Question for Obama’s Syria plan: Who are the ’moderate’ rebels?
▻http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/10/2/syria-moderate-rebels1.html
The problem, analysts say, is that turning the foundering FSA into a force capable of beating both the Assad regime and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) would require far more help than anyone, including the U.S., is willing to give them. The FSA is currently the weakest force on the ground in Syria, a result not only of inadequate foreign backing compared with that of rival Islamist and extremist factions, but of its own internal divisions, byzantine leadership structure (based in Turkey) and rampant corruption. (...)
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... Obama’s plan to give limited backing to “moderate” rebels is more widely interpreted as a means of equalizing the balance on the battlefield in the hope of forcing Assad to the bargaining table, not defeating him, and of creating viable ground forces to partner the ongoing U.S.-led airstrikes against ISIL in northern and eastern Syria.
According to Joshua Landis, a leading U.S. Syria scholar based at the University of Oklahoma, “the last thing we want to do is destroy the rest of government-controlled Syria. There would be millions more refugees pouring into Lebanon and Jordan, and we’d turn the rest of Syria’s cities into Aleppo and Homs," two cities that have been gutted by the three-year civil war.
“Frankly we’ve seen too many failed states fill up with jihadist militias,” he said. “The FSA wouldn’t bring unified rule in Syria, they would bring Somalia, just like you’ve already got in the north.”