South of central Damascus and just off the airport road lies the town of Seyda Zeinab, named after Zeinab bint Ali, a granddaughter of the Prophet Mohammad. A shimmering, golden-domed mausoleum and mosque stands on the spot where Zeinab is believed to be buried.
In the year AD 680, Zeinab’s brother Hussein and his supporters revolted against the Damascus-based Muslim caliph Yazid, whom they saw as usurper of the title after his father’s death. They believed that Hussein, a direct descendant of Mohammad, was the rightful caliph.1 They also argued that Yazid’s Umayyad dynasty, with its dictatorial rule and obsession with worldly pleasures, had strayed from the true path of Islam preached by Mohammad.
Still, Hussein and his partisans were very much in the minority, so that same year they set out from Medina (in modern-day Saudi Arabia) to Kufa (in modern-day Iraq) to rally support for their cause. Hussein’s sister Zeinab and her husband and children joined the caravan. On the way, they were ambushed by Yazid’s army in the desert near Karbala in Iraq and ordered to surrender. Hussein’s small contingent was no match for the army, but they were determined to hold their ground even as they were slaughtered one by one.
At one point in the epic of Karbala, as retold by Shiite clerics and scholars, one of Zeinab’s other siblings, Abu Fadhel al-Abbas, a handsome and brave knight, was attacked while he fetched water for his besieged companions.2 Al-Abbas was riddled with arrows, shot through the eye, and lost both arms. but still managed to hold onto a pouch of water for his brother with his teeth. His brother, Hussein, was ultimately beheaded. Hussein’s severed head and the women were brought to Damascus as trophies for Yazid. Some Shiites believe that Zeinab was paraded through Damascus without a veil or perhaps even naked.
The bloody events marked the definitive split in Islam between Shiites and Sunnis. Since then, Shiites have seen themselves as the underdogs who sided with the Prophet Mohammad’s massacred progeny against the tyrannical Sunni rulers representing the majority. Shrines like the one for Zeinab in Damascus and those of her brothers Al-Hussein and Al-Abbas in Karbala became sacred pilgrimage sites and potent symbols for a faith shaped by persecution and victimhood over the centuries.
The tragic yet heroic Karbala narrative rallied Shiite Iranians in what they called the Defa Moghadas (Sacred Defense) during their long war with Iraq in the 1980s. Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, a Sunni backed by Sunni Saudi Arabia and its Western allies, was a perfect Yazid-like figure. The narrative also inspired Hezbollah’s ideological and Iran-trained Lebanese Shiite fighters during their battle to liberate southern Lebanon from Israeli occupation.3
The story of Karbala had even more resonance later in Iraq, the saga’s original setting, where it spurred Shiite youth to join Iran-backed militias to fight Sunni insurgents who could not reconcile themselves to Saddam’s fall and the ascendancy of Shiites after the US-led invasion in 2003. Iraq’s Shiites believed that they faced the descendants of the killers of Al al-Bayt—the House of Mohammad.4 The destruction of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad, in 2006 by Sunni militants linked to Al-Qaeda was the touchstone for the worst Sunni–Shiite bloodletting in the country.
Now Bashar and his Lebanese and Iranian allies borrowed from the same historic narrative to cast themselves as the righteous party of Hussein fighting the Sunni extremists, or takfiris—fanatics ready to excommunicate and kill Shiites and other minorities in the Levant such as the Christians. All the rebels without exception were branded by Bashar as takfiris backed, he claimed, by the “Great Satan” America, Israel, and their tools in the region, wealthy Gulf Arab Sunni states. The mission in Syria would also be another Defa Moghadas (Sacred Defense) for Hezbollah and Iran. It took a good deal of work for this narrative to be fully consummated but, once it was adopted, its repercussions would go far beyond Syria and the defense of Bashar for many years to come.
In the spring of 2013, several banners fluttered at the entrance of a pilgrims’ hotel in Seyda Zeinab. There was the yellow flag of Hezbollah (Party of God) with its green logo showing the name in stylized calligraphy with an arm rising up and clutching an assault rifle. Next to it were the Syrian flag and the banners of the Syrian army and a new militia created by the Syrian mukhabarat called Liwa Abu Fadhel al-Abbas (“the Brigade of Abu Fadhel al-Abbas”), after the valiant brother of the revered Hussein.
In the hotel lobby there was a massive poster of Bashar in military fatigues and aviator sunglasses. Plastic flowers were pasted all around it and also a small portrait of a dour Hafez hanging on the wall next to it. Across from father and son was a framed painting of the twelve infallible imams sacred to Shiites, including Hussein and his father, Ali. For Alawites, members of the Shiite-linked sect to which the Assads belonged, Ali was a godlike figure. Even their name, Alawites, means the followers of Ali in Arabic.
Many Shiites continued to frown upon what they saw as heretical Alawite beliefs, even after Hafez had obtained a fatwa (edict) from a popular and influential Lebanese cleric in the 1970s declaring Alawites a subsect of Shiite Islam. However, now they were all Shiite brothers under Iran’s umbrella, fighting their common historical enemies.
Before 2011, hundreds of thousands of Shiites from Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, and elsewhere used to converge on Zeinab’s mausoleum to pray and weep while recollecting the Karbala saga. Since 2011 there had been hardly any pilgrims and most hotels were filled with families displaced by war.
This particular hotel had been turned into a command and recruitment center for the Liwa Abu Fadhel al-Abbas militia. It housed the office of the commander, Maher Jatta, or Abu Ajeeb al-Wahesh (“the Monster”), as his men called him admiringly. The tattooed thirty-year-old street vendor turned mukhabarat agent was until recently responsible for the Seyda Zeinab Popular Committee, one of many local militias hastily formed by the regime and its allies as army defections multiplied and the threats to Bashar’s seat of power, Damascus, became more serious.5
“The guys in the Popular Committees just wanted to steal and they did not pray,” said Jatta, his bushy black beard neatly trimmed. Jatta’s military uniform bore patches on the arms and front pocket reserved for members of a special-ops unit of the mukhabarat’s Air Force Intelligence Directorate headed by the infamous Jamil Hassan.
Jatta called Hassan “my boss” and described him as an ultra-secular man contemptuous of religion and “all the fantasies” associated with it, but during internal discussions in the fall of 2012 about alternatives to the Popular Committees, Hassan grudgingly went along with the idea of launching a militia that evoked the narrative of Karbala and Zeinab’s plight in order to attract Shiite men to fight on Bashar’s side.6
“We need a symbol to rally Shiites from all over the world, not just Syria. We need to fight with ideology, not like before,” explained Jatta, who is himself a Syrian Shiite but was admittedly not very religious before 2011. He described his own transformation from hustler to devout Shiite. The new decor was meant to attest to that.
A framed photograph of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, with his signature thick white beard, eyeglasses, and black turban, was on the wall next to his desk. Across from the desk on an opposite wall were photographs of Hezbollah’s Nasrallah and Iraq’s Moqtada al-Sadr, both populist clerics with a huge following.
A large poster of Bashar and Maher in military fatigues was on the wall behind the desk in what had previously been the hotel manager’s office.
“We sacrifice our soul and blood for you, Bashar,” was tattooed on Jatta’s left hand, just beneath the knuckles. Dying for Bashar was now blended with Zeinab’s defense. “We’re going to fight until the last drop of blood for our lady Zeinab,” Jatta vowed.
“At your service, O Zeinab!”
Thousands of volunteer fighters were preparing to come to Seyda Zeinab from all over to defend the shrine, said Jatta. His Liwa Abu Fadhel al-Abbas militia already had a Facebook page on which it posted regular updates on threats to Zeinab’s shrine, like the mortar shell that exploded in the plaza around it recently and the alleged text messages he said he had received from takfiris (by which he meant Sunni rebels) in adjacent towns vowing to “demolish the shrine and turn it into an ice-skating rink.”
