The Clearing of the Pawns

For the last six months the Hazm movement, and the SRF through them, had been receiving heavy weapons from the US-led coalition, including GRAD rockets and TOW anti-tank missiles.
But on Saturday night Harakat Hazm surrendered military bases and weapons supplies to Jabhat al-Nusra, when the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria stormed villages they controlled in northern Idlib province.
The development came a day after Jabhat al-Nusra dealt a final blow to the SRF, storming and capturing Deir Sinbal, home town of the group’s leader Jamal Marouf. The attack caused the group, which had already lost its territory in Hama to al-Qaeda, to surrender.

According to reports, HZM surrendered its positions to Al Nusra and turned over its U.S.-provided arsenal without offering any resistance. Harakat Hazm has never been shy about fighting alongside Al Nusra, as one fighter proclaimed to the LA Times less than a month ago, “But Nusra doesn’t fight us, we actually fight alongside them. We like Nusra.” This coziness with al Qaeda is something that investigative reporter Patrick Poole has repeatedly noted, and raises the question of whether these surrogates upon which President Obama’s Syria and anti-ISIS strategy depends were ever really “our surrogates” to begin with? The, admittedly pro-Assad, Beirut paper Al-Akbar has claimed that HZM was explicitly created by the Muslim Brotherhood, and with the support of Turkey and Qatar, in order to serve as a recipient of U.S. aid.

Whether HZM was a Muslim Brotherhood front designed to fool the West from day one, or whether they simply lack the strength to continue resisting Al Nusra, the result is the same.  SRF and HZM  have now being cleared from the board, rendering painfully obvious what should have been clear some time ago. There is no force of “moderation” capable of ruling an intact Syria. U.S. airstrikes cannot defeat ISIS alone, and could not, even were they not hamstrung by a gun shy Administration that insists on controlling every aspect of the air war from the White House. Further escalation, through “boots on the ground” is, as reporter Michael Totten has noted,  a political non-starter, and for very good reason.  The idea that a force of Syrians can be extracted from Syria, tabula rasa, and then reinserted a few years later once they’ve been adequately armed and trained, as some have proposed, is a flight of fancy.  The future of Syria is likely to be decided between Al Qaeda, ISIS and the Assad regime, backed by Iran and Hezbollah.

Recognizing our lack of pieces to move should be the first step in crafting a new strategy, one which takes into account not just Syria, but the whole rapidly changing face of the region.