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From 2012 to April 2014, the phenomenon of the ISIS/ISIL, called “Daesh” (Bad People/terrorists) by people in Islamic states to avoid using the word “Islamic” to describe the organization that calls itself “Islamic State”, burst upon the scene.
The earlier version appeared to have morphed from diverse warlord groups operating in Iraq. The effort to set up democratic US-model elections in Iraq had predictably led to the rise of a government dominated by the majority Shia. There were power-sharing deals to keep the heavily-armed Sunnis (Saddam Hussein was a Sunni) pacified. However the jostling between warlords had spiraled into chaos. American interest in keeping up ground forces di- minished as belated realization that the 2003 ‘WMD dossiers’ were blatant scams, started percolating even through parts of the US public discourse and mainstream media. For reference, even in 2005, State Department retirees and others were citing the consternation of people in the US intelligence community: They had recognized the ‘satellite photos’ that were waved around in the UN Security Council by US Secretary of State General Colin Powell as ‘proof’ of Iraqi WMD. They knew that those were from 1990, and long-since destroyed or otherwise emptied. Rising domestic pressure to bring the troops home, was accompanied by rising pressure on Iraqi politicians to demand exit of the Americans.
A swift rash of attacks by the initial version of ISIS was eventually put down, and the Americans pulled out - significantly including cut-backs in aerial intervention. By late 2013/early 2014, the new ISIS had exploded on the scene, sweeping across the landscape of Iraq. It became evident that the earlier disappearance from Iraq was because the ISIS had been pulled out and redeployed inside the massive Sunni belt of Syria, particularly along the Euphrates river corridor, and the borders with Turkey.
With the Syrian government desperately fighting off the urban/suburban insurrection, the so-called ISIS forces occupied essentially all of the areas marked in white in Figure above as well as most of the Sunni-majority areas. Reuter published so-called Secret Files revealing the structure of the ISIS (Ref: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/islamic-state-files-show-structure-of-islamist-terror-group-a-1029274.html).
We will cite some facts and leave the rest to be filtered by the reader. The city of Raqqa fell to ’rebels’ in March 2013 and on October 17, the Islamic State called all the leaders and announced a full takeover: anyone with other ideas was executed, the rest swore allegiance to the Islamic State.
The second phase of the invasion started with Turkey openly transporting trainloads of heavy weapons to its border areas and feeding the ISIS to occupy the Euphrates valley (https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/world/europe/turkey-is-a-steady-source-of-isis-recruits.html).
Meanwhile Israeli forces attacked Syrian soldiers in the Golan Heights even as they were trying to defend against ISIS assaults; the ISIS wounded were taken into Israeli hospitals for treatment (https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-allows-first-peek-into-secret-field-hospital-on-syrian-border/ and https://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13921113001187 and https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/06/11/exclusive-israel-is-tending-to-wounded-syrian-rebels/) .
Syrian air force bases were attacked by Israeli air power, and then overrun by the ISIS. In most cases, all Syrian soldiers who surrendered - and did not manage to be absorbed into ISIS ranks by virtue of ethnicity, were murdered and dumped in mass graves or rivers. In quick succession, villages small towns and larger cities fell to the invaders.
In December 2013, other Syrian rebel groups, even Al Nusra whom the US belatedly started calling an ‘Al Qaeda- related’ Islamist extremist group, banded together to attack ISIS and pushed them out of most of the occupied Syrian areas, even Raqqa. This may have been mostly for show, as the ISIS was needed elsewhere: by June 2014 the ISIS was swarming in Iraq.
The Kurds in the border areas declared independence, and were supported by American/NATO airpower and weapons to some extent. They managed to repel ISIS attacks on the city of Kobani. There were heart-rending reports of young Kurdish women soldiers fighting until they had exhausted their ammunition, and then, facing capture and torture, killed themselves with explosives, killing several of the ISIS swarming over them. The Kurdish SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) were reported to be fighting in collaboration with the Free Syrian Army (FSA) against the ISIS in September 2014 (https://www.reuters.com/article/world/syrian-army-turkish-forces-clash-near-border-state-media-idUSKBN1X91UX/_).
