Al Jazeera Trouble, al Qaeda and Anti-Semitism

The news outlet from the Middle East, al Jazeera which is the primary news source in the region also reaches into the United States with journalists and a television division. But lately they are in real trouble, ethically and financially. What is worse it appears they have al Qaeda on the payroll.

The embattled CEO of Al Jazeera America was pushed aside Wednesday, ending more than a week of public turmoil that included the resignations of three top female executives.
The announcement capped a turbulent week for Ehab Al Shihabi. His company was sued for $15 million, AJAM was cited for alleged sexism and anti-Semitism and al Shihabi was blamed by one departing executive for presiding over a ‘culture of fear’. Full article here.

But it gets worse.

U.S. Government Designated Prominent Al Jazeera Journalist as “Member of Al Qaeda”

The U.S. government labeled a prominent journalist as a member of Al Qaeda and placed him on a watch list of suspected terrorists, according to a top-secret document that details U.S. intelligence efforts to track Al Qaeda couriers by analyzing metadata.

The briefing singles out Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, Al Jazeera’s longtime Islamabad bureau chief, as a member of the terrorist group. A Syrian national, Zaidan has focused his reporting throughout his career on the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and has conducted several high-profile interviews with senior Al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden.

A slide dated June 2012 from a National Security Agency PowerPoint presentation bears his photo, name, and a terror watch list identification number, and labels him a “member of Al-Qa’ida” as well as the Muslim Brotherhood. It also notes that he “works for Al Jazeera.”

The presentation was among the documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

In a brief phone interview with The Intercept, Zaidan “absolutely” denied that he is a member of Al Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood. In a statement provided through Al Jazeera, Zaidan noted that his career has spanned many years of dangerous work in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and required interviewing key people in the region — a normal part of any journalist’s job. 

“For us to be able to inform the world, we have to be able to freely contact relevant figures in the public discourse, speak with people on the ground, and gather critical information. Any hint of government surveillance that hinders this process is a violation of press freedom and harms the public’s right to know,” he wrote. “To assert that myself, or any journalist, has any affiliation with any group on account of their contact book, phone call logs, or sources is an absurd distortion of the truth and a complete violation of the profession of journalism.” 

A spokesman for Al Jazeera, a global news service funded by the government of Qatar, cited a long list of instances in which its journalists have been targeted by governments on which it reports, and described the labeling and surveillance of Zaidan as “yet another attempt at using questionable techniques to target our journalists, and in doing so, enforce a gross breach of press freedom.”

The document cites Zaidan as an example to demonstrate the powers of SKYNET, a program that analyzes location and communication data (or metadata) from bulk call records in order to detect suspicious patterns.

In the Terminator movies, SKYNET is a self-aware military computer system that launches a nuclear war to exterminate the human race, and then systematically kills the survivors.

According to the presentation, the NSA uses its version of SKYNET to identify people that it believes move like couriers used by Al Qaeda’s senior leadership. The program assessed Zaidan as a likely match, which raises troubling questions about the U.S. government’s method of identifying terrorist targets based on metadata.

It appears, however, that Zaidan had already been identified as an Al Qaeda member before he showed up on SKYNET’s radar. That he was already assigned a watch list number would seem to indicate that the government had a prior intelligence file on him. The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, is a U.S. government database of over one million names suspected of a connection to terrorism, which is shared across the U.S. intelligence community.

The presentation contains no evidence to explain the designation.

Peter Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst and author of several books on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, told The Intercept, “I’ve known [Zaidan] for well over a decade, and he’s a first class journalist.”

“He has the contacts and the access that of course no Western journalist has,” said Bergen. “But by that standard any journalist who spent time with Al Qaeda would be suspect.” Bergen himself interviewed bin Laden in 1997.

The NSA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to answer questions about the basis of Zaidan’s inclusion on the watch list and alleged Al Qaeda affiliation. The NSA also declined to answer a set of detailed questions about SKYNET, and how it uses the information about the people that it identifies.

What is clear from the presentation is that in the NSA’s eyes, Zaidan’s movements and calls mirrored those of known Al Qaeda couriers.

According to another 2012 presentation describing SKYNET, the program looks for terrorist connections based on questions such as “who has traveled from Peshawar to Faisalabad or Lahore (and back) in the past month? Who does the traveler call when he arrives?” and behaviors such as “excessive SIM or handset swapping,” “incoming calls only,” “visits to airports,” and “overnight trips.”

