Phones were ringing through the army headquarters in central Damascus and a veteran of Syria's 1982 war with Israel in Lebanon was explaining how all wars involved victories and defeats - that Syria's forces also suffered setbacks in their war against “terrorism” - when the news arrived at his own desk. A flurry of calls established that Jabhat al-Nusra rebels had stormed into the centre of Idlib, the surrounded but still government-held city west of Aleppo; that they had captured the governor's office and were beheading senior Syrian officers. Our interview was not intended to have gone quite like this. It was a good day to see the general. Which means it was a bad day.
The leading Syrian army officer, who requested anonymity, takes a shrewd view of events - and history - and clearly had no objection to America's air strikes on Isis targets in his country, although he viewed them dispassionately. “Our army doesn't know where or when these strikes are going to happen,” he said. “We see aircraft on our radar - we can see everything - but if our checkpoints (on the front) see the strikes, it is only by chance. We and the Americans are not sharing information with each other. The Americans just do it. It's natural. They decide in the UN that they are going to do these strikes. Syria says 'yes'. We are fighting 'Daesh' (Isis) and the other terrorist groups. But America never asked us about their targets.”
Isis, Jabhat al-Nusra and other Islamist groups are one and the same - he dismisses the Free Syrian Army (FSA) so beloved of President Barack Obama and US Republicans as more of a fantasy army than a reality - and insists that the strategy of Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra is the same wherever the Syrian army fights them. “It's the same plan, the same orders, and we are using the same tactics in fighting them. There is a priority for the Syrian army - to know where they have to fight. I can't say that in all the military operations that the Syrian army is taking the upper hand. War is not just about victory. There are winners and losers. That is the nature of war.”
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That's when the phones started ringing. Other officers arrived in the general's office. He walked into another room to take a call. His right-hand fingers tapped on his desk. Was the army to announce the events in Idlib? But he returned to our interview, remembering exactly where he had broken off. “Yes, there are places where the Syrian army loses and there are some setbacks, we can't deny that. We don't pretend that we always have victories. But our victories are bigger than our losses. Three days ago a town called Moraq - strategic between Idlib and Aleppo was recaptured by our army - the main road from Damascus to Aleppo is now completely safe.”
But not Idlib. The phones rang again. “Nusra tried to infiltrate into the city, but we foiled them,” he said triumphantly. True. But the general didn't mention - perhaps did not even then know - that his own comrades were being beheaded, even as the army was about to recapture the governor's office. By chance, I had been asking the general about Raqqa province, whose last military fortress and airbase was captured by Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra this year. Videos showed hundreds of Syrian soldiers being executed beside mass graves, one even showed two fighter jets being towed through the streets by rebels. And within days, reports from outside Syria spoke of Isis being trained on Mig-21s by former Iraqi pilots.
Read more:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-in-syria-a-general-reveals-the-lack-of-communication-with-the-us--and-his-countrys-awkward-relationship-with-their-alliesbydefault-9826846.html
