ERBIL, Kurdistan Region--On December 18 the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution which seeks to bring about a ceasefire in Syria in early 2016 and then initiate an 18-month transitional period. Not included in the ceasefire will be the terrorist groups Islamic State (ISIS) and the Syria-based al-Qaeda offshoot Jabhat al-Nusra.
However there are a plethora of armed groups fighting in Syria and disagreements among the major powers over who constitutes a terrorist and who does not.
Russia has delegated the responsibility of drawing up a list of terrorist groups to Jordan, a power on good terms with both Moscow and Washington. Amman's early list aptly served to demonstrate just how divided the major powers involved in Syria are as it included Iran's paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). That an inclusion irked Tehran.
Saudi Arabia this month brought together various groups it deems to be the legitimate Syrian opposition. They notably include many Islamist groups the Saudis and others have been backing in Syria against President Bashar al-Assad. Saudi Arabia and Turkey directly backed, for example, the Jaish al-Fatah Islamist faction which seized Idlib Province from Assad last May. Russian bombing has sought to reverse that gain and destroy that group as part of its efforts to bolster Assad's regime.
Turkey is against any power backing the Syrian Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG) group despite its many successes on the battlefield against ISIS with US support. This is because Turkey sees the group as little more than an offshoot of the group it has been at war with for more than three decades, the PKK. Notably the new coalition group the YPG is now a major part of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which was not invited to the Riyadh conference.
The fragile nature of such an agreement was illustrated by the recent assassination by air strike, likely by Russia, of Zahran Alloush, the head of the Jaish al-Islam group whom Riyadh insists is not a terrorist group and whom it had gotten to the table to negotiate with Assad.
"Attempts to assassinate leaderships fighting Daesh [ISIS] do not serve the peace process and [efforts] to achieve a political solution in Syria," argued Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir on Tuesday according to AFP. "I don't know what the Russians have in mind," he added.
Not only will disagreements over who's a terrorist affect the implementation of any comprehensive ceasefire but there are already struggles to figure out just how to go about establishing such a ceasefire. A draft document obtained by Reuters illustrates this difficulty when it suggested three different courses of action that could be pursued;
* A ceasefire that excludes "undesired groups, presumably those deemed to be "terrorists"
* A ceasefire open to all who embrace the framework principles.
* A limited ceasefire that would reduce violence by barring the use of certain weapons.
The former U.S. State Department official Fred Hof observed that, "This whole document does indeed reflect how devilishly difficult it's going to be to implement a nationwide ceasefire in Syria and when I say nationwide, I am not including the area run by ISIS. It's going to be impossible to have a one-size-fits-all set of arrangements."
