By Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi

Readers of my report on my visit to the north Aleppo town of Azaz near the border with Turkey will recall that authority in Azaz is divided between two bodies: the local council and the Shari’a committee. Broadly speaking, the local council covers the realm of public services, while the Shari’a committee, working with the Northern Storm Brigade as the police force, is responsible for criminal law and order, family and public morality. Both bodies are officially ‘civil’ (madani) and ‘independent’ (mustaqill), but in particular, the Shari’a committee’s own links with what was then the Islamic Front in Aleppo (now the Levant Front) were clear during my visit with the presence of the rebel coalition’s flags at the entrance to the building.

This post explores in greater detail the activities of the local council in Azaz, which is located in what used to be the regime’s local security centre that also held detained opposition activists. The local council’s funds primarily come from its own members and charging of locals for some services it provides (e.g. street cleaning).

As the Syrian civil war enters into its fifth year, with so much attention on the Islamic State (IS) phenomenon and its system of administration of territories it controls (for an ongoing extensive archive of IS administrative documents, see this post on my site), one should not forget that life and governance in Syria exist beyond IS, jihadi groups and the regime. Though there is a Jabhat al-Nusra presence in the town that has a base and controls one of the mosques, it still does not exercise governing authority and thus has no presence in Azaz’s local council or Shari’a committee. An interesting notable Jabhat al-Nusra figure in Azaz who was reportedly assassinated in January this year was Shari’a cleric/judge Abu Shu’aib al-Masri, a defector from the Islamic State.

The Azaz local council describes its activities thus in a statement it released earlier this year (beginning of February 2015):

“Local Council in the town of Azaz

Clarification statement on the activities and specialties of the local council in Azaz.

The local council undertakes to guide civil affairs through self efforts and very sparse financial support. Through this statement we clarify the specialties that the local council bears on its shoulder as far as possible:

1. Cleaning/Sanitation: With all its burdens and requirements including securing fuel for the municipality’s vehicles, regular maintenance for them, and securing ‘nature of the work’ for the cleaning/sanitation workers- whose number is at 40- at a sum of 250000 Syrian pounds a month.

2. Electricity: That also through fuel for the electricity network’s mechanisms and regular maintenance for them in addition to supporting the electricity network with maintenance necessities for the town’s network as far as possible, it should be noted that we have received from the Energy Ministry real materials and necessities for the electricity network in the town of Azaz but they are insufficient on account of the accumulation of malfunctions in the network for 4 years and we have undertaken to restore the functioning of the al-Asyana network whose malfunctioning has continued for more than 3 years.

3. Education: We have begun our project on the education situation in a self-effort with the help of some of the generous families and guarantee of male and female teachers recruited from all specialties and the number of schools’ students in all study stages has reached 6500. Let it be known that the schools in the town of Azaz have been interrupted in functioning since the beginning of the revolution but Chemonics and the Syrian Promise movement have moved forward in supporting us in restoring suitable furniture for eight schools including doors, windows, fibres, heaters, and fuel to heat the schools over the course of the winter season and work is now proceeding excellently in the town.

4. Health expenditure: The local council has begun its work in maintaining some of the drainage points with very simple capabilities and we are continuing this project.

5. Water: The local council has undertaken to prepare uncovered wells and the water main in complete form and to draw water from the Midanki Dam so we are continuing to work and by all available means to prepare this project and complete it in the nearest time possible to provide water for all the town of Azaz.

6. Aid: We are now working to restructure the aid staff with areas directors and organizing the distribution operation. As for the operation to distribute milk and diapers, the local council is undertaking to verify children’s vaccination cards on account of the widespread existence of fake vaccination cards and we have undertaken to publish the names of all the beneficiaries for the distribution of milk and diapers on our page and we have asked families to help us identify the names of those not entitled.

7. As for the issue of restoring roads, the engineering office is responsible for this matter in the town in cooperation with the local council and the military office and we will undertake this project at the beginning of the spring because of the lack of possibility at the current time with the rain.

8. As for the bakery (reserve/relief), we undertake to secure aid-provided flour for the bakery through aid of some of the organizations for us and as for its functional management we have nothing to do with that at all.

The local council is ready to be held accountable and open up all to its financial reports and our door is open to any citizen who wants to hold us accountable and hold us to an inquiry by legal means and principles.”

To give some context to the various points statement, sanitation operations for Azaz are reportedly being implemented in cooperation with the World Vision humanitarian organization. ‘Nature of the work’ (tabi’atu l-‘amal) refers to compensation for unusual work undertaken to complete one’s job. In another post, expenses are given as follows for various aspects of sanitation in January 2015:

Municipality vehicles’ fuel: 356275 Syrian pounds.
Vehicles’ maintenance: 141600 Syrian pounds.
Vehicles’ frames: 60200 Syrian pounds.
Oils for the vehicles’ engines: 17590 Syrian pounds.
‘Nature of the work’ for workers: 220000 Syrian pounds.
Sanitation workers’ salaries: 78000 Syrian pounds.

Rubbish collection in Azaz by the local council. Accumulation of piles of rubbish in the open in the town is a notable problem.

Besides World Vision, the local council has also received assistance from GIZ, a German international development organization, claiming to receive 350 garbage containers.

As regards electricity, al-Asyana area mentioned here is a part of Azaz that has suffered from a lack of electricity over long periods. In December 2014, the local council claimed to fix technical problems with the network for the area, including by extension of new cables, but the February statement suggests malfunctioning is still an issue. More generally, problems with electricity will have begun since the outbreak of unrest in Azaz in 2011 and become more acute since July 2012 when the town fell out of regime control. Electricity has since that time come almost wholly from private generators. The “Energy Ministry” that has provided the local council with some aid is that of the opposition-in-exile’s declared Syrian “interim government,” which has been hoping to supply electricity as a public service to rebel-held areas via connection with Turkey’s electricity grid using the town of Azaz as the main link. That said, there has been no sign of real progress on these plans thus far.

The education system is one of the areas in which the Assad regime maintains leverage in Azaz as public school teachers still receive salaries from the regime, which they must collect from regime-held areas of Aleppo province. The system is also disliked by the Jabhat al-Nusra presence in Azaz, which set up its alternative in the Mus’ab ibn Umair mosque it controls in the town. The local council has mostly advertised maintenance and repair of school furniture and equipment as well as provision of appropriate materials for heating in the winter. For example, this statement from mid-February 2015:

“Local Council in Azaz
Intended recipient: Syrian Promise Movement

Thanks to the Syrian Promise Movement

The Syrian Promise Movement has provided a financial sum of $500 as simple aid (for month of February) from the movement to meet the guarantee of fuel for three primary schools in the town- the well-being of the primary schools have precedence since they have a large number of children whose bodies cannot bear the cold of winter.

Head of the Local Council in Azaz
Education Office”

Initiative by Local Council in Azaz working with the Islamic Relief to provide winter clothing for children.

On the plans to secure water, it is of interest to note the local council’s mention of the Midanki Dam, which is located in the Kurdish PYD autonomous canton of Afrin. Northern Storm and the PYD were once enemies, and tensions between the two sides meant that water, which before the civil war would come from the Midanki pumping station two days a week, was subsequently cut off.

However, there was some limited cooperation of convenience in the fight to drive ISIS out of ISIS’ declared ‘Emirate of Azaz’ once wider infighting broke out between the rebels and ISIS in January 2014. Since Northern Storm returned to Azaz officially under the authority of Liwa al-Tawhid and the Islamic Front in Aleppo (now the Levant Front), there has been official neutrality despite suspicion that reinforcements come from Afrin to the regime-held Shi’a villages of Nubl and Zahara.

Securing water from Afrin would therefore require greater outreach to the PYD, which may be one of the underlying reasons behind the agreement publicly announced in February between the PYD’s military wing the YPG and the Levant Front, stipulating a united judicial system, establishing joint Shari’a and da’wah offices in Aleppo and Afrin, and working together to crack down on crime. Of course, Jabhat al-Nusra is opposed to any such arrangements with the PYD/YPG, which it considers to be apostate entities.

Provision of aid and vaccinations has also been advertised by the local council in Azaz. For example, in January, the local council’s aid office claimed to distribute 3500 packs of milk to locals, while also noting the problem of those not needing the milk but receiving distributions to sell for profit.  On 24 February, a notification was put up for a polio vaccine campaign for children in Azaz running from 28 February to 5 March. This vaccine campaign was also advertised by the Azaz Media Centre that exists in a single room on the second floor of what was once a café, now otherwise abandoned.

Outside the Azaz Media Centre: in solidarity with the people of Raqqa living under Islamic State rule. The image alludes to ‘Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently.’ 

Perhaps more notable is the omission by the local council of mention of hospital services in Azaz, likely because the local council has no influence over such services that are private in nature. This similarly applies to the mention of only one bakery for which the local council provides flour, for it is public in nature whereas the other three bakeries in Azaz are privately run.

In sum, it can be seen how the council wishes to present itself as an accountable body caring for local needs. Some sense of order has also been brought to the town particularly as Northern Storm is no longer an independent group but must answer to a higher rebel coalition authority (the Levant Front) if trouble arises. The opposition-in-exile, despite its unpopularity with locals on the ground in Azaz and more widely in Syria, maintains limited indirect influence in Azaz through its “interim government” provision of some aid.

Yet by the local council’s own admission, resources are still highly strained, undoubtedly further pressured by the internal refugee influx into Azaz and the wider district. In comparison with direct Islamic State administration that spans significant contiguous territory and has greater financial revenues, the Azaz local council’s administrative system is much less complex and also suffers from the inherent problem of localization of rebel administration.

The post The Administration of the Local Council in Azaz appeared first on Syria Comment.

– Guest post for Syria Comment by Aron Lund, editor of Syria in Crisis

On March 28, Syrian rebels and jihadi fighters announced that they had captured the city of Idlib, posting pictures and videos online that showed them in control of government buildings and other landmarks. This followed a lightning offensive of several days, by a coalition of Sunni Islamist militias that assaulted the city from several directions.

After the security forces of President Bashar al-Assad violently put down protests inside the city in 2011 and 2012, resistance had been relegated to the countryside. With most of the surrounding Idlib Province captured, rebels had in the past year slowly but surely increased pressure on the city itself. They repeatedly demonstrated their capacity to block access roads as a way to force concessions and prisoner exchanges, which must have been a demoralizing experience for pro-Assad forces inside the city. In December 2014, the bell tolled for Idlib City, when the opposition overran the long-besieged Wadi Deif base, freeing up hundreds of crack rebel fighters for new campaigns.

At the time of writing, the situation remains unstable and it cannot be ruled out that Assad’s forces will launch a counterattack from areas still under their control. The government-run SANA news agency only speaks of “repositioning forces” in the southern neighborhoods of the city. Still, the apparent collapse of government defenses in Idlib has punched a gaping hole in the government’s narrative of approaching victory and boosted the opposition politically as well as militarily, spelling trouble for Bashar al-Assad.

A Sign of Government Overstretch

Out of thirteen provincial capitals, Idlib is only the second to be lost to the government, after the northeastern town of Raqqa was captured in early 2013. And like Raqqa, Idlib is a regional center rather than a major city – it would not fit on a top-five list over Syria’s most important cities. But the blow is heavy nonetheless.

The government remains much stronger than any rebel group on the national level, controlling perhaps two thirds of the population. Assad’s semi-cohesive central leadership and his control of a fully functional air force makes him Syria’s by far most powerful political actor, but his regime suffers from serious shortcomings nonetheless. It lacks enough reliable troops to conduct multiple offensives while also controlling its current territory and has been forced to farm out sensitive security tasks to local militias and Iranian-backed Shia Islamist foreign fighters.

Meanwhile, the state-run economy is withering, with a currency crisis and increasingly debilitating lapses in the fuel supply system and electricity production. The falling oil price is likely to cap Russian and Iranian support at levels too low to sustain the current ambitions of their Syrian ally. In short, it seems that Assad is still trying to bite off more of Syria than he can swallow, and the recent defeat in Idlib underlines how dangerously overstretched his regime has become.

The Islamic Emirate of Idlib?

The fall of Idlib is not without its risks for the rebels. Previous attempts by opposition groups to govern urban areas in Syria have been disastrous failures. Of course, a major reason has been Assad’s systematic bombings of civilian areas and infrastructure, which have killed and maimed tens of thousands of Syrians and forced millions out of their homes – a treatment now likely to be extended to Idlib. Even so, the rebels themselves are far from blameless. They have by and large failed to produce anything other than chaos and economic collapse, with what they refer to as liberated territory now suffering from chronic infighting, predatory criminal bands, and the brutal imposition of ultra-conservative Islamist norms. Most infamously, Raqqa has since its capture in 2013 transformed into a local capital of sorts for the self-declared Islamic State.

In the case of Idlib, many different groups were involved and all of them are hostile to the Islamic State, but the offensive appears to have been spearheaded by jihadis from the al-Qaeda-aligned Nusra Front and the large Islamist faction known as Ahrar al-Sham. While there are important sources of friction between these two groups – Ahrar al-Sham refuses to endorse al-Qaeda’s anti-Western attacks and is seeking local allies to avoid being swallowed up by the Nusra Front’s increasingly bold bid for hegemony in Idlib – they are both overtly anti-democratic, hostile to religious minorities, and committed to establishing a Sunni Islamist theocracy in Syria.

There is already great concern in the United States and Europe over the riseof jihadi groups in Syria. Now, early headlines in the Western press speak of a city that has “fallen into the hands of al-Qaeda,” which is hardly the kind of coverage that Syrian rebels were looking for.

This will be a serious problem for the rebels in the coming weeks and months. If Idlib becomes the scene of public floggings and streetside executions of “immoral” women, such as the Nusra Front has committed elsewhere in Idlib Province, or if it collapses into a turf war between rival groups, it would not only weaken more moderate rebel factions – it would also provide Bashar al-Assad with an opportunity to turn military defeat into political gain.

Where Next?

Militarily, however, the Idlib defeat puts Assad in a difficult spot as he needs to foresee the next rebel assault and deploy accordingly. Rebels already controlled most of the Idlib Province, but some pro-regime pockets remained apart from the provincial capital – notably the twin Shia towns of Fouaa and Kefraya, near the Sunni Islamist-controlled town of Binnish to the northeast of Idlib City. On March 27, Ahrar al-Sham announced that it had cut the last remaining supply route via Idlib City to Fouaa and Kefraya, meaning that these towns will now have to sue for peace with the rebels or risk destruction and perhaps a sectarian massacre.

To the south of Idlib City, the government controls a string of towns in the northern Jabal al-Zawiya region, the largest being Ariha, that served to supply forces inside Idlib. If that is no longer an objective, the regime may decide to abandon some of them to focus on defending territory of larger strategic value. However, at the other end of the road controlled by Ariha, we find the city of Jisr al-Shughour which connects the Idlib province to the Sunni-populated and rebel-friendly northern areas of Latakia Province. While Jisr al-Shughour is of little value in itself, Assad will presumably be reluctant to allow for increased pressure on his strongholds on the Alawite-majority coast. According to some sources, the government transferred its provincial government offices from Idlib to Jisr al-Shughour already two weeks ago.

South of Jisr al-Shughour lies the Ghab area of Hama, a heavily irrigated agricultural plain that butts into the Idlib Province alongside the Alawite Mountains. This religiously mixed powder keg has seen fierce fighting and may be of particular value to some rebel groups – for example, many of the founding fathers of Ahrar al-Sham hailed from villages in the Ghab. It is also possible that rebels from Idlib could move further south past Khan Sheikhoun and the battleground town of Morek, thereby attempting to put pressure on Hama, Syria’s fourth-largest city. It is a Sunni stronghold that has remained under Assad’s rule but could prove difficult to control once rebels gather critical mass on its outskirts. A rebel advance on Hama would certainly force the army to concentrate forces there, even at the expense of other fronts.

To the east, there is another very attractive target: the Abu Duhour air base. Capturing it would not only hobble Assad’s air campaign, it would also open up an area of coherent rebel control from the Turkish border to the desert south of Aleppo. In so doing, the rebels would also expose Assad’s only remaining supply line into Aleppo, a desperately improvised logistics trail through the rural towns of Khanaser and Sfeira that would be tremendously difficult to defend against multi-pronged attacks, especially if air cover falters. Under that scenario, the rebels could turn the tables on Assad in Aleppo, threatening his control over the city by cutting it off entirely from the rest of Syria.

At the end of the day, however, Idlib City is of limited value in itself. It is possible that the regime will counterattack or that none of the scenarios sketched out above will materialize. But considering the military and economic resources invested by Bashar al-Assad in its defense over the past four years, the loss of Idlib would undoubtedly signal to many of his supporters that the government’s current strategy is untenable in the long term.

– Aron Lund is a freelance writer on Middle Eastern affairs and the editor of Syria in Crisis, a website published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Affairs.

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Joshua Landis and Matthew Barber discuss the devastating IS campaign to plunder Mosul’s Christians and enslave thousands of Yazidi women: (Watch on YouTube)

The post Video: ISIS, Yazidis, and the Enslavement of Thousands of Women appeared first on Syria Comment.

By Maxwell Martin, a researcher at ARK, a stabilization consultancy based in Istanbul. He has previously written for Foreign Policy and Syria Comment. Follow him on Twitter @WilayatNowhere Between November 27 and 29, the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) was formed after months of preparations, its backers having announced their intention that the RCC would be […]

The post Will the Revolutionary Command Council be Syria’s New Rebel Government? appeared first on Syria Comment.

The Legal Foundations of the Islamic State By Mara Revkin – @MaraRevkin December 17, 2014 for Syria Comment Notoriously violent groups such as al-Qaeda, the Islamic State (IS), and the Taliban are widely assumed to be lawless organizations. Judge Abraham Sofaer, former Legal Adviser to the U.S. State Department, summed up this attitude when he […]

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2014 Roundup and 2015 Predictions By Aron Lund December 25, 2014 for Syria Comment Lots of things happened in 2014, but the single most important development was the rise of the Islamic State as an independent actor in Syria and as a global bogeyman, shifting the terms of Western and Arab Syria debate. The split […]

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How Far is Hezbollah Willing to Go in Syria? By Vahik Soghom, BA. AUB, MA. Univ of St. Andrews, Humboldt Univ of Berlin For Syria Comment April 20, 2015 The melting of snow in the Qalamoun mountains signals the end of the especially harsh winter of 2015. By extension, it opens the door for the […]

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Click here to download Dabiq issue #9. A new issue of Dabiq was released today (#9, They Plot and Allah Plots), which contains another article justifying the practice of slavery against enemies. (Thousands of Yazidi women were kidnapped and enslaved as concubines when IS attacked Sinjar in Northern Iraq, in August 2014. See: 1, 2, […]

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by Aron Lund, editor of Syria in Crisis.

According to rumors doing the rounds now, the Islam Army leader Mohammed Zahran Alloush has traveled to Amman to meet with foreign intelligence services and coordinate a purge of Islamic State and al-Qaeda elements in Syria.

Zahran Alloush is the most powerful rebel leader in the Damascus region. A Sunni Islamist of the salafi tendency, he is the son of a Saudi-based Syrian theologian named Abdullah Alloush. He ran into trouble with the authorities long before the uprising and was held in Seidnaia Prison until June 2011, when he was freed in an amnesty.

Upon his release, he immediately began to construct the armed faction now known as the Islam Army, which eventually grew into the most powerful militia in his hometown Douma. He now controls the Unified Command in the Eastern Ghouta, an area of satellite towns, suburbs, and farming communities on the outskirts of Damascus, which includes Douma. The Eastern Ghouta region has been under government siege for much of the uprising, turning it into an enclave; inside that enclave, Zahran Alloush is by far the most powerful leader. He is a controversial figure, however, and has been accused of silencing dissent by force.

The Unified Command and its member factions are mostly Sunni Islamists of some variety, but with considerable personal and even ideological differences between factions. Together, they have fought hard to root out the Islamic State from the Damascus region, but they have so far cooperated with al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front (which is not part of the Unified Command). The idea of starting a war with the Nusra Front would be controversial among other rebels. Many are wary of Nusra’s extremism and international agenda, but they see no urgent need for diverting resources to fighting the group, which is held in high esteem for its ability to inflict damage on Bashar al-Assad and the Islamic State alike. Being a very useful ally, it would also be a very dangerous enemy. Indeed, some rebels would probably feel inclined to support the Nusra Front rather than Alloush—which is precisely why the topic is so sensitive.

Zahran Alloush Goes to Turkey

In a surprise move, Zahran Alloush recently left his stronghold in the Douma to go to Turkey, where he has been meeting with foreign governments and other rebel leaders. According to recent reports, Abu Mohammed al-Fateh, who is the leader of another Ghouta-based Islamist group, the Ajnad al-Sham Islamic Union, has taken over after Zahran Alloush as head of the Ghouta Unified Command. I have asked two representatives of the Islam Army about this. One says it’s false and has been denied by all involved. The other says it is true but only a temporary arrangement, while Zahran is out of the country.

Whether or not he traveled on to Amman this week, Zahran Alloush’s trip abroad seems to be related to the recent Turkish-Saudi push to empower the Syrian rebels and reorganize the insurgency. A lot of things are happening at the moment, with the quietly Saudi-approved Cairo II conference for moderate opposition members slated to start in Cairo on Tuesday and another conference scheduled for after Ramadan in Riyadh. Meanwhile, President Khaled Khoja of the National Coalition—the Syrian opposition’s internationally recognized exile leadership—has ordered the dissolution of the Free Syrian Army’s Supreme Military Council, a more or less defunct exile body set up in 2012 to coordinate support to the rebellion. Something new will surely take its place. Recent reports suggest a reorganization into a two-pronged structure: the Northern Front and the Southern Front. While the insurgency in the north is a mess, albeit a successful mess, a Southern Front structure already exists, though less as an independent entity than as a label for the groups that are jointly backed and coordinated by Western and Gulf states operating out of Amman.

As these pieces start to fall into place, many suspect that Zahran is being groomed for a bigger role in the new rebel leadership structure—or at the very least, that he is independetly angling for one. He may not be the most popular rebel leader in Syria, but he is surely the person most likely to grab the presidential palace if the Assad regime starts to crumble. In a recent interview with the McClatchy news agency, he tried to back away from his previous hateful rhetoric against Shia and Alawite minorities in Syria. It is hard to shake the feeling that this aimed to make him more acceptable to Syrian and international opinion.

