So Americans must provide gainful employment for Syrian mercenaries?

“The Southern Front is divided into cantons that answer to international parties.”

Yesterday a well-known Syria observer, an American named  Sam Heller, earnestly argued in Saving America's Syrian Ceasefire that U.S. taxpayers must continue paying salaries to Southern Front fighters. These fighters belong to factions of terrorists, so-called rebels, and criminals in southern Syria -- each faction answering to its own emir, military commander, and foreign boss.

Support for Heller's argument comes from an unnamed "Western" official he interviewed earlier this year:

In Amman, I heard estimates of Southern Front’s manpower ranging from 10,000 to 37,000. Whatever the real number, after December those fighters will need money to support themselves and their families.

“There are tens of thousands of fighters and families who are going to need gainful employment,” a Western diplomat told me. “The task is ensuring people have livelihoods -- their ability to feed and clothe their families. That needs to be addressed.”

Why December? Remember Trump's decision this summer to shut down the CIA's "covert" assistance program -- money, weapons, ammo, and training -- for terrorists and terrorist stooges as long as they promised to fight the Syrian Army.  The decision was supposed to go into effect in December. 

As to why they didn't end the program at the time they supposedly decided to do so -- nevermind asking a reasonable question; the point is that December is supposed to mark the end.

But now, without being told the actual number of people they must feed and clothe, Americans are urged to keep throwing about $1 billion a year into a black hole that even Heller called an "elaborate, Rube Goldbergian military-political project that could never work." 

All that just to continue proxy military actions that have rendered much of Syria to rubble.

If you want to feed and clothe the families of terrorists, etc.  there's a way that ensures the charity won't be abused. It's called soup kitchens and used clothing drives.  Same place you ladle the soup you hand out the donated clothing.

But the Southern Front fighters don't want to acquire food and clothing for their families; they know their wives can always scrounge that stuff from the Syrian or Turkish governments. They want cash -- cash they can spend on weapons and ammo.

I don't believe the Western official that Heller interviewed or the "international parties" mentioned in his October 20 report aren't aware of this.

So what's really happening? The same thing that's been going on in Syria in one form or another since 2011. Notice the two suits in the middle of the scene. I'd guess they're agents for  Saudi bosses.  

The photo, provided by "Syrian Media Organization," is from Heller's October 20 report. The caption: "DARA’A LOCAL COUNCILS MEET IN DARA’A PROVINCIAL COUNCIL HEADQUARTERS, JOINED BY HIGH NEGOTIATIONS COMMITTEE HEAD RIYADH [Riad] HIJAB OVER SKYPE. "

The High Negotiations Committee is a Saudi creation and completely controlled by the Saudi rulers. Heller thinks the committee has "few real future prospects" in creating order in southern Syria. I have never seen any sign that order is the Saudi goal in Syria; Saudi control of Syria is the goal and if that can't be achieved the Saudis want the country destroyed. 

Now what is the significance of Dara'a to the Saudis? To return to Heller's report:

U.S. diplomats had previously tried and failed to secure nationwide ceasefires in Syria, but this time, they focused narrowly on the southwestern provinces of Dara’a and al-Quneitra, which seemed uniquely auspicious. The United States and Jordan could exercise more effective control over rebels in the south—as opposed to Syria’s more unruly, Islamist- and jihadist-dominated north—and the south had been kept relatively quiet since 2015.

The United States has an especially compelling interest in the south, whose security and stability is of vital importance for neighboring countries and U.S. allies Israel and Jordan. Both countries also have positive relationships with Russia, making their national security a matter of shared great-power interest, and both have been keen to find a way to keep the Assad regime’s Iranian-backed militia allies away from their borders.

That last is misleading. The Saudis and their puppets in the EU and Washington were machinating in Syria years before they saw the Iranian-backed militias as problematical -- and years before Israel became concerned about the same.

As to Heller calling any ceasefire in Syria "American" -- Washington on behalf of its Gulf Arab bosses and NATO allies insinuated itself with Russian acquiescence into ceasefire discussions when it saw which way the wind was blowing in Syria. That is, the Syrian government, with help from Russia and Iranian military prowess, forced settlement talks through its battlefield successes, which the "international parties" had considered impossible to accomplish until earlier this year. 

To credit Washington for any of that is an attempt to save American face. Yet Washington will continue to serve the designs of Riyadh on Syria, and in this way continue to make as much trouble for Syrians as it can.  

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