Hezbollah chief Nasrallah, one of Bashar’s main allies and defenders, also chimed in that same spring with cataclysmic forewarnings: “Destroying or blowing up this shrine would have extremely grave consequences. Things would get out of everyone’s control.”7
What Nasrallah did not say was that already, months before, battle-hardened Iraqi militiamen from groups trained and funded by Iran to attack the US military when it maintained a major presence in Iraq were flocking to Syria to join the fight alongside Bashar. The mukhabarat’s Liwa Abu Fadhel al-Abbas militia was a catalyst and promoter of this influx. The battle mobilization order came from the veli-faqih (“guardian jurist”), Iran’s supreme leader.8
The veli-faqih had to be obeyed by his followers because he was supposed to be ruling on behalf of the last Shiite imam, who was currently in a state of occultation but would return at the end of times to save the world.
A holy war narrative began to morph—beyond just protecting Zeinab’s Damascus shrine.
In the Shiite holy city of Karbala in Iraq and not far from the shrine of Zeinab’s brother Hussein, one bookshop could barely keep up with the brisk demand for books and maps about an end-of-times battle involving a dozen different armies that Shiites believe will take place in Iraq and Syria—a battle presaging their hidden Imam’s return to save humanity.
Iraqi Shiite clerics allied to Iran spoke about it in their sermons. The battle to defend the Shiite faith in Iraq and the growing civil war in Syria were one and the same, they kept saying. The pitch was that yes they were fighting with Bashar, but this was much bigger than Bashar, this was potentially apocalyptic. Their hidden Imam and savior intended for them to join this battle.
For many Iraqi Shiites, events in Iraq itself, coupled with the more than a dozen global and regional powers immersing themselves in the Syrian conflict, seemed like a fulfillment of the prophecy.
In Iraq, Obama’s decision to withdraw the last remaining US troops at the end of 2011 in order to fulfill his campaign promise brought out into the open a simmering power struggle among Iraq’s many ethnic and sectarian groups. It was made worse in the context of the Arab Spring revolts, what was happening across the border in Syria, and the broader sectarian-driven proxy wars between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, an increasingly autocratic and paranoid figure who refused to forge a meaningful reconciliation with Sunnis from the Saddam era, was politically dependent on Iran, but he also needed American troops to keep all his enemies and rivals at bay.
In the end, the interests of Obama and Iran seemed to overlap: Obama was anxious to leave Iraq, and Iran wanted US troops out at any cost so it and its so-called axis of resistance partners could declare victory over the Americans.
With US troops out, Maliki feared that regional Sunni states like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey were conspiring against him through their Sunni protégés in Iraq in the same way that they were backing Bashar’s opponents in Syria.9 Maliki therefore moved closer to the Iranians and Bashar.
Equally, Sunnis in Iraq, and by extension their regional allies, felt that the Americans were handing over the country to Iran. Sunnis from Iraqi tribal areas bordering Syria felt betrayed and abandoned after they had partnered with America to drive out Al-Qaeda militants from their areas a few years earlier in what had become known as the Awakening.
Maliki struck first, going after Sunni members of his government, including the vice president, for allegedly plotting to topple him with the backing of regional powers. This plunged the country into a deep political crisis, triggered protests and civil disobedience and calls for autonomy across many Sunni areas, and pushed violence back to levels not seen since the sectarian strife of 2005–2007.10 The discord reenergized both Al-Qaeda’s local franchise (the Islamic State of Iraq) and Iran’s Shiite militias. Average Iraqis looked to these entities for protection as their already fragile state became more divided and dysfunctional.
By then, many of the protagonists needed a holy war.
Bashar needed the earthquake with which he had always threatened the West each time he felt they were working to get rid of him. Iran wanted to trounce its archenemy, Saudi Arabia, and solidify its presence and reach from Tehran to the Mediterranean shores; Syria became ground zero for the war against those who wanted to stand in Iran’s way.
Al-Qaeda had its own holy war narrative, but, more important, the group saw events in Iraq and Syria as a tremendous opportunity for a comeback. And so did the leaders of Al-Qaeda’s Iraqi franchise, many of them former Saddam loyalists who had never gotten over his demise, notwithstanding their supposed transformation into pious jihadists.