That presentation states that the call data is acquired from major Pakistani telecom providers, though it does not specify the technical means by which the data is obtained.

The June 2012 document poses the question: “Given a handful of courier selectors, can we find others that ‘behave similarly’” by analyzing cell phone metadata? “We are looking for different people using phones in similar ways,” the presentation continues, and measuring “pattern of life, social network, and travel behavior.”

For the experiment, the analysts fed 55 million cell phone records from Pakistan into the system, the document states.

The results identified someone who is “PROB” — which appears to mean probably — Zaidan as the “highest scoring selector” traveling between Peshawar and Lahore.

The following slide appears to show other top hits, noting that 21 of the top 500 were previously tasked for surveillance, indicating that the program is “on the right track” to finding people of interest. A portion of that list visible on the slide includes individuals supposedly affiliated with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, as well as members of Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. But sometimes the descriptions are vague. One selector is identified simply as “Sikh Extremist.”

As other documents from Snowden revealed, drone targets are often identified in part based on metadata analysis and cell phone tracking. Former NSA director Michael Hayden famously put it more bluntly in May 2014, when he said, “we kill people based on metadata.”

Metadata also played a key role in locating and killing Osama bin Laden. The CIA used cell phone calling patterns to track an Al Qaeda courier and identify bin Laden’s hiding place in Pakistan.

Yet U.S. drone strikes have killed many hundreds of civilians and unidentified alleged militants who may have been marked based on the patterns their cell phones gave up.

People whose work requires contact with extremists and groups that the U.S. government regards as terrorists have long worried that they themselves could look suspicious in metadata analysis.

“Prominent American journalists have interviewed members of blacklisted terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It would surprise me if journalists in Pakistan hadn’t done the same. Part of the job of journalists and human rights advocates is to talk to people the government doesn’t want them to talk to.”

A History of Targeting Al Jazeera 

The U.S. government’s surveillance of Zaidan is not the first time that it has linked Al Jazeera or its personnel to Al Qaeda.

During the invasion of Afghanistan, in November 2001, the United States bombed the network’s Kabul offices. The Pentagon claimed that it was “a known al-Qaeda facility.”

That was just the beginning. Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman, was imprisoned by the U.S. government at Guantanamo for six years before being released in 2008 without ever being charged. He has said he was repeatedly interrogated about Al Jazeera. In 2003, Al Jazeera’s financial reporters were barred from the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange for “security reasons.” Nasdaq soon followed suit.

During the invasion of Iraq, U.S. forces bombed Al Jazeera’s Baghdad offices, killing correspondent Tariq Ayoub. The U.S. insisted it was unintentional, though Al Jazeera had given the Pentagon the coordinates of the building. When American forces laid siege to Fallujah, and Al Jazeera was one of the few news organizations broadcasting from within the city, Bush administration officials accused it of airing propaganda and lies. Al Jazeera’s Fallujah correspondent, Ahmed Mansour, reported that his crew had been targeted with tanks, and the house they had stayed in had been bombed by fighter jets.

So great was the suspicion of Al Jazeera’s ties to terrorism that Dennis Montgomery, a contractor who had previously tried peddling cheat-detector software to Las Vegas casinos, managed to convince the CIA that he could decode secret Al Qaeda messages from Al Jazeera broadcasts. Those “codes” reportedly caused Bush to ground a number of commercial transatlantic flights in December 2003.

But the U.S. government appeared to have somewhat softened its view of the network in the last several years. The Obama administration has criticized Egypt for holding three of Al Jazeera’s journalists on charges of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood. During the height of the 2011 Arab Spring, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised the network’s coverage, saying, “Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it’s real news.”

A Journalist and Al Qaeda

Zaidan first came to international prominence after the 9/11 attacks because of his access to senior Al Qaeda leadership. Zaidan wrote an Arabic-language book on bin Laden, and interviewed him in person multiple times.

“He covered the wedding of bin Laden’s son which was shortly after the [U.S.S.] Cole attack, and I think it was a very useful piece of journalism, because bin Laden declaimed a poem about the Cole which implied him taking responsibility for the attacks, which of course he later did,” said Bergen.

