Mixed reaction in Middle East as US-led air strikes in Syria up the ante

The Syrian rebel commander has been struggling for two years just to get ammunition for his men’s rifles and food to feed them, as they have sought to take ground from the military of President Bashar al- Assad while receiving only an erratic trickle of outside aid.

So he was amazed to wake up on Tuesday to the news that the United States and five Arab countries had begun a sweeping campaign of air and cruise-missile strikes in Syria – not against Assad's forces but those of the Islamic State (IS) militants who also want to topple the Syrian government.

The commander said he wasn’t against the strikes but thought the campaign’s priorities were out of order. “Our goal from the start has been to topple the regime, and then we can fight the Islamic State and the other extremists,” said the commander, who gave only his nickname, Abu Hussein, for fear of retribution from Islamist rebels. “It was Bashar who carried out all the massacres, and started the whole thing.”

The new military intervention in Syria by the US and five Arab allies has drawn mixed reactions across the Middle East, a region where many people hate the brutality of IS, also known as Isis, but are also deeply sceptical of the motives behind any foreign intervention.

Looming over the new campaign are memories of recent US-led interventions in Libya and Iraq, which many Arabs welcomed at first but later turned against, because they led to new waves of instability and civil war. US president Barack Obama, who made his opposition to the Iraq war central to his presidential campaign, has insisted the fight against IS will be different. Instead of putting US troops on the ground, the US will support local forces in Syria and Iraq that can follow up air strikes with work on the ground.

Regime change has never been mentioned as a goal, and the participation of Arab states has been regarded as crucial, to deflect any criticism that the US was going to war against Muslims. Some of the Arab participants, especially Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have been heavily involved in Syria's civil war for years, so joining the international coalition is merely a new, more direct form of intervention for them.

Plot attacks at home

Saudi Arabia, along with others such as Jordan and Bahrain, worries that their citizens who have gone to join IS forces will later return and plot attacks at home. And the

United Arab Emirates

has supported efforts to combat a range of Islamist movements across the region.

“This is the right way to do it, if you want to defeat the Islamic State, because you cannot cut off the tail and leave the head,” said Ebtesam Al Ketbi, chairwoman of the Emirates Policy Centre. “And everyone is participating, so no one can accuse the United States alone.”

Others see IS as spreading an abhorrent interpretation of Islam and support the fight against it. “They are a minority of extremists who have nothing to do with the rest of the world’s Muslims,” said Issa Alghaith, a member of Saudi Arabia’s Shura Council. In Baghdad, the city with perhaps the most experience of US-led air strikes, many people lauded the bombing of Raqqa, the extremists’ de facto capital in Syria, and faulted the air campaign only for not happening sooner.

“The American reaction to the situation in Iraq is late,” said Kadhem el-Maqdadi, a journalist and commentator in Baghdad. The US agreed to help Iraq if it was under attack, he noted, “but their help came after the Isis virus had spread throughout Iraq”.

Pre-dawn strikes

He said the air strikes alone would not defeat the militants. “Wars are fought mainly on the ground, and air support can help but they can’t fix the problem,” he said. The pre-dawn strikes shook the city of Raqqa, rattling residents’ windows and knocking out the electricity. Many IS fighters left the city, fearing further strikes.

Many people in Syria said they were happy to see the IS's grip on the city weakened, but expressed concern that government troops might use the air strikes as an opportunity to advance. – (New York Times service)