America’s regional allies (Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey) also did not mind a holy war as long as it remained confined to Iraq and Syria and ultimately served their own agendas and achieved their respective goals.
Jabhat al-Nusra, or the Nusra Front, was formally launched in January 2012 as the Syrian affiliate of what was still known at the time as the Islamic State of Iraq. Nusra was led by Ahmad al-Sharaa, a Daraa native in his thirties who went by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani. He was among those sent by the Syrian regime to Iraq to wage jihad at the start of the US-led invasion in 2003. He and the other volunteers were welcomed at the Syrian embassy in Baghdad.11 Later Jolani was arrested and then returned to Syria, where he collaborated with the Syrian mukhabarat to channel fighters to Iraq to fuel the insurgency and undermine US post-invasion efforts to stabilize the country.
Starting in the summer of 2011 as Syria was in the throes of the popular uprising against Bashar, Jolani slipped across the border to Iraq to discuss the establishment of a Syrian wing with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, head of the Islamic State of Iraq. All the cells and networks that had been in place when Bashar and his mukhabarat were facilitating the transfer of foreign fighters to Iraq via Syria during the previous decade were reactivated and became the “building blocks” (as one analyst put it) for establishing the Syrian franchise throughout 2011.12 Most of the early recruits were the Islamists and jihadists freed from prison by Bashar in May 2011. Foreign fighters came later. Between December 2011 and December 2012, Nusra claimed responsibility for at least forty suicide bomb attacks in major cities that targeted mostly the mukhabarat and regime forces that were killing Syrians.13
“I literally flew—the sky was red,” said one resident of an eastern Damascus neighborhood who was home on October 9, 2012, when massive twin explosions hit a nearby outpost for the mukhabarat’s Air Force Intelligence Directorate, killing more than 100.14
Still, many in the opposition were uneasy about what they regarded as an ominous development. First, these attacks often killed civilians, too, and second, the terror and sectarian mayhem they had long associated with Iraq was spreading to Syria. Some in the opposition blamed the mukhabarat for being behind the attacks in an effort to muddy the waters and taint regime opponents by linking them to terror, something Bashar had set out to do from the onset of protests in the spring of 2011. It was not farfetched to believe that the notorious mukhabarat was carrying out these bombings, but Nusra was real and most of the attacks were theirs. Some of Bashar’s opponents were in a state of denial about a problem that had begun to plague their ranks. The truth was that all the conditions were there to favor the rise of Nusra and other extremist groups.
Nusra filled a leadership void in the ranks of the opposition as Bashar killed or imprisoned peaceful protest leaders, people like Mazen Darwish and many others, and crushed any hope for a moderate and inclusive opposition to establish itself in areas liberated from his regime. Nusra tapped into the rage and vengefulness that consumed Syrians after each atrocity committed by Bashar. It also played on a growing feeling among many average Sunnis in Syria: only Nusra’s religious fanatics, who were also Sunnis, could protect them from the ideology-driven Shiite fighters dispatched by Iran to defend Bashar. Many believed their only succor was God and Nusra.
Paradoxically, both Bashar and Nusra were greatly aided by the opposition’s internal divisions and a deepening rift between their two main regional backers, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, as well as a schizophrenic US approach in dealing with the grim developments in Syria and the wider region.
As Bashar’s warplanes rained bombs on civilians in opposition-held areas, Hillary Clinton wanted serious consideration to be given to the idea of a no-fly zone, and she discussed it with British, French, and German allies in the summer of 2012. Former CIA director David Petraeus, meanwhile, sketched a plan to vet, arm, and train Syrian rebels. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was increasingly frustrated with the gridlock over Syria.
“Petraeus and I argued that there was a big difference between Qatar and Saudi Arabia dumping weapons into the country and the United States responsibly training and equipping a non-extremist rebel force,” said Clinton. “And getting control of that mess was a big part of our plan’s rationale.”15
Obama wanted to hold off. In the endeavor to end the Syrian tragedy and affect change, the Americans seemed to have one foot in and the other out. Obama was horrified by Bashar’s atrocities and called for his resignation, but at the same time he signaled that this was not America’s problem.
