ISIS, Syria and Bashar al-Assad – Who, What, When, Where and Why

As the president prepares to address the nation this evening regarding ISIS/Syria, it is worth taking a moment to reflect on how the Syrian crisis and later the ISIS crisis came to be.

In the spring of 2011, moderate students, small business owners, academics and others took the streets of Damascus, Syrian to protest the tyrannical reign of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. This was part of the larger regional democratic push coined as the “Arab Spring.”  

These protestors were not jihadists. They were not radicals. They were fathers and mothers, husbands and wives who simply longed for the same values we cherish – freedom of assembly, free and fair elections and a fair and open judicial process among them. They also dared to seek rights we do not ever think to cherish such as the right to not be tortured by the intelligence service of your own government for verbalizing any criticism of the president or his policies.

For the first time in decades there appeared to be hope that the people of Syria may soon see the dawn of freedom.  There was a rising army of non-extremist, freedom thirsty Syrians who were willing to risk their lives and their families’ lives to demand President Assad be removed and with him his dictatorship of terror. These men and women took the streets by the thousands hopeful that their cries for freedom would be heard not only in Damascus but also in the United Nations and Washington.

Their world of hopeful revolution, however, quickly slide into a geopolitical twilight zone where a calculating dictator out maneuvered a vacillating U.S. president and a divided UN Security Council, leaving the dictator free to openly and brazenly unleash a war of destruction and murder that continues to this day. 

With no significant international resistance and a desperate lust to cling to power Assad began a military campaign against his own population. Documented tactics included, and still include, the use of barrel bombs dropped on open markets, hospitals and apartment buildings, chlorine gas dropped from helicopters into small towns indiscriminately killing civilians, and the systematic torture of women and children believed to be sympathetic to the opposition  -often implementing the barbaric process of blade torture and stoning. 

According to the Immigration Policy Center, an estimated 9 million Syrians have been forced to flee their homes since the revolution began. Two and half million have sought refuge in camps along the Turkish and Jordanian borders with Syria while another 6 million remain displaced within Syrian. 

More than 190, 000 Syrian civilians have been killed since March 2011.

Assad also recognized the need to keep Western nations at bay. To accomplish this he strategically released hundreds of radicalized jihadists from Syrian prisons who had been captured entering Syria following the U.S. Iraq war and deported them back to Iraq. It was there that these terror warriors who had been battle hardened during the last Iraq war organized with other similar groups and in June 2013 formed the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). 

U.S. Senator John McCain has astutely stated, “It’s obvious that Bashar al-Assad’s strategy is to present us with a choice of ISIS or him so that eventually we will choose him.” Intelligence reports support this this claim indicating that Assad intentionally introduced radical elements into the moderate oppositional forces that were successfully fighting his regime.  With Al-Qaeda- like fighters claiming opposition to Assad and fighting inside Syria there became little hope of U.S. intervention in support of even the most legitimate rebel forces. 

In the vacuum of any U.N. or U.S. strategy to develop a coalition of opposition, ISIS was free to grow within Syria and enter Iraq. Social media outlets are now filled with images and reports of the incalculable toll the evil of ISIS has taken on the people of northern Iraq and Syria – Christian and Muslim alike.  

In addition, ISIS has taken control of all oil fields inside Syria and those of northern Iraq.  This has given them a strategic advantage no other extremist group has in the region, a sustainable and significant funding source that is not reliant ideological support. Who is the purchaser of this oil? Syrian President Assad.

President Assad continues to support ISIS through the purchase of oil as well as the exchanging of intelligence regarding the moderate freedom fighters that continue their desperate struggle. According to David Butter, an expert on Syria and an associate fellow at the think-tank Chatham House, Assad’s intelligence service works closely with ISIS both in regards to weapons and funding.

It should be noted that the American journalist, James Foley, was kidnapped in Aleppo, Syria in 2012 and turned over to Syrian intelligence. He is believed to have been held at a Syrian Air Base by Syrian intelligence officers before strangely being turned over to ISIS who then so gruesomely murdered him as a means of taunting the United States.

It is the belief of this author that we must look past the occasional fighting between ISIS and Assad and recognize that some dark deal has been made between the two. Given the genesis of ISIS and the lack of effort Assad is employing to stop ISIS along the Iraqi border and around Aleppo, it seems plausible that he is willing to give them ground in exchange for their assurance not to march on Damascus. For their part Assad’s willingness to insure a steady purchase of oil would be motivation enough to agree. Although their long-term goals cannot co-exist, far stranger bedfellows have been brought together in search of short-term gains. 

If President Obama is successful in persuading Congress and the American people that it is in our national interest to support the destruction of ISIS, then we must also recognize that the only way to achieve this is to simultaneously support the downfall of Bashar al-Assad and the rise of a Syria free to choose the path the people of Syria began walking in the spring of 2011.