Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale add nothing to our understanding of Syria. They make three references to the armed opposition to Assad, and they are all woefully wide of the mark.
"
Saudi Arabia, and various small gulf states, backed various right wing Sunni Islamist rebel groups against Assad’s Syrian government."
No, they have mostly backed the FSA, and all the groups they have supported have been defending Syrians against a murderous government; not the problem here. Complaining about the Islamist character, quite mistakenly in their formulation, could be seen as part of the anti-Muslim prejudice the authors claim to be opposing.
"Assad’s Syrian government is fighting the Islamic State."
As little as they possibly can, as their strategy all along has been to fight jihadis as little as possible, in the hope that they will eclipse the secular opposition and Assad will appear the better option. So they have been engaging in a major offensive, mostly carried by their Iranian and Lebanese foreign fighters, against the moderate opposition in southern Syria, but the only advance in the north-east where ISIS has done a runner.
"The revolt that began in 2011 united a broad range of Islamist and secular groups in resistance, and mixed local alliances. But by 2014 ISIS, a right wing Islamist group, was the largest army opposed to the governments of Syria and Iraq.
This does not mean the secular left was unimportant. But it does mean that for a generation now Islamists have been the strongest force in mass movements against American power and against the dictatorships."
The broad range of Islamist and secular groups are still fighting Assad, and now have to deal with ISIS too. ISIS are not opposed to the government of Syria, but to the Sunni Muslim communities they are parasites upon. To say that there is now just a battle between the US and "dictatorships" and Islamists, in which the important reality is US bombing, ignores the struggle against Assad's genocide.
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