Op-Ed: Moonwalking in Syria

(LA Times) - Here's how feeble U.S. influence on the outcome of Syria's dreadful civil war has become: For the Obama administration's diplomacy to succeed, it now needs help from an armed group with the unpromising name of the Islamic Front. Many young rebels, following the money (and, more important, the weapons), voted with their feet and joined the Islamic Front.

And that brings us to the situation in Syria today: a civil war among four main factions, in which the group supported by the United States, the Free Syrian Army of Gen. Salim Idriss, appears to be the weakest.

Last weekend, the headquarters and main warehouse of the FSA were overrun by troops of the Saudi-funded Islamic Front. The attackers made off with much of the U.S.-supplied equipment there, including trucks and food rations (but not weapons, officials say).

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The dust-up had the effect of both embarrassing Idriss, who spent much of the week denying that he had fled the country, and confirming the most important new fact on the ground: The strongest player in the opposition now is the Islamic Front, a loose alliance of seven factions that wants Syrians to live under Sunni Muslim law.

"They're Salafists but not extremists," explains Andrew J. Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy [Utter nonsense, Salafists are part of the militia and terrorists in Tunisia, Libya and Maghreb - Oui]. What that means is that although members of the front want a government dominated by devout Sunnis, and they probably aren't reliable pluralist democrats, they're at least not Al Qaeda-style terrorists.

That's why U.S. diplomats have been trying to persuade the Islamic Front to join -- or at least endorse -- the peace conference that's scheduled to begin in the Swiss city of Montreux next month.

The top U.S. negotiator on Syria, Ambassador Robert Ford, met in Turkey recently with representatives of the most important faction in the Islamic Front, sources told me. But the outcome of the talks isn't clear, and in previous statements, the Islamic Front's leaders have said they will not participate in any talks that include the Assad regime.

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