Now, a note of caution: there is no confirmation of these news yet. Instead, the most detailed version of the rumors about Zahran’s meetings in Amman comes from @mujtahidd, an anonymous account on Twitter that is dedicated to critical commentary on Saudi politics. Whoever or whatever is really behind the @mujtahidd account, it has an enormous following in Saudi Arabia and the Arab world, but there is no way of confirming these reports—so make of them what you will.

What follows is my quick translation of @mujtahidd’s tweets, which are available in the original Arabic here.

MUJTAHIDD’S TWEETS ON ZAHRAN ALLOUSH’S VISIT TO AMMAN, JUNE 6:

Zahran Alloush spent last week meeting with Saudi, American, and Jordanian intelligence in Amman hotels, in order to coordinate the situation against the Islamic State and the Nusra Front, and for other tasks.

The meeting with the Americans took place a week ago. He met with the Saudis two times: last Friday between 14.30 until 16.00 and on Sunday at 20.00 in the Hayat hotel in Amman.

Saudi intelligence was represented by Abu Badr, who is close to Mohammed bin Nayef. In the first meeting, Zahran Alloush was accompanied by Mohammed Alloush and Abu Ali al-Ajwa. In the second meeting, he was alone.

The goal was to coordinate the war against the Islamic State and the Nusra Front. Alloush said that the war against the Nusra Front will be more difficult to justify than the war on the Islamic State, and that they will have to help him with that.

Alloush was asked to coordinate with the Southern Front, which consists of the remains of the strays of Jamal Maarouf’s troops and of the rest of the mercenaries. A meeting was set up between Alloush and Abu Osama al-Golani, who is one of the leaders of this front.

Alloush started coordinating with the Southern Front in fighting the Islamic State and the Nusra Front in Deraa and Quneitra. With the Saudis, he discussed replacing the Islam Army flag with the revolutionary flag.

The meetings were arranged by members of the Jordanian intelligence services. No fewer than ten were seen there and several of them attended the meetings.

Despite insisting on the destruction of the the Islamic State and the Nusra Front in all of Syria, the main focus was on keeping the Damascus front in his hands so that he will be able to reap the fruits even if the regime is toppled by someone else.

An interesting point is that the person known as Abu Badr was asked in detail about the Muslim Brotherhood’s strength on the various fronts. It was not clear if the question was in order to push them out or to make use of them.

An observation: the meetings took place in the Hayat hotel, but Alloush is living at the Crowne Plaza. Of course, they’re all in Amman. We ask God to expose all the hypocrites.

— Aron Lund is the editor of Syria in Crisis, a website published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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The Syrian Southern Front: Why it Offers Better Justice and Hope than the Northern”
For Syria Comment – 9 July 2015
by Marika Sosnowski – @mikisosnowski

The coalition of several dozen local insurgent groups, known as ‘the Southern Front’, is consolidating its control in and around Daraa and the Houran Plain in Syria. While the Southern Front is not a cohesive organization but instead an alliance of units that are each individually linked to and funded by the Western- and Arab-backed Military Operations Center (MOC) in Amman, the coalition has in recent months shown itself to be adept in understanding the importance of establishing and maintaining a legitimate and authoritative justice provider. This is because a strong judiciary shows Syrians, and the world, that the Syrian opposition can effectively govern areas under its control. A strong judiciary also makes the Southern Front one of the few viable alternatives to the Assad regime that has emerged from this crisis.

Syrian policemen stand in front the burned court building that was set on fire by Syrian anti-government protesters, in the southern city of Daraa, Syria, Monday March 21, 2011. Mourners chanting “No more fear!” have marched through a Syrian city where anti-government protesters had deadly confrontations with security forces in recent days. The violence in Daraa, a city of about 300,000 near the border with Jordan, was fast becoming a major challenge for President Bashar Assad, who tried to contain the situation by freeing detainees and promising to fire officials responsible for the violence. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Around November 2014, financial and military setbacks forced Jabhat al-Nusra, which also has a strong presence in the south, into an alliance with the Southern Front and other Islamists. The alliance consolidated the various Hay’at Al Sharia, or Islamic Justice Committees, that had been operating in the Southern Front’s area of control, into one Dar al-‘Adl known as the Dar al-‘Adl fi al-Hawran, or the Houran Courthouse, which is located in Gharz, southern Syria. Before that, the Islamic Justice Committees of the Southern Front had used a mix of tribal, Islamic, and customary law to maintain order, with some success.

While in many ways the union is borne out of strategic necessity the real difference with the formation of the Dar al-‘Adl is that nearly all the factions seem to back it, whereas the courts in the north are more fragmented and affiliated with smaller sets of armed groups. As such, the northern courts do not command the same authority or legitimacy with Syrians that the southern court seems to be garnering. Additionally, the relative strength of the Southern Front, gained in part through the consistent coordination and backing of the MOC, have enabled the creation of a unified court that includes groups such as al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham. The formation of the court draws on lessons learned from the north in seeking to prevent the Islamists from creating their own systems of governance.

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In a display of both military power and good faith, the groups negotiated to appoint sixteen judges to the court. Half were chosen by the Southern Front with al-Nusra appointing four and the remainder selected by other Islamist groups that are part of the alliance, Harakat al-Muthana and Ahrar al-Sham. It is not clear whether the judges are independent or simply members of their respective factions. However, the Courthouse is not wholly religious or civil, following the original Justice Committees by using tribal, Islamic, and customary law to deal with cases common in rebel-held Syria. These include military, criminal, and administrative matters, as well as reconciling disputes involving civilians and armed factions. For example, once the court was established detainees being held by the various factions were handed over to the court for sentencing and detention. The Court also seems to be playing an active mediation role between armed factions, such as the Shohadaa al-Yarmouk Brigade and Jabhat al-Nusra. In the aftermath of a military operation in April to secure the Nasib border crossing with Jordan, the Court was also charged with establishing a judicial committee to record the claims of people affected during the operation.

While each faction would certainly prefer sole-control, the establishment of the Houran Court reflects a necessary practicality. With all sides unable to decisively establish dominance over the others on the battlefield, they have been compelled into compromise. Additionally, the establishment of one main justice provider is part of a pragmatic effort by the Southern Front to win civilian hearts and minds. External backers of the revolution may also see the Court as a relative success story for pragmatism showing that the Syrian opposition can create, ‘a “third way” of local governance that threatens Bashar al-Assad’s depiction of the Syrian opposition movement as extremists and terrorists.’

The effectiveness of the Courthouse in Houran in upholding and enforcing the law is in stark contrast to the situation in the north of Syria. In rebel-held Idlib and Aleppo, many courts have been essentially white-anted by the armed groups or other power brokers in town making it impossible for them to enforce the law. While some courts operating in rebel-held areas, such as those established in the image of armed groups like the Islamic Front’s Aleppo Sharia Court, have the ways and means to enforce their rulings, other courts, such as the Unified Judicial Council that operated until February 2014 in Aleppo and northern Idlib, have little to no ability to implement the law without the support of an armed group.

Additionally, because a cohesive legal structure is essential to effective governance, local communities need to establish and develop one main justice provider (and an associated legal hierarchy) as well as decide on one consistent body of law to deal with legal issues. In Kafr Nobel and Saraqib in northern Idlib province, for example, there are as many as five justice providers including a Sharia Court, the local police force and a Security Committee. Additionally, there is as yet no opposition agreement on whether pre-Ba’athist Syrian Law, the Unified Arab Code or Sharia law should be used to arbitrate disputes. Particularly regarding civil matters, the opinion of local tribal leaders also remains authoritative.

The obstacles that plague the establishment of the rule of law in northern Syria don’t seem to be happening with the Dar al-Adl in the south. Groups have so far honoured the courts decisions including cases of criminal allegations against their own members. The Court also seems to be using a consistent body of law that builds on the work of the Southern Front’s original Justice Committees. However, at this stage, the Court remains firmly wedded to its armed backers.

In wartime, fortunes are won and lost on the battlefield. As the most recent battle for control of Daraa unfolds, it will be interesting to see how military results affect the Southern Front’s relationship with its Islamist partners. If the Southern Front gains militarily, its professed nationalist and democratic agenda could offer new hope for a Syrian opposition that, until relatively recently, was considered by many as either extremist or fratricidal.

*Marika Sosnowski is a Middle East researcher. She has taught the history and politics of the region at a number of universities and is a regular guest on Melbourne radio station Triple R.

End article

News:

Idlib Falling Victim to Systematic Looting

The post The Syrian Southern Front: Why it Offers Better Justice and Hope than Northern Front” by Marika Sosnowski appeared first on Syria Comment.

What happened to ‘Man like Fatlum?’: The inside Story of the British Suicide Bomber of Ramadi
By Tam Hussein (All Street scene photos by author others public)
July 21, 2015

This is the back story of Abu Musa al-Britani, a young British suicide bomber who blew himself up in Iraq. He grew up in Ladbroke Grove, the area that I worked and grew up in as a youth worker. We also went to the same school. My essay seeks to answer the question as to why such a popular young man went to Iraq when he had planned a trip to Spain two weeks earlier. What compelled him to go, it also seeks to explain why the like of him and Jihadi John came from the same area. What are the factors that lead to their choices?

It is clear that neither foreign policy nor ideology are solely responsible for motivating European youth to go on Jihad. My essay argues that the reason many of these men went to Syria and join specifically ISIS is due to the subtle interplay between religion, foreign policy and gang culture and modernism. … [quoted from Tam’s email to me]

Tourists and bohemians love rummaging through the stalls on Portobello Road with its shimmering trinkets and shaggy clothes fit for an art student. To the locals it’s a “joke ting” , a skank to bring tourists from all over the world to sample the latest authentic “efnik” fad. Down the road on Golborne road, a stones throw away from David Cameron’s Notting Hill, young British Moroccans feast on  platters of seafood on Hassan’s Grilled Fish stall laughing at the antics of their respective football teams.

Fatlum with Mohammed Nasser.

Some wear the latest garms others wear the trademark white thobe, full length beard, trousers above the ankle and Nike trainers like many Salafis do. Across the road Lisboa Patisserie is packed with locals and Moroccan old timers chomping on the best custard tarts in London talking about their worries, the way they might do back home. Here on the Golborne Road, West London, the Roadman rubs shoulders with the affluent city banker and never do their worlds meet, unless the Roadman is invited to a party to dispense a bit of coke. This is where Trellick towers estate sits easy with the bohemian Portobello Road. You wouldn’t expect a young native of these parts to cancel his ticket to a Spanish holiday resort, and instead end up a thousand miles from home and hearth, fighting in Iraq on behalf of ISIS.

Fatlum in school uniform, note the Westside gang sign he makes.

This is the story of Fatlum Shalaku, or Abu Musa al-Britani; the one who raised his index finger to the sky testifying to the oneness of God and rammed a truck laden with explosives into an Iraqi army position in Ramadi. The twenty year old Zayn Malik lookalike, handsome and muscular; popular with the ladies broke the Golden Division. The US trained special forces unit had been holding a defensive line for fourteen months and suffering heavy losses. His actions forced them to abandon the capital of Iraq’s Anbar province.

Word in Ladbroke Grove got out pretty soon. “Heard about Fatlum?” said one, “madd ting.” On the following Friday, we sat on the floor listening to the Imam at Ladbroke Grove’s Al-Manar mosque talking about how to prepare for Ramadan. I doubt the Imam had heard about the news, for if he had perhaps he would have addressed it. Fatlum’s friends didn’t quite know what to make of it and might have appreciated a talk on this issue coming from an Imam who was quoting the very scholar that ISIS revered; Ibn Taymiyyah, the 13th century Syrian scholar, the progenitor of the Salafi movement. But instead, he reminded his worshippers about the virtues of Ramadan; about the tendency to over eat during the holy month, the tendency to smoke shisha in cafes as people wait for the dawn prayer, the tendency to sleep well into the afternoon, and generally not benefit from the abstemiousness which should enrich the soul. But to some of the younger worshippers there was a need to make sense of his death. They talked about it with a sense of surprise and stupefaction. “I used to see him at the gym; lovely guy” said one, “can’t believe what he did.” In the estates around the mosque the young knew he had gone to fight in Syria but few expected him to go out like that. Another friend said, “Fatlum’s world view was twist but I know his heart was pure”. There was begrudging admiration for the young man who walked the walk even though he hadn’t talked much about it. A former school mate put it differently to ITV news: “it is sad, we have to ask ourselves why a person full of dreams and possibility and potential …would…blow them selves up.”^[1] Everyone seemed to say what happened to man like Fatlum?

Golborne road North African shop

Outside of Ladbroke Grove, little is known about Abu Musa al-Britani. He didn’t have a large social media footprint. Fatlum had deleted his Facebook account before leaving for Syria according to his friends. He came from a Kosovo Albanian family and attended Holland Park School. Fatlum enjoyed his time there and was described as “popular” and “friendly.” The school population reflected the diversity of the area and had a large British Moroccan and Somali community from Shepherds Bush, Latimer and Ladbroke Grove since the Nineties. Many like Fatlum, who grew up in North Kensington, were brought into the British Moroccan cultural orbit, after all nearly sixty percent of the UK’s British Moroccan population settled in North Kensington in the 70s and 80s.

Reminders of the home country

Some say that Fatlum was intensely moved by the Syrian conflict, but that is simply not true. When the Syrian revolution broke out as one friend of Fatlum said, “every one was gassed” about Syria. These young men were profoundly affected by the images coming out on social media. After all this is the most mediated conflict that the world has ever seen and anyone with beating heart would find it hard to bear witness to the despicable acts carried out by the Syrian regime.  As a cousin said of Mohammed Nasser, a fighter and friend of Fatlum who was killed in Iraq:

“…[Nasser] was angry about what was happening in Syria…like Iraq and Palestine. I  don’t think he was radicalised, he understood what radicalisation was and what extremism was…”

Fatlum knew of a mysterious convert, not unlike Ras in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, who packed up his bags and joined ISIS. This Ladbroke Grove Ras, rootless, charismatic and confrontational had gathered around him a group of young men in Ladbroke Grove who would eventually follow him. These young men recruited others through whatsapp and other messaging services. It was chain migration in reverse. Rumours has it that he was killed by Jaish al-Fath, a rebel faction that has made recent gains in Idlib. Speaking to a local, Elias, not his real name, the fact that there was a recruiter, was something the British security services must have been aware of in the Ladbroke Grove area. They were showing locals pictures of persons of interest.

Trellick towers next to Al-Manar mosque

But Fatlum wasn’t that hyped about fighting in Syria or swayed by this ‘recruiter’. Like his family, Fatlum was not religious and lived a relatively secular lifestyle like many Kosovo Albanians whose parents had experienced Communist rule. He was close to Mohammed Nasser and also knew Hamza Parvez, all ended up fighting for ISIS. One theory has it that Nasser influenced him to go to Syria. Nasser had found Islam after his father died; he has been described as a charismatic and passionate young man who influenced those around him. In contrast, Hamza Parvez was described by a family member as being “lazy” and a bit of a drifter, more interested in Krispy Kremes than fighting. He followed Nasser to Syria. Usually when a close circle forms around one or two charismatic individuals who are motivated to go, others are more likely to follow, irrespective of income or socio economic background. Those who are less wedded to aspiration and the good life, might have little to lose and a lot more to gain by going. Especially as the promise for them is either paradise or ghanima, war booty. Hamza Parvez may have fitted that type, but Fatlum didn’t. Speaking to his friends it is difficult to ascertain how much of an influence Nasser was on him. In fact, Fatlum left for Syria before Nasser. According to a cousin, Nasser “was a good guy and he knew right from wrong and he had compassion. He went to uni, played football…he wasn’t the sort of guy who argued about the caliphate. I never ever suspected he would go.”

A friend told me: “If any one influenced him it must have been his older brother, Flamur. They were close and Fatlum looked up to him. He rediscovered his faith a year into his degree at uni.” Flamur was a talented young architect whose work had been showcased by the Saatchi and Saatchi gallery. His transformation, according to another school friend, was overnight, going from someone who could “be seen socialising and drinking with friends” to someone who was assiduous in worship. He was often seen at Ladbroke Grove mosque attending the congregational prayer there. It was Flamur who drew his younger brother into discussions that led the latter to confront his own perceptions about life. But whilst Fatlum might have considered the big questions, two weeks before his departure to Syria, he was still interested in the usual stuff that the Ladbroke Grove mandem were interested in. Had it not been for his older brother talking him out of his Spanish holiday, Fatlum would have larged it with the ladies.

And yet, Fatlum’s decision to fight in Syria was not just a whim, but perhaps the flotsam and jetsam of various currents that coursed through the Ladbroke Grove area.

Religious Currents in Ladbroke Grove: The influence of the Salafi-Jihadis

Inside Manar Mosque

One of these currents was the religious element in Ladbroke Grove. As Raffaello Pantucci noted in ‘We Love Death as You Love Life,’ London had seen a religious revival long before Syria and long before 9/11. Ladbroke Grove in this regard was no exception. The Muslim community’s gradual confidence and religiosity found expression in the opening of Al-Manar Islamic Centre on Acklam Road in 2001. The airy mosque complete with school and sports facilities, with a hint of North Africa, was jammed in between Westway recreational grounds and a council estate. It was also an expression of the Moroccan community’s self-confidence. Now, a few decades on, and it sees about twelve hundred worshippers every Friday from all walks of life and counted amongst its congregation ISIS fighters likes Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, Hamza Parvez, Mohammed Nasser, Flamur Shalaku, Choukri Elkhlifi, Mohammed El-Araj, and Aine Davies, who all prayed there from time to time.

Old Timer praying in Manar Mosque

The area was not unique in that diverse Islamic strands and traditions coursed through it. There was the traditional Islam brought over from Larache, Morocco. It was a mix of Maliki jurisprudence, scholarship and Sufi traditions. These traditions are found amongst the old timers who sit reading the Quran after the evening prayer at the mosque. Sit down with them and you will sense the rich scholarly tradition of Fez and Marrakech. The way the old timers taught Tajweed, the art of Quranic recitation to the youngsters is reminiscent of the master student relationship still alive in their home land. They come from a rich tradition of learning that had been distilled over centuries with a great deal of nuance. The student has to master Arabic, philology, grammar, Quranic exegesis, jurisprudence and moral ethics amongst other things and only then, would the teacher grant him an Ijaza or permission to teach. That sort of profound study takes more than a few years of an Islamic studies BA in any modern Islamic university. Few in Ladbroke Grove, least of all Fatlum, had time to go down that route.

Alongside this, you also had the competing modernist Salafi tradition inspired by Muhammed ibn Abdul Wahab, a revivalist scholar of eighteenth century. His movement called for strict monotheism and rejected the adherence to a school of jurisprudence, mysticism and precepts that appeared to be cultural additions. This view, believed that over-reliance on blind imitation or Taqleed of scholars was misguidance, and sought to connect the layman directly to the sources of religion and thereby get him closer to God. Salafism’s appeal was its simple call to authenticity. As one worshipper put it: “Islam is simple, all you need is Quran and Sunnah”.

But occasionally its adherents fell into a trap of interpreting the texts with out having the prerequisite skill-set. Salafism disliked ‘blind imitation’ as it was disparagingly known, or taqleed of a scholar. To the born again devotee on the Golborne Road in search of religious enlightenment, he didn’t need a religious specialist, he could just open up the Quran and take the canonical sayings of the Prophet as his guide; no middle man was required to distil that seemingly contradictory mass of Prophetic sayings and Quranic verses. To Salafism’s detractors though, this was exactly the problem. These novices were akin to a thirsty rabble drinking straight from the vast salty ocean instead of allowing the scholar to making the seawater potable. Drinking straight from the ocean would result in madness or at the very least hubris. This was something a family member complained about when Hamza Parvez found his faith:

“This was last year. He used to wear the thobe and he’d pray and what annoyed me most was when he started telling his mum what to do. It kind of gave him this superiority because he thought that she didn’t have any knowledge.”

And certainly the answers and scribblings on the tumbler pages, and Ask FM answers of some these ISIS fighters appear as if they were fatwas, or religious legal rulings.

Another offshoot of the Salafis in Ladbroke Grove was the Salafi-jihadi movement. As Jonathan Birt notes in Radical Nineties Revisited: Jihadi Discourses in Britain^[2], the fact that many of these radicals and Salafi-jihadi ideologues were allowed to operate in the 90s so freely meant that the conditions were in place for it to flourish by the time Fatlum encountered it. As one young Imam who grew up in the area, told me West London has always had a strong Salafi-jihadi tradition. So disturbed was the young Imam that he decided move away from the area. The Salafi-jihadi movement in a nutshell, believes that only through Jihad can the Muslim global community restore its dignity and power; in some respects it is Fanonesque in conception. It is as Abdallah Azzam, one of its icons and the father of the Afghan Jihad put it, “Men need jihad more than the jihad needs men.”  Salafi-jihadi thought was a response to the centuries-long decline of Muslim power on the world stage and the incursions of the West into Muslim societies.The communities in Ladbroke Grove through a mixture of faith and heritage were profoundly connected to the affairs of the Middle East, especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 resulted in Salafi-jihadi thought having a greater resonance in the community especially amongst the young. Fatlum’s older brother was certainly an adherent to the ideology and though Fatlum may not have been, in the company of his brother and like minded individuals he certainly became one.

