Last Wednesday, a media outlet sent an advisory note to its staff about Jabhat Al Nusra and Al Qaeda: “Please don’t introduce Al Nusra Front as ‘Al Qaeda affiliated’ … The reality is that Al Qaeda isn’t the organisation it used to be and it’s irrelevant in this context.” On the same day, an audio message was released with Ayman Al Zawahiri, the leader of Al Qaeda, calling on his fighters to cooperate with ISIL combatants against the US-led coalition in Syria and Iraq.
Tomorrow is 14 years since the 9/11 attacks. The fallout from the war on terror resulted in the dismantling of many aspects of civil liberties in the West and foreign policy disasters abroad. It’s important to understand the bad choices that were made in the aftermath of 9/11, which had disastrous effects then, especially when some in the region continue to promote new examples of a war on terror.
Nevertheless, one thing that was clear in those years was that there was an organisation called Al Qaeda that had decided it wanted to promote a particular worldview – one that was destructive for the West, but also for the Arab world.
Fourteen years later, that seems to have been forgotten. The leader of Al Qaeda in Syria, Abu Mohammed Al Golani, can be interviewed on a satellite news channel and treated as though he were a normal politician. News organisations can pretend that Jabhat Al Nusra is not actually Al Qaeda in Syria – although the former has no problem in confirming that it is indeed Al Qaeda in Syria.
In the heart of the Washington establishment, former CIA director David Petraeus recently confirmed that he is urging the Obama administration to “peel” fighters from Jabhat Al Nusra that joined for opportunistic reasons. It’s not a strategy that has much chance of success – and Mr Petraeus was not calling for arming Al Qaeda in Syria. But in an environment that increasingly downplays the risks of Al Qaeda in Syria, such an approach might have been given more currency than it is due.
These are not purely theoretical questions, but ones that have real life consequences for the people of Syria. As these discussions are unfolding, tens of thousands of Syrians are attempting to escape to safety and a better future for their families.
Last week the world was temporarily jolted out of its lethargy when social media spread pictures of a drowned Syrian toddler, Aylan Kurdi. But international attention is often short-lived. The summer is over and the winter will soon be upon us. The conditions of the refugee camps will only become more difficult for their residents to bear.
Against that backdrop, discussions that underestimate the serious problems with groups like Jabhat Al Nusra are a waste of time and resources. The international community always has a short attention span – and too much time has already been wasted. Piecemeal efforts to deal with the refugee crisis will not suffice.
The scope of the Syrian quagmire was underestimated for far too long – and when that was no longer possible, the complicated nature of it was used as an excuse to do too little about it. This is not a problem that will go away – it is one that will get progressively worse.
The issue of the Assad regime itself is crucial in all of this. Barrel bombs kill civilians, just as much as beheadings do. That is a great factor in prolonging this conflict.
Any suggestion that the West ought to align itself with Bashar Al Assad against ISIL is a foolhardy one. The direction the international community takes must be one that recognises that neither radical extremism nor brutal authoritarianism is the solution for the people of Syria.
On 9/11, about 3,000 people were killed and the West pronounced a war on terror, leading to decisive action, much of it unwise.
Fourteen years later, the number of people dead in Syria is estimated at more than 300,000, with over 4 million refugees, and almost 8 million internally displaced. Their lives are worth no less than any other nation’s. The disaster of Syria is already the tragedy of our time. We don’t want it to be the tragedy of our children’s time as well.
Dr HA Hellyer is an associate fellow in international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London, and the Centre for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC
On Twitter: @hahellyer
