November 15-2013
Only about a quarter of the rebels fighting in Syria are secularists favorable to the West, a report by the defense consultancy IHS Jane’s says.
The London-based global defense consultancy said there are about 100,000 rebels fighting the central government backed by Iran.
Of those, about 10,000 are linked to al-Qaeda, mainly Iraqis but with numbers of other foreigners and overwhelmingly opposed to Iran and the West.
Another 30,000 to 35,000 belong to “powerful factions” that are fighting for an Islamic state within a larger Middle East caliphate stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. This group is also Sunni and fiercely opposed to Iran and its Shiite state as well as the West.
The study says there are “at least a further 30,000 moderates belonging to groups that have an Islamic character.” They are also Sunni and unfriendly to Iran, though they may not be quite as hostile to the West as the others.
Only about 25,000 to 30,000 fighters hold more secular, nationalist views, or a scant 25-30 percent of the rebel force that could be considered friendly to the West. They are hostile to Iran both because it is a religious state and because it is backing the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
Iran portrays the West and especially the United States as supporting all the rebels. And it portrays all the rebels as al-Qaeda in either membership or spirit.
The United States just this month began sending limited weapons support to the secular rebels. It has held off doing so until now because it sees so few trustworthy rebels and fears any weapons it supplies will end up in unfriendly hands eventually.
IHS Jane’s said its study was based on “intelligence estimates and interviews with activists and militants.”
The Daily Telegraph of London said the report “accords with the view of Western diplomats who estimate that less than one-third of the opposition forces are ‘palatable’ to Britain while American envoys put the figure even lower.”
That’s bad news for the President Obama, who wants to see a Western-oriented government in Damascus to block Iran.
But then the prospect of having Sunni Muslim zealots controlling Syria isn’t good news for Tehran either.
Even if the Americans don’t step up arms supplies and training for the non-extremist rebels, it’s likely that Saudi Arabia will.
Riyadh’s track record of covert operations supporting the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan (1979-89) and the recent escalation in its arms shipments to the so-called moderate rebels in Syria—who now seem to spend as much time fighting the Islamists as they do the regime—would indicate that this is so.
Jane’s says that the main jihadist groups—the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant—now dominate the opposition battlefield and control income-generating resources in northern Syria, including oil, natural gas and grain.