Isis consolidates

Patrick Cockburn

 I've just seen this bullshit promoted by Alex Callinicos, demonstrating that Alex knows bugger all about Syria. The Free Syrian Army was the only rebel force until people realised that the US was spending its time preventing them from getting heavy weapons through Turkey or Jordan, and so people drifted towards the Islamists. Now the US has belated made a promise of substantial funding at some point in the future, but haven't delivered. The anti-tank weapons that have been delivered have made substantial differences to the brigades supplied in Idlib and elsewhere. Aymeen al-Tamimi I once had a polite conversation with when he was blogging at the pro-Israel Harry's Place, he's recently been getting into trouble for encouraging supporters of ISIS to get his opponent's twitter accounts suspended. What "Western diplomats admit" is their policy of hoping the Syrian revolution will go away. If there was anything like the level of weaponry provided to the opposition that Russia and Iran supply to Assad, he would have fallen long ago. Even the basic supply of anti-aircraft weaponry would stop the strategy of creating refugees by barrel bombing. But instead of this Cockburn wants us to co-operate with Assad in the hope will now fight the Islamic State. Cockburn repeats the claim that all the evidence of mutual toleration between the régime and ISIS is just a conspiracy theory. I wouldn't expect any socialist to be promoting this trash.
 

 "Like the Shia leaders in Baghdad, the US and its allies have responded to the rise of Isis by descending into fantasy. They pretend they are fostering a ‘third force’ of moderate Syrian rebels to fight both Assad and Isis, though in private Western diplomats admit this group doesn’t really exist outside a few beleaguered pockets. Aymenn al-Tamimi confirms that this Western-backed opposition ‘is getting weaker and weaker’; he believes supplying them with more weapons won’t make much difference."