Gang Culture and Religion’s subtle interplay

Skateboarding on the West way in Ladbroke Grove

But Fatlum also grew up in a milieu where there was a subtle interplay of religion and gang culture. In amongst the affluence of North Kensington, gang subcultures flourish. On the estates youth workers fight a constant uphill battle, not against radicalisation but the normal problems that most inner city communities face. The predominantly Moroccan community in the area face huge challenges in North Kensington. Myriam Cherti notes in Paradoxes of Social Capital: A Multi-Generational Study of Moroccans in London, in 1998, Golborne Ward fell under the 1 percent of the most deprived wards nationally^[3], this situation changed little by 2012, when it was was ranked as the second most deprived in London^[4]. The same author noted in a study for the Runnymede Trust, British Moroccans: Citizenship in Action, that poverty and disadvantage was “endemic in the area”. The youth workers I met were constantly trying to get young people to channel their energies into more positive activities. One of the bolder youth workers, Khaled, not his real name, told me, “I fork out money out of my own pocket; buy them chicken and chips and then they come to the sessions.” but with funding cuts these youth workers were struggling. Khaled complained that other youth clubs were receiving funding from different funding streams but those available to Moroccan communities were mainly through Prevent funding, the governments controversial anti-terrorism policy. This cynicism is not something recent. As early as 2009 the Runnymede Trust study states that: “smaller organisations complained that the Council discriminated in their funding practices, favouring certain projects whilst blocking others’ opportunities to develop.” Khaled explained that the bigger problem in the area is still drugs, knife crime, gang fights, teenage pregnancies and civil engagement rather than terrorism and radicalisation. To this youth worker, it didn’t matter that five young men had left the area to join ISIS, he had to scour the streets to stop “Kids stabbing each other over a mobile phone. Every young person is touched by gang culture around here”.

With marginalisation comes social problems. Drugs and criminality had always been a facet of Ladbroke Grove since the 90s. Golborne Road was the best place to pick up skunk and hash in West London. Anyone who grew up in the area knew that Ladbroke Grove had cornered the market. You could drive up in a car and some dealer would shake your hands drop the punk and walk off in his joggers. Any undercover would have a hard time finding this ghost disappear into the estates. But as time passed these men, coming mostly from the close knit Moroccan community, felt the impact of religion in their lives. Their parents were getting old and becoming increasingly devout. They started their own families in the area and with the profundity of having one’s own family they too began to consider the deeper meanings of life. “Once a man holds his own kids in his arms” said one, “he starts thinking about their future, you can’t help it. That’s just God’s way”. A few decades on and these same dealers who had shot the stuff to willing punters, were sporting beards and praying five times a day looking for ways to atone themselves. These men raised in the school of hard knocks found that Salafi-jihadism fitted their temperament just like perhaps a creative temperament might prefer a Sufi understanding of Islam.

Despite the prejudice faced by the Moroccan community in North Kensington political engagement has always been high especially at local level. However, as the Runnymede Trust study found, there was also political discontent especially in the second generation. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 being the main boon of contention. The punishing decade of sanctions that preceded it with over half a million children dead and Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State, quipping that the price “was worth it” jarred. To many in Ladbroke Grove, the Iraq war wasn’t a L’Oreal advert. Long before the area produced AQ adherents like Bilal Berjawi and Ramzi Mohammed, there were rumours that some old skool British Moroccans were expressing their political disenchantment by adopting Salafi-jihadi ideology and even trying to join the insurgency in Iraq. There was always talk of ex-Ladbroke Grove criminals suspected of a string of crimes in and around West London to fund their Jihadi activities. These criminal acts, it was said, were justified by the legal fiction that they were living in Dar al-Harb or ‘House of War’; a classical Islamic term developed by a body Islamic Jurisprudents during the medieval period to denote the lands that the Muslim world was at war with. Jihad as any jurisprudent will tell you was an all encompassing term referring to warfare that was nuanced, localised and differed according to time and place. So for instance, if the enemy mutilated your dead, you were not allowed to mutilate their dead because it was considered unjust and in direct contravention of God’s injunctions. Some of those rulings, albeit a minority, allowed for repaying the invaders of Muslim lands with the same treatment in extreme circumstances. That understanding allowed that everything was permissible, fraud, robbery, even enslaving women and so on. One worshipper told me, on condition of anonymity, that one “Grove man” had the audacity to rob a security van, and then turned up to offer Asr prayer at the mosque with the money box next to him, and after finishing casually walked off home with it. It was also rumoured that some of these men joined the smaller battalions within Syria’s splintered rebel factions like Katibat al-Khattab and Sham al-Islami brigades; the latter drew predominantly from North African participants.

Golborne Road

But one thing these Ladbroke Grove Salafi-Jihadis were not; unlike many of the younger generation of Jihadis; they were not blatantly Takfiri in outlook in the way ISIS adherents were. Although there were some exceptions, most refrained from making Takfir or excommunication. Compare for instance the latest comments made by the late AQ spokesman Adam Gadahn, regarding the execution of Alan Henning and ISIS’ position. The latter considered it a sin. Like it or not, Salafi-Jihadism does have a theological discourse, with its thinkers, scholars and traditions. Usually the older fighters from Gadahn’s generation kept to within that framework. They looked at the West as an oppressive colonising infidel power that needed to be opposed, those Muslims who took a different view, were not declared automatically infidels en masse. This type of Salafi Jihadi still had respect for tradition and the sanctity of Muslim blood, even if they had none for UK law. But nevertheless as one Imam who knows Ladbroke Grove and those that adopted that opinion, told me, “is it victory at all cost that these men wanted? By adopting such an extreme opinion, they essentially did away with any ethical considerations of the Sharia, did the Companions and the Prophet do any of these things they did? No of course not, what they did do was open up the flood gates for the next generation where they could do anything they wanted.”

Despite the obvious problematics of Salafi-jihadism within Islamic intellectual discourse as well as outside of it, the newly emerging strain of Salafi-jihadis was hard to grasp by the older generation. The old skool jihadists were now criticising Fatlum’s generation for spiralling out of control. In fact, most recently the Jordanian Salafi jihadi cleric Abu Qatada, one of its main ideologues, criticised young Westerners coming to Syria with no religious training killing Islamic Jurisprudents with years of religious learning. The new generation they said lacked tarbiyyah or sound upbringing; their sincerity was not enough. There was clearly a generational disconnect. In many ways the conflict between Nusra Front and ISIS is also a reflection of this conflict between Old Skool Jihadis versus the New Skool. This new strain of Salafi-jihadism was seen as even more radical, virulently takfiri; they cared nought for any tradition that would ground them, nor for scholarship, and any kind of normative except their own. This idea seems to be confirmed by Thomas Pierret, Lecturer at Edinburgh University and author of Religion and State in Syria: the Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution, in a post on Facebook he says of the older generation Jihadis they were:

“motivated by the will to defend fellow Muslims against oppression. Their propaganda was a never-ending complaint about the plight of Muslims across the world. ISIS-generation of foreign fighters are completely different. Their Propaganda and behaviour suggests that not only are they totally indifferent to the plight of the Syrians, but they’re happily imposing upon them a ruthless form of oppression as part of their narcissistic settler-colonialist utopia^[5]”

It is true that young Ladbroke Grove Jihadis like Fatlum were different. According to a friend, Fatlum was “extremely Takfiri” in outlook, but he didn’t proselytise it the way other ISIS fighters did on social media. But to him the sacred and the profane was photoshopped with pop culture. These young men, in typical post-modern style comfortably mixed iconic images of Jihadica with Call of Duty. Sitting in an Italian cafe, Ali, a student who grew up in and around Ladbroke Grove told me even more bluntly what he thought the problem was; “There’s more to it, you have a high percentage of Roadmans who don’t know anything about the faith and they discover Anwar Awlaki on Youtube and it’s a disaster. On top of that everything they watch from Lord of the Rings to 300, to Saving Private Ryan to Black Hawk Down everything about the Western culture celebrates heroism and self sacrifice. Some of their fathers also fought in Afghanistan, they have a fighting mentality because of the streets and once you put religion into it; which says helping the weak and oppressed is good, you got a Jihadi Roadman. It’s so predictable. Notice that most of these Roadmans joined ISIS; the rest with any sense of the faith didn’t.”

Fatlum’s friend Mohammed Nasser was a case in point; going through his twitter feed you notice that Grand Theft Auto Five is mentioned in the same breath as martyrdom, even though GTA is probably the most antithetical to the Islamic moral ethic. On his twitter feed. He flitted from talking about his friends, to messaging Pro-ISIS disseminators like Shamiwitness^[6] and talking to the brother of Iftekhar Jaman, the Portsmouth ISIS Jihadi^[7]. The connections they were making, the culture they were creating was one particular to their generation. They had their own terminology, they wore their Salafi-Jihadism on their robes, blended it with rebellious Roadmannism, garnished it with a bit of Anwar Awlaki, Quran,Sunnah and a bit of thug life. They could yearn desperately for forgiveness and paradise, and in their youthful ardour want a sense of belonging and adventure. West-side hyperbole turned into “the land of the Muslims have to be defended.” The new generation Jihadi Roadmans short circuited the Salafi-jihadi tradition for just Team Muslim-no matter what; the response was not un-similar to the American patriot who cried Team America: no matter what. These men no doubt sincere in intention had become a law unto themselves and could wreak havoc and go against well established Islamic principles. These men joined ISIS.

Flamur’s artwork brother of Fatlum

When Abdel Majed Abdel Bary, 23, from Maida Vale, held out a decapitated head and declared to his tweeps that he was: ^[8]‘Chillin’ with my homie or what’s left of him.’ To many it contradicted traditional concepts of chivalry and everything that Jihad represented. “No one is saying that war is a walk in the park, its ugly and nasty, but the whole point about Jihad is that when man has license to be at his most brutal, most callous, he doesn’t give in to his baser nature. It is easy to be clement, merciful and civilised in our everyday lives, but in war a man can actually show his true nobility, by being merciful, clement, and chivalrous, even when he has been wronged and his instinct is telling him to be brutal and unforgiving. And this is something that many fighters in ISIS have forgotten” said one Imam who asked to be anonymous.

A cursory glance through Medieval literature on famous Muslim warriors shows them to be cultured both in war and also the humanities, the autobiography of Usama bin Munqidh a 12th century knight during the crusades and Ibn Shaddad’s biography on Saladin for instance is testimony to that. Both are able to show magnanimity towards their enemies. Read Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, a novella declared by the literary critic Harold Bloom to be “sublime” and you notice Tolstoy’s deep admiration for a Muslim warrior. A Jihadi   who refused to give in to the demands of the world, least of all Tsarist Russia. Fast forward to the twentieth century to Abdullah Anas, a veteran of the Afghan Jihad and the son in law of Abdullah Azzam, and find a man disgusted by the antics of these young fighters who kill men and upload it on twitter. As he told me in his office in North London:

“Prisoners have full rights. We fed them the same food, gave them the same clothes and the same quality of life. After several months, many of the Soviet troops started to believe that they weren’t prisoners because we were on such good terms with them.  Through our conduct we showed them we were not bloodthirsty people. Some of them became Muslims, others remain our friends to this day^[9].”

To the veterans the Abdul Barys of this world were just expressing Roadmannism found in every day Ladbroke Grove, only the location was different. So what had happened in-between the period between Old Skool Jihadists and the modern day Jihadist who joins ISIS? According to Bilal Abdul Kareem, an American Muslim convert and freelance journalist who spent a considerable time in war torn Syria it seems to be a case of a ignorance and loosing one’s moral compass. Sitting in a cafe sipping a latte and relishing a chocolate chip cookie, he told me that some of these fighters “are extremely sincere in their intentions but because they don’t know the basics they attach themselves to a group who they think will take them to God, so they get played…I couldn’t believe it…we were inside a car once and they were discussing whether it was permissible to target women and children, I’m like brother, why are we even having this conversation?! Islam doesn’t allow that. That’s how ignorant they were.” Fatlum’s knowledge of Islam was at the time of leaving, described by friends as basic but continued under Islamic State proselytisers.

When Fatlum left it wasn’t just faith and the International community’s inactivity that pulled him there. There were complex factors at play, the influence of individuals, the interplay of Salafi-jihadi thought, Roadman culture, identity, or simply a need for adventure and atonement that made him get on that plane to Turkey. In spring 2013 the brothers went to Turkey transiting off a European country.

To their father, Muhamet, the news came as a complete shock. The brothers had kept their faith secret from the family. Once they were in Syria contact with family was intermittent. They told the parents that they were doing aid work. Fatlum’s mother fell into deep depression. Although the parents did not report the two missing immediately, their disappearance did not go unnoticed, the police were aware that they had left. The father said that special branch had visited them and taken their computers away. He perhaps naively, believed they would help to retrieve them. The officers were particularly interested in the two following the revelation of the identity of Jihadi John.

In Syria, what had started as a true revolution began to resemble 12th century Andalusia during the age of the Muluk at-Tawa’if or the Party Kings. Each emir of Andalusia’s fractured principalities, supported by various Christian kings, made war on each other for hegemony of the Spanish Peninsula. Many foreign fighters who had come to fight Assad, instead found themselves embroiled in this intra-rebel infighting. Abu Layth al-Khorosani, or Anil Khalil Raoufi from Manchester, for instance died fighting the Free Syrian Army instead of Assad. When the fighting broke out between ISIS and Nusra Front, to the surprise of one friend, the two brothers did not get involved in the internecine Jihadist infighting that broke out in January 2014. Fatlum made his choice quite early on. Contrary to reports, the two brothers did not defect from the Nusra Front but rather after they had finished their training with Katibat al-Muhajireen (KaM) led by Georgian national Omar Shishani and his former deputy Abu Mus’ab al-Jazairi, they joined ISIS. It is not clear why the two brothers left Katibat al-Muhajireen for Islamic State. Perhaps they followed Omar Shishani as he made his oath of allegiance or hoped to join a group that would take them to Paradise, it is hard to tell. Nevertheless their aloofness from fighting their former comrades earned them the respect even of their enemies. This may have been one of the reasons they ended up in Iraq, precisely because they wanted to avoid fighting their ex-comrades. Instead they preferred to fight the Shi’ites and the Kurdish YPG, the former who Salafi Jihadis consider to be heretics, and the latter who they view as godless Atheists due to their secular or communist beliefs.

Abdullah Anas in middle

Flamur Shalaku or Abu Sa’ad as he was known, was killed in March of this year in Iraq. His father, Muhamet received a phone call where a distant crackly arabic voice spoke in broken English and said: “Everything is good with your son”. The father was not devout, he didn’t quite understand what that meant. He came to see me one rainy night in Whitechapel, to see if I could locate him. I didn’t know how to break it to him, his red nose with delicate red veins hinted at a man who liked Jack Daniels, I told him that the Grapevine said that Abu Sa’ad had been killed.

He stumbled, he woke up, his eyes watered up, his lips quivered for a moment. I wanted to give him a hug. I felt like a scumbag. But he didn’t let me hug him, he composed himself. He told me about the phone call. I explained what that meant.

“To Islamic State death means martyrdom. For them it’s good news”

“I don’t know what to tell his mother” he said as if Flamur was still alive. “Is there anyway we can get Fatlum back? I need to tell him to come back? If we lose him, we are finished you know? Finished. I will not tell anything to the mother for now.”

A month later I called him to ask about Fatlum’s death.

Perhaps Flamur’s death made Fatlum want to join his brother, by this time he had lost Mohammed Nasser and now his brother. And so he stepped into a truck laden with explosives and stuck his index finger out for the camera and drove towards his target. He blew himself up hoping to be flung in to paradise. Whilst his friends in Islamic State rejoiced in his self-annihilation, the reverberations of the explosions were also felt in Ladbroke Grove. Friends and locals were shocked by the fate of such a popular young man. Some of the younger ones rated him for dying for his beliefs, “he was a man of action y’get me- he talks the talk and walks the walk.” To the old timers there is a sense of foreboding that the spotlight will once again fall on a community that is afflicted by far greater problems than ISIS.

^[1] http://www.itv.com/news/2015-05-22/revealed-the-british-schoolboy-who-became-an-islamic-state-suicide-bomber/

^[2] https://www.academia.edu/8689148/The_Radical_Nineties_Revisited_Jihadi_Discourses_in_Britain

^[3] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=lf1YAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA20&lpg=PA20&dq=british+moroccans+are+marginalised&source=bl&ots=I4vsPXJqsi&sig=V4s4EkLI-he1KF23UdMey7ZKG-c&hl=en&sa=X&ei=URqTVcCkNMa4UbfIgagF&ved=0CFIQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=british%20moroccans%20are%20marginalised&f=false

^[4] http://www.kcsc.org.uk/news/8-mar-2012-1448/golborne-ranked-second-most-deprived-ward-country

^[5] Facebook post on 7 July 2002

^[6] http://www.channel4.com/news/unmasked-the-man-behind-top-islamic-state-twitter-account-shami-witness-mehdi

^[7] http://www.channel4.com/news/iftikhar-jaman-syria-death-isis-jihad-british-portsmouth

^[8] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2723659/ISIS-militants-seize-key-towns-villages-close-Syrian-border-Turkey.html

^[9] http://eng.majalla.com/2014/02/article55248465

* Tam Hussein is an award winning investigative journalist and writer. He speaks five languages and holds an MA in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies. His work appears in the Guardian, New Statesman, New Internationalist, Sharq Al-Awsat, etc.

The post “The inside Story of the British Suicide Bomber of Ramadi,” By Tam Hussein appeared first on Syria Comment.

by Aron Lund, editor of Syria in Crisis

Subhi al-Refai is a leader of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), a coalition of Syrian revolutionary factions formed in December 2014. He has been kind enough to provide me with the following statement, presenting his personal analysis of a question that is on the mind of many in both Syria and the United States at this moment.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford recently penned a piece for the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank, together with the Beirut-based Middle East analyst Ali El Yassir. In the text, they argued that the U.S. needs to overcome its resistance to working with Ahrar al-Sham, one of Syria’s largest Sunni rebel factions.

The first foundations of Ahrar al-Sham, whose full name is now “the Ahrar al-Sham Islamic Movement,” were laid in 2011, after the start of the Syrian uprising. Most of its founders and leaders were former political prisoners who had been jailed for advocating Islamist causes or for involvement with the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. Having formed networks and built trust among each other in the Seidnaia prison north of Damascus, where Islamist prisoners were assembled in a special section, they were released on presidential amnesty in the early months of the uprising and promptly went underground to create militant cells. The groups they formed to fight President Assad’s regime were gradually expanded and connected to each other, first in the Idleb-Hama region, which remains the group’s main stronghold. Ahrar al-Sham then grew through clever alliance-building among the Syrian rebels until it reached its present size and shape. (As a legacy of the latest of those coalitions, Ahrar al-Sham also operates under the “Islamic Front” brand, which refers to a now essentially defunct coalition in which Ahrar al-Sham gradually absorbed most of the minor members.)

Often characterized as a salafi group, it is an ideologically committed Islamist organization that seeks a Sunni religious state in Syria. It has proven itself militarily strong and hardy and has survived years of fighting, and—no less impressive—has held together through the merciless backbiting and internal rivalries of Syrian rebel politics. In September 2014, most of Ahrar al-Sham’s leadership was wiped out in a mysterious explosion, but the group defied expectations and managed to survive this setback, electing new leaders and carrying on the struggle. Most powerful in northern Syria, it has established what appears to be a strong working relationship with the Turkish AKP government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and recently endorsed the Turkish-American bid for a ”safe zone” in northern Syria.

The question of whether or not the U.S. should work with Ahrar al-Sham in its bid to put pessure on Bashar al-Assad’s government is controversial, not least because some members of the group have been connected to global anti-American jihadi factions including al-Qaeda. Ahrar al-Sham itself claims to be a fully independent group and it does not engage in armed action outside Syria. It has at times been critical of al-Qaeda and its Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front, but—like many other rebel factions, particularly the Islamist groups—it works closely with the Nusra Front on the battlefield.

Recently, the Ahrar al-Sham leadership has been on a charm offensive, pushing back against Western views of it as a dangerous jihadi faction. Its foreign relations official Labib al-Nahhas, alias Abu Ezzeddin al-Souri (who I interviewed here, before his group merged into Ahrar al-Sham), recently penned editorials in The Washington Post and The Daily Telegraph arguing that his group should be considered a moderate and centrist faction in the uprising and is deserving of international support and acceptance.

But the group still remains committed to its ideology and the idea of a Sunni theocracy in Syria, and it continues to play to Islamist opinion in ways that are clearly at odds with U.S. strategy (whether one agrees with that strategy or not). For example, Ahrar al-Sham recently released a public euology of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar that included praise for the Taliban movement’s fourteen-year long war against the U.S. army in Afghanistan, as well as Ahrar al-Sham’s best wishes for his successor, described as “the Mujahed Brother Mullah Akhtar Mansour.” I’m sure that played well within the group and among its Islamist allies in Syria and abroad, but I can’t imagine it will do much to improve Ahrar al-Sham’s image in Washington.

That Robert Ford, as a former ambassador and policymaker on Syria, has taken such a strong position in favor of working with Ahrar al-Sham has of course drawn attention both in the U.S. and among Syrian rebels. Now, the RCC leader Subhi al-Refai—who is not a member of Ahrar al-Sham, although the group is involved with the RCC—joins this debate with his own analysis of the chances of a collaborative relationship between the American government and Ahrar al-Sham.

What follows is the statement provided to me by Subhi al-Refai, in my own translation from the original Arabic.

–Aron Lund, editor of Syria in Crisis

Analysis of Mr. Robert Ford’s comments about the Ahrar al-Sham Islamic Movement

An initial analysis of Mr Robert Ford’s positive view of the Ahrar al-Sham faction, and of the necessity of opening relations with it, points to the existence of a significant school of thought inside the White House that pushes for working with the movement.

However, I believe that this is an attempt to widen the gulf between the two differing schools of thought that exists within Ahrar al-Sham, in order to destroy it from within.

The first of these schools is striving to be more open towards the West and to restore the Umma Project to the National Project, as expressed by the late Abu Yazen.

The second school of thought remains committed to the Umma Project, which transcends Syria’s borders, and it views the Free Syrian Army as a Western project that they must refrain from trusting or working with.

Of course, it is possible that I am wrong in my analysis! But what could it be that has encouraged the American government to move towards working with a faction that is so forcefully supported by parties whose goals completely contradict its own? In particular, we must consider that taking this route would complicate relations with these other parties even more than today. In addition, the chances for success of this new relationship are very slim, for two reasons.

The first reason is that Ahrar al-Sham is incapable of taking a decision to open up new relations that could harm the interests of a fundamental ally of the movement.

The second reason is the strength and control that the school of thought opposed to relations with the USA exercises within the movement. In addition, a not-insignificant proportion of the movement’s components lean towards the ideology of Jabhat al-Nusra, a fact that stands between the leadership of the movement and this (adventurous) step in the direction of the Americans.

