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
3 - The strategy
Al
Ahmad’s strategy appears to have involved two steps. The first was
convincing the West and the US that there was a state and it should
be preserved, the second was to support reconciliation as a way to
build a wall against the spread of Salafi influence and build new
local leaders.
According
to Westerners who dealt with him, al Ahmad believed that
reconciliation was a military tool best applied on besieged or
partially besieged areas. Once an area was selected and the forces
embedded there complied, the government could open trade and allow
for goods to flow in. According to al Ahmad’s thinking, it would
also be able to deal with new leaders who rose to power during the
war or with those who previously had connections with the state.
These men would be empowered as stakeholders assisting in securing
peace and services. This would force people to choose between those
who offered them money to fight or those who offered them money and
services to gradually transition into a civilian role with less risk
of death.
“Al
Ahmad once told me,” said one UN official, that “history
teaches us that leaders are made of those who offer their people
something and power is the most important tool for revolutionary
change in history.” Al Ahmad saw in the war an opportunity to
reform Syria, though he was confronted by a system that resisted
change. Even in 2012 when the threat against the Syrian state was
increasing, he insisted that the government should still enact bold
reforms. “Khaled believed that all wars were alike and only
those who studied past experiences and applied it could gain the
upper hand,” an EU official told me. So al Ahmad studied
American counterinsurgency experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan during
the George Bush and Obama eras.
Al Ahmad
may not have convinced the West to embrace the Syrian government, but
he persuaded key officials not to invest in more war. According to
one Western critic, “Al Ahmad’s meetings with Westerners and
the opposition were just a good show, and he used the reconciliations
as an excuse for the West to feel less guilty about abandoning the
Syrian revolution. He played on our guilt.”
Another
Western critic, a UN expert on Syria with knowledge of areas that had
undergone reconciliation processes, was unsatisfied with the outcome
of Al Ahmad’s efforts. “The assessment I’ve been hearing
from security minds in Syria is that there has been a striking calm
in areas that have been reconciled, people are like the Walking Dead,
but the trauma isn’t about the shelling,” the UN expert said.
“The entire civil society has been blocked, it’s just going to
explode. The outcome of the war, the end of the conflict, unless
there is a genuine reconciliation, it’s just going to explode
eventually. It can collapse any second.”
But for
now, the peace has held, allowing communities to return to a
semblance of normality, and for economies and social structures to
begin functioning again. The eerie calm taking hold in areas that had
once been theaters of carnage is the legacy of one of the Syrian
war’s most mysterious figures.
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