As Syria’s second peace conference looms, and we prepare ourselves for a lot of hot air drifting over from Geneva, I’ve been making a list of those players in the civil war who actually want peace and those who don’t fancy it one bit.
The anti-peace side is easy. There’s Bashar al-Assad, of course. Hillary saw to that during the first conference. Perhaps she’s right that he shouldn’t be part of any transitional government, but if he loses all power, Assad and his Alawite clan are toast. So what use is peace to him? The rebels of the Islamic Front alliance are the latest Washington craze; they’re the alliance of ‘moderate’ extremists some East Coast optimists think we should support, but even so they can’t be said to want peace: they hate America and remain set on war and sharia law.
Then there are the real bad boys, the rebels with a global cause: Al Nusra (affiliated to al-Qa’eda) and worse: the foreign fighters of ISIS, who are set on carving an Islamic state out of north-eastern Syria and western Iraq. A few weeks ago, they took Fallujah, so they’re really making progress. For ISIS, peace would be actually satanic — an affront to jihad. Here’s their latest communiqué, which I think gets to the heart of their philosophy: ‘Our army is full of hungry lions who drink blood and eat bones, finding nothing tastier than the blood of Sahwa [the other rebels],’ they said. Take that, Geneva.
So does anyone on the ground have any interest at all in calming things down? There are the official rebels, the Free Syrian Army. They’re on the pro-peace list although the best of them are in despair and the worst increasingly into beheadings.
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