Therefore, we find that, for the most part, Ahrar al-Sham’s foreign policy takes the path of hidden relations, in so far as these relations concern the West generally or the United States in particular.

Perhaps some serious thinking on how to change the politico-military map of northern Syria has finally begun!

Subhi al-Refai

President of the Executive Office
Revolutionary Command Council
Syria

Notes by Aron Lund:

The Umma Project, Mashrou’ al-Umma, is a slogan that has been used by Ahrar al-Sham to describe its ideological and political foundations. The word Umma can be translated as ”nation,” but in this context it specifically refers to the Islamic nation, i.e. the global community of Muslims inside and outside Syria. In contrast to Umma, the term Watan— which can be translated as ”nation,” ”homeland,” or ”country”—signifies a more narrow focus on Syria and Syrian interests.

Abu Yazen al-Shami was an influential leader and religious ideologue within Ahrar al-Sham, who was killed alongside most of the rest of the group’s historical leadership on September 9, 2014. He has posthumously been identified as a leading light among the ”reformers” in Ahrar al-Sham, who were shocked into a reappraisal of politico-religious principles by the rise of the Islamic State. Before his death, he had begun to argue against hardline jihadi purism in favor of a more pragmatic albeit still unambiguously Islamist stance.

READ ALSO:

For an interview with Mohammed Talal Bazerbashi, alias Abu Abderrahman al-Souri, a leading member and co-founder of Ahrar al-Sham, click here.

For a previous interview of mine with the RCC’s Subhi al-Refai, click here.

The post Syrian Rebel Leader Subhi al-Refai on U.S. relations with Ahrar al-Sham appeared first on Syria Comment.

by Aron Lund, editor of Syria in Crisis

Although little noticed in the international media, Iraqi politics have been unusally stormy these past days, ever since it was revealed that Qatar would host a conference for ”Iraqi reconciliation.” With all involved well attuned to the dog-whistle rhetoric of Iraqi politics, this was universally understood to mean ”Sunni Arab Iraqi reconciliation.”

Much of the Shia press and political landscape in Iraq reacted with outrage. These voices grew even angrier as speculation intensified about who would attend. When the meetings began in Doha on September 2, Iraqi debate collapsed in a roaring pandemonium of threats and accusations against those Sunni politicians who had dared travel to Qatar.

While details remain scarce, it seems clear that the Doha Congress was directly backed by the Qatari government. This was quite enough to anger Iraqi Shia politicians, many of whom subscribe to the idea that no foreign state should ever be allowed to interfere in Iraqi politics unless it fulfills the stringent requirement of also having a four-letter name that begins with I-R-A. To make matters worse, the attendees weren’t just the usual mix of Gulf-friendly Sunni tribal figures, party leaders, and elected officials. This time, the meeting included a generous sprinkling of wanted fugitives and others with links to banned militant groups that have waged war on the Iraqi government for more than a decade.

According to the Qatar-funded newspaper al-Arabi al-Jadid, the three main factions invited were (1) elected Sunni Arab officials from Iraq, (2) people linked to the formerly powerful Islamist insurgent faction known as the Islamic Army, and (3) the Iraqi Baath Party. Which is probably where the real controversy starts.

Unrepentant Insurgents

Specifically, this is about the Baath Party wing led by Saddam Hussein’s former deputy Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri—the “King of Clubs,” if you still recall that silly-but-effective American propaganda stunt from 2003. Having operated underground since 2003, he has repeatedly been declared dead, only to pop right back up like a murderous Jack-in-the-Box and continue the war. Most recently, he died in April 2015.

With the Baath Party having gone underground to turn itself into a guerrilla group in 2003, Douri is nowadays better known as the driving force behind the so called Naqshbandi Army, a Baathist front organization that has been killing Iraqi soldiers for years. The Naqshbandi Army was an active participant in the wave of violence that engulfed most of Iraq’s Sunni areas in 2014—a wave unleashed partly in response, it must be said, to years of sectarian discrimination and misrule by the Iran-backed Shia Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. While the Baathists were never formally allied with the Islamic State, there certainly existed a measure of tacit cooperation against their common enemies—the governments of Iraq, Iran, the USA, the Kurdistan Regional Government, etc. Izzat al-Douri only broke ranks with the Islamic State after the latter had solidified control across Sunni Iraq and began purging, torturing, and killing all fellow travelers who would not submit to its ”caliphate”. At that point, the rather few remaining Naqshbandi/Baath fighters found themselves forced to adjust their rhetoric in search of international sponsorship. (Judging by their effusive praise for Qatar these days, they seem to have found it.)

Of course, any dealings with the Baath Party is a criminal offense in Iraq and this creates serious risks for Sunni officials interested in meeting its representatives. When it turned out that the Iraqi Speaker of Parliament and Muslim Brotherhood member Salim al-Jabbouri was going to be in Doha on September 2, all hell broke lose. Shia politicians of all stripes, but particularly some of the more unhinged sectarians close to Iran, unleashed a firestorm of condemnation. Claims of high treason were among the milder charges leveled at Jabbouri and his group.

Former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki thundered that the Doha Congress was part of a plan to ”split Iraq along sectarian lines.” Maliki’s ally Khalaf Abdessamad—who is parliamentary whip of the Islamic Daawa Party, members of which have headed the Iraqi cabinet for ten years straight—fumed with loquacious rage: ”the enemies of Iraq are once again, with the support of the nursers of sedition and the funders of terror and extremism, organizing their meeting in Qatar, which has shown that it is an enemy of the Iraqi people.” He then demanded that all participants in the Doha Congress should be fired from their jobs and kicked out of parliament and said that the Islamic Daawa Party is canvassing parliamentarians to make that happen. (One claimed on September 3 that more than one hundred parliamentary signatures calling for the ouster of Jabbouri have already been gathered.)

Jabbouri and other politicians who were actually or allegedly en route to Qatar quickly began to backpedal, fumbling forth all manners of unlikely explanations for why they had found it so important to fly off on a quick jaunt to Doha on that particular date. Jabbouri’s group deplored that certain not-to-be-named irresponsible politicians were trying to confuse Iraqis about the purpose of their trip, which was simply to meet Qatar’s prime minister and talk about, um, uh, things. Jabbouri insisted that his group had not been in any meetings with other Iraqis while in the country.

Perhaps to defuse tension or to prod supposed partners into action, Qatar also let it be known that the conference had been coordinated with the office of the prime minister in Baghdad, Haider al-Abadi. This didn’t particularly help. Since the eruption of major popular protest in Iraq this summer, Abadi is locked in struggle with a number of other political currents, prime among them the pro-Iranian militia radicals and his predecessor Nouri al-Maliki. Once these groups spotted an opportunity to portray the prime minister as a Baathist-lover, they had all the more reason to ramp up their anti-Doha rhetoric. Whether out of compulsion or conviction, Abadi finally broke his silence to condemn the Doha Congress as a breach of Iraqi sovereignty.

Baathists, Gulf Ambassadors, and the United Nations

On September 5, the Baathist website Dhi Qarr issued a statement from Khodeir al-Morshidi, a (rare) Shia member of the Baath who has acted as its spokesperson. Morshidi explained that the party had indeed sent a formal delegation to ”brotherly Qatar in response to its generous invitation.”

Accounts in al-Arabi al-Jadid had been circumspect about the exact nature of the ”Gulf cover and international patronage” that enabled the conference, but the Baath Party—or Morshidi at any rate—emptied a bucketful of names on the table for all to see. By his account, the meeting was held as a discussion between two delegations, Iraqis and foreigners:

On the one hand, there was a delegation from the Baath Arab Socialist Party in Iraq along with a number of national Iraqi personalities who are opposed to the political process and the Iranian intervention and influence. On the other hand, there was the Qatari foreign minister and ambassadors of several states in the Gulf Cooperation Council—including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait—as well as the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary General in Iraq and his deputy.

True? Apparently. U.N. Special Representative Ján Kubiš was present in Doha at the right dates, hanging out with Iraqi Sunni leaders at

a significant meeting that took place on 2 September in the Qatari capital, Doha, between many different Iraqi Sunni groups. The meeting was opened by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Qatar, Mr. Khalid bin Mohammad al-Attiyah. Official representatives of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates were also in attendance.

To have a delegation from Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party sitting in a room with the Gulf States and the United Nations is progress to some Iraqis, but it is outrageous to others. When something like this was last tried, in Amman in 2014, Baghdad was livid with anger and the United States seemed similarly distressed.

Khodeir al-Morshidi claims the Baath now wants a non-sectarian Iraq and a multiparty democracy, but even if this represented a genuine change of heart—of course it doesn’t—most of Iraq’s Shia Arabs and Kurds would hardly be moved to embrace their former oppressor. In the 1980s and 1990s, Izzat al-Douri and Saddam’s other lieutenants slaughtered tens of thousands of Iraqis and the wounds of that era have never healed. The mass graves continue to be unearthed today, even as the Islamic State is busily digging new ones.

As if that’s not enough, Iranian state media is fanning the flames. Iran lost tens of thousands of its own citizens to Saddam Hussein’s army, missiles strikes, and nerve gas attacks during the 1980-1988 war. For Iran, it is also a straightforward national security issue, irrespective of painful memories and sectarian calculations: Tehran has worked hard to set up a pro-Iranian order in Baghdad since 2003. It is naturally unwilling to accept a resurgence of anti-Iranian forces with or without the Baathists, especially one backed by its arch-enemies on the Arabian Peninsula.

Insurgents vs. Politicians

But Iraqi and Iranian Shia outrage is just part of the story. The Doha Congress in fact sparked two different controversies, the other one among the Sunni attendees.

While many Iraqi Sunnis, such as Jabbouri, have accepted to work in post-2003 politics despite feeling that the system is rigged against them, others have refused to accept that the current government is in any way legitimate. For many of the rebels who are still fighting thirteen years after the American invasion, Sunnis who have allowed themselves to be elected to parliament are at best weak and corrupt but more likely traitors. This is exactly the problem that the Doha Congress was intended to overcome, or start overcoming, but it seems easier said than done.

Even as Jabbouri is at pains to deny meeting with any active insurgents in Doha, those insurgents are just as sensitive to the accusation of having met with him. Their constituency isn’t just Sunni Arabs in general: it is the hardliners who fight, fund, and favor armed struggle against the current political system, a system of which Jabbouri is a prominent member.

Thus, Khodeir al-Morshidi had no problem acknowledging that the Baath delegation met with Gulf Arab ambassadors (”in an atmosphere of brotherhood and mutual understanding,” etc) or the United Nations. But when it came to Jabbouri and others working in legal Iraqi politics, he reverted to the insult-laden rhetorical drone so dear to Baathists everywhere:

We must confirm, contrary to the malicious fabrications and calculated dissimulations put out by certain actors and media organizations, that the meeting was not attended by any of the participants in the political process or the Green Zone government, as they claim. The Party exempted itself from any [separate] meeting with those of them that happened to be present in brotherly Qatar at the time, and neither did the Party seek to attend any meeting with any representative or participant in the political process—those whom the people have rejected and for whose downfall it calls while asking for the trial of the corrupt, thieving, and treacherous among them.

Once you have waved away the smoke puff of angry denials, what remains is the fact that a Baath Party delegation met with the Qatari leadership, which in turn met with Jabbouri, for the purpose of unifying Sunni ranks in Iraq. Whether or not they were ever in the same room is almost beside the point.

Both sides have very good reasons to downplay this. Morshidi and the Baath (assuming he truly speaks for the organization) do not want to give anyone the impression that they’re going soft or that they are about to extend any sort of legitimacy to the Iraqi government. Because of course they would never do that and, besides, they would want something in return.

For his part, Jabbouri is clearly in hot enough water as it is. If he and the Baath both emphasize that he never sat down with what Iraqi law says is a terrorist movement, it could well save him a trial or two in Baghdad. Not that he was going back home just yet. He had one more stop on his trip after non-attending the Doha Congress—and it was, intriguingly enough, Tehran.

Unifying Sunni Ranks

What this all seems to amount to is a regionally-backed attempt to unify all those Iraqi Sunni Arab forces that remain opposed to the Islamic State and get them to endorse a few common demands, thereby paving the way for reconciliation talks with Baghdad. The Doha Congress obviously enjoyed the backing of Qatar, but if these reports are anything to go by, other Gulf states states were also involved, as well as the United Nations. And if we believe that, we must assume that the Doha Congress—Baathists and all—enjoyed at least the tacit acceptance of the United States.

It makes perfect sense, in theory at least. The confusion, the defections, and the contradictory statements that poured out from the Doha Congress, and the virulent reaction from Shia politicians in Iraq, hints that it could perhaps have been a little better prepared, or a lot. But the idea of trying to cultivate some basic unity among Iraq’s Sunni leaders, up to and including those linked to non-Islamic State insurgent factions, is a sound one. Without unity you can wage neither war nor peace, as anyone watching the tragedy unfold in neighboring Syria will have noticed.

What is preventing the defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq is ultimately not a lack of firepower, but rather the dizorganized nature of the coalition fighting the jihadis and—most of all—its inability to produce a Sunni Arab force that could challenge the Islamic State on its home turf. For the war on the Islamic State to succeed, other Iraqi Sunni rejectionists need to be cajoled back into the political game and Iraq’s Sunni Arab leadership as a whole must be empowered to draw opportunistic support away from the extremists. It need not be a very explicit or formal process and it must not involve either side publicly declaring defeat or bowing to the other, but it will involve painful compromises for all involved.

There are a number of problems with such an approach, of course, one being that Iraq’s Sunni leaders all seem to hate each other. But the ferocity of reactions in Baghdad show the other side of the problem. What prevents intra-Sunni reconciliation isn’t only the criminality of the Baath Party leadership or the intransigence of various Islamist guerrillas. It is also the blanket refusal of the Shia Islamist parties ruling Baghdad to countenance the rise of a Sunni Arab bloc that could challenge their hegemony—particularly one that includes ”terrorists.”

In the long run, that is a self-destructive attitude. It is true that Iraq’s official Sunni political groups are lamentably weak and divided—because Sunni elites were first smashed into submission by Saddam Hussein, then weakened and fractured by the United States, then pressured by Shia persecution, then undercut by the rise of the Islamic State. It is also true that those Sunni leaders who are closer to the militants and can sway communities on the ground will often be linked to the former regime or to radical sectarian groups. Some of them are soaked in blood, before and after the 2003 invasion. But this is also true: the Islamic State will not go away until there is a credible alternative for Iraqi Sunni Arabs to rally behind. And in producing that alternative, like it or not, this is what there is to work with.

The Iraqi Sunni leaders that can establish an Islamic State-free order in their own home towns will not be invented by Haider al-Abadi in Baghdad and they aren’t waiting in the wings in Washington, Doha, Riyadh, Amman, Erbil, or Tehran. They will need to come at least in part from the ranks of ex-insurgents and politicians now shunned and persecuted as outlaws for their Baathist, jihadi, or foreign ties—but this is precisely what the current Iraqi regime will not allow.

It is a hellishly difficult equation to solve, perhaps an unsolveable one, where all sides glory in their own victimhood and all are truly victims. But one step in the right direction is surely to try to address the disorganized state of Iraqi Sunni politics. Nothing can be achieved for as long as the Islamic State remains the only game in town for Sunnis in places like Mosul and Falluja, and even in places it hasn’t occupied yet. Overcoming the Baghdad government’s resistance to some form—any form—of compromise with Sunni rejectionists will almost certainly require the intervention of independent Shia leaders like Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani as well as the kingmaker in Iraqi Shia politics, Iran. But with the Islamic State lining up Shia civilians for video-taped slaughter week after week, and with proxy conflict still raging across the Persian Gulf and in Lebanon and Syria, hardliners are likely to keep the upper hand.

Aron Lund
Editor of Syria in Crisis

The post The Doha Congress: Negotiating a Return of the Iraqi Baath Party? appeared first on Syria Comment.

by Aron Lund, editor of Syria in Crisis

Abu Yahia al-Hamawi Source: @ALAMAWI

The Syrian Islamist group known as Ahrar al-Sham Islamic Movement, which is one of the biggest armed groups in the country, has elected a new leader: Abu Yahia al-Hamawi.

Founded in 2011, Ahrar al-Sham was first led by Hassane Abboud, who also used the alias Abu Abdullah al-Hamawi. Like most of the group’s leaders, he was a former inmate of the ”Islamist wing” of the Syrian government’s main political prison in Seidnaia, north of Damascus. According to one piece of not-necessarily-accurate information, Abboud was held in jail—not necessarily in Seidnaia all of the time—between 2004 and 2011 on charges of having links to salafi-jihadi groups; other sources say 2007-2011.

Many of these Islamist prisoners were released early on in the uprising by presidential amnesty, a hotly debated decision. The amnestied prisoners formed several different armed groups in 2011 and began connecting with relatives, older Islamist sleeper cells from inside or outside prison, a number of exiles who fled the anti-Islamist crackdown of the 1980s, as well as foreign Islamists and jihadi figures, in order to create a Syria-wide armed movement.

The resulting  faction, known then as the Ahrar al-Sham Battalions, took shape in the Idleb-Hama region of northwestern Syria, where many of its leaders were born and where the group remains strongest today. Abboud, for example, reportedly hailed from Khirbet Naqous in the Ghab Plains area, which juts up from western Hama into Idleb. The group then grew step by step, by gobbling up smaller factions looking for protection and leadership, as well as by reconnecting with old Seidnaia cellmates who had independently set up their own movements in other provinces (such as the Aleppo-based Fajr al-Islam faction created by Abu Hamza and Abu Yazen, both of whom died in 2014). Having expanded its network to most of Syria, albeit still weak in the east and south, the group took its current name after a major series of mergers in spring 2013.

On September 9, 2014, most of Ahrar al-Sham’s first generation of leaders were killed in an explosion in an underground site near Ras Hamdan in the Idleb Province, where they had gathered for a top-level meeting. The causes of the explosion remain unknown. There have been suggestions of it being set off by accident (since the Ras Hamdan site reportedly also contained a bomb factory), or by a suicide bomber, or by internal treachery on behalf of a foreign government, the so called Islamic State, or even al-Qaeda, but it is all speculation. Ahrar al-Sham leaders interviewed about the event have refused to comment except by saying that an investigation is in progress.

Abu Jaber and the 2014 Leadership

Abboud and most of his lieutenants were among the dead and many, me included, expected the group to be dramatically weakened and perhaps to split. But it somehow defied expectations and bounced back impressively.

Immediately after the explosion, surviving members of the Ahrar al-Sham Shoura Council gathered to quickly elect a new team of leaders leaders, including a number of formerly second-tier commanders and recent affiliates.

As their new head—Ahrar al-Sham prefers the term “general leader,” or qaid ‘amm, over “emir”—the Shoura Council appointed Hashem al-Sheikh. Also known by the alises Abu Jaber al-Maskani and Abu Jaber al-Sheikh, he was not from either Idleb or Hama. Rather, he came from the currently Islamic State-occupied town of Maskanah, east of Aleppo, where he had run a small group known as the Moussaab bin Omeir Battalion until it was absorbed into Ahrar al-Sham in 2013. Abu Jaber, too, was a former Seidnaia prisoner, held by the regime from 2005 to 2011, allegedly for helping to transfer foreign fighters to the Islamist insurgents in Iraq.

Abu Jaber and the new leadership held the group together over the following year and—thanks in large part, it would appear, to increased support from Turkey and Qatar—even managed to expand its influence.

Meanwhile, the group continued to try to moderate its political position, stepping back from the hardline, jihadi-inflected salafism that had colored its rhetoric from the first public statements in 2012 until early 2014. The change in tune (whether it is also a change in actual content is a matter of some dispute) began already in spring 2014, before the death of the old leadership. It seems to have been triggered by the onset of two crises at once:

– First, Qatar reportedly stopped much of its support for the group after U.S. pressures and as part of attempts to reorganize the rebellion via a new Military Operations Center in Turkey. This wreaked havoc with Ahrar al-Sham finances and left it in a weak negotiating position vis-à-vis foreign sponsors.

– Second, Ahrar al-Sham (and other groups) entered into battle against the Islamic State, thereby forcing it to grapple seriously with the problem of jihadi ultra-extremism and to redefine Ahrar al-Sham’s own identity in opposition to it. Some, such as the above-mentioned Abu Yazen al-Shami, who was an influential ideologue until his death in the September 2014 explosion, even began to publicly apologize and distance themselves from their past as salafi-jihadi hardliners.

The ensuing series of ideological revisions, some seemingly heartfelt but others surely opportunistic, are still ongoing today. The cooptation of less hardline Islamist factions in the autumn and winter of 2014 may further have strengthened the ”doves” within Ahrar al-Sham, but with the group’s internal politics so secretive that no one can really claim to know for sure.

At any rate, Ahrar al-Sham’s public rhetoric has continued to move in the direction of the pragmatics, with anti-Islamic State editorials aiming to appease the West recently published in the Washington Post and the Daily Telegraph by its new foreign-relations official Labib Nahhas (Abu Ezzeddine al-Ansari, from Homs, whose Haqq Brigade faction joined Ahrar al-Sham only in December 2014). Ahrar al-Sham also, to the consternation of some more hardline members, also welcomed the Turkish intervention in northern Syria.

Some now claim that the group’s internal tensions have taken on an institutional character, with hardliners stronger in the Military and Sharia Offices elected in 2014 (headed by Abu Saleh Tahhan, from Idleb, and the Syrian-Kurdish salafi scholar Abu Mohammed al-Sadeq, respectively) while the Political Office (led at first, after the 2014 explosion, by the Islamist intellectual Jaber al-Halloul, who later resigned and was replaced by Sheikh Abu Abderrahman—not to be confused with Abu Abderrahman al-Souri alias Mohammed Talal Bazerbashi, who is another prominent leader of the group—and, yes, this is an unacceptably long parenthesis) has promoted a program of ideological pragmatism and collaboration with Western-backed rebels.

Abu Jaber al-Maskani Steps Down

Abu Jaber’s appointment as Ahrar al-Sham leader was only set to last for one year. He could have opted to run for reelection, but he declined, said the Ahrar al-Sham spokesperson Ahmed Qara Ali when I contacted him earlier today: ”As his term ended, brother Hashem al-Sheikh refused to extend his term, since he wanted to allow for new blood to be pumped into the leadership.”

