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Fabrice Balanche
Towards an alliance between the international coalition
and Bashar al-Assad?
Western intervention against Daesh is not an easy task, as relying on local populations
means involvement in ethnic, religious and tribal conflicts in this complicated region.
In Iraq, Sunni Arab populations in the North see the army as an occupying Shiite force,
while the Kurdish Peshmerga who now control Kirkuk are also rejected as they are accused
of wanting to carry out ethnic cleansing in order to extend the territory of the Kurdistan
Regional Government into these “disputed” areas. The same is true in Syria, where Kurdish
strategy is to create an uninterrupted territory stretching between their three cantons in the
North, which means that Arab and Turkmen populations in these areas would have to
accept their new minority status or leave the future Rojava. Supporting the Syrian Army is
a consideration for the West, as they cannot effectively fight Daesh in Iraq without forcing
them out of Syria; their Kurdish allies have no desire to fight Daesh outside Rojava and
they cannot rely on “moderate rebels” as these no longer exist.
A programme to train an army of moderate rebels was launched in Turkey in the spring
of 2015. But at least a year is needed to train 5,000 fighters, and there is no guarantee
that they will be capable of fighting Daesh, or whether they will have any desire to do
so. For the Syrians did not take up arms against Daesh, but against Bashar al-Assad The
inevitable “collateral damage” to the civil population has brought him new support.
With no terrestrial support in Syria, coalition strikes will soon prove ineffective, and even
be counter-productive. The international coalition is therefore faced with a Cornelian
dilemma: renew relations with Bashar al-Assad or allow Daesh to prosper in Syria and risk it
spreading to Jordan and Lebanon. Operations in Iraq, led in coordination with Iran, should
prepare the ground for an alliance reversal as Daesh has now become the main threat in
the region, making authoritarian regimes the lesser evil. The United States priority is to
preserve Syrian institutions in order to avoid a Libyan scenario,
14
yet Bashar al-Assad (who
retains the support of Iran and Russia) is the keystone in a system that must be preserved in
the face of jihadism and chaos.
14 Speech by a US State Department representative at a seminar at the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy in Washington on 12 February 2015.