Angry Over Syrian War, Saudis Fault U.S. Policy
By BEN HUBBARD and ROBERT F. WORTH
Associated Press
Saudi Arabia, frustrated with the United States on
Syria, wants to offer more arms to the rebels, but is concerned that the
weapons might get into the wrong hands.
Saudi Arabia is threatening to break with the United States and pursue a
more robust role in supporting the rebellion against the Syrian
government. But officials worry about alienating a friend and helping
jihadists.
Associated Press
Saudi Arabia, frustrated with
the United States on Syria, wants to offer more arms to the rebels, but
is concerned that the weapons might get into the wrong hands.
By BEN HUBBARD and ROBERT F. WORTH
Published: October 25, 2013
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Saudi Arabia has abandoned its traditional policy
of discretion in recent weeks, signaling deep anger at the Obama
administration’s Middle East policies and threatening to break with its
most powerful ally and pursue a more robust and independent role in
supporting the rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
But privately, Saudi officials concede that their efforts to forge an
alternative strategy in Syria have run up against the same issue the
Americans face: how to bolster the military might of a disorganized
armed opposition without also empowering the jihadists who increasingly
dominate its ranks.
And while Saudi officials have hinted at a broader diplomatic shift away
from the United States, their options are limited there, too: Saudi
Arabia is dependent on American military and oil technology, and the
other countries the Saudis have courted — including France and India —
can help only on the margins, analysts say.
Diplomats who have spent time recently with Prince Bandar bin Sultan,
the Saudi intelligence chief running the kingdom’s Syria operation, say
he seems most preoccupied not with Mr. Assad’s forces, but with the
number of foreign jihadists in Syria, which he estimates at 3,000 to
5,000, including about 800 Saudis whose identities his government
closely tracks. He expects those numbers to double every six months,
said an American official who knows him well.
The Saudis work to broaden their support to the Syrian rebels by sending
money and arms to nonjihadist factions. But their fear of blowback is a
limiting factor, rooted in their bitter experience with Saudis who
fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s and later returned to mount deadly
terrorist attacks here.
“No Saudis will be trained to fight in Syria — in fact, we don’t want
any Saudis there at all,” said Prince Turki al-Faisal, who was the
kingdom’s intelligence minister when thousands of Saudis went — with the
government’s blessing — to fight in Afghanistan.
It is particularly galling for the Saudis to see that their regional
rival, Iran, has no such fears as it carries out a far more effective
proxy war in Syria. It has deployed its Revolutionary Guards and the
Lebanese militant group Hezbollah as far afield as Yemen to recruit
jihadist-style fighters for the cause, who are then trained and equipped
in Iran or Syria, American officials say. The commander of the
Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, visits Damascus
regularly and is playing a leading role in Mr. Assad’s military campaign
against the rebels, American and Arab officials say.
In a sense, Prince Bandar is Mr. Soleimani’s counterpart, but his
failure to shape a cohesive rebel force helps explain the depth of the
Saudis’ anger at the Obama administration’s decision not to launch airstrikes
on Mr. Assad’s military in September. They feel their hands are tied,
and the recent gestures — including Saudi Arabia’s unprecedented refusal of a seat on the United Nations Security Council
— are rooted in a belief that only the United States has the military
power and global authority to make a difference in Syria.
“Refusing the council seat this way, after we had won it, had more
impact than if we had just withdrawn two years ago,” said Prince Turki,
who gave a speech on Tuesday in Washington assailing the Obama
administration for its failure to provide more support to the rebels.
Prince Turki, who has no official position, said he believed the gesture
was aimed in part at a Saudi domestic audience and in part at the
United States, in hopes that it could win some leverage for a more
aggressive stance on Syria.
“Whether we can get Mr. Obama to change his mind, I don’t know,” Prince Turki said.
Syria is not the only Saudi grievance against the Obama administration.
With Egypt, the Saudis were angry that Washington turned on its longtime
ally, President Hosni Mubarak, and accepted the election of an
Islamist, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Saudis were again
upset that the United States suspended some aid after the military
overthrew Mr. Morsi in July.
While Washington may have felt it had no choice but to support the
millions who poured into the street calling for Mr. Mubarak’s ouster and
to show some displeasure with a military takeover, the Saudis saw the
United States as having let down an ally in support of the Islamists,
twice.
