The Middle East is very much like the fairground game whack-a-mole. You think you have solved your problems by knocking a mole on the head and another one of the pesky beasts pops up on the other side of the board.
Just as Israel and Washington thought they had Hezbollah and Iran on the back foot, an Islamic fundamentalist group has popped up to threaten Syria’s Assad regime. And, of course, the Gazan mole still has its head above the parapets – just.
The temptation is to raise a cheer for Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its leader Abu Muhammad Al-Jolani. They are, after all, now the main threat to the regime of Basahar-al Assad, one of the regime’s most brutal anti-Western dictators. They also pose the biggest danger to Russian and Iranian influence in the region.
But HTS are an internationally proscribed terrorist organisation with a reputation for brutal repression. They also want to create an Islamic state within Syria. The last thing the Middle East needs is another religiously-based government which derives its legitimacy from its relationship with an infallible Higher Being.
So, who is HTS and its leader? Why have they suddenly leapt into the world’s headlines? And, finally, what are their chances of toppling the Assad regime?
Al-Jolani himself is a shadowy figure. Even his birth date is unknown, although he is believed to be in his mid-forties and hails from Damascus where his parents still live. When the Syrian Civil War started with the 2011 Arab Spring, Al Jolani was associated with the Jihadist group Al Nusra which was the main Islamic opposition group opposing Assad in Aleppo and Syria’s northern Idlib region.
Al Nusra was initially affiliated with Al Qaeeda and Islamic State. But then in 2016, Al-Jolani broke with Al Qaeeda and IS and formed HTS. In 2019 he gave a rare interview to Al Jazeera in which Al-Jolani said he was no longer interested in fighting for world or even regional Jihad. Instead, HTS would focus on creating an Islamic state in Syria.
A year later, 2020, saw the Astana Accords which established an uneasy truce between Iran which, along with the Kurds of the Syrian Democratic Front, held sway in northeast Syria; the Turks whose troops dominated in northwest Syria and the Russians. Assad, much to the Russians annoyance, refused to sign up, but neither did he actively oppose the accords.
The result was an uneasy peace in northern Syria which allowed HTS – which was based in Idlib – to develop a modus operandi with both Turkey and the Kurds and gradually establish their own Sunni-dominated administration. Within a few years HTS was running hospitals, schools, building roads and even established a military training college. Its successful governance allowed it to collect taxes, a big chunk of which went on re-arming with missiles and drones.
HTS may have carried on carving a successful state out of a state if not for the Ukraine War and Hezbollah’s defeat in Lebanon. The former meant that Russia was forced to withdraw many of the troops which had been supporting Assad since 2015, including its S-300 missile systems.
But Assad could still count on Hezbollah and Iran. 10,000 Hezbollah fighters have played a key role in supporting Assad’s mainly conscript army. They have been financed by Iran who has supplied 5,000 troops from its elite Quds force as well as substantial, political, economic and logistic support. Iran has supported Assad because it needs his territory to maintain supply lines to Hezbollah in Lebanon and because Assad is an Alawite. The Alawites are a Shia sect which comprise only about 15 percent of the Syrian population, but they control the political and economic levers. The country is 70 percent Sunni. The remaining 15 percent are mainly Druze, Christians and Jews.
The defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon diminished both the fighting power of Hezbollah in Syria and Iran’s need to maintain a supply line through Syria. At the same time, Turkey has been pushing refugees back into the HTS-controlled areas and Russia continued to reinforce its Ukrainian operations.
A window of attack opportunity opened for Al-Jolani and HTS. They took it. They surprised themselves and the world by capturing Aleppo—Syria’s largest and most industrialised city—in just four days. It took Assad four years.
So what happens now? Clearly al-Jolani wants to replace Assad in Damascus. Can he do that on his own? HTS is still a proscribed terrorist organisation. How desperate is Assad? Will he again resort to chemical weapons? What would be the reaction of the international community if he does? What about the Russians? Will they rush to Assad’s aid? They are peeved at his refusal to improve relations with Turkey and are tied down in Ukraine, but their wider influence in the Middle East depends on keeping Assad in power. And then there is Iran and Hezbollah, both of whom are angry that Assad did not do more to support Hezbollah in Lebanon and are themselves being forced into a retrenchment exercise.
In short, which mole will need whacking next?
* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and author of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War” and “America Made in Britain".
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5 Comments
I must take issue with this statement, though I understand where it comes from: “The last thing the Middle East needs is another religiously-based government which derives its legitimacy from its relationship with an infallible Higher Being.”
