In July 2013, two years after the Arab Spring began, I was asked during a panel at the Aspen Security Forum to assess the Syrian crisis and whether the United States and the West were responding in an adequate way. Given my role at the time as the Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and using information the Defense Department cleared for release, I described two very likely developments in Syria in the absence of external intervention.
First, even though the Islamic State or other variants of their name â?? ISIS, ISIL, Daâ??esh,- had not yet broken away from al-Qaidaâ??s element in Syria, the Jabhat al-Nusrah Front, my conclusion was that the more extreme groups would gain more influence than the moderate opposition groups in Syria. These extreme groups included elements from al-Qaida in Iraq, former Baâ??athists, al-Nusrah Front, and other Islamic extremist elements who would eventually become part of ISIL. If there were no outside intervention in Syria to support the moderate opposition, the extremist groups would gain more and more influence. Second, the extremist elements in Syria would not respect the international borders in the Levant because they viewed them as illegitimate. In other words, Anbar in Iraq, western Syria, eastern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and beyond all became part of the same territory in the eyes of the Islamist extremists. The Syrian crisis would not be contained within Syriaâ??s borders. As obvious as these outcomes seemed, senior Defense Department officials were unhappy with the description of likely events in Syria as it did not appear to comport with the policy narrative that the Syrian crisis would soon end.
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