Zaidan also received a number of bin Laden’s taped messages to Americans, which were broadcast on Al Jazeera.

In 2002, he met a mysterious man with a “half-covered face,” who handed him a cassette tape with bin Laden’s voice, Zaidan told Bergen in an interview. In 2004, another bin Laden tape was dropped off at the office gate, Zaidan told the Associated Press. “The guard brought it to me along with other mail. It was in an envelope, I opened it and it was a big scoop,” Zaidan recounted.

Zaidan, right, in a 2011 Al Jazeera documentary he made about bin Laden.

Files collected from bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound after his death — a portion of which were released this year — indicate that Al Qaeda members viewed Zaidan as a journalist they felt comfortable dealing with.

In an August 2010 missive, discussing Zaidan’s plans for a documentary, bin Laden directs his deputies to get “brother Ahmad Zaydan’s” questions and “tell him it would be good if it was on the tenth anniversary of September Eleventh.” Any other input should come in “an indirect way,” bin Laden cautions. “If we want this program to be a success, then we should not get involved in the details of how it is run, except that I don’t want him to interview any of my family,” he wrote.

Zaidan released his documentary on Al Jazeera in December 2011, an oral history of bin Laden’s years in Pakistan and Afghanistan comprised of interviews with a range of people who had known him, including Taliban fighters, government officials, and many journalists.

Bin Laden had also grown paranoid about meetings with Zaidan, although he did not think the U.S. government had managed to kill anyone “from surveying Ahmad Zaydan,” he wrote in May 2010.

He continued, “keep in mind, the possibility, though remote, that the journalists may be involuntarily monitored in a way that we or they do not know about, either on ground or by satellite, especially Ahmad Zaydan of Al Jazeera, and it is possible that a tracking chip could be put into some of their personal effects before coming to the meeting place.”

Zaidan is still Al Jazeera’s Islamabad bureau chief, and has also reported from Syria and Yemen in recent years. Al Jazeera vigorously defended his reporting. “Our commitment to our audiences is to gain access to authentic, raw, unfiltered information from key sources and present it in an honest and responsible way.” They added that, “our journalists continue to be targeted and stigmatized by governments,” even though “Al Jazeera is not the first channel that has met with controversial figures such as bin Laden and others — prominent western media outlets were among the first to do so.”

 

DOJ Sends Bad Lawyers to Court, Good Thing

Switchboard operator: Commissioner Koskinen, Loretta Lynch, Jack Lew, you are being paged to answer calls on lines 4,5 and 6.

Remember that pesky IRS targeting scandal that the White House said was phony? Remember groups that applied for tax exempt status were discriminated against at the direction of Lois Lerner? Remember Lerner going to the Department of Justice to get some legal advise when the IRS is actually under the Treasury Department who has lawyers and even the IRS has their own? Well, lawyers in Washington DC appear to have lousy skills at presenting an argument in this case…defense.

The DOJ actually argued it was okay to discriminate for a period of time. Really? Yes, discrimination IS fair….well not so much.

The IRS Goes to Court

The agency suggests it can discriminate for 270 days. Judges gasp.

It isn’t every day that judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals declare themselves “shocked.” But that happened on Monday when an animated three-judge panel eviscerated the IRS and Justice Department during oral argument in a case alleging the agency delayed the tax-exempt application of a pro-Israel group due to its policy views.

In December 2009, Pennsylvania-based Z Street applied for 501(c)(3) status to pursue its pro-Israel educational mission. In July 2010, when the group called to check on what was taking so long, an IRS agent said that auditors had been instructed to give special attention to groups connected with Israel, and that they had sent some of those applications to a special IRS unit for additional review.

Z Street sued the IRS for viewpoint discrimination (Z Street v. Koskinen), and in May 2014 a federal district judge rejected the IRS’s motion to dismiss. The IRS appealed, a maneuver that halted discovery that could prove to be highly embarrassing. Justice says Z Street’s case should be dismissed because the Anti-Injunction Act bars litigation about “the assessment or collection of tax.” Problem is, Z Street isn’t suing for its tax-exempt status. It’s suing on grounds that the IRS can’t discriminate based on point of view.