Internal campaigning to succeed Abu Jaber has been going on for a while and it has apparently been quite fierce, at least partly due to the ideological tensions within the group.

According to a source close to Ahrar al-Sham, the victorious Abu Yahia al-Hamawi had squared off in a fierce internal debate against other contenders—most prominently Abu Ali al-Sahel, but there were others, too, including, apparently, an Abu Amer, of whom I know nothing more. Charles Lister also names Abu Azzam al-Ansari, head of the former Liwa al-Haqq contingent from Homs, Abu Abderrahman al-Shami, and Abu [Ammar?] Taftanaz.

However, according to Ahmed Qara Ali, Abu Yahia was elected ”by consensus.” When I ask about other contenders, he insists that ”the Shoura Council session was a closed meeting and brother Abu Yahia was elected by consensus, as has been publicly announced.”

My other source—who says he is not a member of the group and whose information I cannot confirm—insists that there was ”kind of a vote, but only inside the Shoura Council.” He says that there has been a longstanding factional debate inside the group, and since it was inconclusive, the Shoura Council initially tried to convince Abu Jaber to extend his mandate. When that failed, ”finally, they chose this person, as he is not a strong man, so he does not represent either side.”

The New Leader: A Preliminary Biography

Abu Yahia al-Hamawi is the alias of Mohannad al-Masri, a Syrian citizen born in 1981. (He has also been called Abu Yahia al-Ghab and presumably a number of other things.) He is a civil engineer by training, who studied at Tishreen University in Latakia City before the uprising. At Tishreen, as it happens, he became friends with Hadi al-Abdullah, who would after 2011 emerge as one of the most famous media activists in the Syrian opposition.

Qalaat al-Madiq in 2005 – Photo: Aron Lund

Like Abboud and so many other early Ahrar leaders, Abu Yahia is also a son of the Ghab Plains. According to the senior Ahrar al-Sham leader Khaled Abu Anas—who is himself from Saraqeb in the Idleb area—Abu Yahia hails from Qalaat al-Madiq. This Sunni Arab community of some 80,000-100,000 inhabitants (before the war) lies next to the famous Roman ruins of Apamea, a major tourist destination (also before the war…). It is currently in an area fought over by Bashar al-Assad’s government and rebel forces, prominently including Ahrar al-Sham, following the fall of Idleb and Jisr al-Shughour in March, and the town has been badly shelled and bombed.

Abu Yahia is also, unsurprisingly, a former Seidnaia prisoner, first arrested on August 2, 2007. One online source claims he was part of a group of Islamist activists arrested at the same time, which also included ”Abu Abdullah al-Hamawi and Abu Talha,” the former being the nom de guerre of Ahrar al-Sham’s founding leader Hassane Abboud and the latter presumably a reference to Abu Talha al-Makhzoumi, the Ahrar al-Sham military leader who was killed in 2014. Both of them were from nearby villages in the Ghab Plains.

At any rate, Abu Yahia was held in Seidnaia until his release in mid-Arab Spring on March 16, 2011, coinciding almost to the day with the start of the Syrian uprising. At first, he participated in peaceful demonstrations but he soon switched track to help pioneer Syria’s armed uprising and to create Ahrar al-Sham. Hassane Abboud has claimed that the group’s first real armed operations began in the Idleb-Hama area—which is another way of saying the Ghab Plains—around May-June 2011, thus predating the July 2011 announcement of the Free Syrian Army in Turkey.

Along with his associates, then, Abu Yahia began to organize armed ambushes for the government. He became the leader of the Osama bin Zeid Company, a small armed group based in and around his hometown of Qalaat al-Madiq. According to Ahmed Qara Ali, this was the first armed group working under the Ahrar al-Sham banner.

Abu Yahia then moved on to command the Osama bin Zeid Company’s parent group, the Omar ibn al-Khattab Battalion. As the conflict grew, he became the head of an even larger structure, called the Khattab Brigade. (He is seen speaking to Khattab Brigade fighters here, in a January 2014 video release from Ahrar al-Sham.) While in this role, Abu Yahia was appointed to serve as Ahrar al-Sham’s head of operations in rural Hama, which includes the Ghab Plains and is clearly a very important front for the group. He was finally appointed deputy leader under Abu Jaber in 2014—reportedly with special responsibility for security—and has served in this role until now. The Ahrar al-Sham media activist Abul-Yazid Taftanaz also claims that Abu Yahia heads the Central Force that Ahrar al-Sham is establishing in an attempt to reorganize its armed forces, following its merger with the Suqour al-Sham faction earlier in 2015.

Be that as it may, Abu Yahia’s family roots and longstanding leadership role in the Ghab region may well have played a role in his election, since this is currently one of the hottest fronts of the Syrian war. Ahrar al-Sham plays a leading role in the Fath Army coalition that dominates these battles, taking place in and around the hometowns of Ahrar al-Sham’s founders.

A Rebel Group with Real Institutions

Syrians and others will now look for signs of a shift in Ahrar al-Sham’s political line. So what do we know about his politics? Almost nothing.

A Twitter account that Abu Yahia started in 2013 (it hasn’t been active since April this year) mostly contains retweets of sayings and statements by senior Ahrar al-Sham figures or independent Islamists such as Abdulaziz al-Tareifi, an influential salafi scholar in Saudi Arabia. But there are also some 140-character quips by Abu Yahia himself, such as this one: ”If our project is a project of the Umma, then our jihad must by necessity also be a jihad of the Umma; an Umma whose jihad is led by an elite that will not restrict the jihad to the elite alone.” (For context, see the bottom of this post.)

More information is likely to filter out in the coming weeks, but according to Charles Lister, who regularly meets with Ahrar al-Sham leaders and has excellent insights into the group, Abu Yahia “played a lead role in developing the group’s new political ‘discourse’ of reaching out to West, including the US.”

As for my above-cited anonymous source—the one close to but not inside Ahrar al-Sham—Abu Yahia’s political priorities are not likely to be significantly different from those of Abu Jaber. And perhaps it would not matter anyway. According to this source, ”the problem with Ahrar’s structure is that the leader has limited authority. It’s the exact opposite of the Islam Army, where Zahran has the ultimate say, even though both have a Shoura Council.”

While this might indeed be a problem for Ahrar al-Sham, for example by slowing-down its command structure and policymaking, the level of institutionalization achieved by the group is also a major asset. Diplomats and others who are in contact with its leadership report that Ahrar al-Sham seems well structured, even at times disturbingly bureaucratic, to the extent that it is capable of pulling out a file on every past meeting with notes on exactly who was there and what was said by whom. Most of the Free Syrian Army militias in Syria could only dream of that level of organization. It is surely also what kept Ahrar al-Sham alive after the loss of most of its top-ranking leadership in September 2014, a blow so serious that few other groups could have survived it.

Abu Jaber seems to have bowed out gracefully. He has announced his resignation and the appointment of Abu Yahia on his personal Twitter account, commenting that ”the soldiers of Ahrar al-Sham are brought up to cling to the project rather than clinging to personalities. Whether moving from soldier to leader or from leader to soldier, all work under the same ceiling, which is obedience to God.” He is now being roundly praised by Ahrar al-Sham activists and supporters online for not clinging to office, as is the norm in Syrian rebel groups.

So far, then, the leadership change—Ahrar’s second in one year—seems to have gone very smoothly. Whether it will help solve the group’s internal contradictions remains to be seen. In terms of both ideology and alliances, Ahrar al-Sham still has one foot among the foreign-backed militias that depend on the largesse of Gulf Arab or Turkish sponsors, and must therefore do their bidding, and another in the hardline salafist camp that refuses to take instructions and gravitates towards al-Qaeda.

While the focus is now on the public replacement of Abu Jaber, and on the new leader Abu Yahia, the group’s rank and file is likely remain torn between these contradictory instincts. Ahmed Qara Ali says there are no new elections planned at the moment—for the political, military, media, organizational, etc, sub-offices—but at some point, Ahrar al-Sham will have to come down on one side or the other of the political gulf that it has tried to straddle since 2011.

— Aron Lund, editor of Syria in Crisis

The post Abu Yahia al-Hamawi, Ahrar al-Sham’s New Leader appeared first on Syria Comment.

By Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi

History and Analysis

Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa (the Raqqa Revolutionaries Brigade) was initially formed in September 2012 as a merger of several local rebel groups in Raqqa province following on from the Assad regime’s loss of the northern border town of Tel Abyad, at a time when the regime was forced to pull back from large swathes of northern Syrian border areas to focus on defending more vital areas- in particular the provincial capitals. Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa declared its loyalty to a “Revolutionary Military Council” in Raqqa province, a loose umbrella similar to other early nationalist rebel structures like the FSA Military Council of Col. Oqaidi in Aleppo province. Some declared components of Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa at the time included [Kata’ib] al-Jihad fi Sabil Allah, al-Nasir Salah al-Din, al-Haq,  Shuhada’ al-Raqqa, Saraya al-Furat and Ahrar al-Furat.

Over the subsequent months, some new local formations were announced and added to Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa’s ranks. Thus, in December 2012, the Katiba al-Risala of the village of al-Sheikh Hassan in the north Raqqa countryside, the Katiba Suqur al-Jazira operating in the western Raqqa countryside, and the Katiba Usud al-Tawheed operating in Raqqa city area were announced as affiliates of Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa. The rhetorical focus in these videos is on driving the Assad regime presence out of Raqqa province, rather than laying out an ideological vision for a post-Assad Syria. This is so despite its original emblem that ostensibly conveyed a distinctly Islamist orientation.

Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa’s first emblem. On top: “Allahu Akbar.” Beneath that: “There is no deity but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.”

Also in December 2012, Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa joined the Raqqa Liberation Front coalition, alongside similarly aligned groups including the familiar Ahfad al-Rasul (a brand of Western-backed brigades that went into sharp decline in 2013, including expulsion from Raqqa city by ISIS in August of that year), Liwa al-Muntasir bi-Allah and Liwa Isar al-Shamal (both of which, like Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa, identified as part of the same Revolutionary Military Council) and Liwa Rayat al-Nasr (which eventually joined the Salafi grouping Ahrar al-Sham). As has often been the case in the Syrian civil war with the various coalitions announced and dissolved, the Raqqa Liberation Front coalition never led to a real merger of these groups.

Raqqa city fell in March 2013 to a combination of these brigades, Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra. The following month, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced the creation of ISIS, demanding the subsuming of Jabhat al-Nusra under this structure. Most of the Jabhat al-Nusra contingents in Raqqa province accepted Baghdadi’s argument and defected, though a group under Abu Sa’ad al-Hadhrami broke away from ISIS in Raqqa city and temporarily took refuge in the city of Tabqa to the west of Raqqa city in mid-summer of 2013. Meanwhile, Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa continued to operate as part of the rebels’ wider bid to take the remaining regime bases in Raqqa province- Division 17, Brigade 93 and Tabqa military airport.

Thus on 20 June, Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa’s leader Abu Eisa denied claims he had been killed by regime forces. It is also notable that Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa appeared to adapt somewhat to the ISIS presence in Raqqa, not only by adding the definite adjective ‘al-Islami’ (Islamic) to its name but also by using the same flag as ISIS in at least one video, as per below from July 2013, in which the group claims coordination with a number of formations, including ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, Liwa Ahfad al-Rasul and Liwa al-Muntasir bi-Allah, in attacking a convoy that came from Brigade 93.

Despite the apparent military cooperation, tensions became increasingly apparent in a number of ways. As ISIS’ presence in Raqqa city grew with its da’wa office that set up numerous billboards throughout the city, it began detaining members of other groups, such as the leader of Liwa Amana’ al-Raqqa (another of the independent, nationalist brigades), and moved decisively to expel Ahfad al-Rasul in August, despite cooperating with the same group on the Latakia front where an offensive had been launched to push towards Assad’s ancestral village of al-Qardaha. This does not mean tensions solely revolved around disputes between ISIS on one side versus the rest of the factions on the other. There were also tensions between Liwa al-Nasir Salah al-Din (another independent group at this point) and Ahrar al-Sham as they arrested each other’s members, and Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa reportedly had its own disputes with Ahrar al-Sham as well. Even so, all-out warfare between the various factions had not yet broken out, and the civilian local council continued to operate.

In September 2013, Jabhat al-Nusra announced its ‘return’ to Raqqa city. Some of the smaller brigades saw in Jabhat al-Nusra the chance to protect themselves from the growth of ISIS, and accordingly pledged allegiance in some form. This included Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa, though the exact terms of the allegiance are disputed. It appears Jabhat al-Nusra had hoped to integrate Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa through Shari’a sessions, but regardless of whether or not this was actually agreed upon, it is therefore clear that Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa was not properly integrated into Jabhat al-Nusra’s ranks. This may have hindered the fight against ISIS when wider infighting broke out in January 2014.  Components of other actors saw a stronger horse in ISIS (which detained and eventually killed Abu Sa’ad al-Hadhrami) and thus joined its ranks, a case-in-point being part of the Liwa al-Nasir Salah al-Din.

As infighting spread between rebel forces and ISIS, Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa appears to have taken the lead in fighting ISIS inside Raqqa city in January 2014, at which point it had broken off from Jabhat al-Nusra. However, ISIS did not suffer the same problem as elsewhere (e.g. in Idlib province) of being thinly spread out and was able to consolidate control of Raqqa city, expelling Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham, Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa etc. It would appear that the rebel side conversely suffered from problems of poor coordination in their efforts. Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa then withdrew into the Raqqa countryside up to the Kobani enclave, seeking refuge with the Kurdish YPG. As the Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa break-off from Jabhat al-Nusra had not been officially announced at the time, this was the origin of the ISIS narrative that Jabhat al-Nusra had entered into an alliance with the YPG. In April 2014 came Jabhat al-Nusra’s announcement of the break between itself and Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa.

As the months continued, Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa claimed occasional low-scale sabotage attacks and clashes with ISIS in Raqqa province, usually in coordination with another brigade that also took refuge in the Kobani canton: Liwa al-Jihad fi Sabil Allah, aligned with the opposition-in-exile. Thus on 9 June 2014, the two groups claimed to have attacked an ISIS bridge and checkpoint installation near Raqqa city. They also sent a message of solidarity to the rebels in Deir az-Zor province as ISIS continued its advance and threatened to overrun the entire province. Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa also claimed a prisoner exchange with ISIS, in which the former released 3 ISIS operatives in exchange for 13 prisoners held by ISIS.

In September 2014, Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa along with a number of rebel groups in the Kobani area joined the Burkan al-Furat (‘Euphrates Volcano’) coalition led by the YPG, and participated in the battle of Kobani as well as the subsequent push eastwards following the failure of the Islamic State to take the city. Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa appears to have been the main rebel auxiliary force alongside the Kata’ib Shams al-Shamal formation of the Dawn of Freedom Brigades, which unlike Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa draws its membership mainly from rebel groups (e.g. Liwa al-Tawheed) that existed in north-eastern Aleppo province localities such as Manbij.

As the Islamic State was driven back towards Tel Abyad, a clarification was broadcast that only Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa would be allowed to enter Arab localities. In an interview with Orient News, it was affirmed that “the door of repentance is open. God is forgiving, merciful.” This ostensibly parallels one of the Islamic State’s own methods of securing control over a new area it takes: offering the chance for repentance. However, it was also made clear that the hand of mercy would only be extended to those whose hands were not stained “with the blood of Syrians. As for those whose hands are stained with the blood of Syrians, there is no mercy for them except killing, by God’s permission.” Abu Eisa also denied allegations that Burkan al-Furat had engaged in ethnic cleansing of Arabs in areas retaken from the Islamic State. Reflecting its political agenda more clearly, Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa uses this logo now:

“Free Syrian Army: Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa”, with the familiar FSA emblem.

At the present time, Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa appears to be the primary rebel actor responsible for outreach to the Arab tribes in northern Raqqa province (e.g. photo below), also claiming administration over the Ain Issa area to the south of Tel Abyad.

The group is hoping to push further south to Raqqa city, though the prospects of such an assault being successful are slim now and for the near future at least, as the Islamic State has deployed its special Jaysh al-Khilafa division to solidify the defence of Raqqa city. In the long-run, the alliance with the YPG in the Burkan al-Furat coalition seems problematic, as Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa and the YPG/PYD have different political visions. Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa is committed, like most rebel forces, to the concept of a unified Syria that suspects any Kurdish autonomous administration projects as working towards taqsim Souriya (‘division of Syria’). Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa has already alluded to these issues somewhat obliquely in a recent statement denying rumours that Tel Abyad would be subsumed administratively to the PYD’s Kobani canton:

“The Tel Abyad area will wholly remain administratively with Raqqa governorate and we do not accept modification of the administrative borders for Raqqa governorate and changing the affiliation of any area under the name of any entity. What is being circulated in suggestion about the affiliation of the Tel Abyad area in administration is not within the special powers of the local council or any other council or committee. This matter requires a law and legislative committee to decide on that. And we are in an exceptional state of affairs. It is not possible to adopt any decision to change the administrative borders or affiliation of any area.”

One should also note the reference to a ‘local council’ here: on 26 August, Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa issued an invitation for participation in a conference for the election of the local council for Raqqa province, particularly calling on members of the nominal electoral committee to participate. This conference was supposed to take place on 28 August in the Turkish city of Urfa, but as the Arabic outlet al-Aan notes, it failed to lead to the election of a local council. Out of 107 members of the electoral committee, only 4 showed up alongside representatives of the opposition-in-exile government. It would appear that the majority of those from Raqqa province in exile do not see it as worthwhile to elect a local council to provide civilian support to Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa, recognizing that the Islamic State still controls most of the province and the PYD is the true administrator of the important town of Tel Abyad, for which the PYD has already formed its own local and seniors councils.

This is why, as I have emphasized before, it is highly misleading to go by Thomas van Linge’s maps that portray Tel Abyad and similar areas as somehow jointly controlled by the YPG and the ‘FSA’, driven as Thomas van Linge is by an ideological agenda to hype supposed Kurdish-rebel unity. Yes, it may be that the PYD takes into account for the time being local Arab and Turkmen objections to incorporating Tel Abyad into Kobani, and certainly it has little interest in pushing further south to Raqqa city and thus delegates an area like Ain Issa to Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa. Yet the playing up of ‘YPG-FSA’ cooperation tends to ignore the fact that the YPG has done the bulk of the fighting, sustained the bulk of the casualties, and as a result its political wing the PYD has come to be the administrator of the vast majority of localities retaken from the Islamic State.

Corroborating this point for the Tel Abyad area in particular is an order from the PYD’s Asayish police division forbidding travel between Tel Abyad and Raqqa, as well as importation of various goods from Raqqa to Tel Abyad, including building materials, fuels and electrical and manufacturing apparatuses. While these decisions are understandable in that the PYD worries that bombs may be smuggled in amid the imported goods and wants to cut off as many revenue sources as possible for the Islamic State in so far as the continued cash flow between non-Islamic State and Islamic State-held areas is key for Islamic State revenue via taxation, it is clear there was no consultation here with the rebel groups in Burkan al-Furat.

To sum up, we have traced the evolution of the rise, fall and re-emergence of Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa from 2012 to the present day, first as one of a number of indigenous, nationalist rebel groups in Raqqa province, to a non-ideological Jabhat al-Nusra affiliate, and finally to an uneasy, junior partner of the YPG. To shed further light on these issues, below is an interview I conducted recently with the director of Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa’s media office.

Interview

Q: Where was Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa established and from where are most of the members of Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa (i.e. Raqqa, Ayn Issa)?

A: It was in the north Raqqa countryside in the border town of Tel Abyad. Most members are from Raqqa, some from Raqqa, others from the countryside.

Q: Jabhat al-Nusra says you gave bay’a [allegiance] but you deny you gave bay’a to them? You mean it was just a military alliance?

A: Yes an alliance to expel the Dawla organization from Raqqa.

Q: And when did the alliance end?

A: It ended because of their lack of support for us during our battle with Da’esh and they withdrew from Raqqa without informing us of that.

Q: In their statement on the end of the alliance they say that you had agreed on Shari’a sessions. True or not?

A: No, not true.

Q: After Raqqa fell to Da’esh’s hand, did most of their [Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa] members go to Kobani?

A: Yes.

Q: How many martyrs do you have from the battles in Kobani, Tel Abyad and Ain Issa?

A: I am not sure but approximately 30.

Q: Many of the factions say the PYD wants taqsim Souria [division of Syria]. Do you agree?

A: Yes. They had a plan of division but amid our opposition to the matter of joining Tel Abyad to Kobani [canton] our opinion was taken into account.

Q: Is Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa administering any areas?

A: Currently only the locality of Ain Issa.

Q: I heard that you are trying to establish relations with the tribes in the north Raqqa countryside. What are the names of these tribes?

A: Many names: al-Mashhura, Albu Assaf, Albu Khamees, Jais, Albu Shamis, Albu Jarad, Albu Issa

Q: Do you want a civil or Islamic state?

A: Civil democratic state.

Q: With regards to the other battalions in Burkan al-Furat are they administering liberated areas or do they only have a military presence? That is, if I understand correctly, Kata’ib Shams al-Shamal for example wants to recover Jarabulus and Manbij?

A: Yes, they want to recover Jarabulus and Manbij and administer them.

Q: When do you expect that you will try to recover Raqqa city?

A: When we are given sufficient support we will recover Raqqa city soon, but if things remain as they are the time to liberate it will be delayed a lot.

Q: Do you have relations with the Syrian opposition in Turkey or are you independent?

A: No, we are independent.

The post Liwa Thuwar al-Raqqa: History, Analysis & Interview appeared first on Syria Comment.

By Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi

Establishment and Beginnings (2012-2013)

Initial emblem of Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk

Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk (The Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade) was formed in the summer of 2012 initially using the name Katiba Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk and based primarily in southwest Deraa province. The group first came to prominence with the capture of UN peacekeeping troops in March 2013 in the Jamla area near the UN patrolled portion of the Golan Heights. In the initial statement on the hostage taking, Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk justified its actions as follows:

“At a time in which the UN is silent about the crimes of the regime against the Syrian people, here are the UN forces providing aid to the criminal regime forces besieged for days by the heroes of the Free Army [FSA] on frontline duty in the area defending our people there from the barbarity of the regime and its shabiha…at a time in which the Yarmouk Valley area is witnessing artillery and rocket bombing as well as continual Assad war plane bombing raids that have led to the destruction of a great number of homes and the killing of unarmed civilians without mercy, as well as displacement of families.

