The War Beyond Iraq, Ctd

Here's an updated map with clearly coded legend show ISIS gains in Syria and Iraq during lighting offensive pic.twitter.com/3ARqzi4gT3

— Tamer El-Ghobashy (@TamerELG) June 16, 2014

Nicholas Blanford sees ISIS’s Iraq campaign changing the Syrian regime’s war strategy, which in turn has implications for Lebanon:

Although sworn enemies on paper, ISIS has largely refrained from fighting the Syrian regime to focus on building an Islamic state in northern Syria and ousting more moderate rebel rivals. In return, the regime has left ISIS alone, allowing the Syrian military to concentrate on fighting the moderate rebel groups. At the same time, Assad also points to the brutal exploits of ISIS and other jihadist groups in the conflict to justify its argument to the international community that it is fighting Islamic “terrorists.” The Iraq upheaval appears to have changed that calculation. It has also injected uncertainty into Assad’s reliance on Iraqi Shiite fighters to seize the upper hand in Syria’s war. In recent weeks, “thousands” of Iraqi Shiite fighters who were in Syria to defend the Assad regime have left, according to a diplomatic report from a European embassy in Beirut. …

A drawdown of Iraqi Shiites could make Syria’s regime even more dependent on Hezbollah fighters, further straining the Lebanese group’s support base. Lebanese Shiites generally have supported Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria, especially when Shiite areas of Lebanon suffered suicide bombings last year by extremist Sunni groups. But the last car bombing occurred at the end of March, and since then Lebanon has enjoyed a period of relative calm. Now, there is a sense of unhappiness building among the families of Hezbollah fighters. They are increasingly asking how much longer their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons will be sent to fight and die on the Syrian front.

Jean Aziz notes the anxiety of the Lebanese that this war will spread to their country in new and more dangerous ways:

With the progress made by ISIS in Iraq, there are once again Lebanese fears of the possibility of ISIS sleeper cells in Lebanon or at least the possibility that its progress in Iraq will revive hopes and illusions among other fundamentalists on Lebanese territory to join their “brothers” in jihad, even if they do not have an organizational link to ISIS. With more than 1 million displaced Syrians now on Lebanese territory, one cannot be certain that there are no fundamentalists among them.

Lebanese politicians opposed to the Damascus regime refer to a second source of concern. Recognizing the danger of these Sunni fundamentalists, they raise the possibility that Syrian troops might deliberately take advantage of the “erasing” of the international border between Iraq and Syriaby ISIS and resort to doing the same along the Syrian-Lebanese border. They believe that the Syrian army might initially carry out limited incursions, but then expand or legitimize them under the pretext of pursuing ISIS militants on both sides of the border between Lebanon and Syria. They fear that Damascus would dare take such steps in eastern and northern Lebanon because of possible international, in particular Western, indifference in blessing any step that targets Sunni fundamentalist terrorism.

Looking across the Gulf to the Arab petro-states, Keating imagines some anxious fidgeting: