Rebels: West's inaction is radicalizing Syria

By C.J. Chivers The New York Times

SAMAS, Syria Majed al-Muhammad, the commander of a Syrian anti-government fighting group, slammed his hand on his desk. “Doesn't America have satellites?” he asked, almost shouting. “Can't it see what is happening?”

A retired army medic, Muhammad had reached the rank of sergeant major in the military he now fights against. He said he never joined a party, and loathed jihadists and terrorists.

But he offered a warning to the West now commonly heard among fighters seeking the overthrow of President Bashar Assad: The Syrian people are being radicalized by a combination of a grinding conflict and their belief that they have been abandoned by a watching world.

If the West continues to turn its back, he said, Syrians will turn their backs in return, and this may imperil Western interests and security at one of the crossroads of the Middle East.

This is a theme that has resonated in recent days, not just in Syria, but in Turkey, where the government fired artillery shells into Syria this week after a mortar round hit a Turkish town and killed five civilians. In Turkey, there is a growing sense of frustration shared by the Syrian rebels that the West, the United States in particular, called for Assad to leave power, only to sit by as the crisis transformed into a civil war.

“We are now at a very critical juncture,” Melih Asik wrote in the Turkish newspaper Milliyet. “We are not only facing Syria, but Iran, Iraq, Russia and China behind it as well. Behind us, we have nothing but the provocative stance and empty promises of the U.S.”

Heading into another winter of fighting, and enraged by what they see as the inaction and hypocrisy of powerful nations, frontline leaders say the West risks losing a potential ally if the regime should fall.

The corollary is frequently sounded, too: As anger grows, armed groups opposed to the United States may grow in numbers and stature, too.


The origins of these sentiments are typically the same: a view that Washington and European capitals are more interested in maintaining the flow of oil from Libya and Iraq, or in protecting Israel, than in Syria and its people's suffering. The view is supported, Syrians opposed to Assad say, by the West's refusal to provide weapons to the rebels, or to protect civilians and aid the rebels with a no-fly zone.

The contrast with the West's military assistance and vocal political support to the uprising last year in Libya is frequently drawn.

The donations of nonlethal aid to the Syrian opposition by Washington are often called small scale, to the extent that none of the half-dozen fighting groups visited, or the many commanders interviewed in Turkey, claimed to have seen, much less received, U.S. aid.

“We haven't received anything from the outside,” said Thayar, a member of the ad hoc governing body in Kafr Takharim, known as the revolutionary council.

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