The three judges—Chief Judge Merrick Garland,David Tatel and David Sentellewere incredulous. You say they want a tax exemption, but that’s not the complaint, Judge Sentelle admonished government lawyer Teresa McLaughlin: “They are not in court seeking to restrain the assessment or collection of a tax, they are in court seeking a constitutionally fair process.”

The suit should also be foreclosed, the government argued, because under Section 7428(b)(2) of the Internal Revenue Code groups may sue to obtain their tax-exempt status if no action has been taken for 270 days, and that should be an alternative to Z Street’s approach.

“You don’t really mean that, right? Because the next couple words would be the IRS is free to discriminate on the basis of viewpoint, religion, race [for 270 days]. You don’t actually think that?” Judge Garland said. “Imagine the IRS announces today a policy that says as follows: No application by a Jewish group or an African-American group will be considered until one day short of the period under the statute . . . Is it your view that that cannot be challenged?”

The judges also asked why the government had buried the key precedent in a footnote in its brief. In Direct Marketing Association v. Brohl, the Supreme Court decided that the language of the Anti-Injunction Act did not preclude cases like Z Street’s. In a previous case before the D.C. Circuit, Judge Garland noted, the court also “rejected” the exact arguments the government was making, “so in a way we have already decided every issue before us today, against you.”

Poor Ms. McLaughlin was sent to argue the indefensible so the IRS can delay discovery until the waning days of the Obama Administration. “If I were you, I would go back and ask your superiors whether they want us to represent that the government’s position in this case is that the government is free to unconstitutionally discriminate against its citizens for 270 days,” said Judge Garland.

Ms. McLaughlin replied, “Well, I will take that back.” The Beltway media may be bored, but the IRS scandal is a long way from over.

HUD, the Coming Next Financial Crisis

Do you know the Castro twins, Julian and Joaquin? Well, both have been fully groomed by powerbrokers in the Obama administration and the mentoring continues. In fact, the twins are rightly classified as the ‘enemies within’.

Julian is the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and Joaquin is a U.S.Congressman. Julian is especially dangerous and there is chatter about his vying for a vice-presidential run. Meanwhile, Julian is in large measure part of the Latino immigration movement while working his wonder-lust at HUD.

So what about the coming financial crisis? Just think back to the housing crisis, to the toxic mortgages, to the bailouts and the massive layoffs.

The Government Is Definitely Back in the ‘Affordable Housing’ Game

by: John Ligon

More than six years out from a government-driven housing bubble, the chief regulator at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Mel Watt, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development secretary, Julian Castro are respectively clearing a path to expand the “credit box” for government-backed home loans.

Two recent examples: Fannie Mae recently started a program guaranteeing loans with as little as 3 percent down payments, and, earlier this year, the Federal Housing Administration reduced by 50 basis points the annual mortgage insurance premiums it charges borrowers.

We have been down this path before. Using the U.S. housing finance system to try to achieve political ends of broader and “affordable” housing goals ultimately undermines taxpayer safety and the opportunity to build meaningful equity for homeowners.

After all, it was only less than two decades ago that Andrew Cuomo, then-Housing secretary under the Clinton administration, announced that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two largest housing finance companies at that time, would be required to buy $2.4 trillion in mortgages over the next 10 years to provide affordable housing for about 28.1 million low- and moderate-income families.

In the same announcement, Cuomo went on to say that “this action will transform the lives of millions of families across our country by giving them new opportunities to buy homes or move into apartments with rents they can afford … it will help ease the terrible shortage of affordable housing plaguing far too many communities.”

To be fair, political leaders in both Democrat and Republican administrations have repeatedly called for arbitrary, vague goals aimed at achieving a “homeownership society” and expanding “affordable housing” even when most qualified homeowners already owned homes.

A great irony, though, is that these affordable housing initiatives have had the exact opposite of their intended impact: These programs encourage higher levels of debt, increased housing prices (and lower affordability) in many markets, and greater risk within the overall housing finance system.

Affordable housing advocates tend to focus on high rental costs and widespread slack in the first-time home purchase market as main justification for expanded government support, but establishing new government credit programs and expanding existing ones has repeatedly failed to fix these problems.

To be sure, there are numerous factors weighing on the overall housing market outlook, and certainly a main influence is the sluggish first-time purchase market. This market, in particular for younger individuals, is hampered by high levels of non-mortgage debt, weak employment and income opportunities, low labor mobility (some held back by federal mortgage modification programs), and high home prices in some metropolitan areas.

