This article was previously published in GPR’s Spring 2017 Magazine
As 2016 came to a close, people all around the world were inundated by stories about how Aleppo, the largest city in Syria, was under siege from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s army. Major news networks ran stories of an impending massacre in the city and social media websites all had trending topics urging viewers to “pray for Aleppo” or to raise awareness about the situation there. Pictures and videos across the internet depicted destroyed buildings, bloodied bodies, and citizens frantically trying to evacuate from the city as the Syrian rebels, who had been fighting to keep control over parts of Aleppo since 2012, could no longer hold on and were forced to retreat and leave citizens defenseless against Assad and his soldiers.
However, conspicuously absent from these pictures and stories were depictions of the rebels themselves. Many people who wrote about the alleged atrocities in Aleppo were quick to draw comparisons between this event and others, such as the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, in which brave Polish Home Army rebels attempted to take back Warsaw from Nazi forces. When one looks at photos and videos from the uprising, the Polish rebels take front and center in many of them, showing how much they symbolized the Polish people’s struggle in World War II. As for Aleppo, while the media makes countless references to “rebels” fighting, they are almost nowhere to be seen in any images. In fact, when Assad’s forces recaptured Aleppo, the only videos coming from inside the city were ones depicting Syrians celebrating in the streets, a peculiar sight if one believes that these rebels were the only thing standing between Aleppines and disaster. Though the media are quick to claim that the Syrian rebels are present and fighting, many news organizations do not draw attention to these “rebels” because many of them oppose secularism, adhere to Islamist/Salafist ideology, and wish to establish an Islamic state in Syria. Consequently, they are much different from the moderate opposition groups that much of the world supported in the beginning of the Syrian Civil War.
The Syrian Civil War began in response to Assad’s attempt to quash demonstrations during Arab Spring in 2011. Within a year of Assad cracking down on protests, an opposition army, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), was formed in Syria. The FSA, composed of defectors from Assad’s Syrian Arab Army (SAA) who wished to overthrow his regime, was perhaps the most notable of the moderate rebel groups and had been the strongest force fighting against Assad in the early years of the war. In fact, the FSA had gained control of all major border crossings between Iraq and Syria by mid-2012 while carrying out a number of offensives against government forces, expanding its territory to much of western Syria. On the diplomatic side, the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces (SNC) was founded in 2012. The SNC, which gave membership to representatives of the FSA and was endorsed by both secularists as well as moderate Islamic groups, gained diplomatic recognition from over twenty states by the start of 2013 and even obtained Syria’s seat in the Arab league after Assad’s government was suspended. At the time, there was hope that these moderate rebel groups would succeed.
While the moderate rebels received diplomatic and military support from Western countries along with positive media coverage, little attention was paid to how fragile these moderate rebel coalitions were. Although it was rarely discussed in the Western media, Syria is a diverse state consisting of a variety of groups such as the Kurds, Alawites, Sunni Arabs, Assyrians, and many others who have their own aspirations for independence or ideas for governance. As a result, even the once powerful FSA was not easily held together and by the end of 2013, the group, which formed a large part of the national “moderate” opposition, started to unravel. The FSA, at one time the most formidable opponent of Assad, according to some ceased to be a unified group sometime between 2012 and 2013, largely due to mass desertions that decimated the group’s numbers. When the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), now arguably the strongest secular opposition group in Syria, formed in 2015 in northern Syria, they did not include what was left of the FSA, indicating how far out of favor the group has fallen since its apex only a few years ago.
The greatest threat to a unified, secular opposition in Syria is not one ethnic group but rather Islamists and Salafists, who made up anywhere from one-fifth to one-half of all Syrian rebels in 2013 and hope to establish an Islamic state governed by sharia law in Syria. Although many of these Islamist fighters were affiliated with or members of groups such as al-Qaeda, the United States still collaborated with states such as Saudi Arabia to train them while they were still fighting alongside the FSA in the hopes of accelerating the fall of the Assad regime. On the battlefield, both Islamists and moderates did have the same goal of toppling Assad. However, when the SNC was formed the ideological rift between the groups was exposed when Islamist groups refused to respect the authority of the SNC. Around the same time thousands of Islamists left the FSA to join Islamist militias and called for forming an Islamic state governed by Sharia law due to the ineffectiveness of commanders, low pay, and the lack of a shared vision for Syria amongst FSA soldiers as well as officers. Islamist armies, many of whom enjoyed backing and financial support from wealthy Gulf States such as Qatar and Syria, seemed more appealing to many who were disillusioned by the secular opposition’s failures and were able to attract many fighters from not only Syria but foreign countries as well. Meanwhile, as ISIL rose to prominence in 2014, many fighters with Islamist sympathies in the FSA began to join the group as it seized nearly all territory held by the FSA in western Syria, most of which ISIL still retains to this day.
Throughout the Syrian Civil War, the threat of Islamist and Salafist groups seizing power or leading the Syrian opposition has been downplayed by Western governments who would like to see Assad removed from power due to his alleged “support of terrorists.” However, on the ground in Syria the largest rebel groups on the ground also have strong connections to terrorist groups. al-Qaeda’s former affiliate in Syria, previously known as the al-Nusra Front and now called Tahrir al-Sham, is now one of the largest opposition groups fighting in Syria. On the diplomatic end, a leader of Jaysh al-Islam, another Islamist group which opposes secularism, represented the rebels at peace talks in Astana this year. The likely reason why the media uses the term “rebels” without showing them or describing them is they are no longer the same rebels which challenged Assad when the war began. Despite once having a strong secular opposition fighting Assad, the only formidable groups left in the fight are either Islamist or, in the case of the SDF, are focused on fighting ISIL rather than ousting Assad. Although Assad seemed like an easy target a few years ago when there was a strong secular opposition, today he still holds territory with 65.5% of the Syrian population and the conflict has only led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and many more displaced. Should Assad be deposed, the groups who would replace him in all likelihood are no more committed to a unified, secular Syria than ISIL is. As such, is it fair to continue to stoke the conflict by arming rebels and endangering Syrian civilians when there is no longer a viable, secular alternative to Assad?