How
a nearly unknown businessman named Khaled al Ahmad became Damascus’
secret liaison to the West and quietly dealt Syria’s grinding war
to a close
by
Rania Khalek
Part
2 - The man behind the deals
In
dozens of towns, villages, and cities across Syria, reconciliation
agreements have brought fighting to a halt. Some people call them
truces, others refer to them as settlements and those staunchly
opposed to them call them forced surrenders. Whatever one’s
preferred label, there’s no denying that the reconciliation process
has been vital to the de-escalation of violence Syria has witnessed
over the past two years.
The
reconciliation process was initiated in 2015, when al Ahmad carried a
message to Berlin. There, he met with representatives of the Southern
Front, a coalition of Western and Saudi-backed rebel groups that
operate in Southern Syria and received support from the US-run
Military Operations Center (MOC) in Jordan. That same message was
delivered to faction leaders from the Southern Front in Jordan and
the south. Some leading commanders even secretly entered Damascus to
meet security chiefs before returning to the south. This series of
exchanges formed the basis of the southern ceasefire agreement and
ultimately became the Russian-American de-escalation zone.
Coordinated
with Wafiq Nasr, who was at the time the head of security for the
south and one of the most respected security officials in Syria, the
offer held that the Southern Front would be allowed to administer the
south on behalf of the Syrian government. One Western observer
described it as offering the opposition in southern Syria the chance
to become the “Palestinian Authority of the south,” a cynical
analogy that painted the opposition as a toothless vassal, with the
Syrian government as a stand-in for the Israeli occupation.
Pragmatic
as it might have been, the division of Syria into de-escalation zones
was at first opposed by then-Secretary of State John Kerry. The top
US diplomat wanted a national Cessation of Hostilities instead, but
when that failed, the Americans came around to the proposal.
Following a 2017 visit to Moscow by former Secretary of State Rex
Tillerson and his policy chief Brian Hook, Trump personally signed
off on the plan.
In a
seven year war where so many previously unknown figures have gained
worldwide notoriety, al Ahmad managed to remain largely anonymous.
One of the few observers to pick up on Al Ahmad’s importance was
the neoconservative operative Tony Badran, a fellow at the
Washington-based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Badran
observed that al Ahmad had briefly appeared in the media in 2012 when
emails to Assad were leaked showing him to be some kind of advisor to
the Syrian president. Badran described Al Ahmad as “a man who
would emerge at the center of the White House’s channel to Assad.
Remember that name. Ahmad appears in the correspondence as an adviser
of sorts to Assad; a troubleshooter active on the ground and offering
counsel on issues ranging from security policy to monetary policy.”
Badran
also noted Al Ahmad’s connections to then-Al Jazeera journalist Nir
Rosen, adding that “Ahmad’s connection with Rosen would
endure, and ultimately intersect with, other, bigger channels Assad
tasked Ahmad with. Namely, contact with the White House.”
Al Ahmad
resurfaced again in a December 2015 article in the Wall Street
Journal, which revealed that his contacts with the Obama White House
began in late 2013 when he met Robert Ford, the Special Envoy for
Syria, to offer collaboration between Assad and the US in fighting
terrorism. The article also revealed that it was al Ahmad who in 2015
arranged for Steven Simon to visit Damascus and meet Assad. Simon had
been head of Middle East policy in Obama’s White House until 2012
and at the time of his secret mission to Damascus he was at the
Middle East Institute in Washington. The Gulf-funded institute fired
him after his Damascus trip.
The Wall
Street Journal article revealed that Simon and al Ahmad had met “at
least twice before the Damascus trip.” This counter terror
approach would prove fruitful over time as the ISIS threat grew, and
al Ahmad eventually brought officials from the anti-ISIS coalition to
Damascus to meet security chiefs.
In
addition, Simon met with his successor at the White House, Robert
Malley, before and after the trip to Damascus to coordinate the
message. The connection with Malley is significant because in 2015
and 2016, al Ahmad secretly met with him in the Middle East while he
was still at the White House and again at a global conference called
the Oslo Forum, where al Ahmad was described as a “senior
strategic adviser.”
In
September 2014, Malley commissioned Nir Rosen, now working for the
Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, “a Swiss-based private
diplomacy organization,” to publish an informal but
influential paper on de-escalating the Syrian war. The arguments and
proposals featured in Rosen’s paper – which was first reported on
in Foreign Policy and is published here in full for the first time –
appear to have been vindicated four years later.
The
paper promoted de-escalation, local ceasefires and freezing the
conflict as the solution for the Syrian war. These recommendations
were adopted by UN special envoy Staffan De Mistura when he proposed
his Aleppo Freeze. It appears that De Mistura’s draft for the
Aleppo Freeze was written by Al Ahmad and Rosen and then personally
approved by Assad, only to be ultimately rejected by the opposition
and their foreign backers. UN sources say it was Rosen who led a
delegation of De Mistura’s staff to Aleppo to help plan the
ill-fated freeze.
It’s
hard not to see in these negotiations a clever and ultimately
successful Assad policy of using Al Ahmad, the urbane English
speaking face of the Syrian government, to influence White House and
UN policy on Syria. By sending al Ahmad to Moscow and to Oslo to meet
with Russians, Assad was able to manipulate the Russians, implanting
his own ideas in the minds of their officials, preventing them from
proposing ideas the government would not accept, and instead pitching
initiatives like the Sochi talks which changed the parameters of what
could be discussed in international settings.
Still,
not all Western officials are enamored with al Ahmad. One Swiss
diplomat, who like most people I contacted for this article agreed to
talk only on a voice call on the application Whatsapp, accused al
Ahmad of having blood on his hands. Others dismissed him as a
smuggler and regime enabler.
In a
second article by Badran, the neoconservative operative drew a more
explicit connection between Rosen, al Ahmad and the American foreign
policy establishment.
“Malley
met in Washington with journalist Nir Rosen, who has a close
relationship with the Assad regime. Following his meeting with
Malley, Rosen authored an unpublished pro-Assad report making the
case for local cease-fires—which have been an instrument of warfare
for the regime camp. Malley distributed Rosen’s report, which,
naturally, was also leaked to David Ignatius. Simon’s and Lynch’s
pieces floated the approach favored by Malley and the White House in
much cleaner form and venues than the tarnished Rosen.” Behind
all this was al Ahmad.
In the
interest of full disclosure I must admit that I met Al Ahmad’s
brother, Tariq, in a 2017 reporting trip in Damascus. Tariq is an
official in the reformist wing of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party
(SSNP), part of the country’s ruling coalition that believes in a
greater Syria encompassing all of the Levant. Repeated attempts to
contact Khaled al Ahmad have failed, and his close partners, Syrian
and Western, largely refused to respond to requests for information.
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