By then, the Saudis had a team in Turkey whose sole job was to lure rebel factions away from Qatar with cash and supplies of weapons. Sunni clerics from Gulf Arab states flew to the Syrian–Turkish border with suitcases of cash to back their favorite rebel factions.16 Factions adopted Islamic-sounding names in order to increase their chances of securing this support. Some of these clerics were taken inside Syria so they could be filmed and photographed with members of their adopted rebel faction. This material was used to raise more funds.
To counter rising Islamist militancy and sectarian fearmongering, a new opposition body was unveiled in the Qatari capital, Doha, in November 2012, after long deliberations involving US envoy Robert Ford, France’s Éric Chevallier, and others.17 It was hoped the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces would be broader and more representative of Syria’s sectarian and ethnic demographics, and that it would be unified and capable of controlling the plethora of armed groups fighting the regime, while also creating credible alternative local government structures in liberated areas.
Moaz al-Khatib, a respected, well-liked, and moderate Damascene Sunni preacher, who had left Syria a few months earlier, was appointed president of this new coalition. He had no prior political experience. Symbolically, his deputies were an unveiled woman, Suhair al-Atassi, and a secular veteran regime opponent, Riad Seif.
It was hoped that Khatib’s Islamist background put him in a better position than others to secure acceptance for the coalition from many of the Islamist rebels gaining strength on the ground, the idea being that a large block of moderate Islamists would sideline and neutralize extremists linked to Al-Qaeda. Khatib himself believed that, with the right support and resources, he could even convince certain Nusra Front elements to distance themselves from Al-Qaeda.18
Within days, most Arab states, as well as Britain, France, and Turkey, recognized the coalition as the sole legitimate representative of the Syrian people. Qatar’s emir went a step further by orchestrating the handover of Syria’s seat in the Arab League to the opposition and inaugurating their new embassy in his capital, Doha,19 where futuristic skyscrapers and stadiums rose from the desert sands as part of a spending spree of more than US$200 billion in preparation for hosting the 2022 World Cup.20
“We consider them a legitimate representative of the aspirations of the Syrian people, [but] we’re not yet prepared to recognize them as some sort of government in exile,” the ever-so-cautious Obama said in Washington just after his reelection for a second term.21
It was not long before the new Syrian opposition body was mired in the Qatari–Saudi feud.22 A Syrian businessman brought in by Qatar to be the coalition’s budget controller and de facto leader co-opted his colleagues with money.23 The Saudis and their allies then pushed hard to expand the opposition body by installing their own people in order to dilute the sway of Qatar and Turkey.24
Similar discord and dueling agendas plagued the effort to reorganize the rebel groups and bring them under the control of the political leadership. The Saudis, with the Emiratis and Jordanians on their side and their Western allies behind them, pressured the Qataris and Turks to divide the battleground into five fronts. The Saudis wanted the central and southern zones, which included Damascus.25 This was supposed to sideline the militant Islamists but it actually had the reverse effect.
During a meeting in the Jordanian capital, Amman, a defected army officer turned rebel commander objected to this plan, arguing that it would lead to further fragmentation rather than unity.26 Retorted Prince Salman bin Sultan, the brother of Saudi spy chief Prince Bandar, “You will fight like that and if you’re not interested, ‘to my shoe’”—an expression offensive to Arabs.
“The plan is going forward whether you like it or not,” added the prince.27
Meanwhile, the head of the opposition’s political body, the moderate cleric Moaz al-Khatib, resigned in the spring of 2013 after some of his colleagues called him a “traitor” for making overtures to Bashar’s backers, Iran and Russia, and proposing contact with the Assad regime to discuss humanitarian relief for civilians.28 The Saudis eventually installed their own man at the helm, but in the end both the political and military opposition bodies proved ineffectual and hollow structures as their backers worked at cross-purposes.
