On Friday the Al-Qaeda Light™ Islamist Front in Syria took over the headquarter and warehouses of the U.S. proxy force – the Supreme Military Council. The head of the SMC, General Idris first fled to Turkey and then to Doha, Qatar. The Unites States and Great Britain claim to have stopped providing 'non-lethal' aid to the insurgency in North Syria. Turkey is said to have closed its border to Syria though there is some doubt about that:
One Western diplomat expressed doubt that the Turkish government was fully cooperating with Western efforts to staunch the flow of fighters. "We are still experiencing operational difficulties, although we have seen signs that it is improving. As to whether a ‘shift’ ever occurred, that is still an open question,” the diplomat says.
The U.S. claims it still has to learn what actually was stolen from its 'non-lethal' aid but the Free Syrian Army certainly knows its losses. The cache on 'non-lethal' aid captured by the Islamic Front was indeed significant:
[A senior FSA Supreme Military Council official] said that the Islamic Front raided a total of ten warehouses belonging to the Western-backed umbrella group and seized a significant arsenal of weaponry, including 2,000 AK-47 rifles, 1,000 assorted arms—including M79 Osa rocket launchers, rocket-propelled grenades, and 14.5mm heavy machine guns—in addition to more than 200 tons of ammunition. At least 100 FSA military vehicles were also taken in the attack.
U.S. lethal and 'non-lethal' aid is still flowing, though now mainly through Jordan, and Turkey is silently keeping up its support for AlQaeda in Syria and Iraq. The U.S. never had qualms with using Islamist proxy forces. It is in talks with the Islamist Front and I doubt that it is retracting from its general plan of destroying Syria. The ideological differences between the FSA, the Islamist Front and AlQaeda are anyway small – if they exist at all.
But the Free Syrian Army, which never really existed as a consistent fighting force force, and the Syrian Military Council are finished. The Islamic Front, sponsored mainly by Saudi Arabia, is now the main opposition to the Syrian state. The U.S. plans to present some alternative government structure to the Syrian government are finished too. The Islamist Front is not presentable as such. It has committed war crimes and kidnaps and kills journalists and the few civil opposition activists who actually exist. If the Geneva II talks, announced for January, actually happen there will be no one other than the current Syrian government who can claim legitimacy.
When Thomas Hegghammer and other 'experts' muses about the ideological motives of the foreign Islamist fighters in Syria they miss the most profane but most important one: money. The Islamist Front and other fighters are offered and paid relatively high wages by the various clandestine outlets in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere:
One Kuwait-based effort raised money to equip 12,000 rebel fighters for $2,500 each.
For many unemployed young men in the Middle East and elsewhere $2,500 is more than they can hope to make anywhere else. The ideological motivation of violent Jihad is only a smoke screen to disguise that these are foreign sponsored mercenaries.
When the Gulf oil dictatorships call for 'foreign militias' to leave Syria they of course do not refer to those they are paying themselves. They still have illusions that their mercenaries could actually win but they lost the battle for Damascus and will lose the war over Syria. Soon the blow back will come to their countries.