The twin
suicide bombings that killed at least 30 people in Damascus on Friday
are good news for the regime of President Hafez al-Assad, and bad news for the
opposition protest movement. That’s because the regime’s
narrative of the 10-month crisis has been that Syria is facing not a
citizens’ movement for democracy, but a sectarian, extremist terror campaign —
a claim it uses to explain its own heavily militarized response that has
resulted in the deaths of more than 5,000 Syrians, according to the U.N. The
timing of the blasts, moreover, couldn’t have been better for the Assad regime,
coming just a day after it had admitted, under pressure, a delegation of Arab
League observers tasked with monitoring a peace agreement under which the
regime had agreed to withdraw troops from its restive cities. That, and the
regime’s rush to pin the attacks on al-Qaeda within minutes of breaking the
news, may explain the knee-jerk response of many opposition activists who
branded the event “mysterious”, and implied that it may
have been staged by the regime for propaganda ends.
Useful as Friday’s attacks may have been to the regime’s
p.r. battle, the likelihood of a jihadist attack on the Syrian regime can’t be
that blithely dismissed. The blasts also coincided with Thursday’s attacks
in Baghdad, assumed to be the work of Sunni jihadists looking to reassert
themselves in Iraq amid the steadily rising sectarian tensions. The
growing alienation of Iraq’s Sunni minority from the Shi’ite dominated regime
of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki — and Maliki’s systematic efforts to hobble
the Sunni “Awakening” movement of former insurgents that had allied with the
U.S. in order to drive al-Qaeda out of their communities — has created a more
permissive environment for the Iraqi jihadists to reestablish themselves
and reverse some of their losses over the past four years.
The Iraqi Sunni insurgent tribes of Anbar and Nineveh
provinces, which abut Syria, have strong ties with Sunni communities across the
border, and some have spoken of helping
their brethren across the border in the fight against Assad.
Iraqi Sunni extremist groups have for months been urging
fighters to cross into Syria and help lead the rebellious Sunnis in a
jihad against the regime. Substantial numbers of Syrians previously fought as
volunteers in the Iraqi insurgency, and some are also believed to be playing a
role in the Syrian uprising. The more militarized and sectarian the struggle to
unseat Assad becomes, the more prominent the role of militant Islamists could
become.
Until now, much of the armed resistance to the Assad regime
is being undertaken by the Free Syrian Army, an insurgent force founded by
defectors from the regular army and linked
with the opposition umbrella organization they Syrian National Council,
which quickly condemned Friday’s blasts. The Assad regime is currently engaged
in what appears to be an operation to eliminate defectors around the town of
Idlib, where as many as 200 have reportedly been killed in heavy fighting over
the past couple of days.
While it’s hardly beyond the realm of possibility that a
regime as brutally cynical as that of President Bashar al-Assad would
manufacture a false-flag terror strike to burnish its case, it would also be
naive to deny the existence of a jihadist element that may be quite happy to
accept a fight on Assad’s terms, i.e. a violent and sectarian war. After
all, the Arab rebellion has not been kind to those who follow the path of
al-Qaeda, leaving them on the sidelines as the Arab public forces out its
tyrants and opts largely to replace them with moderate, democratic Islamist
parties. There’s no room for jihadists in that equation, but they’re not likely
to passively accept their marginalization. Right now, the roiling conflict in
Syria — and the one coming to the boil, again, in neighboring Iraq — would
present themselves as an opportunity for jihadist groups to reassert their
claims to be fighting on behalf of embattled Sunni communities. That’s
just fine with the Assad regime, of course, which will hope to roll back
regional Arab pressure by pinning the entire rebellion on an al-Qaeda threat.
The scale of the uprising, particularly if opposition groups take advantage of
the presence of Arab League monitors to undertake mass protest actions, may
make it harder for Assad. But, whatever the identity of the authors of Friday’s
attacks in Damascus, the development represent a tactical and political
challenge to the Syrian opposition, demonstrating the danger created by
responding to the regime’s brutality with a more militarized rebellion. That,
after all, appears to be exactly the terrain on which Assad is choosing to fight.
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