To counter the Saudi moves, both Qatar and Turkey significantly upped their financial and military support for a constellation of Islamist groups allied to Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front,29 branded as extremists by the United States and its Western allies; Nusra got the official “terrorist organization” designation from Washington. These groups, though, were the most effectual on the battleground and garnered support among populations in opposition areas that were coming under brutal assault from Bashar. The Islamists seemed like the only ones doing something concrete while Obama was objecting to the supply of heavy weapons that could better deal with the regime’s tanks and warplanes even as Iran and its militias got increasingly involved on Bashar’s side. These Islamists also started taking the leadership role in running people’s daily affairs in the liberated zones.
The United States and its European allies, including Britain and France, were mainly providing so-called nonlethal aid to the opposition’s revamped military leadership. This aid included things like vehicles, computers, bulletproof vests, and night-vision goggles. To average Syrians, the Western approach to defeating Bashar seemed cynical if not complicit with the regime that was murdering them day after day.
“The idea was not to give them the means to win the battle; it was to give them the means to be more structured in order to show the regime that there was no military victory possible and a need to go to the negotiating table,” said one Western official, describing Washington’s strategy at the end of 2012.30 The premise was that Bashar would rush to negotiate his exit if he saw an organized rebel force.
The dissonance in America’s Syria strategy was turning surreal.
Obama wanted to maintain his distance but the United States was still eager to control what its regional allies Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey were funneling to rebels in Syria. In Turkey, where Qatari cargo planes laden with weapons purchased from Eastern Europe and elsewhere landed regularly, CIA operatives took on the role of inspectors and advisers who “were sort of looking the other way,” because America was not supposed to be involved in arming the Syrian rebels, as per Obama’s official policy.31
CIA officers often met with members of Qatar’s special forces and Turkey’s intelligence services at a secret maximum-security location on the outskirts of the Turkish capital, Ankara, that became known as “the farm.”32 It was an old military base consisting of a block structure and some trailer homes at the foot of a mountain nestled amid trees and guarded by dogs.
“There were red lines: no snipers, no antitank and no antiaircraft weapons,” according to one person present at the meetings.33 There was fear that these more sophisticated weapons could fall into the wrong hands. Still, the Qataris and Turks sometimes passed on these prohibited weapons and even a small shipment of Chinese-made shoulder-fired missiles capable of downing the regime’s warplanes. “This is top secret—the Americans do not know about it,” they often told the Syrians when the Americans were not in the room.34
Between the fall of 2012 and spring 2013, Obama refused to consider the no-fly zone even as Bashar was massacring Syrian civilians in ever-greater numbers. He also rejected the proposal to bring the rebels under more Western control and scrutiny as America’s regional allies competed for their loyalty with cash and weapons. Obama did authorize “nonlethal” aid to rebels and hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance to the refugees fleeing the war, things like food, water, blankets, and medical services. There were more than 700,000 refugees in neighboring countries by the end of 2012,35 while the death toll surpassed 60,000.36
At the same time, the holy war narrative was amplified and began to spread beyond Iraq and Syria.
France’s foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, called the American policy a “macabre fool’s bargain,” and he explained, “The sentiment given was that he [Obama] was doing a lot to help the Syrian resistance, but in reality he did not do much. He never wanted to get involved in the process.”37
Weighing on Obama’s decisions was what was happening in Iraq and the countries touched by the Arab Spring.
Libya was sliding into anarchy. The United States and its Western allies imposed a no-fly zone there and helped rebels defeat Gaddafi but largely took a back seat when it came to helping a new state emerge from the ashes of conflict and four decades of tyranny. Tribal and clan-based militias refused to disarm, there was violent retribution against those accused of having been loyal to Gaddafi, rifts between the country’s different regions deepened, especially east versus west, and Islamist extremists were gaining strength. Fueling these fights was the race between the Qataris and other Gulf states, such as the Saudi-allied Emiratis, to control post-Gaddafi Libya.
