A very good article from Reuters about al-Nusra, the Al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria. See “Syria's Nusra Front may leave Qaeda to form new entity”, March 2015.
According to Reuters in 2015 Qatar was trying to convince al-Nusra to quit Al-Qaeda in order to start cooperating with Qatar against Assad.
Qatar is trying to bring al Nusra closer to it, but the Americans have designated al-Nusra as a terrorist organization. Qatar wants to isolate al-Nusra from Al-Qaeda, because Iran has a lot of influence in Al-Qaeda, and Qatar and Iran are fighting each other in Syria. Qatar is with Turkey and Iran is with Assad.
Iran, Sudan and Hezbollah trained Osama bin Laden’s men in Sudan in the early 90s. The Arabs of Al-Qaeda i.e Saudis, Egyptians, Libyans, Sudanese, Iraqis etc, were giving money to Hezbollah, and Hezbollah was giving them training and weapons. Al-Qaeda had plenty of money and Hezbollah had plenty of expertise and weapons from Iran. See “The Al-Qaeda-Hezbollah Axis”.
Qatar would also like to convince al-Nusra not to target the Americans and the French, as al-Qaeda does, but instead focus on Assad and the Islamic State (ISIS). Note that the top people of the Islamic State are the ex-officers of Saddam Hussein, who were trained by the Soviets and KGB, who were selling oil to Turkey, and who were hunting the Kurds of Iraq and Turkey together with the Turks. Today the Islamic State is using the same trade routes that were used by Saddam in order to sell oil to Turkey in the black market.
In September 2015 the ex-director of CIA, General Petreaus, said that maybe the United States should cooperate with the moderate elements of al-Qaeda i.e. al-Nusra in Syria, in order to fight ISIS. See Guardian “David Petraeus' bright idea: give terrorists weapons to beat terrorists”, September 2015.
The Americans still consider al-Nusra a terrorist organization, and they know that sooner or later they will have to fight al-Nusra too. But maybe they could have a limited cooperation with al-Nusra without providing it with sophisticated weapons. For example the Americans can provide air-coverage to al-Nusra when al-Nusra fights ISIS, or when al-Nusra fights Assad.
On the other hand the American Foreign Minister John Kerry said that the United States must cooperate with Russia against al-Nusra and ISIS, which means that the Russians and the Americans will jointly target al-Nusra, which is attacking Assad, and Russia will allow the Americans to attack ISIS, which is targeting the Europeans and the Americans. See CNN “Kerry: US, Russia to cooperate against al Qaeda in Syria”, July 2016.
The Russians are making it very difficult for the Americans to target ISIS. Very often the Russians say they attack the Islamic State, but they don’t. They rarely target the Islamic State, mostly when they want to put Assad’s or Hezbollah’s men in a post held by the Islamic State. But they are normally letting them know before they attack. Remember that the Russians and the ex-Saddam people know each other very well since the Soviet times, which is not the case with al-Nusra, which is an enemy of Russia and Assad, and that was more so from the time al-Nusra was bought by Qatar.
Putin and Assad know very well that in the Sunni part of Syria they will have some opponents, and they do not want opponents who can cooperate with NATO. ISIS and al-Qaeda are ideal opponents for Assad and Putin from this point of view, because they both target NATO too, and therefore they can be supported by the Turks and the Arabs, but they cannot be supported by NATO.
ISIS is not attacking Assad, but even if it does at some point attack him, the Americans and the French will not be able to provide ISIS with any weapons, and that’s the same for al-Qaeda, which is attacking Assad though.
That’s the reason the Russian, the Iranian, Hezbollah, al-Nusra and ISIS, all target the Syrian soldiers who are trained by NATO. They make sure that when the Arabs and the Turks fight Assad they cannot have NATO on by their side. If there was a NATO friendly opposition in Syria NATO would provide tons of weapons in order to open the Qatar-Turkey pipeline.
Note that the Qatar-Turkey Pipeline is the true pipeline. The Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline is more of a propaganda from Russia and Iran, in order to say that they have something to put in the place of the Qatar-Turkey pipeline. Otherwise it would be very difficult for Assad to explain to his people why he does not want the Qatar-Turkey pipeline.
The Qatar-Turkey pipeline could go straight from Qatar to Europe, while the Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline would have to liqyefy the gas in Syria, then ship it to Europe with the very expensive LNG carriers, and regasify it there. That does not make economic sense. Iran can simply liquefy the gas in Iran and ship it from Iran without construction a multi-billion dollar pipeline which will beconstanly sabotaged by the Arabs.
Map Sunni VS Shia Pipelines
Map Pipelines
It is not a secret that Assad and Putin helped the ex-people of Saddam Hussein to create the Islamic State. The predecessor of the Islamic State was Al-Qaeda of Iraq, which was created in 2003 by the Arabs and the Iranians to attack the Americans, when the Americans attacked Iraq without their approval. The ex-officers of Saddam were in al-Qaeda of Iraq and they were trained by the Soviet. See “Turning to Kurdistan”.
https://iakal.wordpress.com/2016/07/26/turning-to-kurdistan/
When the Muslim Brotherhood attacked Assad in 2011, with the support of Turkey and Qatar, Putin and Assad supported the ex-people of Saddam Hussein, most of whom were already in Al-Qaeda Iraq, and they created the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Two great articles which explain how Russia, Syria and Iran created the Islamic State and al-Nusra in Syria are the following:
Spiegel “The Terror Strategist: Secret Files Reveal the Structure of Islamic State”, April 2015.
and
The Atlantic “The Short, Violent Life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi”, August 2006
The Spiegle is the largest European magazine, and the Atlantic is an American magazine with almost two hundrend years in circulation.
