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THE EUROPEAN UNION’S RESPONSE TO JIHADIST TERRORISM AND THE SYRIAN CONFLICT
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whom have fled to other countries and, of that
number, one million have found their way to
Europe. The country’s main political opposition
groups have formed the National Coalition for
Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces,
whose principal component is the Syrian Na-
tional Council. Its most important military or-
ganisation is the Free Syrian Army, which al-
though disorganised and debilitated, partially
controls the southern Syrian provinces of Daraa
and Quneitra. Another armed rebel faction, the
Army of Conquest, controls a large part of the
northern province of Idlib. In total, there are al-
most one hundred groups and factions active
throughout the country, many of which em-
brace Salafist ideology but are not aligned with
either AQ or IS.
Turkey provides the majority of these groups
with arms and money, as does Saudi Arabia, Qa-
tar, The United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, the
greatest assistance going to Islamic factions. All
of these countries with Sunni majorities are ea-
ger to see the government of Assad, who be-
longs to the Alawite branch of Shiite Islam,
overthrown. Nevertheless, the Assad regime
enjoys the support of Iran and the Hezbollah
militias of Lebanon. In other words, the conflict
in Syria constitutes a proxy war between Sunnis
and Shiites as well as a struggle between Iran
and Saudi Arabia for hegemony in the Middle
East, a state of affairs that makes the fight
against IS (which is, as least officially, the com-
mon enemy of all involved) infinitely more dif-
ficult.
From the outset of the Syrian civil war, the
United States and European countries have
aligned themselves with Saudi Arabia and Tur-
key and taken the position that Bachar al-Assad
should step down, although they have chosen
not to intervene directly and limited their scope
of action to political and material support for
opposition factions. They have, however, taken
a more militant stance towards IS. In October
2014, the US Central Command launched Op-
eration Inherent Resolve, a military campaign
against the IS in Syria and Iraq that has involved
a coalition of more than 60 countries, amongst
them several European states whose contribu-
tions have ranged from missions focused on
training Iraqi military units and the supply of
arms to Kurdish militants to bombing raids. Bel-
gian, Danish, Dutch, French and British forces
have participated in bombing missions carried
out over Iraqi territory with the permission of
the Iraqi government. Although the Syrian gov-
ernment has not given permission to any coun-
try other than Russia to engage in a military in-
tervention on its territory, France, Great Britain
and Holland have carried out airstrikes there. As
a result of these actions and a more efficient
performance on the part of the Iraqi and Syrian
armed forces, and Kurdish militias, the jihadists
have lost 40 % of the territory they once con-
trolled in Iraq (including Ramadi) and 20 % of
their territory in Syria (including Palmyra). Nev-
ertheless, more progress will be difficult to
achieve without further extensive land opera-
tions difficult to carry out until the civil war has
been resolved. Although NATO is conducting
AWACS surveillance missions with over Syria,
the EU has no direct role in these operations.
In September 2015, Russia, Assad’s principal
foreign ally, launched a mission in Syria that os-
tensibly targeted IS but for all practical purposes
was conducted to shore up the troubled regime.
Moscow, which had been calling for a larger in-
ternational coalition against IS to specifically
include Al Assad and Iran for some time, was
accused by the U.S. and the EU of shoring up
the Assad regime and bombing opposition
groups other than IS and the ANF, the two
groups that the UN and all the parties involved