On the anniversary of 9/11 in 2012, Islamist militants launched an attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city. The US ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans were killed.38 One of the triggers for the assault was a crude and amateurish movie trailer insulting the Prophet Mohammad that was produced and promoted by right-wing Christian evangelicals in the United States and Egyptian-American Christians opposed to the new Islamist-led and democratically elected government in Egypt.39
In Egypt itself, opponents of the first post-Mubarak president, Mohammad Morsi, seized on a controversy over the drafting of a new constitution to mobilize a march on the presidential palace in December 2012. Morsi and the leadership of his Muslim Brotherhood party were accused of wanting to impose Islamic law on the country.
Protesters besieged the palace in Heliopolis on Cairo’s east side, covering its walls with subversive graffiti and chanting against Morsi. Some scaled the perimeter as Morsi was rushed to safety.40 Months of protests and turmoil followed. Morsi, who was strongly supported by Qatar and Turkey, was eventually ousted in a military coup in the summer of 2013 by army generals and former regime figures backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.41
In the spring of 2013, as Iran’s ideologically driven Shiite militiamen flocked to Syria to defend Bashar, a leadership struggle between Al-Qaeda’s Iraqi and Syrian affiliates reached a breaking point. The Nusra Front sought to align itself more with the Syrian rebels and their Syria-focused agenda and assure them it had no transnational jihadist agenda, at least for now, while Al-Baghdadi in Iraq moved to bring what he regarded as a renegade group back under his firm control.42
In April 2013, he announced that he was abolishing the Nusra Front and that from then on there was only one Al-Qaeda-affiliated entity in both Iraq and Syria—the Islamic State in Iraq and Al-Sham, or ISIS. Bilad al-Sham (sometimes spelled “al-Cham”) is the name usually given to the area encompassing the Levant: Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, and Syria. Baghdadi’s Levantine and pan-Arab aspirations were no different from those long espoused by the Baathist regimes in both Iraq and Syria. Syria was the “pulsing heart of Arabism,” according to Assad regime dogma. The Baath Party manifesto speaks of “Arabs as being one nation with the natural right to live in one state.”
While he was at it, Baghdadi warned Syrians against replacing Bashar with democracy, as had happened in Iraq when the Americans invaded and toppled Saddam, or as in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, where revolts swept aside dictators there, too.
“Look at their condition and what has become of them, and beware that you be stung from the hole which the Muslims in those countries have been stung,” Baghdadi said as he made the case for Islamic rule. It was short of declaring a caliphate.43 (In its most basic sense, the caliphate refers to the entities that came to be after the Prophet Mohammad’s death and ruled over the Arabian peninsula and, later, parts of Asia, Africa. and Europe in the name of Islam. The term evokes the grandeur and power of the ummah, the Muslim nation, before it broke into nation states. The Ottoman Empire considered itself a caliphate.)
Notwithstanding his motives, Baghdadi’s warnings about democracy and his use of Iraq and the countries of the Arab Spring as cautionary tales could have come right out of the mouth of Bashar—and they did. “They are soap bubbles, just like the [Arab] Spring is a soap bubble that will burst,” said Bashar mockingly about calls for him to leave power.44
He spoke in early 2013 to a packed auditorium of regime officials and loyalists at the Dar al-Assad for Culture and Arts, also known as the Damascus Opera House. “What’s certain is that the majority of the people we are facing now are terrorists who espouse Al-Qaeda’s ideology,” said Bashar, dressed in a charcoal suit, white shirt, and thickly knotted tie.45 “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s not only opposition versus loyalists and an army versus gangs and killers—we are now in a state of war in every sense of the word, we are confronting a vicious external aggression.”46
Bashar stood on a stage in front of a massive collage of portraits of civilians and soldiers killed since the start of the conflict, done in the colors and pattern of the Syrian flag—the work of a savvy new media team.
It was in this same venue that, in May 2008, Bashar and Asma watched Richard III: An Arab Tragedy. In this version of Shakespeare’s Richard III, an army general in an unspecified Arab state murders his way to the crown.47
Bashar was even caught smiling at one of the play’s lines about public support for this fictional usurper: “We have done an Internet survey of the entire population, and 99 percent of them want you to become king. The other 1 percent don’t have Internet.”
Less than five years later, Bashar was the solo performer on the same stage.