Despite any of the best stated intentions to assist individuals with “affordable rent” or “affordable mortgages,” all of this direct and indirect government interference in the housing finance system ultimately biases individuals toward certain market segments and particular types of debt instruments, increasing financial risk to homeowners and taxpayers in the process.

 

Eco-Terrorists Meet Your new Machine Challenge

States in the West have been experiencing an epic water issue, of this there is no debate. Water use has been regulated and limited for the sake of a fish with no cause for protection and a plant or two that has no value. The consequence is business, farming and daily life suffering restrictions with wide ranging national implications. Every citizen wants to be a good steward of the environment and often is. Sure there are violators, however we have the EPA who has extreme mandates and laws for them right? Yes and they are extreme.

There are radical environmental groups that go so far as to cause civil disobedience all wrapped up under graduated causes of climate change.

California needs water and has for decades so some desalinization machines were purchased to mitigate a problem. No one could decide of the rules of use until now. But the rules of themselves up for a long debate where the solution of using brine or sea water for human use will not be forth-coming anytime soon.

Enter the battle of more bureaucracy, debate, protests, rules and legislative measures. In a nation that is establishing protective classes of people, such is the same with plant life and the Delta smelt, a fish of zero consequence. Who will win? What if that fish eats the plant and corrupts the water supply? The state of California meets it final destiny…more DIRT. Tax rainwater, shower with your dog, but only for 3 minutes. Share towels and socks with other family members to slow down the laundry duty. Hang a scarlet letter on the palm tree for excessive water consumption and ask the DEA and Secret Service to investigate the promiscuous behavior of fish, plants and lizards….wink….

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) – California regulators on Wednesday adopted the first statewide rules for the permitting of seawater desalination projects that are expected to proliferate as drought-stricken communities increasingly turn to the ocean to supplement their drinking supplies.

The action, which sets uniform standards for minimizing harm to marine life, was welcomed by developers of the state’s two largest desalination projects as bringing much-needed certainty and clarity to the regulatory approval process.

“It reaffirms that the Pacific Ocean is part of the drinking water resources for the state of California,” Poseidon Water executive Scott Maloni told Reuters after the rule was enacted on a voice vote in Sacramento by the State Water Resources Control Board.

The measure leaves the permitting process in the hands of the state’s regional water boards while establishing a single framework for them to follow in evaluating applications to build seawater treatment plants, expand existing ones and renew old permits.

But regional decisions could now be appealed to the state board for review if opponents of a project felt a permit was wrongly approved.

Before Wednesday’s action, developers and regulators of desalination plants had no specific guidance for meeting federal and state clean water standards, complicating review of the projects, state water board spokesman George Kostyrko said.

Desalination has emerged as a promising technology in the face of a record dry spell now gripping California for a fourth straight year, depleting its reservoirs and aquifers and raising the costs of importing water from elsewhere.

Critics have cited ecological drawbacks, such as harm to marine life from intake pipes that suck water into the treatment systems and the concentrated brine discharge from the plants.

The newly approved plan sets specific brine salinity limits and rules for diffusing the discharge as it is pumped back into to the ocean.

It also requires seawater to be drawn into the plants through pipes that are sunk into beach wells or buried beneath the sea floor, where possible. Such subsurface intakes are viewed as more environmentally friendly.

The Western Hemisphere’s biggest desalination plant, a $1 billion project under construction since 2012 in the coastal city of Carlsbad, California, is due to open in November.

It will deliver up to 50 million gallons (190 million liters) of water a day to San Diego County, enough to supply roughly 112,000 households, or about 10 percent of San Diego County’s drinking water needs, according to Poseidon.

Approval is being sought for a final permit to begin construction of a second plant of similar size in Huntington Beach, south of Los Angeles, next year.

About a dozen much smaller desalting plants have already been built along the coast, state water officials said.

On Tuesday, the state water board enacted California’s first rules for mandatory statewide cutbacks in municipal water use . The emergency regulations, which require some communities to trim water consumption by as much as 36 percent, were approved unanimously just weeks after Democratic Governor Jerry Brown stood in a dry mountain meadow and ordered statewide rationing.