The Syrian government claimed since the very beginning, that they were facing a foreign terrorist invasion. This has been more than vindicated by the massive scale of subsequent warfare, with the Syrian armed forces severely outgunned and outmanned, and reduced to defending a few pockets around Damascus and in the province of Latakia. By mid 2015, these areas were also under threat with Damascus suburbs getting heavy shelling. The cities of Homs, Aleppo, Raqqa, Kobani and Palmyra had been lost from Syrian control. Deir ez Zor (D-e-Z), near the Iraq border, has a gruesome history: It was where the Turkish Ottoman forces drove thousands of exhausted Armenian families, and left them to starve to death under the desert sun during the Armenian Genocide. D-e-Z became a besieged garrison with an airport that was often under fire. Syrian soldiers who surrendered elsewhere, had been mercilessly beheaded by the ISIS and the other Rebels, and perhaps this knowledge of certain torture and death sustained the D-e-Z defenders through a historic stand until they were relieved by a combined Syrian-Iranian force in late 2016. The commander of the D-e-Z garrison, General Zahreddin died days later when his vehicle hit a mine outside D-e-Z. At the very last stage of the D-e-Z siege, US warplanes killed over 100 Syrian soldiers in their defensive positions outside D-e-Z, 3 minutes before the ISIS launched a massive assault, very nearly breaking through the Syrian defense line. The US military later claimed that this was an error - which the Russians and Syrians found incredible.
The US Taxpayer’s Benevolence
US involvement started with covert aid to the Syrian Rebels, and clearly supported the armed groups trying to invade Damascus and overthrow the Assad government. The US arming, training and funding the ‘dissent’ in Syria, was quite open and proudly announced. There was strong support for the principle of supporting the Forces of Freedom in Syria against the ‘regime’ of the ‘brutal dictator Assad’, with measures including decapitation strikes, and War Crimes Trials loudly demanded against President Assad. The small fact that Syria was (and is) a sovereign member of the United Nations, that had done nothing hostile against the United States nor posed any challenge to the security of the USA, was not seen mentioned.
It is now apparent that covert aid started very early, but formal approval for military aid to the ‘Rebels’ did not occur until September 2014, by which time the ISIS was swarming all over Iraq and Syria. By 2015, the US had authorized some of the rebel groups to call in US/ NATO airstrikes, purportedly to allow them to fight off ISIS assaults, but equally enabling strikes on the forces of the Syrian government (https://nypost.com/2014/09/17/house-grudgingly-approves-arms-for-syrian-rebels/ and https://www.reuters.com/article/world/u-s-congress-approves-arming-syrian-rebels-funding-government-idUSKBN0HD1UJ/ and https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/09/17/349075789/after-a-long-wait-syrian-rebels-hope-the-weapons-will-now-flow and https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-to-give-some-syria-rebels-ability-to-call-airstrikes-1424208053).
Doubts about the nature of the Allies receiving US aid appeared in the US media following this Congressional approval. By September 2014 the media were putting the term ’moderate’ in quotes while referring to the rebels whom the US taxpayer was supporting. Thus there were reports that the US-funded ‘Opposition’ against the Syrian Government, had sworn that they backed the ‘rebels’ against the ’Al Qaeda’. In this context, we must point out that the term ’Al Qaeda’ means ”root directory’ of a hard disk in a computer found in the rubble in Afghanistan by US forces in 2001. The term appears to find usage mainly in justifying funding from Western lawmakers, as in ’we need funding to fight Al Qaeda in (fill in the geographic feature such as ‘Arabian Peninsula’ or ‘Iraq’).
The only reported usage of such a term in an in- ternal Arabic document was an early position paper by Dr. Aiman Al Zuwahiri, lieutenant to Sheikh Osama Bin Laden, de- scribing the members of the initial Afghan resistance against the Soviets as the core of the movement for Islamic purity (https://www.reuters.com/article/world/syria-s-moderate-rebels-say-they-need-weapons-not-training-idUSKBN0HA0QX/ and https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/turkeys-erdogan-does-not-rule-out-meeting-syrias-assad-restore-ties-2024-06-28/).
In September 2014, the US forces bombed ISIS sites in Syria. By May 2015, apparent consternation had dawned in Washington DC about what was obvious to anyone else: that Saudi Arabia and Turkey were sponsoring the ISIS- the same entities that the US forces were supposed to be bombing in Syria. By November 2015, the optimism had faded, lamenting that more airstrikes were not likely to help defeat the ISIS. But by then the Russians were in action (https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/u-s-bombs-isis-sites-syria-targets-khorasan-group-n209421 and https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-crisis-turkey-and-saudi-arabia-shock-western-countries-by-supporting-antiassad-jihadists-10242747.html)
To be Continued..
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