Syria crisis: Saudi Arabia to spend millions to train new rebel force.

[dipsydoodle]

Source: Guardian

Saudi Arabia is preparing to spend millions of dollars to arm and train thousands of Syrian fighters in a new national rebel force to help defeat Bashar al-Assad and act as a counterweight to increasingly powerful jihadi organisations.

Syrian, Arab and western sources say the intensifying Saudi effort is focused on Jaysh al-Islam (the Army of Islam or JAI), created in late September by a union of 43 Syrian groups. It is being billed as a significant new player on the fragmented rebel scene.

The force excludes al-Qaida affiliates such as the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra, but embraces more non-jihadi Islamist and Salafi units.

According to one unconfirmed report the JAI will be trained with Pakistani help, and estimates of its likely strength range from 5,000 to more than 50,000. But diplomats and experts warned on Thursday that there are serious doubts about its prospects as well as fears of "blowback" by extremists returning from Syria.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/07/syria-crisis-saudi-arabia-spend-millions-new-rebel-force

[RiverNoord]

1. Goddamn mess - and we kicked it off by invading Iraq :-(

If we hadn't destroyed Iraq by idiotically forcing out all Baath party members out of the government and especially military, which pushed the Sunni/Shia schism in the region into a full-scale civil war, the entire 'jihadi' thing would have passed, slowly but surely, into obscurity.

It's one thing to invade a country on trumped-up assertions of the dangers of not doing so - human beings have been doing that for thousands of years. It's another thing to incompetently break the country upon religious and ethnic lines, guaranteeing vicious sectarian strife throughout the entire region.

For anyone who watched the TV series Babylon 5, did you recall the sense of deep satisfaction you experienced when Mollari turned over Lord Refa to a group of Narn? I, for one, would be perfectly happy to see Dick Cheney dropped, without a shotgun to shoot people in their faces, in the middle of Ninevah province, wearing a bright American flag outfit.

Not that I'm advocating for anyone to cause harm to a former Vice President of the United States. That wouldn't be nice.

[Igel]

2. Nice hypothesis.

How do you work in the 8-year hiatus between 2003 and 2011, when nothing happened of any worth?

Or that Assad was stable enough until not only with all the refugees from Iraq, not only after Tunisia fell, but until there was intervention in Libya and Egypt was already in quite a bit of turmoil?

Let's also not forget that in the late '90s this kind of turmoil was predicted for the late '00s and into the '10s, based not on politics and US meddling but entirely on purely domestic demographics and economics. It accounted not only for the states that did see revolts, but continuing unrest. The US is irrelevant in the initial impetus to revolt, but do bear some responsibility (mostly indirect) to the extent that we condone and sanction other actors' involvement.

In other words, we have a sufficient cause for Syria which makes any allusion to 2003 unnecessary. Furthermore it's not shown that 2003 was a necessary cause, and if not necessary then certainly not sufficient.)

[Comrade Grumpy]

3. Payback is bitch, o House of Saud. Your time is coming.