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Strikes Against ISIS in Syria Draw Mixed Reactions in Middle East Startling Sight Where Blasts Are the Norm
(about 9 hours later)
BEIRUT — The Syrian rebel commander has been struggling for two years just to get ammunition for his men’s rifles and food to feed them, as they have sought to take ground from the military of President Bashar al-Assad while receiving only an erratic trickle of outside aid. BEIRUT, Lebanon — When the predawn blasts rattled their windows and jolted them from sleep, residents of Raqqa, the Syrian city that is the de facto capital of the Islamic State, thought they were in for a new round of airstrikes from the Syrian government.
So he was amazed to wake up on Tuesday to the news that the United States and five Arab countries had begun a sweeping campaign of air and cruise-missile strikes in Syria — not against Mr. Assad’s forces, but those of the Islamic State militants who also want to topple the Syrian government. But as the sun rose, it was quickly clear that something altogether different had taken place. A drone had collided with a satellite tower and crashed to the ground. The former governor’s office used as a headquarters had been reduced to rubble. An equestrian club where fighters had lodged their families and a training camp near town had also been bombed.
The commander said he wasn’t against the strikes, but thought the campaign’s priorities were out of order. Even after a year living under the fist of the so-called Islamic State, where men with guns and a messianic vision controlled nearly every aspect of their lives, the people of Raqqa were surprised by what they found.
“Our goal from the start has been to topple the regime, and then we can fight the Islamic State and the other extremists,” said the commander, who gave only his nickname, Abu Hussein, for fear of retribution from Islamist rebels. “It was Bashar who carried out all the massacres, and started the whole thing.” “I opened my shop at 8 a.m., and everything was ordinary,” said a shopkeeper who gave his name as Abu Khalil. “Then I heard from my neighbor that today’s attacks were by the Americans, and not the regime.”
The new air campaign in Syria has drawn mixed reaction across the Middle East, a region where many people hate the brutality of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, but are also deeply skeptical of the motives behind any type of foreign intervention. The attack was part of President Obama’s strategy of denying the leaders and fighters of the militant group, also known as ISIS, a safe haven in Raqqa Province and its capital.
Looming over the new campaign are memories of recent American-led interventions in Libya and Iraq, which many Arabs welcomed at first but later turned against, because of the waves of instability and civil war that followed. Raqqa is where, for more than a year, the group massed its forces, honed its ideology and strategy and began its effort to build a caliphate — or Islamic state. Step by step, it methodically turned this northern Syrian city into a hub of the most extreme Islamist ideology, where crucifixions were routine, and the religious police banned even cigarettes.
President Obama, who made his opposition to the Iraq war central to his presidential campaign, has insisted that the fight against the Islamic State will be different. Instead of putting American troops on the ground, the United States will support local forces in Syria and Iraq. On Tuesday, the men with beards and guns tried to act as if it were just another day. Fighters from the Islamic State drove around to distribute cooking gas. But soon reports trickled in that the campaign of strikes by the United States and five Arab allies had destroyed many of the group’s facilities, killed scores of its fighters and dealt a serious blow to much that it had managed to build over the past year.
Regime change has never been mentioned as a goal, and the participation of Arab states has been regarded as crucial, to deflect any criticism that the United States was going to war against Muslims. The coalition hit training camps, headquarters and a recently captured air base. In Deir al-Zour Province, along the border with Iraq, at least a dozen sites were hit, including an agricultural school turned into a command center.
Some of the Arab participants, especially Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have been heavily involved in Syria’s civil war for years, so joining the international coalition is merely a new, more direct form of intervention for them. Saudi Arabia, along with others like Jordan and Bahrain, worries that their citizens who have gone to join the Islamic State forces will later return and plot attacks at home. And the United Arab Emirates has supported efforts to combat a range of Islamist movements across the region. And attacks in Hasaka Province sought to loosen the group’s grip on Syria’s petroleum wealth, which it has used to fund its operations.
“This is the right way to do it, if you want to defeat the Islamic State, because you cannot cut off the tail and leave the head,” said Ebtesam Al Ketbi, the chairwoman of the Emirates Policy Center. “And everyone is participating, so no one can accuse the United States alone.” At least one of the strikes killed civilians as well, raising suspicions of American motives even among those who said they were otherwise happy to see the Islamic State pushed back.