Ranking the Syrian Threat

 

Bashir al Assad of Syria was labeled a reformer by the Obama administration. Syria is the favorite battleground of militant terror operations for countless organizations. Assad has been propped up by Russia and Iran for years while the United States was forced to posture itself siding with Assad against al Nusra and Islamic State.

The United States has sided with Iran in Iraq, has sided against Iran in Yemen and has sided with Iran in Syria. Quietly, the United States has also launched a military mission to create safe zones in Syria that includes ordnance and counter-measures against regime aircraft, stinger missiles, manpads and ground operations.

Assad has been losing ground in spite of all the foreign support which makes matters in Syria all the more alarming. The future is difficult to predict, hence a strategy is even more ghastly an objective to draft or adhere to.

 

Obama announced a red-line threat if Assad was found to be using chemical weapons. They did and continue to do so. The White House turned the solution of chemical weapons over to Russia to cure. The United Nations sent in teams to collect the chemical weapons declared by Assad and removed them. To no avail, chlorine barrel bombs are being used by the regime with wild abandon and without a whimper from the UN or the West. Chlorine is not on any list of forbidden substances so it seems.

There is a multi-track convoluted mess to clean up in Syria, yet how will it play out with the United States, Iran, Syria, Turkey, Jordan. Lebanon and Russia?

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Eyes watering, struggling to breathe, Abd al-Mouin, 22, dragged his nephews from a house reeking of noxious fumes, then briefly blacked out. Even fresh air, he recalled, was “burning my lungs.”

The chaos unfolded in the Syrian town of Sarmeen one night this spring, as walkie-talkies warned of helicopters flying from a nearby army base, a signal for residents to take cover. Soon, residents said, there were sounds of aircraft, a smell of bleach and gasping victims streaming to a clinic.

Two years after President Bashar al-Assad agreed to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, there is mounting evidence that his government is flouting international law to drop cheap, jerry-built chlorine bombs on insurgent-held areas. Lately, the pace of the bombardments in contested areas like Idlib Province has picked up, rescue workers say, as government forces have faced new threats from insurgents. Yet, the Assad government has so far evaded more formal scrutiny because of a thicket of political, legal and technical obstacles to assigning blame for the attacks — a situation that feels surreal to many Syrians under the bombs, who say it is patently clear the government drops them. Read more here.

Now the chilling questions must be asked, who is bailing out on Assad’s regime in Syria? What will be the future consequences? Why has the regime begun a tailspin and what will fill that void?

Bashar al-Assad is losing ground in Syria

by

For most of the past two years, it looked like Bashar al-Assad’s campaign to hold on in Syria was working. Syria’s weak, uncoordinated, and increasingly Islamist rebels were being gradually pushed back. And while ISIS had seized vast parts of the country, it and Assad appeared to tolerate one another in a sort of tacit non-aggression pact designed to crush the Syrian rebels. It seemed that Syria, and the world, would be stuck with Assad’s murderous dictatorship for the foreseeable future.

But in the past few weeks, things appear to have changed — potentially dramatically. The rebels have won a string of significant victories in the country’s north. Assad’s troop reserves are wearing thin, and it’s becoming harder for him to replace his losses.

A rebel victory, to be clear, is far from imminent or even likely. At this point, it’s too early to say for sure what this means for the course of the Syrian war. But the rebels have found a new momentum against Assad just as his military strength could be weakening, which could be a significant change in the trajectory of a war that has been ongoing for years.

Assad is losing ground

syrian rebel aleppo april

A rebel fighter in Aleppo. (Ahmed Muhammed Ali/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Bashar al-Assad’s forces are losing ground against the rebels, for example in northern Idlib province, where two recent rebel victories show how strong the rebels have gotten. First, in late March, Assad’s forces were pushed out of Idlib City, the region’s capital. Second, in late April, rebels took Jisr al-Shughour, a strategically valuable town that lies on the Assad regime’s supply line in the area and near its important coastal holdings.

“Jisr al-Shughour is a good example of how the regime is, indeed, losing ground,” Noah Bonsey, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, told me. “Most observers were surprised at how quickly it fell, given that it is a town of some strategic importance.”

While rebels’ most dramatic victories are in Idlib, they’re advancing elsewhere as well. They’ve seized towns in the south and have repelled Assad offensives around the country.

