Syria’s war to get dirtier

As Cia-vetted weapons flood the country and some Islamist rebels pledge allegiance to al-qaeda, the civil war is about to take an even bigger turn for the worse, reports Foreign Editor David Pratt

ONE f or mer US official has called it “a cataract of weaponry”. From small clandestine offices i n countries as far flung as Qatar, Jordan, Turkey and Croatia, US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers have acted as brokers and overseers of a massive arms shipment programme to Syria’s opposition rebels.

With the operation shrouded in secrecy, the CIA declines to comment publicly on the arms supply. US officials instead talk of its existence in a kind of coded doublespeak referring to “a maturing of the opposition’s logistical pipeline.”

But exist it definitely does, and according to arms-trafficking investigators who are monitoring data on the weapons’ supplies, the scale of the shipments is huge.

“A conservative estimate of the payload of these flights would be 3500 tons of military equipment,” confirmed Hugh Griffiths, of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in a recent detailed analysis of the illicit transfer outlined in a New York Times (NYT) investigation.

“The intensity and frequency of these flights,” says Griffiths, are “suggestive of a well-planned and co-ordinated clandestine military logistics operation.”

According to the data compiled and information gleaned from Syrian rebel commanders, the NYT investigation reveals that, with CIA help, both Qatar and Saudi Arabia have been moving military material via Esenboga airport in Turkey to the opposition since, respectively, early and late 2012.

Towards the end of last year it appears a major obstacle to this process was removed after the Turkish government agreed to a rapid increase in the supply chain.

Evidence in the NYT report also points to arms and equipment being bought by Saudi Arabia in Croatia and flown to Jordan on Jordanian cargo planes for rebels operating in southern Syria, with some moving to Turkey for rebels operating from there.

That this arms pipeline should now be in full flow comes as no surprise, with fighting intensifying daily across Syria and the rebels’ need for resupply seemingly endless. The same former US official who spoke of “a cataract of weaponry,” says that the quantities are huge because the rebels “burn through a million rounds of ammo in two weeks.”

But as many intelligence and regional analysts are at pains to point out, the flood of weapons into Syria also comes at precisely the moment when major differences are emerging between Islamist and secular rebel forces.

It comes as one of the most combat- effective rebel groups on the ground, the powerful jihadist alNusra Front, last week pledged its allegiance to the leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Only last month the al- Nusra Front played a pivotal role in the capture of Raqqah, Syria’s first provincial capital to fall under opposition control. That victory effectively consolidated the gains of an assortment of mostly Islamist-inclined groups across three of Syria’s north-eastern provinces.

In taking Raqqah the al- Nusra Front had, of course, to rout government troops loyal to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, but in so doing it also set itself on a further collision course with other more moderately Islamist or secular rebel groups, who do not share or sometimes openly oppose the jihadist outlook of the al-Nusra front.

Among the al- Nusra Front’s most dogged rivals are the Farouq Brigades, one of the largest and bestknown units of the rebel umbrella organisation, the Free Syrian Army (FSA). To say that there is no love lost between these two bitter rivals would be an understatement.

In January, there was the killing of Thaer al-Waqqas, northern leader of the Farouq Brigades, amid suspicions he himself was involved in the death of a commander linked to the al-Nusra Front.

Then in March, Mohammad alDaher, another popular Farouq leader in eastern Syria, was badly wounded in an apparent attempt to assassinate him by the jihadists.

Within hours Colonel Riad al- Assad, who established and commanded the FSA, was badly injured in a car bombing.

It was initially believed to be the work of the Syrian regime, but some now say the attack bore distinct similarities to the one on al-Daher.

All this points to a deepening rift between the al-Nusra Front and the Farouq Brigades and has profound implications not only for the CIA’s clandestine arms supply programme but the future direction of Syria’s civil war and its outcome.

Are we perhaps looking at a rebel war within the already ongoing one between opposition and Syrian government forces?

“A full-blown civil war among the rebels is not out of the question,” was