Why is this aid not offered to the unarmed civilians instead of the criminal gangs? Therefore we have decided to detain and keep hold of the aid together with its UN personnel until Assad’s forces pull out their forces from the area and the Assad bombing and war plane raids stop. And these personnel will remain safe, and when the bombing stops and Assad’s forces pull out their forces from the area entirely and the UN fulfils its humanitarian and international obligation for which it is present in the area, we will immediately release them.

Long live Free Syria and down with the criminal Assad regime.”

However, Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk very quickly retracted this hostile statement, claiming it was actually protecting the UN personnel from the “barbaric bombing that Assad’s criminal gangs are launching against the western villages of Deraa province and all of Syria.” The group then called on the UN to hold a secure meeting to hand over the personnel. Eventually, the incident was resolved. Another kidnapping incident took place in May involving 4 Filipino  UN peacekeepers , though they were also released. At the time, Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk seemed keen to assure outsiders of its supposedly good intentions, even telling the Times of Israel that the group’s quarrel was only with Assad regime and praising Israeli medical treatment for refugees.

Through 2013, Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk gained prominence as a player on the battlefield, acquiring some new local affiliates. In late March, the group coordinated with Jabhat al-Nusra in an assault on the 38th division air defence base. In May- at a time when Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk was participating in the “Yarmouk al-Karama” battle focused on localities to the south of Nawa town like Ain Dhikr– the Omar al-Mukhtar battalion for the Nawa area was announced, employing nationalist rhetoric typical of what one would associate with the FSA brand: “I swear by God the Great to defend my religion, my homeland [watani] and my land, and expend what is dear and precious in liberating all the soil of the homeland from the claws of the criminal Assad occupation.”

In July, Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk announced participation in the “Umm al-Ma’arak” (“Mother of Battles”) to capture Nawa from regime forces, though that operation was ultimately unsuccessful. At this point, Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk’s nationalist rebel affiliations were still apparent, and in October the group joined a coalition of 50 southern formations embodied in the “Revolution Leadership Council- Southern Region.” In a show of military strength, a video emerged in November 2013 of a large military parade held by Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk.  At the time, Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk’s leader Ali al-Baridi (nickname: al-Khal) claimed that the group’s control of territory extended from the area of Tel Shehab (near the border with Jordan) to the occupied Golan.

All that said, the group was not without its critics in 2013: for example, one page entitled “Secrets and Revelations of Shabiha and Thieves of the Free Army in Deraa” in September accused Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk of laziness under the leadership of al-Khal and his deputy Abu Abdullah al-Ja’ouni, asserting: “There is an abundance of arms yet it has stopped operating on many fronts like the Sheikh Sa’ad front in waiting for additional support…and today we have heard calls to provide relief from Sheikh Sa’ad so what will Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk and the other brigades sleeping in Tafis and the majority of the western areas?”

Developments in 2014

Moving into 2014, Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk continued to participate in rebel operations, being one of the declared participants alongside Jabhat al-Nusra and other brigades in the “Hold fast to God’s rope entirely and don’t separate” battle announced in late February to capture strategic positions between Deraa and Quneitra. In that same month, Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk was also one of the declared components of the ‘Southern Front’ initiative backed by the West and Gulf states. At the end of April, the brigade along with some other groups announced a new offensive to take Tel al-Jumu’ and other areas to the south of Nawa, though that came to nothing as an identical initiative with more participants including Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk was announced in June.

Even at this point, Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk’s public affiliations were ostensibly clear in its appearance as a signatory to a statement signed by 54 southern groups affirming respect for human rights and democracy: as per the third clause, “We fight so that Syrian men and women may choose a free and democratic system that establishes a prosperous state respecting the aspirations of Syrians in the freedom and dignity for which they have fought.”

It is in July 2014 that some signs of tension emerge between Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk and other factions, beginning with an apparent clash with Harakat al-Muthanna al-Islamiya, a Salafi group primarily operating in Deraa province. One may also argue that in this clash lies the first hint of links with the Islamic State [IS], as there is an echo of IS discourse in pronouncing takfir on the group with whom one clashes. Thus from a Facebook page in support of Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk at the time:

“Harakat al-Muthanna- which calls itself ‘Islamic’ but it has no connection to Islam- launches an attack on the al-‘Alan checkpoint at which the heroes of Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk are based, blows it up and arrests the members of the checkpoint affiliated with Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk, exploiting the fact that most of the heroes of Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk are present in the town of Sheikh Sa’ad to liberate it from Assad’s gangs and shabiha. And while the brigade was moving Mahmoud Suleiman al-Baridi, one of the most important field commanders in Deraa province, who was wounded during the liberation of Sheikh Sa’ad, they got in the way and held him back, which led to the aggravation of his condition…So, a question that suggests itself, Harakat al-Muthanna, which calls itself Islamic, is it Islamic in deed or….?”

In a follow-up statement, Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk’s leader mentioned that the Syrian Revolutionaries Front and the al-Hamza Division had participated alongside Harakat al-Muthanna al-Islamiya in the attack, and had allegedly accused Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk of “apostasy and disbelief.” Al-Khal gave an extended account in which he claimed that after the capture of Tel al-Jumu’ it had been agreed that Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk would participate on the Sheikh Sa’ad front but then members had been approached by a convoy of cars that also claimed to be participating on that front. Approval was granted for joint participation by the leadership, but soon after that, Harakat al-Muhthanna al-Islamiya, the Syrian Revolutionaries Front and the al-Hamza Division began the attack on Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk. Eventually, Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk’s media office released a statement simply clarifying on which fronts it would continue to operate: Nawa town, Atman and Kharbat al-Ghazala.

By summer 2014, Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk had adopted a more Islamic-style emblem (variant featuring a white flag).

Even so, Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk continued to identify with the Southern Front operations, participating in the Imam Nawawi offensive to take Nawa from regime forces. The group also participated in the wider fighting over Shaykh al-Maskin, Nawa and other parts of Deraa in November 2014 that eventually culminated in disaster for regime forces, with the total loss of Nawa and other holdings such as Liwa 112 base, in which Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk advertised its presence after the routing of regime forces.

The following month came a major conflict with Jabhat al-Nusra, from which point onwards Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk’s pro-IS affiliations have become so obvious that it does not really make sense now to speak of the group as secretly pro-IS. Jabhat al-Nusra’s fight with Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk in the Yarmouk basin was rooted in its perception of the latter as an IS cell, an allegation that Southern Front commanders apparently rejected at the time. Though the exact sequence of events remains somewhat unclear, the Dar al-‘Adl (House of Justice), a southern rebel judicial body, initially called for a ceasefire and its own judicial investigation (15 December) with the backing of multiple factions, including the Al-Hamza Division, Ahrar al-Sham and Harakat al-Muthanna al-Islamiya. As in July of that year though, when Harakat al-Muthanna al-Islamiya had already clashed with Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk, it appears the group had also been involved on the side of Jabhat al-Nusra in the initial clashes with Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk. Eventually, Harakat al-Muthanna al-Islamiya proposed its own ceasefire and the Dar al-‘Adl issued a new statement on 23 December, requiring the warring sides to return to frontline posts against the regime and for the Dar al-‘Adl to receive the checkpoints set up within the Yarmouk basin.

Leaving behind the Southern Front: Moving overtly towards IS

Since the December clashes, multiple lines of evidence point to Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk’s IS affinities that build a very clear case when taken together. To begin with, the group’s current emblem featuring IS’ flag:

Further, a key figure involved in the December 2014 clashes was Jabhat al-Nusra’s Abu Mariya al-Qahtani, widely perceived as one of the most pragmatic members of the al-Qa’ida affiliate, though he has since been sidelined. He has been the subject of verbal attack from Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk using discourse identical to IS, namely in referring to him as ‘al-Harari’ (H/T: @AbuJamajem). For example, in a statement entitled “To our people in the town of Nawa,” Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk says it released two people on verifying they had no link to Jabhat al-Nusra, while warning “our people in Nawa…to be careful of the conspiracy in which al-Harari is trying to embroil them, whereby he makes from among them cannon fodder for his ambitions that his agenda, which is not hidden from anyone, imposes upon him. This already happened in reality when he embroiled some of the sons of Nawa, deceiving them, in the attempt to commit treachery against Saraya al-Jihad…and it was established to all that Saraya al-Jihad was in a state of defending itself.” Saraya al-Jihad is a jihadi group in Quneitra that became part of the coalition Jaysh al-Jihad, also suspected of being an IS cell: its name appears to be used interchangeably with Jaysh al-Jihad here.

In this context, one should then note an interview uploaded on 1 May 2015 with the deputy leader of Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk, in which he denies that Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk has links with Jaysh al-Jihad but says Jabhat al-Nusra committed aggression against them. When asked as a follow-up whether Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk has allegiance to IS, he avoids giving a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to the question. This interview followed on from a lengthy statement by the Dar al-‘Adl on 30 April, which condemned Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk for violating terms imposed upon them. Though the brigade handed over leaders of sub-groups who had pledged allegiance to IS for questioning and verification as stipulated, the Dar al-‘Adl claims that those handed over actually affirmed that the leadership of the brigade had also pledged allegiance and received financial support from IS.

According to the Dar al-‘Adl, other violations on the part of Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk include re-opening an alternative court in violation of the agreement, declaring takfir on the Dar al-‘Adl, kidnapping and torturing civilians and leaders of rival brigades (e.g. the leader of Liwa Buruj al-Islam affiliated with the First Legion), and running a cell to assassinate rivals in the town of Nawa. These patterns of behaviour are very similar to IS conduct in 2013 and in Fallujah in early 2014 (back when it was just ISIS), whereby an alternative proto-administration was set up (most often in the form of a da’wa office and/or Islamic court), combining an approach of outreach and subversion. Criticism of the Dar al-‘Adl as a judiciary body was also the subject of an official IS Damascus province video.

Over the course of this year, Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk has further developed its administration along the IS model in the Yarmouk basin, with its own da’wa office, Islamic court, Islamic police force and apparently a Diwan al-Hisba, as per below.

Da’wa office of Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk. Here is a video of a sample da’wa meeting held by Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk: note the use of the Islamic State song “The Shari’a of Our Lord.”

Da’wa pamphlet cover from Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk.

Establishment of the Islamic court dated 11 Shawwal 1436 AH (27-28 July 2015): “Striving on our part to realize the religion and the ruling of God’s law…over the land, supporting those who are wronged and standing in the face of wrongdoers and those who sow corruption, we announce the formation of the Shari’a court. This court is to be considered the sole legitimate place form which judicial rulings are to be taken in the Yarmouk basin area according to the Book of God and the Sunna of His Prophet Muhammad (SAWS) on the understanding of the just predecessors, may God be pleased with them. And we ask our people to be an aid to us in this court and that to restore rights to its people.”

“The Shari’a court in the Yarmouk basis announces its desire to appoint Islamic judges affiliated with the court and working in it. Thus we ask all whom God has cultivated with Shari’i knowledge to be selected for the judicial work in the court. Appointment of the judges for work will be completed within the cadre of the Shari’a court according to specialities and suitability. To apply: base of the Shari’a court in al-Shajra everyday from 9-11 a.m. beginning from the issuing of this statement- 11 Shuwwal 1436 AH.” The al-Shajra court was mentioned earlier in the year by the Dar al-‘Adl as something reopened by Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk contrary to its wishes.

Announcement by Shari’a court for the recruitment of Islamic police to be affiliated with the court (not military matters).

From a Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk account on Twitter: Diwan al-Hisba organizing distribution of niqabs to locals.

In this vein, recent Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk photo releases mimic IS propaganda, portraying scenes of normality in the Yarmouk basin area it controls, as well as distributions of da’wa pamphlets and revelling in the destruction of its enemies, who have generally failed to dislodge it from its strongholds. For comparison, note that another group that eventually pledged allegiance to IS- Boko Haram- also had its own media outlet- al-Urwat al-Wuthqa- that imitated IS photo releases.

Football match in the Yarmouk basin area

Distribution of da’wa pamphlets

“Corpses of the slain of ‘Jaysh al-Fatah’ [in the south, comprising Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham et al.] who tried to assault the areas controlled by Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk.”

Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk member Ahmad al-Baridi featuring a quotation from IS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani on his Twitter account.

Purported areas of control of Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk (in green) vs. rebel rivals (in red) as of early August 2015.

Given the numerous lines of evidence for the IS affinities of Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk, one may ask why IS has not already announced a new ‘wilaya’ (province), in this case a Wilayat Deraa, which would from a propaganda viewpoint mark a significant ‘expansion’ in that even its predecessor ISIS, which was much more widely (and thinly) spread across Syria, never had a foothold in the province on account of the loyalty of Jabhat al-Nusra affiliates to Jowlani. One answer may be that the problem for IS is that the territory currently controlled by Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk is not contiguous with the rest of its holdings in Syria and Iraq, or it may be the announcement is only a matter of time.

In any case, the growth of Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk poses a significant problem for the rebels, and the Dar al-‘Adl continues to be targeted in sabotage operations, with the assassination of its deputy head most recently, but it seems no one has the strength to dismantle Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk’s presence. This is particularly telling with regards to the relative strength of Jaysh al-Fatah in the south (which seems most keen to destroy Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk) as opposed to its much more successful counterpart in the north. More generally, southern rebel efforts have stalled with the faltering offensive on Deraa city despite the regime’s thin line of control through the province.

The post Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk: History and Analysis appeared first on Syria Comment.

by Aron Lund, editor of Syria in Crisis

“We are ready to support from the air the patriotic opposition, including the so-called Free Syrian Army,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recently told Russian state television. But, he said, Moscow is currently unable to do so, since it cannot figure out who leads the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the United States won’t help identify them. Lavrov’s comments were met with derision and scorn by Syrian rebels, including many self-declared FSA members, who complain that the Russian Air Force has been bombing them since September 30.

But lo and behold—on October 25, the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported that other members of the FSA are ready for “dialogue” in the hope of Russian “assistance.” The agency quoted Fahd al-Masri, whom it described a founder of the FSA, as saying that the two sides “need to facilitate a new meeting, so we could express our position and discuss our joint actions.” Masri’s comments were widely echoed in media friendly to the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad, including Iran’s Press TV, which quoted Masri as saying that “it is in the interests of Russia and FSA to hold this meeting as soon as possible.”

Suddenly, rumors were everywhere that FSA reprsentatives were en route to Moscow. The Syrian exile opposition tried to deny them, but no use. Russian state media kept going. On October 26, Sputnik News referred back to Masri’s purported proposal for a Russia-FSA conference in Cairo and then dropped a diplomatic bomb: ”Moscow has confirmed that Free Syrian Army (FSA) envoys had visited Russia, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said Monday.”

A few days later, on October 30, Bogdanov spoke on the sidelines of a meeting on Syria in Vienna to explain that Russia wants the FSA to be included in future peace talks, while ”one of the founders of the so called FSA,” who once again turned out to be Fahd al-Masri, was heard praising Moscow’s newfound flexibility in Russian state media.

On November 3, we were told that the Russian military is now in touch with a large number of opposition groups, which have begun feeding the Russians battlefield coordinates to help them take out “terrorists.” Then, finally, on November 5, Sputnik News brought on one Mahmoud al-Effendi to announce that officials from the Russian foreign and defense ministries will meet with the FSA leaders in Abu Dhabi next week.

Is this the long-expected Syrian game changer? Is the Free Syrian Army, Syria’s much-vaunted moderate mainstream opposition, now defecting from its Western and Gulf allies to instead hook up with Russia and Bashar al-Assad?

No, not quite.

All-American Agitprop

These reports come as Russian officials are trying to manage the political fallout of President Vladimir Putin’s intervention in Syria. While the Russian Ministry of Defense continues to claim that its attacks target the so-called Islamic State, an extremist group that is hostile to both Assad and other rebels, the geographical pattern of Russian Air Force strikes shows no attempt (or ability?) to distinguish between rebel groups. Islamic State-affiliated groups are in fact a small minority of the targets and some of the very first strikes seem to have hit an American-backed faction. In other words, the Kremlin is trying to play on Western fears of terrorism as political cover for a mission designed to shore up Assad’s government.

Of course, wartime propaganda is not an exclusively Russian domain. When the United States was occupying Iraq, senior Bush administration officials like Washington Don kept blaming “terrorists” of the “Baathist dead-ender” or “al-Qaeda” variety for everything new setback. To be sure, Baathists and al-Qaeda loyalists were a prominent part of the mix, and they would later become dominant. But in the early days, Iraq’s insurgency seems to have been considerably more diverse than what we now see in Syria. In 2003-2004, it consisted of innumerable little local groups that spanned the full range of ideologies from secular nationalism to jihadism; they would even on occasion bridge the Sunni-Shia divide. And yet, U.S. President George W. Bush could get away with telling his people that the Iraqi resistance was all “al-Qaeda types, Ansar al-Islam types, terrorist groups” and conclude that it was better to “fight them there than here.”

A decade later in Syria, the roles are reversed. Russian politicians will contemptuously label any Syrian who has taken up arms to stop the depredations of Bashar al-Assad’s army a “jihadi terrorist” and in lieu of a political strategy, they smirk and puff their chests and say “bring ‘em on.” Their American counterparts sound like the anti-Iraq War tankie left in 2003-2004, eyes darting nervously around the room as they try to explain that there are good salafi insurgents and bad salafi insurgents. Give it a year more, and they’ll be complaining about Russia’s “cowboy attitude.”

Not that their respective supporters seem to notice, or care. But if you’re not a die-hard partisan of either Vladimir Putin or of the late and unlamented presidency of George W. Bush, you will by now have noticed that the Kremlin’s “anti-terrorist” discourse is essentially indistinguishable from the bullshit shoveled into the media by the American White House ten years ago, and equally self-serving, misleading, and destructive. And it, too, works beautifully.

The Russian Defense

Since anyone with access to a map of Syria can easily confirm that the Russian government is lying about its activity in Syria, the international media has started to raise questions. Reuters, for example:

Almost 80 percent of Russia’s declared targets in Syria have been in areas not held by Islamic State, a Reuters analysis of Russian Defence Ministry data shows, undermining Moscow’s assertions that its aim is to defeat the group.

When faced with such accusations, Moscow has responded in a chaotic fashion. Instead of settling on a single political message, officials have presented different and often contradictory explanations of what they are doing in Syria, why they are doing it, and why they said they would be doing something else. Some now claim that the intervention was never only about the Islamic State, which would be an excellent defense if not for the fact that the Russian Ministry of Defense continues to falsely claim that it is attacking … the Islamic State. Others prefer to simply change the subject. Still others will continue to retell the original lie and shrug off any objections, since they are well aware that their core audience—largely made up nationalistic and/or apolitical Russians, plus Western tabloid scribblers and conspiracy theorists—neither knows nor cares about the truth.

For example, here’s an actual headline from the British Daily Express on Oct. 30, 2015: “More than 800,000 refugees RETURNING to Syria as Putin OBLITERATES Islamic State.” All of it is nonsense, based off of the tall tales told by Russian officials, but what do they care?

And in Russia, an independent poll shows that 48 percent of respondents think their air force is attacking the Islamic State, and only 13 percent think that the targets are mostly other Syrian opposition groups, while Putin’s own approval ratings have soared to more than 90 percent, according to a state-run pollster.

No need to be surprised. This is how propaganda works. Its primary purpose is to mobilize the base and produce talking points for those already inclined to support you. A secondary purpose, however, is to keep your opponent uncertain, uncommitted, and off balance. And this is where Fahd al-Masri and the FSA come into the picture.

A Meeting in Paris

On October 7, a week into its Syrian campaign, the Russian Foreign Ministry suddenly announced that it would begin talks with the FSA. That same day, a meeting took place at the Russian Embassy in Paris, which brought together Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov—who is a chief architect of Russia’s policy in Syria—with a very interesting cast of characters: “Fahd al-Masri, who is the coordinator of the National Salvation Group in Syria, the retired American general Paul Vallely, and his adviser on Middle Eastern affairs, Nagi Najjar, who is a former intelligence officer.” (We know that the meeting took place since Russian authorities have confirmed that Bogdanov was in Paris at the time, also speaking to French officials and a Syrian Kurdish leader, and Vallely has released a photograph of himself with Bogdanov.)

After the October 7 meeting, the Russian press began to float stories about a Moscow-FSA connection. In two articles, Kommersant cited Masri’s press statement and referred to him as “one of the founders of the Free Syrian Army,” while the state-owned Sputnik News took it a step further: “The Free Syrian Army is ready to establish contacts with the Russian leadership.” Masri was also brought up in another Sputnik News article headlined “Russia Reaffirms Readiness to Cooperate With Free Syrian Army.”

A couple of weeks later, the campaign was turned up a notch, when Russian state media released the information cited at the start of this article, about Fahd al-Masri’s overtures to the Kremlin, his proposal for a political conference in Cairo, and the mysterious FSA delegation in Moscow.

In other words, the meeting with Fahd al-Masri, Paul Vallely, and Naji Najjar has suddenly become part of the Russian government’s claims of a budding relationship with the FSA. But who are they and in what way could they represent the FSA?

Before we answer that question, let’s first step back and define what we mean by “FSA.”

A Brief History of the Free Syrian Armies

The Syrian insurgent movement has always been composed of many different factions. Today, there is about ten or twenty larger organizations, but most of them remain regionally focused and they are continually fragmenting on the fringes, with additional hundreds of smaller rebel bands drifting and out of local alliances.

Many of these groups refer to themselves as part of the FSA, and when the United States and other Western governments provide support to the rebels, they also talk about aiding the FSA. Much of the media has thrown the FSA term around for years, only rarely trying to clarify what’s meant by it except to say that the FSA is a “moderate rebel group” or a “loosely aligned movement” or some such. The confusion stems from the fact that there is no straightforward definition and that many different people, groups, and countries use the word “FSA” to apply to many different things.