“Losses in Idlib and the southern governorate of Deraa have placed great pressure on Assad,” Charles Lister, a fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, writes. “Frustration, disaffection and even incidences of protest are rising across Assad’s most ardent areas of support on Syria’s coast — some of which are now under direct attack.”

Bonsey concurs. “Rebels have seized momentum in recent weeks and months,” he says. “The regime is clearly weakening to an extent that was not widely reflected in the English-language narrative surrounding the conflict.”

Rebels are more united as Assad troop losses mount

Syrian rebels FSA

Free Syrian Army rebels train. (Baraa al-Halabi/AFP/Getty Images)

Recent regime defeats reflect growing unity among the rebels as well as fundamental weaknesses on the regime’s side.

The Idlib advance, in particular, was led by Jaish al-Fatah, a new rebel coalition led by several different Islamist groups. While the coalition includes Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, the jihadis don’t appear to dominate the group.

“The operations also displayed a far improved level of coordination between rival factions,” Lister writes, “spanning from U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) brigades, to moderate and conservative Syrian Islamists, to al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and several independent jihadist factions.”

Rebel coordination is nothing new in Syria. But this coalition stands out for its size and breadth.

“The number of fighters mobilized for the initial Idlib city campaign has been significant, and that’s been just as true in subsequent operations in the north,” Bonsey says. “The level of coordination we’ve seen over several weeks, on multiple fronts, is something that we have rarely, if ever, seen from rebels in the north.”

And as the rebels have gotten more united, the regime has gotten weaker. The basic problem is attrition: Assad is losing a lot of soldiers in this war, and his regime — a sectarian Shia government in an overwhelmingly Sunni country — can’t train replacements quickly enough.

Bonsey calls this an “unsolvable manpower problem.” As a result, he says, Assad is becoming increasingly dependent on his foreign allies — Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah specifically — to lead the ground campaign.

But Iran has shown limited willingness to commit heavily to areas like Idlib, and rather is concentrating principally on defending the regime’s core holdings around Damascus and the coast. According to Bonsey, “it’s a matter of priorities,” which is to say that their resources aren’t unlimited, and they’ve (so far) preferred to concentrate them in the most critical areas.

Iran’s involvement in conflicts in Iraq and Yemen on top of Syria has left it “really overstretched,” according to Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. The cumulative resource investment has “certainly had an impact on Assad losing territory in Syria,” he concludes.

“For the regime, the status quo militarily is not sustainable,” Bonsey says, and “Iran’s strategy in Syria does not appear sustainable. The costs to Iran of propping up Assad’s rule in Syria are only going to rise with time, substantially. And what’s happened with Idlib in recent weeks is only the latest indication of that.”

How Assad could ride this out: with Iran’s help

iranian revolutionary guard ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images

Iranian Revolutionary Guard. (Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images)

Bonsey, like most Syria experts, does not believe Assad is on the road to inevitable defeat.

“While much of the subsequent commentary [to the Idlib offensive] proclaimed this as the beginning of the end for President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, we are still a long way from that,” Lister writes.

For one thing, Iran sees the survival of the Assad regime as a critical strategic priority, as it allows Iran to supply Hezbollah and maintain a close ally in the Levant. Any post-Assad government is likely to be Sunni-dominated,and quite hostile to Iran. Tehran is probably willing to go to some lengths to keep that from happening, and Iranian intervention in the war has been a significant force.

“In strict military terms, there isn’t yet a direct threat on the strategically essential territory that the regime and its backers continue to control,” Bonsey says, “and there isn’t yet a reason to think the rebels are capable of threatening” such a region.

Since Assad can’t crush the rebels in their strongholds, then, the conflict is looking a lot like a stalemate — which it already was before this rebel offensive began.

Moreover, the unity of this new rebel coalition could collapse. The broad alliance we’ve seen in Idlib is held together by victory: the more they push back Assad, the more willing they are to cooperate. But if Assad’s forces start beating them, the ideological and political fault lines in the coalition could cause rebel groups to turn on one another. It’s happened — many times — before.

The “big question now,” according to Bonsey, is “how the regime and its backers choose to respond to these defeats.” A major decider, in other words, is Iran. But as long as they see protecting the Assad regime as vital, they are likely to do what it takes to keep his core territory intact.