Actually, the last thing the Middle East needs is the survival of the Assad regime. It’s difficult for outsiders to understand just how responsible this bunch of gangsters is for so much of the instability plaguing the region, not to mention the depravity of its actions towards Syrians themselves.
Clearly HTS are not peace-loving hippies. The world stood by while such people were gunned down in the street or thrown into concentration camps by the Assad regime. But it would be foolish to ignore the evolution of the group over the years. We may be about to see how much they have changed.
Nor is HTS the full story. Dara’a and Suwaida governorates in the south are now both mostly free. And the fighters there include the Druze – who by definition are not Islamist jihadists!
It’s essential to listen to Syrians: and they are flocking to return to their homes after the collapse of regime rule.
Of course Syrians – and outsiders – worry about what comes next. But Assad is almost universally loathed by Syrians no matter their region or religion or sect.
Tom, your “whack-a-mole” analogy is trite, Orientalist essentialism.
If Assad’s position deteriorates much further, his regime will collapse. Syrians I know feel a sense of relief this may be about to happen, but are understandably nervous about the day after. You seem to be rather out of date on Jowlani. He is a Salafi Islamist but his organisation seems to be genuinely trying to reassure Christians and other minorities that they have nothing to fear in a new, inclusive Syria.
We will see, but this could be similar to the first steps in the Northern Irish peace process. HTS are not fighting on their own. The Free Syrian Army is part of the coalition they are leading and is secular, and the towns in the south – Der’a, Suwayda, Quneitra seem to have risen up spontaneously, very probably under local leadership.
If the disparate political forces of the opposition form a provisional government great things could be achieved (if interfering outside powers allow it) but there is also the risk of a new civil war between the victors. Plenty of foreign actors willing are to aid and abet that. I just pray that at last the Syrians will be given the space to find their own way. Sterotyping the opposition forces marching on Damascus will not help.
We need to recognise what the Allies did in 1918, dividing historic Syria (from Taurus Mountains to Egypt), which the Arabs wanted, into puppet statelets. France recruited minority groups into its local army while Sunnis disdained it. Syria’s first independent government was overthrown in 1949, thanks to CIA machinations. Syria refused aid from the West, turned to the Soviet Bloc. By the late 1960s military Alawis controlled Syria.
So, this is the first time since the 1940s the Sunnis have a chance of taking a leading role in Syria. I’m not holding my breath since HTS has an unsavoury history, but let us hope that HTS leader, al-Jawlani, creates an administration that, mindful of minorities, plays to a sense of common mission to repair the damage over the past century. Syria (and Lebanon) have for too long been cockpits of foreign mischief making, most notably during the now ended civil war. Let’s just hope the people of Syria will at long last be allowed to flourish. It has all the potential of a wonderful and important country, so fingers crossed.
Vladimir Lenin, the Russian revolutionary and founding leader of the USSR, has long been rumored to have said, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” This seems to be the case here. With the end of the Assad regime we have to hope that the Syrian factions can come together and rebuild their country as Iraq has after Saddam Husseie,. The rebels attack on Kurds in Manjib, NE Syria does not augur well for an inclusive transition.
Tom, you are right: ‘HTS are an internationally proscribed terrorist organisation with a reputation for brutal repression. They also want to create an Islamic state within Syria. The last thing the Middle East needs is another religiously based government which derives its legitimacy from its relationship with an infallible Higher Being.’
In 2015, I wrote: The Sunni fundamentalists of ISIS, under the leadership of the new Caliph, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, see their fight as an existential battle against the Alawite Shia Assad and the Christians, which had been forecast in one of the sayings of the Prophet that the final showdown would be fought in a location called Dabiq, a small town in Northern Syria, 28 miles north of Aleppo. Dabiq is now the symbolic destination of jihadis from around the world.
There was, however, corruption and the brutal security service inherited in 2000 from Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez al-Assad.
Charles R Lister in The Syrian Jihad says Bashar al-Assad, on taking power, ‘presided over a partial revival of Sunni Islam within state-accepted circles and set about establishing friendly and eventually rather cosy relationship with moderate Sunni leaders, who were duly installed in positions of authority.
According to Eugene Rogan’s The Arabs: A History in 2011, Syria was almost the last Arab country to be affected by the Arab Spring: Assad did enjoy a degree of legitimacy and public support that made him different to other Arab autocrats.