The Saudis also feel slighted by Washington’s seeming eagerness to reach
a nuclear deal with Iran — negotiations they feel they should be a part
of. Iran is Saudi Arabia’s nemesis in the region, and the Saudis are
worried that Washington is again being naïve in trusting that Iran will
offer a sincere and verifiable compromise with its nuclear program.
But Syria has been a special concern for Saudi Arabia’s monarch, King
Abdullah, Saudi officials say, for two reasons. He feels responsible for
halting the wide-scale killing of his fellow Sunni Muslims. And Syria
has become the most important battleground, in Saudi eyes, for the
perennial conflict with Iran, which is seen here as almost an
existential threat to the kingdom because of its goal of exporting its
own brand of revolutionary Shiite Islam across the Muslim world.
“Saudi Arabia cannot afford to be encircled by Iran, from Iraq and
Syria. That is out of the question,” said Khalid al-Dakhil, a political
sociology professor at King Saud University who has called for Saudi
Arabia to become less dependent on the United States.
The Saudis were initially reluctant to provide military support to the
rebels in Syria after the uprising turned into an armed opposition
movement in 2011. The interior minister, Muhammad bin Nayef, was against
it, and cited the concern that money and arms could flow to jihadists,
according to a Western diplomat who spoke with him at the time.
The Saudis began funneling arms to the rebels in 2012, but provided
light weapons only, largely out of concern that heavier weapons could
get into the hands of jihadists. They mostly worked through middlemen,
including Lebanese political figures who had long been part of their
patronage network. But that approach hampered their effectiveness, with
much of the money landing in foreign bank accounts instead of buying
weapons for the rebels.
One of those intermediaries was Okab Saqr, the Lebanese member of
Parliament who fled to Europe because of death threats after his role
was exposed, though some in the Syrian opposition say he is still
involved. Wissam al-Hassan,
the Lebanese security general who was killed in an explosion in Beirut
last year, also helped to coordinate military support to the rebels,
according to a Lebanese official and a Saudi adviser who spoke on the
condition of anonymity to discuss internal operations.
The Syrian opposition’s political arm complained about the intermediary
role of the Lebanese, and asked the Saudis to deal with the opposition
more directly.
In late 2012, Saudi Arabia grew frustrated with Qatar, which had been
financing Islamist rebel brigades, and shifted its focus to Jordan,
where it began working with the Jordanians and the C.I.A. in an effort
to vet and train the more secular rebel groups. The Saudi effort was
largely in the hands of Prince Bandar’s younger half-brother, Prince
Salman bin Sultan, with Prince Bandar supervising from Riyadh.
Last weekend, Prince Bandar hinted that he would downscale this joint
effort, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, and that he
might work more through the French and Jordanians. But French, Jordanian
and Saudi officials dismissed those prospects, saying that Prince
Bandar’s comments were meant to show anger at American inaction on
Syria, not an actual plan.
“We can’t punish America,” said the Saudi official, adding that while
the sense of grievance was strong, no specific steps had been taken to
break with the United States. “We don’t have the tools.”
Other Saudis also expressed doubts that the kingdom could easily decrease ties with the United States.
“Move to what?” asked Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist with close ties to
the royal family. “There is no alternative. It is just a tactical
pressure on the American administration when it comes to Syria,” he
said. “But Saudi Arabia has so much of value in the relationship with
America, in security exchanges and the war on terror. We benefit more
from this than the U.S. does from us.”
For the Syrian opposition, the Saudi outbursts have been encouraging,
but members say they have not seen any signs of a new direction that
might benefit them.
“If all this Saudi anger translates into more support for us, great,”
said Najib Ghadbian, the United States representative of the Syrian
Coalition, the opposition’s main political arm.
U.N., Fearing a Polio Epidemic in Syria, Moves to Vaccinate Millions of Children
By RICK GLADSTONE
Officials said that the discovery a few weeks ago of a cluster of
paralyzed young children in Deir al-Zour, a heavily contested city in
eastern Syria, had prompted their alarm.
- Hardships Mounting for Refugees Inside Syria
- Norway Rejects U.S. Request to Help Destroy Syrian Chemical Weapons
Yazan Homsy/Reuters
Children carried their
belongings in Homs, Syria, this month. The United Nations is struggling
with how to deliver emergency aid as the war rages.
By RICK GLADSTONE
Published: October 25, 2013
United Nations officials said Friday that they were mobilizing to
vaccinate 2.5 million young children in Syria and more than eight
million others in the region to combat what they fear could be an
explosive outbreak of polio, the incurable viral disease that cripples
and kills, which has reappeared in the war-ravaged country for the first
time in more than a dozen years.