The concept of a “Free Syrian Army” first emerged in July 2011, when a “Supreme Command for the Free Syrian Army” was launched by Syrian military defectors in Turkey. Their highest-ranking member, Colonel Riad al-Asaad, took the title of FSA Supreme Commander. Col. Asaad’s FSA group was backed by Turkey and others in order to channel funds to local rebels and create a more cohesive insurgency—one that would be able to topple Assad by some combination of disciplined military action and negotiation. This strategy failed. The insurgency remained chaotically divided, and Col. Asaad’s FSA never evolved far beyond the role of “a fax machine in Turkey,” pouring out press releases in which it claimed credit for attacks staged by others.

Yet, the FSA was wildly successful as a branding operation. The name and the associated logotype caught on among the rebels and is still in widespread use today. It is typically used to refer to those rebels that accept Western and/or Gulf State support, publicly profess some level of belief in democracy and Syrian nationalism  (as  opposed to pan-Islamism), and maintain a healthy distance from al-Qaeda.

Since the creation of Col. Asaad’s original outfit, and its swift decline, there have been repeated foreign-backed attempts to create a new central node for the rebellion, or at least for its more pragmatic and moderate factions. Most of these projects have used the FSA brand.

In December 2012, several countries pooled their efforts to set up something called the General Staff, which had an appended Supreme Military Council. This evolved into the “new FSA,” under the leadership of Brigadier General Salim Idriss. While Idriss’s FSA command would become far more successful than previous unification attempts, it remained a virtual army at best—a kind of political superstructure resting on top of a Gulf Arab-Western-Turkish funding stream for selected Syrian factions, which lacked any central control over them. After limping along for a year and a half, this version of the FSA finally imploded in 2014.

Successive attempts to rebuild this type of central FSA leadership have fizzled. Most recently, we’ve seen the Revolutionary Command Council set up in December 2014 and the reincarnated FSA Supreme Military Council of July 2015. Another project, the FSA High Command , is backed by the exile opposition, but it remains a work in progress. The list will surely continue to grow.

Behind the Scenes: MOM and MOC

The failure to produce an official FSA leadership does not mean that there are no material structures connecting these segments of the insurgency. Thousands of rebel fighters have by now been vetted, trained, and approved for material support via two Military Operations Centers, which feed the insurgency from across the Turkish and Jordanian borders. The one in Turkey is colloquially known as the MOM, for Müşterek Operasyon Merkezi, while its Jordanian counterpart is called the MOC, after its English initials.

Apart from Turkey and Jordan, these centers gather representatives of the United States, Saudi Arabia, France, and a bunch of other governments. Their role is to coordinate and supervise the flow of arms and ammunition to a select number of rebel groups. Foreign intelligence services, chief among them the CIA, collaborate through these centers to pick which groups should be eligible for support. They will not receive a stamp of approval until their members have been vetted for suspicious contacts, declared that they will stay away from alliances with al-Qaeda, and showed some interest in a negotiated solution to the conflict. The groups involved enjoy different levels of trust and approval, but many also receive “unofficial” support on the side from, for example, Turkey, Qatar, or Saudi Arabia, or various private funders.

So far, this arrangement has been accepted by something like a hundred rebel factions all in all, although a head count is complicated by the fact that they are often folded into overlapping regional umbrellas. While each faction is typically quite small and few of them enjoy national name recognition, they collectively make up a fairly significant segment of the armed opposition. In southern Syria, MOC-funded groups seem to account for a majority of the insurgency. The northern MOM-backed factions enjoy less influence than their southern counterparts, but they are still a considerable force around Aleppo, and some have used U.S.-manufactured missiles to establish themselves in an important niche role as anti-tank units in the Idleb-Hama region.

These groups are what the U.S. government typically refers to when it talks about “the FSA” and there is indeed a very considerable overlap between MOM/MOC-backed factions and factions that self-designate as “FSA.” This crude definition (MOM + MOC = FSA) is also increasingly used by the Syrian exile opposition, the rebels themselves, and others who follow this conflict.

All Those Other People Who Call Themselves “FSA”

Still, there isn’t a perfect correspondence. Anyone can raise an FSA flag without having the approval of the MOM/MOC structure. Some factions do so because they see it as a way to underline their moderate nature and curry favor with foreign funders. Others claim the FSA heritage as part of their revolutionary identity, and say that it shouldn’t be reserved for foreign-backed factions. Conversely, there are MOM/MOC backed factions that do not use the FSA name or symbols, or at least do so very infrequently. This is typically because they previously rejected the FSA brand and developed their own political identity, typically along Islamist ideological lines, and now prefer to maintain that distinction even after being coopted into the MOM/MOC network.

Many groups mean different things when referring to the FSA and use the term opportunistically. For example, when nearly fifty rebel groups recently issued a statement on behalf of the FSA, the signatories included many well-known MOM/MOC affiliates, but also the Islam Army, an Islamist faction that does not normally use FSA insignia and often rejected the label.

In northeastern Syria, there is also a number of self-identified FSA groups that fight the Islamic State alongside the American-backed Kurdish YPG militia. The YPG, in turn, is a front for the pan-Kurdish PKK movement, which has excellent working relations with Moscow. These “FSA” groups are mostly small Arab splinter factions or tribal groups that have been coopted by the PKK to provide extra manpower and put a multi-ethnic face on what is in reality a wholly Kurdish-run project. Some of them also call for Russian intervention, and a prominent Syrian rebel leader who works for a MOC-backed group has claimed that these Kurdish-backed factions are responsible for some of the chatter about “the FSA” visiting Moscow. (Perhaps in connection with some small service to the PKK?)

Then, there are the exiles. The decaying remains of former “FSA leaderships” cover the hotel lobbies of southern Turkey like jellyfish on a shore. Hundreds of defected Syrian military officers still whirl around the exile circuit and most seem to consider themselves to be part of the FSA in some fashion. Some will happily appear in the media as “FSA members,” “FSA advisers,” or even “FSA commanders,” whatever their actual relationship to the insurgency on the ground. Among them, there are indeed those who work closely with the MOM/MOC or its associated factions, but others claim the mantle merely by virtue of past association with some long-since collapsed FSA unity project, often dating back to the pre-Idriss era. For example, the FSA brand’s original inventor in 2011, Col. Riad al-Asaad, still toils in obscurity in Turkey as one of several self-declared “supreme commanders of the FSA.”

In other words, the term “FSA” can mean a great many things. If it is to have any sort of substance and be relevant to the war in Syria these days, it means a rebel group backed by the MOM/MOC structure. Nine out of ten times that you hear about “the FSA” having done something on the Syrian battlefield, it means those groups. But among the groups actually fighting in Syria, there are also the PKK-backed FSA groups and various other claimants, particularly among the exiled officers. Some of their now-defunct unity projects were at one point genuinely representative of armed groups on the ground, while others were ephemeral creatures of Facebook.

As for Fahd al-Masri, he ran one of the latter.

Meet Mr. Masri

The name Fahd al-Masri first came to my attention around six or seven years ago, when I was writing a book on the Syrian opposition. Born in the Midan Quarter of Damascus, he had left Syria in the mid-1990s and ended up in Paris, where he sought work as a journalist. In 1996, he worked for about six months as a technician at the Arab News Network, a satellite channel controlled by Refaat al-Assad, Bashar’s exiled uncle (who recently visited Moscow). When I ask him about this, Masri tells me that he simply needed a job and that he does not support a “murderer” like Refaat al-Assad. He was also seen as close to Syria’s former Vice President Abdelhalim Khaddam, who, after being kicked out of office by Bashar al-Assad in 2005, had moved to Paris and begun to bankroll opposition activity. By the end of the 00s, Masri was hosting a talkshow on Barada TV, a London-based anti-Assad satellite station (which was covertly funded by the U.S. State Department). He returned to Paris in late 2010 or early 2011.

All in all, Fahd al-Masri was a minor figure at the time—a small shard of Syria’s great tragedy, as one of tens of thousands of political émigrés huddled around Europe and the Middle East, human byproducts of the Assad family’s machinery of fear, wealth, and power.

With the advent of the Syrian uprising in 2011, Fahd al-Masri’s stature began to grow. Media outlets all over the world began a frantic search for representatives of the budding insurgency in Syria, but only a small number of long-time correspondents, nerds, and academics seemed to have any idea about who was who in the Syrian opposition. At the same time, the Assad government, many different opposition groups, regional intelligence services, and what at times appeared to be a global army of narcissists were all jostling to get in front of the cameras. The results were confusing, at times tragic, and occasionally hilarious—such as the media uproar over Mohammed Rahhal’s 2011 declaration of war, or the Gay Girl in Damascus who turned out to be a straight man in Edinburgh.

Into this chaos stepped Fahd al-Masri. As early as August 2011—when most of the mainstream political opposition still clung to nationalist-democratic rhetoric and peaceful protest—he would appear on al-Arabiya from Paris to demand a foreign intervention in Syria. He didn’t represent any known activist group or political party, but some combination of availability and incendiary statements still made him a sought-after commentator.

The FSA Joint Command

Masri has told me that in late 2011, he promoted an aspiring rebel leadership known as the FSA Supreme Military Council, which was headed by Brigadier General Mustafa al-Sheikh. Briefly considered a Saudi favorite, Sheikh’s group fizzled in mid-2012 and he later went into exile in Sweden. But by that time Masri, who does not appear to have had any official link to Sheikh’s group, had already moved on. In this period, “[h]e tried to build himself up as FSA spokesman, but it didn’t work out,” says a person who has worked with Masri. “The officers he had allied himself to all flopped.”

In March 2012, Masri was invited to the founding congress of a new rebel unity project, the FSA Joint Command of Colonel Qasem Saadeddine. Masri then began to appear as the FSA Joint Command’s media spokesperson, although it is not clear to me whether this was approved by the group itself. Some have claimed that Col. Saadeddine’s group fired him after only a week. While Masri disputes that, he certainly seems to have drifted away from the rest of the leadership at some point.

As a military coalition, the FSA Joint Command soon declined into irrelevance, but not before endowing Col. Saadeddine with name recognition and useful foreign contacts, which he would later trade in for a position in Salim Idriss’s Western-endorsed FSA network.

By that time, the FSA Joint Command had been forgotten by everyone—except its erstwhile spokesperson. In an e-mail to me, Masri says the creation of the Idriss-led FSA in December 2012 was part  of a plot by the “terrorist Muslim Brotherhood” to “gain hegemony over the FSA” and insists that many officers involved with the FSA Joint Command had refused to accept its dissolution. Therefore, he says, “we continued our work despite the withdrawal of Col. Qasem Saadeddine and others.”

In reality, this version of the FSA Joint Command seems to have consisted of Fahd al-Masri alone. The Idriss-led FSA and the FSA-branded rebel factions inside Syria would invite journalists to travel with their troops and they often uploaded videos from the battlefield. Masri’s own FSA Joint Command could produce no such evidence. Though Masri often hinted that he represented tens of thousands of military defectors on the battlefields in Syria, “security reasons” prevented him from naming them.

Instead, the FSA Joint Command remained restricted to a ghost-like virtual existence, maintained by the generous distribution of online statements. Every week or so, people interested in Syria would receive a formal-looking Arabic-language communiqué in their mailbox, signed by Fahd al-Masri, who called himself head of media relations for the FSA Joint Command. The content was always savory stuff.

Masri would often call for foreign intervention—although he later changed his mind—or rail against Islamists and the Muslim Brotherhood. In February 2014, for example, he announced that the FSA Joint Command had declared the Brotherhood a terrorist organization and would arrest any member who dared set foot in Syria. On other occasions, the FSA Joint Command would share secret intelligence about chemical weapons, “revealing” that Assad had smuggled them to Hezbollah in Lebanon. More and more often, Masri would condemn the internationally recognized opposition bodies, such Idriss’s FSA leadership, the Syrian National Council, the National Coalition, and its Turkey-based exile government. These statements would soon be the source of innumerable media reports about opposition disunity and “splits in the FSA.” Typically, some rebel commander in Turkey or Syria would be quoted saying this or that, only to be swiftly contradicted by “another FSA representative,” namely Fahd al-Masri.

Some of his critics suspect Masri of working on behalf of a third party, though no one seems sure of exactly which one that would be. “Knowing Fahd, he doesn’t do anything for free,” says the person who once worked with Masri. “He’s not crazy, just a conman, a chancer. There’s many of them in the Syrian opposition.”

When asked about his sources of funding, in late 2013, Fahd al-Masri told me that he funds his activism from his own pocket, although he added that hosting organizations or governments sometimes pay travel and accommodation for conference visits. This may very well be true, since Masri’s activism cannot have been very expensive: a Hotmail account is free to register and media appearances will often come with a small honorarium. However, Masri also told me that certain ”well-known Syrian citizens” and ”Syrian friends who believe in the importance of what I do” have helped him and his family financially, enabling him to work full time for the Syrian revolution. He did not name them.

Spokesperson of the Revolution

Even though Masri’s FSA communiqués had at most a coincidental relationship to reality, journalists ate them up like tabbouleh. Soon, FSA Joint Command Media Director Fahd al-Masri had become one of the most frequently employed talking heads of the war—the voice of the Syrian revolution, or perhaps its ventriloquist.

In the past few years, he has appeared as a representative of the FSA, or the opposition more generally, on any number of Arabic- and French-language talkshows and newscasts. TV channels include the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya, Qatar’s Aljazeera, Russia Today, the British BBC, American channels like NBC News, Fox News, and al-Hurra, the Colombia-based NTN24, Turkey’s TRT, France24 and TF1 in his own country of residence, Egypt’s ONTV, and Lebanon-based channels like al-Mayadin, OTV, and MTV, as well as religious channels like al-Safa… and the list goes on.

He has been a frequent source for the printed press, too. Whether pulled from his e-mailed communiqués, copied off newswires, or extracted through interviews, Fahd al-Masri’s many colorful declarations and revelations have found their way into the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, USA Today, the Daily Star, al-Ahram and al-Ahram Weekly, al-Sharq al-Awsat, al-Quds al-Arabi, al-Hayat, Haaretz, the Times of Israel, the Jordan Times, Kommersant, Izvestia, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Le Monde, Le Figaro, El Mundo, the Guardian, the Times, the Independent, and many other newspapers.

International officials would also occasionally try to bring the FSA Joint Command into their political schemes and peace processes, such as when UN peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi met Fahd al-Masri in Paris in August 2012.

By October 2013, Idriss’s FSA General Staff had grown so frustrated that it issued an official statement in which it denied any connection to Masri. This did nothing to clear up the confusion—instead, it led to garbled reports about Idriss having fired his longtime media spokesperson. Masri’s FSA Joint Command hit back by calling for Idriss to be arrested, which led to another round of reports about splits in the FSA. A few months later, Masri appeared on Lebanese television to announce a startling discovery: information had emerged to prove that Salim Idriss’s leadership was infiltrated by Hezbollah.

And on it went.

From the FSA Joint Command to the National Salvation Group

Then all of a sudden, Fahd al-Masri dropped out of the FSA representation business. What happened isn’t clear—and Masri says it was a voluntary decision—but perhaps he had finally taken his game too far. Certainly, there must be downsides to provoking an armed guerrilla movement backed by the government on whose territory you reside.

On March 31, 2014, the FSA Joint Command issued one final grandiloquent statement entitled “To Whom It May Concern,” in which Fahd al-Masri announced his decision to “cease my voluntary work in the Central Media Administration of the FSA Joint Command” and return to his previous vocation as an independent activist. Since then, nothing more has been heard of the FSA Joint Command.

And yet, Masris’ e-mailed statements kept coming. In the first few months, they were signed only by himself, as an individual activist, but institutional affiliations soon began to crawl back onto the letterhead. In summer 2014, he represented a “Preparatory Committee for the Creation of the Independent National Commission for Inspection, Oversight, Accountability, and the Struggle Against Corruption,” which kept up the attacks on other opposition movements. Then came the “Center for Strategic, Military, and Security Studies in Syria,” which has, among other things, been considered a reliable source on the Islamic State by the Daily Mail.

Sometime in late 2014, Masri also launched a “Project for National Salvation,” which then reconstituted itself as “the National Salvation Group in Syria.” It portrays itself as a broad political umbrella for Syrians on the inside and in the diaspora. But just like the now-vanished FSA Joint Command and the other groups mentioned above, the National Salvation Group only seems to exist in the form of statements from its coordinator, Fahd al-Masri.

Masri’s Own Version

In Masri’s view, he has done nothing wrong and has not deliberately misled anyone. If you look closely at what he has been saying, he has in fact never claimed to represent any political or military body except those listed above, which are of his own invention. When I asked him about this in late 2013, he responded (swiftly and professionally) with a frank admission that he had absolutely no ties to the internationally recognized FSA leadership of Salim Idriss; indeed, he condemned Idriss and his men as “blood merchants” and tools of foreign conspiracies. Still, he insisted that he had every right to represent the FSA as a concept and argued that any confusion that might result from this would be entirely in the eye of the beholder:

I was among the first who spoke in the name of the FSA, before Idriss’s General Staff was formed, so I don’t need the approval of either Salim Idriss or his General Staff. I am one of the founders of the FSA Joint Command and my role is in leading the media war on the regime.

Masri stuck to his guns when I contacted him again in October 2015, a year and a half after he terminated his FSA Joint Command:

I know myself and my history in opposing the regime well, and I know my role in supporting the revolution and the FSA. Thus, it doesn’t matter to me what this person or that person may say and I have no need to defend myself, because my history is well known. […]

The FSA is not a regular military institution that could issue an authorization for this or that party [to speak on its behalf]. The FSA is a national and revolutionary condition and I was one of its founders, or a leadership for the FSA. [However,] I announced more than a year ago that I have stopped my work as media spokesperson for the FSA, as a protest against the regional and international powers that restrict support to the FSA in favor of Islamic and extremist organizations.

When I asked about the recurring rumors about him leading FSA delegations to Moscow—they have made the rounds many times, including winter 2013, summer 2015, and again in October 2015—Masri denies ever having visited Moscow. He also made a clarification that puts a rather different spin on the stories peddled by Russian state media:

When I invited Russia to a meeting in Cairo, I didn’t issue the invitation in the name of the FSA and I didn’t claim to represent the FSA or any of its factions. Rather, I spoke in the name of the National Salvation Group in Syria, of which I am a representative.

What to make of this is up to you. I cannot claim to know anything about Fahd al-Masri’s rationale for doing what he does and it is possible that his intentions are perfectly sincere. But, to me, it seems perfectly clear that he cannot be considered a spokesperson for the insurgency on the ground in Syria, or any part of it. It is equally clear that this will be obvious to anyone who spends a moment researching the matter. Indeed, most of the major news organizations that cover Syria no longer pay any heed to his statements, even if they have reported them at some point in the past.

Regarding his interactions with the Russians, however, Fahd al-Masri seems to be telling the truth. When reviewing the statements and media reports of the past few weeks, it becomes clear that it is the Russian side that has consistently sought to portray Masri as a representative and/or founding member of the FSA. Even though Masri tries to highlight his own National Salvation Group, Kremlin-friendly media sources invariably use his statements to promote the Russian government’s own narrative of a Moscow-FSA rapprochement.

The Rest of the October 7 Troika

Fahd al-Masri was not alone in his meeting with Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov. He was flanked by two other persons, supposedly invited to discuss Russia-FSA connections: former U.S. Major General Paul E. Vallely and his Lebanese associate Naji Najjar. When asked about these two individuals, Masri says he was introduced to Vallely through Najjar, whom he met in Paris around two months ago.

Paul E. Vallely is indeed a former U.S. major general, as advertised, but with a strong emphasis on “former.” His current role is as a political commentator on the fringes of American conservatism. Having left the military nearly 25 years ago, Vallely now runs “a network of patriotic Americans” called Stand Up America, which seems to envisage itself as a foreign policy arm of the Tea Party movement. Its website features a heady mixture of military news, Muslim-baiting, and conspiracy theories. To provide some indication of his place on the political spectrum, Vallely has claimed in a radio interview that the “corrupt and treasonous” Barack Obama was illegally installed as president with the aid of billionaire George Soros and a faked birth certificate, in order to make the United States a socialist country.

Najjar is a former member of the Lebanese Forces, a right-wing Christian group in Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war, and claims to have been an intelligence official of some sort. Since the end of the civil war, he has been involved with a variety Lebanese-Christian, anti-Assad, and pro-Israel groups. Among other things, he apparently ran a group that defended the 1982 massacre of Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila and advocated against the war crimes prosecution of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Najjar now appears to be Vallely’s link to Syria, through an amazingly shady entrepreneurial entity called the Syria Opposition Liaison Group, which claims to be involved in Syrian politics and hostage negotiations. To what extent this is true, I don’t know.

In 2013, Vallely and Najjar traveled into northern Syria, shook hands with a lot of rebels, and met with Col. Riad al-Asaad, the man who first came up with the FSA name in July 2011. It must have been an interesting trip and it has provided plenty of fodder for online conspiracy theorists, but this little publicity stunt does not indicate that either of them could serve as a useful link to today’s real-world FSA insurgents, namely those backed by MOM and MOC. In other words, while Vallely and Najjar have enough curious political connections to make a LaRouchie weep with joy, neither they nor Masri ever commanded a single fighter inside Syria.

Yet, there they are, at the center of Russian public diplomacy. In fact, according to Masri (who has repeated this story to me personally, in an e-mailed statement, and on Turkish television), the Russians were sufficiently impressed by the meeting with Bogdanov to immediately ask for a follow-up session. The next day, he says, “we received a phone call from a Russian military official who asked for an urgent meeting at the request of the Russian minister of defense. We accepted the invitation and gathered in Paris in a meeting that lasted for nearly three hours.”

Mahmoud al-Effendi and the Abu Dhabi Meeting

The latest bid, on November 5, is the announcement via Russian state media of a meeting in Abu Dhabi. It will supposedly bring together ”28 brigades of the FSA in the suburbs of Damascus, Qunaitra, Hama and the western suburb of Homs, as well as the northern front from the suburbs of Aleppo and Idlib with the representatives of the Russian Foreign Ministry and the Russian  Defense Ministry” to discuss how these groups can negotiate a separate peace with the Syrian government and establish a permanent collaboration with Russia.

The source of this amazing piece of information was the meeting’s official coordinator, Mahmoud al-Effendi, who doubles as head of “the Popular Diplomacy Movement.” Little known in Syrian dissident circles, Effendi has trundled around the exile opposition for a while and most recently popped up in Astana, Kazakhstan, at an event called by a number of ostensible Syrian opposition groups.

