Assad bolsters al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria with secret oil deals, prisoner release: Western intelligence

“The regime is paying al-Nusra to protect oil and gas pipelines under al-Nusra’s control in the north and east of the country, and is also allowing the transport of oil to regime-held areas,” the source told the Telegraph. “We are also now starting to see evidence of oil and gas facilities under ISIS control.”

The Western intelligence sources said that even though there is no love lost between the Assad regime and the jihadist organizations, both have a common enemy: the moderate Syrian rebels. These sources say that “despite Assad’s finger-pointing,” his regime was to blame for the rise of al-Qaeda in Syria.

Analysts note that Assad has a history of switching back and forth between fighting Islamist militants and working with them. After the 9/11 attacks he cooperated with the U.S. rendition program for militant suspects, but after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he helped al-Qaeda to build itself in Western Iraq as part of a coalition of forces in Iraq resisting the United States and the West. When, two years later, the Sunni militants, now established in Anbar province, turned against the Iraqi Shia-led regime, which was backed by Iran, Assad’s major ally, he ordered the Iraq-Syria border sealed, arrested al-Qaeda supporters in Syria, and sent his agents to help the Shia regime in Baghdad hunt down Sunni militants.

In early 2011, when the rebellion against his regime began, Assad turned again, releasing al-Qaeda prisoners in order to help create, and then strengthen, a jihadist rebel alternative to the secular and moderate rebels. Analysts have identified a number of former prisoners now in the leadership ranks of Jihadist groups, including Jabhat al-Nusra, ISIS, and a third group, Ahrar al-Sham.

The Telegraph notes that Syrian intelligence has closely cooperated with Jihadist extremist groups. Aron Lund, editor of a Web site, Syria in Crisis, used by the Carnegie Endowment to monitor the war, said: “The regime has done a good job in trying to turn the revolution Islamist. The releases from Sednaya prison are a good example of this. The regime claims that it released the prisoners because Assad had shortened their sentences as part of a general amnesty. But it seems to have gone beyond that. There are no random acts of kindness from this regime.”

Rebels both inside and outside ISIS also say they believe the regime targeted its attacks on non-militant groups, leaving ISIS alone. “We were confident that the regime would not bomb us,” an ISIS defector, who called himself Murad, told the Telegraph. “We always slept soundly in our bases.”