east, and now a leader in Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Here Qahtani reacts indignantly to criticisms – articulated here by jihadist evangelist and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham religious official Muheisini, playing Devil’s advocate – of the jihadist movement and jihadists as, basically, born losers.

This critique is a sort of free-floating, universally applicable indictment of jihadism. But it also has special relevance in the Syrian context, where the prospects of the Syrian opposition generally and the jihadist-dominated northwest specifically seem bleak. Even relatively hard figures like Ahrar al-Sham-linked Aymen Haroush and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s own Hussam al-Atrash have lately been trying to think through unconventional, counterintuitive alternatives, casting about for something other than an increasingly lonely, fruitless battle against the Syrian regime.

Qahtani offers the jihadist rebuttal. The sentiment he articulates is a sort of mix of impulsive, stand-up-and-fight adamancy – the imperative of resistance, consequences be damned – and conviction that jihadists are fighting with God’s mandate.

He’s also informed by a particular reading of history, in which Islamist democrats have consistently met with betrayal and failure and – this part seems debatable – jihadists can point to victories against occupying enemies, as in Iraq. In this view, less extreme alternatives have been discredited, and jihadist militancy is the only sane option.

Basically, I disagree. Jihadists and jihadism as a global movement and intellectual trend seem impossible to comprehensively defeat. But I’m personally convinced that, ultimately, they can’t win and that they doom whatever group or cause they attach themselves to, whether that’s relief NGOs or the Syrian revolutionary opposition writ large.

But for what it’s worth, this is Abu Mariya’s counterargument.

Translation follows, beginning from 11:50 in the Daimeh episode. (And please note – I'm not hugely familiar with Iraqi, so apologies if I missed or inverted anything from Qahtani.)

Abdullah al-Muheisini: "Given that we mentioned jihadist history just now, some of those criticize it say, Brother, the Ottoman Caliphate and jihad ended. After it fell, the Arab and Muslim countries were divided like a cake, as is well known, through Sykes-Picot and other [means]. And now the world is ruled by the United Nations and these regimes. So the project of armed resistance, jihad on the path of God, is a failed project. And the evidence is that there hasn’t been a jihad that’s happened that’s delivered the desired result. Jihadist groups get stood up, they fight, they’re killed, and then they end. How do you see that? Now you’re violating the laws of the universe, which say you can’t confront these great powers.”

Abu Mariya al-Qahtani: "God on high ordered us to resist the aggressor enemy (dafa’ al-‘adou al-sail). Especially when it enters a Muslim country and corrupts religion and the temporal world. That doesn’t give anyone a license, faced with that, to turn away. So a person comes, and you’re in your home, and this person comes and wants to kill your son, and your wife, and commit criminal acts in this house. So do you leave [him] and just say, 'In the end, we lose?' That’s not a loss. That’s a loss by the measure of the defeatists. To be frank with you.

"The Ummah has provided. Those who are killed from the Ummah’s youth on the path of God, God permitting, is a martyr. So we reckon him, and God makes the final accounting.

"We’ve asked, what have the projects of democracy provided? Is Muhammad Morsi – Muhammad Morsi, I don’t declare Muhammad an apostate, my position on him is known. [I don’t kaffar him] as an individual, I mean. But it’s well-known what Morsi’s government was, it didn’t rule by what God had sent down, and it was well-known it was an idolatrous (taghoutiyyah) government. The same with all these governments. But, what happened? There was a campaign against it, in agreement with the Crusaders, and they fought Islam.

"And when the Islamists won in Algeria, the infidels all mounted up to fight Islam and Muslims."

Muheisini: "They say, the jihadist movement can’t succeed."

Abu Mariya: "Great, well, the democrats didn’t succeed! With every jihadist battlefield (sahah), they say the same thing. It’s a misreading. The jihad – who got the Americans out of Iraq? Let’s be frank – despite my objections to [Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi]. God, if those Dawa’esh could use their heads a little and work with the Sunnis, if it hadn’t happened the way it did with their base…"

The Century Foundation: "Syrian Jihadists Jeopardize Humanitarian Relief"

New from me for The Century Foundation, on the latest challenge to humanitarian assistance for civilians in Syria’s rebel-held northwest:

“Syrian Jihadists Jeopardize Humanitarian Relief”

Since the beginning of the year, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – the latest iteration of former Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusrah – has stepped up its attempts to intervene in assistance in ways that have already complicated aid efforts. Now the group’s declared intention to bring the northwest’s currency exchange and money transfer offices under its supervision has set off alarm bells among humanitarians, who depend on informal “hawalah” transfers to operate inside Syria.

Hundreds of thousands civilians depend on a relief regime for which the space is constricting in Turkey and – now, thanks to Tahrir al-Sham’s more overt interference – inside Syria, too.