Multimedia
Related
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Hardships Mounting for Refugees Inside Syria (October 25, 2013)
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Norway Rejects U.S. Request to Help Destroy Syrian Chemical Weapons (October 26, 2013)
The officials said that the discovery a few weeks ago of a cluster of
paralyzed young children in Deir al-Zour, a heavily contested city in
eastern Syria, had prompted their alarm, and that tests conducted by
both the government and rebel sides strongly suggested that the children
had been afflicted with polio.
The possibility of a polio epidemic in Syria, where the once-vaunted
public health system has collapsed after 31 months of political upheaval
and war, came as the United Nations is increasingly struggling with the
problem of how to deliver basic emergency aid to millions of deprived
civilians there.
Valerie Amos, the top relief official at the United Nations, told the
Security Council on Friday that combatants on both sides of the conflict
had essentially ignored the Council’s Oct. 2 directive that they must
give humanitarian workers access to all areas in need.
Speaking to reporters afterward, Ms. Amos said
she had expressed to the Council’s members “my deep disappointment that
the progress that we had hoped to see on the ground as a result of that
statement has not happened, and in fact what we are seeing is a
deepening of the crisis.”
Dr. Bruce Aylward, the assistant director general for polio and
emergencies at the World Health Organization, which is helping to lead
the new polio vaccination effort in Syria, said officials at the agency
were taking no chances and assuming that the 20 paralyzed children in
Deir al-Zour were polio victims. “This is polio until proven otherwise,”
he said in a telephone interview from the group’s headquarters in
Geneva.
Despite the war, Dr. Aylward said he believed that both sides understood
the urgent need for repeated vaccinations of all young children because
polio can spread indiscriminately and is so difficult to eradicate.
Nonetheless, he said, it remained unclear whether the vaccination
effort, in all parts of Syria, would be impeded by the conflict’s chaos
and politics.
“The virus is the kind of virus that finds vulnerable populations,” he
said, “and the combination of vulnerability and low immunization
coverage, that is a time bomb. There is a real risk of this exploding
into an outbreak with hundreds of cases.”
The World Health Organization, working with Unicef and other aid groups,
has organized a plan to administer repeated oral doses of polio vaccine
in concentric geographical circles, starting with children in Deir
al-Zour and eventually reaching western Iraq, southern Turkey, Jordan,
Israel, the Palestinian territories and Egypt. In Lebanon, home to more
than 700,000 Syrian refugees, public health officials said Friday that
they were undertaking a related effort to vaccinate all children under
age 5.
Altogether, Dr. Aylward said, more than 10 million young children in the
Middle East would get polio vaccinations over the next several weeks.
The World Health Organization has spent 25 years trying to eradicate
polio. In recent years, the disease’s presence had narrowed to just
three countries — Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan — from more than 125
when the campaign began in 1988. The virus is highly infectious and
mainly affects children younger than 5. Within hours, it can cause
irreversible paralysis or even death if breathing muscles are
immobilized. The only effective treatment is prevention, the World
Health Organization says on its Web site, through multiple doses of a vaccine.
While the source of the Syrian polio strain remained unclear, public
health experts said the jihadists who had entered Syria to fight the
government of President Bashar al-Assad may have been carriers. Dr.
Aylward said there were some indications that the strain had originated
in Pakistan. He cited the recent discovery of the Pakistani strain in
sewage in Egypt, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.
The Syria aid crisis portrayed by Ms. Amos in her Security Council
briefing reflected new levels of frustration over the Council’s
inability to act decisively on the conflict, despite its binding — and
so far successful — Sept. 27 resolution on the dismantling of Syria’s
chemical weapons arsenal.
By contrast, the Council’s Oct. 2 statement requesting that all
combatants in Syria protect civilians and allow unfettered access for
humanitarian aid has no enforcement power.
“This is a race against time,” Ms. Amos said. “Three weeks have passed
since the adoption of the Council’s statement, with little change to
report.”
Ms. Amos told the Council that the Syrian government had withheld
approval of more than 100 visas for United Nations staff members and
members of other international aid groups, and had restricted workers
from operating in areas with the greatest need. She also said as many as
2,000 armed opposition groups in Syria had made travel within the
country increasingly dangerous. Kidnappings of humanitarian workers are
increasingly common, she said, citing an instance last week when “we had
a convoy that was ready to go, but we could not get enough drivers, as
they fear for their lives.”
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