Others support the fight against the Islamic State because they see the group as spreading an abhorrent interpretation of Islam. “We know the history of American strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen,” said Ziad al-Ali, an unemployed university graduate in Raqqa. “When civilians are going to be killed, sorry is not enough.”
“They are a minority of extremists who have nothing to do with the rest of the world’s Muslims,” said Issa Alghaith, a member of Saudi Arabia’s Shura Council. It was hard to gauge on Tuesday just how much the strikes had degraded the military capacity of the Islamic State or who was more likely to benefit: the government of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, or the rebels seeking his ouster.
In Baghdad, the city with perhaps the most experience of American-led airstrikes, many people lauded the bombing of Raqqa, the extremists’ de facto capital in Syria, and faulted the air campaign only for not happening sooner. But the strikes added a volatile new element to the country’s three-and-a-half-year civil war, and signs emerged that alliances on the ground could shift in unexpected ways.
“The American reaction to the situation in Iraq is late,” said Kadhem el-Maqdadi, an Iraqi journalist and commentator. The United States agreed to help Iraq if it was under attack, he noted, “but their help came after the ISIS virus had spread throughout Iraq.” Most of the strikes hit the extensive military and economic infrastructure of the Islamic State in northern and eastern Syria.
He said that the airstrikes alone would not defeat the militants. “Wars are fought mainly on the ground, and air support can help, but they can’t fix the problem,” he said. While Mr. Obama had announced that the Islamic State would be targeted, the United States also hit at least two bases belonging to the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Syria affiliate, exposing the gap between how the United States and many of Syria’s rebels see the group, as well as the hazards of attacking it.
Elsewhere in the region, there was a familiar current of cynicism about motives behind the American-led strikes. In a column on Tuesday in Al Ahram, a state-run newspaper in Egypt, Massoud al-Hennawi wrote that Washington and its allies were using because “they want to divide our lands, destroy our nations, occupy our homelands, and monopolize our choices, without shedding one drop of their blue blood.” The United States considers the Nusra Front a terrorist organization, and American officials said the strikes disrupted an imminent plot to attack the West by an offshoot of Qaeda veterans known as Khorasan.
“They have no problem that our cheap Arab blood flows in rivers, if it achieves their goals and purposes,” he continued. While the United States did not say where that group was attacked, it was probably in an area of abandoned villas on the western edge of Aleppo Province where a strike killed about 50 Nusra Front members, most of them foreigners and including at least a dozen leaders, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The government of Egypt, however, favors the air campaign, and the state newspaper’s website omitted the column once the strikes in Syria had taken place. A second strike in a village farther west, Kafr Dariyan, killed 15 people, including seven Nusra fighters and eight civilians, among them four children, the observatory said. An American military official said this was the strike against Khorasan.
The airstrikes shook the city of Raqqa before dawn, rattling windows and knocking out electricity. Many Islamic State fighters left the city, fearing further strikes. Others collected pieces of an aerial vehicle that crashed into a broadcast tower and fell to pieces on the pavement, according to photos posted online. A video posted online showed residents removing a body from the rubble of a collapsed building.
The Syrian government appeared unruffled by the strikes, probably because it was glad to see military power brought to bear against forces that had recently killed many of its soldiers. After insisting for weeks that any airstrikes on its territory that were not coordinated with government forces would be considered an act of “aggression,” Syrian officials claimed on Tuesday that its ambassador to the United Nations and its foreign minister had been informed of the strikes ahead of time. Even rebels who supported the strikes on the Islamic State criticized the targeting of the Nusra Front, which they consider a loyal partner in the battle against Mr. Assad.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry also said in a statement that the government supports “any international effort to fight terrorism,” but that it must be done in a way that protects civilian lives. “It is not the right time to target the Nusra Front,” said Lt. Col. Fares al-Bayyoush, whose rebel group has received support from the United States and its allies.
That response stood in contrast to those of Syria’s international allies, which were critical of the air campaign. Iran, which has backed Mr. Assad financially and militarily throughout the conflict, complained that his government had been bypassed. Colonel Bayyoush was also angry that the American strike had killed civilians and that the United States was not attacking Mr. Assad and his allies, like the Lebanese group Hezbollah, which the United States also classifies as a terrorist organization.
The Iranian deputy foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, called the campaign a “Hollywood adventure" that would not stop terrorism in Syria. “Isn’t Hezbollah a terrorist organization and the coalition wants to target all terrorist organizations in Syria?” he asked.
Echoing earlier remarks by Iran’s highest leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Mr. Amir Abdollahian accused the United States of trying to regain a military foothold in the Middle East by fighting a group that Iran has accused the United States of creating. The coalition strikes did not appear to have any immediate effect on the country’s front lines, although some communities that had been attacked by the Islamic State took solace in seeing it bombed.
President Hassan Rouhani, in New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly, said the airstrikes in Syria violated international law and would accomplish little. For nearly a week, Syrian Kurds from the area of Ayn al-Arab, or Kobani in Kurdish, have been flooding into Turkey because of an offensive by the Islamic State on their communities. The United Nations said Wednesday that 138,000 had entered Turkey since Friday.
“Is it not paradoxical that a country says it wants to fight a terrorist group in Syria, but on the other hand creates armed terrorist groups to fight the central government?” Mr. Rouhani was quoted by the Iranian news agency Tasnim as saying, referring to the United States’s support of Syrian rebel groups that it sees as more moderate. Mr. Rouhani said that to combat terrorism in Syria, the first task was to help the government restore stability. But on Tuesday, a crowd of mostly older men, women and children were clamoring to return, saying that the strikes on the Islamic State had made them more confident that Kurdish militias could fend off the jihadists.
In addition to Islamic State sites, the United States struck bases belonging to the Nusra Front, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, drawing condemnation from the group’s members and supporters. “Crusader airplanes strike the Nusra Front,” wrote Sami al-Oreidi, a cleric with the group in southern Syria. Eyad al-Qunaibi, a Jordanian preacher who supports the group, said its members should be considered martyrs. “We don’t know if American interference will be a problem in the future, but for the time being it is good,” said Azad Abdullah, 30, a laborer from Ayn al-Arab. “What is important is that we can go back to our homes.”
Many ordinary Syrians said they were happy to see the Islamic State’s grip weakened by the airstrikes, though they were concerned that government troops might use the airstrikes as an opportunity to advance. In other Syrian communities, the coalition strikes added a new level of uncertainty to their wartime lives.
In the eastern province of Deir al-Zour, which the Islamic State had almost entirely taken over, Anwar Abu Omran said that many residents there were pleased with the news. Many who had grown accustomed to seeking cover from government airstrikes during the day now worried that they would have to avoid coalition strikes at night.
“People in Deir al-Zour are very happy, and they are trying so hard to hide their smiles from the Islamic State members, because they hate them more than they hate the regime,” he said. “They don’t know what to do,” said an antigovernment activist who gave only his first name, Anas. “During the day, they run from the regime strikes, and at night they run from the coalition strikes.”
Syrians who support the government said that they, too, were happy to see the group hit, but were worried about the ultimate goals of the American and Arab coalition. The strikes on the Nusra Front have also made many residents worry that the local rebels could be targeted, too, he said, and they requested that the fighters move out of residential areas to avoid harm to civilians.
“I don’t trust the coalition,” said Jamal, a local official who lives in a Shiite village in Idlib Province. “They might take advantage of the situation and hit important locations, like the airport where the regime is, and I am afraid of errors.” In building its international coalition against the Islamic State, the United States has said it will form partnerships with local forces in Syria and Iraq to fight the group on the ground. But even those who support Syria’s rebels worried that they were not strong enough to take advantage of any vacuum that might arise.
One activist who had fled Raqqa when the Islamic State took over said he hoped the strikes would weaken the jihadists but worried that Mr. Assad would benefit.
“Maybe the regime will take over ISIS’ locations if the weak rebels aren’t able to after the strikes,” said the activists, who gave only his nickname, Abu Bakr.
Many government supporters were worried about where events might lead because some of the countries in the coalition, like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have called for Mr. Assad to step down or actively supported his enemies with money and arms.
“I don’t trust the coalition,” said a man who gave only his first name, Jamal, from a Shiite village in northern Syria that is besieged by Sunni rebels. “They might take advantage of the situation and hit important locations, like the airport where the regime is, and I am afraid of errors.”