The Century Foundation: "Turkish Crackdown on Humanitarians Threatens Aid to Syrians"

New from me for The Century Foundation, on Turkish authorities’ rolling crackdown on international relief NGOs (INGOs):

“Turkish Crackdown on Humanitarians Threatens Aid to Syrians”

Humanitarians venerate principles of neutrality and independence, but their ostensibly apolitical work now seems to have gotten caught up in an Turkey’s own intensely charged politics.

Further INGO closures seem to pose a systemic threat to the relief effort in northern Syria, and it’s not clear whether Turkish institutions and local NGOs can fill the gap. If not, the interruption in humanitarian aid won’t affect everywhere equally. It’s likely to hit – surprise – Idlib province and Syria’s northwest, which never, ever catch a break.

The Century Foundation: "Turkey’s 'Turkey First' Syria Policy"

New paper from me for The Century Foundation, on the evolution of Turkey’s agenda in north Syria and its implications for the Syrian opposition:

“Turkey’s ‘Turkey First’ Syria Policy”

More than ever before, the Syrian opposition depends on Turkey’s support – yet Turkey has never been more preoccupied with its own security ends, not fighting the Assad regime. The opposition’s future hinges on Turkey’s strategic success or failure, but Turkey, which has burned through most of its best options and damaged its key relationships, may itself be at an impasse.

Based on my last trip to Turkey – including Istanbul, Ankara, and along the southern border – I’ve tried to lay out the Turkish outlook as I understand it, and what it means for Syrians inside Turkey and just across the border inside the Syrian north.

War on the Rocks: "Syria: A Journey Into the Unknown"

New from colleague Michael Wahid Hanna and I for War on the Rocks about the balancing act of U.S. intervention in Syria:

“Syria: A Journey Into the Unknown”

Last week’s U.S. missile strike, as it was executed and messaged, seems to have been meant to discourage the regime from further chemical weapons use – not to commit America to an unlimited escalation, or to some vague and impracticable goal of regime change.

But Trump Administration officials have already muddied this message in the media, and there’s a serious risk that America’s allies and adversaries could get confused. There’s also a danger that some forward-leaning politicians and talking heads may retroactively cast this strike as something more expansive and get the United States in trouble.

Michael and I argue the strike may yet achieve a defined, positive good – but the United States is going to have to resist the impulse to turn it into something that it’s not.

Foreign Affairs: "Syria Policy After the Chemical Attacks"

New from me for Foreign Affairs:

So America might intervene in Syria now?

“Syria Policy After the Chemical Attacks”

I have mixed feelings about U.S. military action in Syria. But if it’s about to happen, then any U.S. action should have clear, narrowly defined deterrence objectives, and it should be deliberately delinked from the broader Syrian war. U.S. intervention shouldn’t be aimed at a negotiated transition in Syria or any variation on regime change – goals that weren’t viable on Monday and, days later, aren’t now.

The Century Foundation: "Four Perspectives on Syria, Round II"

New at The Century Foundation: TCF colleagues Aron Lund, Thanassis Cambanis, Michael Wahid Hanna and I return for another wide-ranging Syria roundtable.

Four Perspectives on Syria, Round II

The Century Foundation: "Syria’s Former al-Qaeda Affiliate Is Leading Rebels on a Suicide Mission"

New from me for The Century Foundation:

Syria’s former al-Qaeda affiliate and a set of hardline allies have taken over the country’s rebel-held northwest, the last bastion of determined opposition to the regime of Bashar al-Assad. They’re apparently convinced they can reverse the rebellion’s downward trajectory and kneecap “defeatists” within the opposition who might settle for anything less than toppling the regime. And they think they can rebalance the opposition’s lopsided relationships with its foreign backers, forcing countries like Turkey and the United States to engage them on their terms.

They’re wrong. And by hijacking Syria’s armed opposition and placing its core under unambiguous jihadist control, they’ve likely sealed its fate.

"Syria’s Former al-Qaeda Affiliate Is Leading Rebels on a Suicide Mission"

الجمهورية: "دفاعاً عن العمل الصحفي في سوريا الأسد"

ترجمة لمقاتلي بموقع "الجمهورية" عن ضرورة نقل الواقع من مناطق النظام السوري رغم القيود على عمل الصحفيين والمحللين:

"دفاعاً عن العمل الصحفي في سوريا الأسد"

Al-Jumhuriya: "The Case for Reporting from Assad's Syria"

In a new piece for al-Jumhuriya, I argue – contra some opponents of “normalization” – that we need more journalists and analysts reporting from inside Assad’s Syria. The reality inside Damascus and other areas under regime control is an increasingly relevant part of the Syrian story, and something about which we know disconcertingly little.

Better visibility on conditions under Assad and original reporting on the human experience of Syrians in these areas is in everyone’s interest. That includes supporters of the opposition, who need to rely on independent reporting, not polemic, if they’re going to stay relevant in a shifting Syria debate.

“The Case for Reporting from Assad’s Syria”