On February 19 at the Frontline Club, a panel chaired by international editor at Channel 4 News Lindsey Hilsum, discussed the current state of rebel fractions and the rise of ISIS in Syria.

Kim Sengupta, Lindsey Hilsum and Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi discuss Syria and ISIS at the Frontline Club

Hilsum started of by asking what happened to the FSA, which was so prominent during the first months of the Syrian rebellion?

Kim Sengupta, defence and diplomatic correspondent at The Independent said:

“There are more brigades, battalions that nominally at least will say that they belong to the FSA but as an organisation it is still very much based in Istanbul. It’s got probably more influence than before but not an awful lot on the ground.”

How did ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) rise to become one of the most prominent groups?

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is a student at Brasenose College, Oxford University focusing on developments in Syria and Iraq:

“On the ground what happened was that Jabhat al-Nusra people accepted [leader of ISIS Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi’s argument [that al-Nusra was merely an extension of ISI and therefore should merge] and accordingly they switched over from Jabhat al-Nusra to declare themselves ISIS.”

Al-Tamimi explained the ideology of ISIS:

“Ultimately they [ISIS and al-Nusra] share the same ideological program. ISIS emphasises much more the goal of establishing a caliphate…Beginning in Iraq and Syria which then should not only encompass the entire Muslim world but the whole world, including London and such places… This globalist emphasis, which ISIS does, in contrast with al-Nusra, means that this appeals so much to foreign fighters.”

http://twitter.com/Alexwhi/status/436260104787484672

Raffaello Pantucci, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI) said that many foreign fighters are unaware of the complicated environment they are going into:

“One of the things that isn’t so clear to individuals that seem to be going out there to fight is I think they miss the point about how confusing a battle field this really is and how shifting it really is. And how these allegiances on the ground are changing almost daily.

But why ISIS and not other groups?

Pantucci:

“…What’s worrying is that ISIS has a more globalist rhetoric… a lot of these people who are going out there are not going…because they want to become involved in terrorist activity and have any intention in coming back here to conduct some sort of terrorist attack… but what’s worrying is the groups they are joining and the people they will meet … may have different ideas and may be able to persuade them to have these different ideas.”

Lindsey Hilsum, Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi and Malik Al-Abdeh discuss ISIS and Syria at the Frontline Club

Malik Al-Abdeh, a British-Syrian freelance journalist based between London and Antakya, attempted to simplify the confusing environment:

“If you go to these places you realise that it’s all about money, it’s about local power brokers. How else do you explain why al-Nusra and ISIS don’t like each other? They’re two gangs that don’t get along.”

@Alexwhi: #Syria is like wild west, and extremist Islamist #ISIS group brings order to areas it controls, @malikalabdeh says @frontlineclub

— Hammad (@hammadsarfraz) February 19, 2014

A question from the audience asked what should the west and other powers be doing?

Al-Tamimi:

“It’s all just become so fragmented now…I think that either you accept the idea of wanting a total victory and then you’ve got to have some kind of international force brought in in the aftermath, to train some kind of army to bring some kind of stability and that will take a very very long time…a timescale of decades…or are you going to go with a de facto partition of the country and some kind of ceasefire?”

Sengupta said that it is actually too late for the west to intervene; the time has passed:

“If you don’t want to support a population against a regime, don’t entice them to rise up which is what Britain and France, in particular did… have been doing consistently and then they have failed abjectly to support what was left of the so-called secular groups and moderate groups and thus we have seen the triumph of ISIS and other extremist groups.”

Pantucci:

“I think that there was a moment where the west could actually do something to affect a difference, I think that moment has passed quite a long time ago and I don’t know if there is a huge amount that they could actually control about this situation anymore.

“…I think the one plan that they’ve got is how do we mitigate the threat that’s going to come back to us. And that’s why … the focus here is on the foreign fighters.. I don’t think there’s a plan for an end state of how we want it to look. I think they want to make it as less bad as possible.”

Watch and listen to the full discussion below:

The critical nature of coming weeks was acknowledged by the panelists who took part in the Frontline Club’s First Wednesday discussion on Syria on the night that the UN Security Council condemned the government’s violent crackdown in the city of Hama.

"Ramadan was always going to be an explosive month for Syria," said Sue Lloyd Roberts who posed as a tourist in June to film Syrian protesters for BBC2’s Newsnight:

"You can be arrested if a group of people meet in a public place, which is why during Ramadan, when thousands go to their mosques routinely every day, it was going to be a chance to focus political dissent and to set off demonstrations.

"This is what has happened and the army was waiting for it to happen and my god have they retaliated in a brutal way."

Malik Al-Abdeh, a former BBC journalist and chief editor of Barada TV a London-based Syrian opposition satellite channel, said if the regime was to emerge stronger than it is now then we could see the beginning of a civil war in Syria.

He added that the slogan from the beginning of the revolution has been ‘death over indignity’ and said many of the protesters would prefer to die than to continue to live under Bashar al-Assad:

"There is no going back as far as the protesters are concerned. They know that if they go back they will all be arrested because there is still a network of informers. However, after Ramadan, if the regime is visibly weakened, then it could well spell the beginning of the end for Bashar al-Assad, so the next three weeks will be crucial."

Christopher Phillips, Syria analyst in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Middle East team, agreed that the Syrian uprising was "at a key juncture". This is the the moment that "the gloves have come off" and the regime had given up all pretence of being reformist, he said:

 "There’s no pretence any more that Bashar in particular is some kind of reformer, or is unwilling to use violence. He is clearly involved in this and he is clearly willing to use force."

But Phillips said he was uncertain if there would be a civil war because that would require another side to fight back.

"One of the reasons movement is peaceful is because they know full well that if ever they give the regime a genuine opportunity to crush them, a genuine justification, they will be smashed. The only arms that can be got hold of are small arms, they would be absolutely crushed. It’s not like Libya where you have large segments of the military with hardware that would switch sides."

Ammar Waqqaf, a member of the British Syrian Societ, who insisted that the uprisings were of a sectarian nature, also said the country was already in a state of civil war: "This is why the regime has toughened up because if it hadn’t then the other side is going to take matters into its own hands," he said.

Daniel Pye, a Damascus-based freelance journalist who has worked as deputy editor of a Syrian current affairs magazine since February 2011, said he had heard only occasional sectarian slogans at anti regime demonstrations. "Maybe one person in a crowd shouts something and everyone else has said ‘No, this isn’t what we’re about, we’re one people against the regime’," he said, adding that there was a growing movement of people in Syria that the world should take notice of:

"It may be disorganised and chaotic and have many different elements to it but there is a movement of people that people all over the world should listen to and do everything they can to understand."

Watch the one and half hour event for a full briefing on Syria here or download the podcast here. The hashtag for this event was #FCSyria.