Spillover and chaos driven by the Syrian conflict threatens to reverse the critical gains made by the U.S. and its allies during the Anbar awakening. The cooperation of tribal leaders in that region allowed the U.S. to hand Al Qaeda a battlefield defeat. Deepening sectarian tensions in Iraq, coupled with a severe deterioration in the security environment, has allowed Al Qaeda to reorganize and consolidate.

Now Al Qaeda, having leveraged Syrian-driven sectarian tensions to reassert itself in Iraq, is making a play for Syria itself:

The al-Qaida-aligned groups that started mustering in Syria from July 2012 onwards have been consolidating in large swaths of the north and east and spreading out, just as they have been in Anbar and the farmlands north of Baghdad. With their creeping presence has come the enforcement of new ways in the rural north; summary justice, fear and intimidation… Black flags now fly above many mosques and civic buildings in towns across Syria’s north and in Iraq’s border towns. Local residents near Aleppo walk silently past school walls with white horses painted on a black background – an image widely used by al-Qaida in the north. “We don’t want their paintings, or their jihad,” said Abu Saed, a member of the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo. “They can take the stallion back to the dark past that they came from.”

The mutually-reinforcing dynamics – spillover from Syria boosting Al Qaeda in Iraq, and then Al Qaeda seeping from Iraq into Syria – is not an accident. Al Qaeda-linked groups view the two countries as part of a single theater. The insidery security bulletin Nightwatch crystalized the observation:

The fighting is no longer containable in Iraq. The al Maliki government openly acts as an agent for Iran in facilitating support to the Baathist government in Damascus. The ISIS and affiliated fighters do not recognize the boundaries of Iraq and Syria and fight on both sides of the border. One astute Iraq analyst observed that ISIS is the first political-military organization to treat Syria and Iraq as a single political entity since before World War I. The Syrian fight now exerts influence on the fighting in Iraq. Iraqi Sunni refugees in Syria add weight to that influence.

[Photo: Europe Daily News / Youtube]