The Arabs and the Iranians were supporting for years the Al-Qaeda of Iraq, because in Iraq Assad and the Arabs of the Persian Gulf were allies. But when the war in Syria broke out things got more complicated, and they found themselves in opposite sides, and there were problems with Al-Qaeda too.
The Russians, the Syrians, the Iranians and the Arabs of the Gulf had different priorities in Syria, and there was a civil war in the Jihadist who were fighting the Americnas in Iraq.
In the beginning the Americans were very enthousiastic about attacking Assad in Syria, but now they have improved their relations with Iran and they are open on the Assad question, because the Iranians want Assad to stay at any cost.
In Syria the Arabs and the Turks are trying to buy as many terrorist gasgs as possible, whether from ISIS or al-Nusra, in order to use them against Assad. The Turks and the Arabs were not happy with the Americans, because they expected more support from NATO in Syria, and the Americans let them down, so they started supporting tetrorists against Assad, even if that strained their relations with NATO.
When I say that ISIS consists of the ex-officers of Saddam Hussein I am reffereing to the top people and not every little group that cooperates with ISIS. At the following picture you can see the terrorist groups of Syria. They are all for hire, and gourps are based on tribal or geographical connections.
Gangs of Syria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_armed_groups_in_the_Syrian_Civil_War
When the Americans conqured Iraq in 2003, they dissolved the army of Saddam Hussein, which was a Sunni army, in order for the Shia majority of Iraq (65%) to build a Shia army and run the country. The Saddam officers, who had been fighting the Americans for decades, and who were trained by the Soviets, were beated in the war and later they were fired too. They really hated the Americans. Many of them joined al-Qaeda Iraq, and later on Putin and Assad used them to create the Islamic State, in order to have an enemy that could not align with NATO. You really need to read the Spiegel article. It is a great article.
By creating ISIS Assad and Syria were not hopping to create a friend. They knew they were creating an enemy. Bus since they could not create a friend in Sunni Syria they created an enemy that NATO could not supply with arms.
The Iranians, for the same reasoning that Assad and Putin did, supported Al-Qaeda in Syria. The Iranians knew that eventually al-Qaeda would attack them in Syria, and it did it when al-Nusra was bought by Qatar, but they knew the Americans could not supply al-Qaeda in Syria with weaons that would be used against Assad.
The Turks, very disappointed by NATO, did not recognize al-Nusra as a terrorist organization, even though they knew how sensitive the Americans are with al-Qaeda. The Turks did that because al-Nusra was also killing Syrian Kurds, and because they wanted to pay the Americans back for not recognizing the Syrian Kurds (YPG) as a terrorist organization.
In 2014 the Turks recognized al-Nusra as a terrorist organization, but later it was mainly with al-Nusra that the Turks and the Qataris would attack Assad. Terrorism is always state funded, and it is a living organism. It changes whenever international relations change. People think that the Americans are funding the terrorists, but it is the Islamists, the Russians and the communist dictators of Latin America who are funding terrorists. The Americans have a very powerful army. They don’t need terrorism. The weaker parties need terrorism.
The United States now have two choices. They will have to cooperate with Russia, in order for Russia to let them fight al-Nusra and ISIS in Syria, which has been Russia’s back yard for the last decades, or they will have to send army in Syria, in order to attack Russia and Assad. The American political system is divided.
But what you should keep in mind is that the main enemy of Putin and Assad is not the Islamic State but al-Nusra. The Islamic State might become their enemiy at some point, but for the moment the Islamic State does not attack Assad, and therefore it does not support the Qatar-Turkey pipeline. Moreover the the Islamic State makes the Americans very reluctant in providing arms to the opposition, because these arms might end up in the hands of ISIS as many times has happened in the past few years.
I must also say that the Arabs and the Turks were initially united against Assad, but at some point there was a divide between Turkey and Qatar on one hand, and Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates on the other, because the Turks and the Qataris were supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a threat for Saudi Arabia. Therefore the Turkey and Saudi Arabia started fighting each other in Syria.
In Syria Saudi Arabia can communicate with Russia because Saudi Aabia does not care much about natural gas. At least not as much as Turkey and Qatar do. But in 2015, with the new Saudi King, the Turks and the Saudis reached an agreement, and the Saudi King accepted a role for the Muslim Brotherhood in the Syrian opposition.
You have to remember that Assad is very important for Turkey and Qatar. Qatar and Turkey do not care too much about ISIS. But ISIS is very important for the United States. The United States care a lot more about ISIS than they care about Assad, especially after they reached a deal with Iran about the Iranian nuclear program.