In fact, the Astana meetings (there have been two so far) are political theatre directed from Moscow and/or Damascus. The attendees are mostly elderly leftists who seek a compromise with Assad based on limited reforms. Some of them are surely sincere, but others are essentially proxies of the Russian or Syrian intelligence services. They are estranged from most of the rest of the opposition and have no relation at all to the insurgency raging on the ground in Syria. Any actual FSA brigade that they encountered would be more likely to shoot them than to accept their conference invitations.

As for the “Popular Diplomacy Movement,” it seems to be another single-member group (but I shall generously grant the possibility of a handful more) and whatever Effendi’s real role is, he is certainly not someone who can mobilize “28 brigades” of the Syrian guerrilla in service of Russian diplomacy.

While a few rebel factions apparently responded to the initial Russian approaches, only to then cut off contacts, the vast majority reject the Russian entreaties out of hand. On hearing the reports about Effendi’s upcoming Abu Dhabi meeting, FSA-branded groups immediately began to deny, condemn, and ridicule these claims. On November 6, most of the main rebel factions inside Syria—nearly fifty, all in all— issued a joint statement in the name of the FSA, in which they denied their participation and condemning the Russian operations in Syria. (Most of the groups that did not sign the statements were Islamist and jihadi factions like Ahrar al-Sham, the Nusra Front, and others, who have never referred to themselves as FSA groups.)

A meeting in Abu Dhabi could very well take place anyway. It shouldn’t be that hard for Russia to buy over a commander or two, and then pad out the roster with minor non-MOM/MOC factions in search of funding, pseudo-FSA groups, PKK clients, various ex-rebels turned by Assad’s intelligence services, some oddballs-in-exile, and any number of disgruntled military defectors. Such a group could certainly be relied on to generate more headlines about Russia meeting with the FSA, but what it couldn’t do is to speak for any meaningful number of armed insurgents inside Syria.

Who Is Using Whom?

At this point, it should be obvious that someone is being conned, but I’m still not quite sure about who is is using whom. The deeper you dig into the connections between Russia and fringe figures in the Syrian diaspora, the more bizarre it gets; a world halfway between Joseph Conrad and Thomas Pynchon, only without the redeeming qualities of style and credible characters.

So what is actually going on here? I see two options.

Either we must believe that the Russian government, at cabinet level and despite the best efforts of SVR and GRU intelligence, is so grossly uneducated about Syrian politics that it would perceive Masri, Vallely, Najjar, the little PKK-backed Arab groups, or  Effendi as credible links to the mainstream American-backed FSA, whatever the Russians may imagine that to be. If so, we would now be witnessing the government of Russia being played by a variety of Syrian, American, and Lebanese political entrepreneurs and charlatans, with the Kremlin a hapless victim of its own famously childlike innocence and wide-eyed trust in humanity’s best intentions.

The alternative, because fortunately there is an alternative, is to imagine this as a diversionary trick on the part of the Russians—a bit of political Maskirovka, or camouflage, in which Bogdanov takes time off from an otherwise busy schedule to talk to people whose influence in Syria he knows to be zero, because it is zero. By bestowing top-level attention on otherwise unimportant interlocutors, the Kremlin has produced the raw material that its propaganda factory needs to push products onto the Syrian rumor market.

Why?

Feeding the media with rumors, hints, and disconnected bits of genuine information about a Russian-FSA connection serves the Kremlin’s political agenda in two ways:

First, it tricks some people into believing that Russia is skillfully peeling away Syrian allies from the USA. It will mostly be people who know nothing about the politics of the Syrian insurgency, but then again, that’s most people.

Secondly, and no less important, Russia’s rivals cannot protest Moscow’s fraudulent claims without engaging in a debate about who actually should represent the FSA in talks with Assad, if it shouldn’t be Masri, Effendi, or the other candidates suggested by Moscow. Since there is no central FSA leadership and no consensus on which groups should be labeled “FSA,” that’s like trying to nail jelly to a wall.

It is a problem partly of the Americans’ own making. Indeed, one could say that the opposition’s backers are now falling victim to their own propaganda. For years, officials in the US, Europe, Turkey, and the Arab World have been promoting ”the moderate FSA” or even “the secular FSA” as Syria’s great hope for the future, without ever arriving at a better explanation of what that means than ”any damned armed group in Syria that we can work with.” It is undoubtedly a definition, of a kind, but how do you sell it to the general public? What do you do when journalists, voters, or even congressmen start to ask questions about who, exactly, is at the receiving end of all this taxpayers’ money?

The Russian government has now started to exploit this deliberately engineered ambiguity for its own purposes. By rebranding their own allies and all kinds of random exiles as “FSA representatives,” they are trying to wring a very useful fiction out of the hands of their enemies or, failing that, to destroy it by adding to the confusion.

As a poker-faced Bogdanov recently put it when discussing whether the FSA should be part of hypothetical future peace talks:

In general, we support their participation as a structure. We do not yet understand who will represent it. We are waiting for them to manifest more clearly or for our partners who maintain relations with the Free Syrian Army to tell us.

Some might call this diplomacy. I call it elite-level trolling.

• Aron Lund, editor of Syria in Crisis

The post Media Maskirovka: Russia and the Free Syrian Army appeared first on Syria Comment.

Sophie Shevardnadze of RT interviews Joshua Landis on Russian TV

Joshua Landis

The following written version is a “cleaned” up “edited” version of my interview. I edited it for grammar, diction and clarity. None of the arguments made in the video (linked below) are missing or altered.

Sophie Shevardnadze: Professor Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East studies at the University of Oklahoma, and influential analyst on Syria, welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us. Professor, President Obama is sending up to 50 SpecOps forces to Syria to coordinate the fight against the Islamic State. Fifty people is not a lot of help. What’s he hoping to change in the grand course of things? Is there a hidden point to this move?

JL: I think President Obama is trying to respond to his critics, more than anything else. 1. One set of critics are the 50 intelligence analysts who complained a month ago that the administration was spinning intelligence to suggest that the U.S. was winning the war against ISIS when it was not. 2, The Iraqis have been asking the Russians to help them bomb ISIS. They complain that the US isn’t doing enough. And 3, U.S. allies, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, have complained that Washington isn’t helping them enough. They complain that the reason Russia is moving into Syria is because the US has left a vacuum. So, Obama is inserting extra troops to satisfy his critics. At the same time, the troops are small enough in number to avoid getting the U.S. sucked into a third Middle Eastern war.

SS: Ok, but doesn’t that number strike you as not even symbolic? Fifty people? I mean, it’s pretty obvious that 50 people can’t really do anything…

JL: Well, I’m not sure they can’t do anything. We’ve seen some important actions by Special Forces. They liberated a bunch of captives in Iraq. In Syria, they killed Abu Sayyaf, the economic brains of ISIS, and captured his wife along with his computers which provided important information about ISIS. They can make a difference, but you are right; no one believes they will change the course of events in any significant way. They are not meant to defeat ISIS.

SS: Okay. 75% of American sorties in the anti-ISIS campaign come back without having fired. And that’s according to Senator John McCain. Should the U.S. air effort be more intense?

JL: Well, obviously, the US is trying not to kill innocent Syrians. They’re very worried about collateral damage. It is important to understand that the U.S. is not trying to destroy ISIS but to contain it and keep it weak enough so that it cannot kill Americans or destabilize Jordan and its neighbors. I think President Obama has largely abandoned the notion that he’s going to destroy ISIS. He is pursing a very narrow counter-terrorism campaign. Of course, many people expect them to destroy ISIS, because he said he would destroy it – but immediately after saying those words, he began to say “well, it’s going to take many years.”

SS: So, Iran has joined Syrian peace talks, sitting down with Saudi Arabia and the U.S. The two were staunch opponents of Iran taking part in the talks. So, what has changed?

JL: The U.S. wanted Iran at the table. Everybody knows that Iran is important. It has thousands of troops in Syria and funds Syria to the tune of billions of dollars. Hezbollah is also in Syria at Iran’s urging, to a certain degree. Iran is a key player. No peace agreement can stick without Iran. The U.S. understands that. And, in some respects, the Russia incursion in Syria has given cover for Secretary of State Kerry and President Obama to revise some of their past policies toward Syria.

SS: Neither the Syrian regime, nor the opposition were invited to peace talks. Why not? Do powers like Iran and Saudi Arabia have more control over the situation in Syria than Syrians themselves at this point?

JL: Well, that’s a very good question: everybody was been scratching their heads about the absence of Syrians at the talks. But it would be very difficult to get Syrians to the peace talks. Assad will not attend so long as the US and coalition members are demanding that he step down. The opposition is too fragmented and numerous. There are a thousand five hundred militias, according to the CIA. Of course, there are about 20-30 that are big, important militias, but they refuse to talk to Assad. So, if one waited for Syrians to attend, one would have to wait until hell froze over. I think that the Great Powers made the logical decision that “we’re going to meet anyway.” Moreover, all combatants in Syria depend almost entirely on outside powers for arms and money. If the powers could agree to stop sending arms into Syria, it would result in a dramatic decrease in the amount of people being killed. Syrians are so weak and poor that external powers, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia can make a tremendous difference even if they meet without Syrians.

SS: Assad has agreed to take part in early elections – can Syria in its current state hold the vote? Can there be a vote before Islamic State is beaten?

JL: First, Syria is in such terrible physical state and so many people have been forced from their homes or left the country that it would be almost impossible to have fair elections. Secondly, and more importantly perhaps, it is hard for anyone to believe that the outcome would be different from the elections held in the past 45 years? All ended up with a 99% vote for the President. There’s such distrust between all sides. Nobody puts much faith in the idea of elections. Most people understand that lurking beneath the question of elections is another question: “Can the Assad regime stay or not?” Now that Russia has intervened on the side of Assad, it’s quite clear the Assad regime is staying and will stay. How the West is going to accommodate itself to this fact is not yet clear.

SS: The Western-backed FSA commander Ahmad Sa’oud told AP: “What we care about is Assad leaving, not turning this from a war against the regime to a war against terrorism”. So, they don’t really care about the fight against Islamic State as well…

JL: You’re right. Most actors in Syria have other priorities besides destroying the Islamic State. Almost all rebel groups insist on destroying Assad before the Islamic State. They refuse to be drawn into what they call a “sahwa.” They do not want to become “agents of America” and so forth. The vast majority want nothing to do with the fight against ISIS before they have defeated Assad. Many members of the Coalition that are fighting ISIS also have other priorities. That is a big problem for both for the Russians and for the U.S. Indeed, the US has other priorities as well. We saw in Palmyra, Deir ez-Zor and elsewhere, the US would not attack ISIS if it believed Assad and his military would benefit. It preferred to have ISIS take Palmyra than to be seen to be helping Assad.

SS: So, why does the West keep supporting those rebels? For the West it’s not a fight about removing Assad rather than fighting Islamic State.

JL: This is true, but many top US generals, like the Syrian opposition, continue to insist that Assad is the magnet drawing ISIS into Syria and thus must be destroyed first. This argument makes little sense. After all, when did Al-Qaeda pour into Iraq? Only after Saddam was deposed and the Americans ruled the country. I don’t think any of the US generals who now claim that Assad must be destroyed in order to defeat ISIS would also argue that America had to be destroyed in Iraq in order to rid it of al-Qaida. If fact the US is building up the Iranian supported Shiite regime in Iraq to destroy ISIS, whereas it is seeking to destroy the Iranian backed “Shiite” regime in Damascus in the name of destroying ISIS. The American policy in Iraq is to kill al-Qaida not to accommodate it.

I think everyone can agree that Al-Qaeda spread in Iraq because the state was destroyed and insecurity prevailed. The same is true in Syria. When Assad pulled his army out of the East, al-Qaida and other forms of Islamic extremism spread. ISIS spreads where states fail.

The U.S. does not use the same logic in Syria that it uses in Iraq. This is simply part of the political landscape in America. You need to understand that the U.S. has two different metrics – one for Iraq and one for Syria.

SS: Does the U.S. have enough influence over the opposition they’re backing to make them agree to a political process in Syria?

JL: No. That’s the short answer.

SS: So people who represent the opposition in peace talks, are they controlling forces on the ground?

JL: No, they’re not. The strongest militias in Syria are the more extreme and more Salafist militias. The Islamists have a real ideology to sell; they are the militias who have national reach and representation in all provinces of Syria. The US backs the weakest militias in Syria. They are the non-ideological militias and are extremely local. For the most part, they are composed of clan and tribal leaders. They may hold sway over a village or two; they may command a thousand men, perhaps two thousand, but not more than that. The Islamic militants, such as Al-Qaeda, Ahrar ash-Sham, ISIS and the Islamic Army, have purchase over a broad segment of Syrian society that stretches from north to south. The US refuses to deal with Islamist militias. It insists on dealing only with the weaker ones, which operate with some independence, but in many cases have to defer to the tougher and stronger Islamist militias that hold sway in most parts of Syria.

The US policy of trying to bring forward moderate militias has failed three different times. It was never likely to succeed. I think Obama was correct not to go down the road of betting on the moderates. The US would have gotten stuck in a third Middle Eastern war. It would be committed to the impossible policy of making them win.  Those that argue that the US squandered its opportunity to train, arm and finance moderates to destroy both Assad and Jihadist militias delude themselves. The US is at a loss in Syria now that the policy of arming moderates has failed. Russians have an opportunity to shape the Syrian political landscape because of America’s confusion.

The US will not like what Russian is doing, but it will stand by without opposing Russia too much. We will see if the Syrian army has enough oomph, enough strength to do the things that it claims to be able to do, such as take Aleppo and Idlib. Right now, Russia is confident, the Syrian authorities are confident; they believe that they can win. But I think people in the U.S., the top brass, are thinking that Russia will fail. Obama explained that he believes Russia will be sucked into the Syrian swamp. Evidently Saudi and others are pumping in more TOWs and advanced weapons to ensure Russia does get sucked into a swamp. They will ensure that Assad doesn’t win; it should be easy. U.S. policy makers are betting that in a year’s time, or even less, Russia and Assad will come back to them on bended knee. We’ll see what happens. Of course, in that time, Syria is going to be further brutalized, and a lot more people will be killed.

SS: So, Professor, you were talking about America supporting moderate rebels just before the end of the first part of our program. A CIA veteran Graham Fuller told me that being a moderate and fighting a civil war contradicts itself. When you pick up a gun, that means you’re already not a moderate – what do you think?

JL: Well, there’s a lot of truth in that. None of the militias are taking prisoners. I don’t know what the US uses as its metric for determining moderation, but if human rights is one of the metrics, none of these militias are following anything remotely close to what the United States would consider moderate or acceptable. Separation of church and state? I’m not aware of any militias that call for secularism or separation of church and state as the US does. All want some form of Islamic state – how much is really the measure. I guess, the U.S. is trying to measure how long their beards are and whether they are really committed Salafists or not. America has sided with tribal and clan leaders, as I said before, that are not very ideological. The danger of this policy is that clan leaders are prone to become warlords who will side with anybody so long as they pay and provide arms.

They are more interested in carving out their own little territories to rule. They cannot presume to conquer Damascus or rule the country. They are teaming up with their cousins and other close relatives and friends in order to protect their families and villages. In the south, Jordan and Israel use friendly militias to build buffer zones. They ensure that radicals, such as al-Qaida and ISIS don’t become neighbors. They also provide their sponsors with leverage against Assad. They can hurt Assad when they need to. In the north, Turkey looks to its favored militias to give it leverage in Northern Syria and prevent Kurdish expansion. Turkey’s aim is to prevent the Kurds from joining Kobani to Afrin.

SS: But also, the rebels inside Syria, they haven’t united against Assad. Do they even want to unify?

JL: They claim to want to unify but have failed to do so because they all want to be the leader or “top dog” in their neighborhood. This is the problem with the larger Middle East – it’s very fragmented. Family, clan, and village still predominate over a sense of the nation. Compromise is a bad word that signifies weakness. It is an important reason for the failure of democracy and secular nationalism. Dictators dominate all the Middle Eastern states. Why? Because there are no ideological bonds that unite the people or democratic traditions. The socioeconomic and ideological prerequisites for democracy are weak.

SS: Does that mean that if Assad is gone, the power struggle between these factions will continue and there will be no unity – so we’re going to get another Libya on our hands?

JL: I believe so, yes. The West falsely believes that it can separate the regime from the state. It argues that it can pursue regime-change while simultaneously preserving the state and its institutions. Washington believes it can avoid the chaos it sewed in Iraq. I don’t believe it can. It wasn’t only Bremer that criminalized the Baath Party and disbanded the army. The Shiite politicians he empowered insisted on it. In most Middle Eastern countries, the regimes, for better or worse, have transformed the states into reflections of themselves. They have cannibalized the state. They have crammed their loyalists into every nook and cranny of the national institutions. They had to in order to coup-proof their regimes. They justified it in the name of bringing stability. State institutions are not autonomous.  Westerners believe that because their own state institutions are run by professional civil servants, Middle Eastern states are too. But they aren’t. Political appointees make up the entire edifice. They cannot simply be swapped out. Regime-change for an Arab country is not like administration change in a Western country. Destroying the regime means destroying the state. The price of regime-change is chaos. That is the situation in Syria today. It is the situation almost everywhere in the Middle East. Think of Saudi Arabia without the Saudi family. What would be left of the state?

Were the Russians to place a Sunni on top of the regime, as the US and opposition insist it do, the Sunni leader would have to smash the state and fire tens of thousands of state employees just as was done in Iraq. He would have to assume that they were disloyal and would seek to overthrow him. He would also in all likelihood insist on putting his cousins and those loyal to him in power. This is what happened in Libya, Yemen, and Iraq. This is the Middle Eastern dilemma. This is one reason U.S. led regime-change has failed so miserably. The United States claims the Middle East needs democracy. But democracy has failed, at least democracy promoted by regime-change. Perhaps, this is why so many people in the world today look at Russia and think: “maybe they’re right? Maybe, the Middle East does need strongmen.”

SS: What do you think Russia understands more about Syria that U.S. doesn’t? If you can say it in few words…

JL: Both countries, both Russia and the U.S. look at the Middle East and see themselves. The religion of the United States is democracy; It looks at the Middle East and thinks: “Oh, we can solve its problems by exporting democracy. Freedom will dry up the swamp of angry youth; it will dry up terrorism, which is the product of dictatorship. They believe that Jihadism and Salafism will vanish as merit-driven, young strivers embrace capitalism and self-improvement.

SS: And that never worked – what about Russia?

JL: Well, Russia looks at the Middle East and says: “We need a strong man; there needs to be stability or things will crumble”. Look at Russia at the time of Perestroyka, when insecurity reigned and the country was weak. I think, the President says: “We need somebody strong.” This reaction is wide spread. It is the reaction of all strong men. Turkish President Erdogan used the same logic and slogan to win recent Turkish elections: “You want stability – I am the only one who can save you from chaos!”. Unfortunately, in Syria, the Assads have been intoning this slogan of “Amn wa istiqrar“, “security and stability” for 45 years. Clearly, many Syrians were fed up with it and hoped to break out of this Hobbsian choice. But the situation in Syria has gotten so bad over the last four and a half years that many Syrians are embracing dictatorship again. They want authority over chaos and stability over insecurity, even at the cost of living under dictatorship and giving up political freedoms? We see this in the ISIS territory, where many people claim that they are happier under a cruel authority than no authority at all. They tasted militia chaos, which prevailed before ISIS swept through the region. They learned how dangerous it can be. They may not like ISIS, but they like the security, the institutions, and and semblance of order that ISIS has brought. Assad benefits from the same calculations on his side. He can point to the chaos and absence of state-supplied services that prevail in rebel territory. Of course, he is doing everything he can to ensure rebel chaos. But there is no getting around the fact that the rebels have failed. They could not unify. For the most part, they do not offer more freedoms than Assad does. The successful rebels replicate the authoritarian structures they complained of under Assad. The major difference is that rebels offer authoritarianism with a distinct Sunni-religious stamp, rather than a “secular” or “godless” Alawi stamp.

SS: Al-Qaeda has called on all jihadists to unite against the West and Russia. Are we entering a new phase of a War on Terror? One where Al-Qaeda, Islamic State, and the Taliban all act as one against us and Americans?

JL: Would America openly sided with Russia? It’s hard to see that. Russia has been demonized in America for many years now, and the Cold War is not entirely dead. The Ukraine issue has returned the Cold War mentality to a certain extent. It’s hard to imagine the rebels uniting in Syria. I think it is more likely that they will continue to fragment.

SS: So, tell me something, you’ve just said that there’s probably no chance that America will openly sided with Russia on Syria, but why is it important for American politicians to look tough on Syria? What’s really so beneficial for America? For America to be involved in Syria, why does the U.S. even care?

JL: That’s an excellent question! It’s like asking why the U.S. drove Russia out of Afghanistan. One of the stupidest things America ever did was try to arm up the mujahidiin to drive secular Russia out of Afghanistan. Look what we got: we got Al-Qaeda, we got 9/11, and we got a war in Iraq from which we cannot escape. A lot of our troubles came from trying to drive Russia out of Afghanistan. And you could ask the same question about Syria. We were wrong to do it then, are we wrong to do it now? Syria is not that important to the U.S. so one might ask, “why not let Russia have it.” Of course there are people who think that in the U.S. administration. But it is very difficult for the U.S., which has been used to being the superpower, the Decider, and the policeman of the world, to come to the understanding that it can’t control places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. It is hard to relinquish the role of policeman to someone else, and particularly, to Russia.

SS: What does the U.S. see as a good outcome of the civil war? Who does it want to win? Or maybe it just wants to contain this whole thing for a couple of years to come?

JL: I think the U.S. is after containment. What does America want? America doesn’t know what it wants. It wants “moderates” to win, Syrians who have a secular and democratic vision for Syria. But moderates are not going to win in Syria; most liberals have been scraped off the top of Syrian society and now sit powerless in foreign countries; the moderate militias are too weak. Of course, moderates complain that they are losing because America doesn’t give them money and arms and didn’t stand by its red lines, but chances are, they’re too weak. Moderates have been beaten everywhere you look in the Middle East. God bless Tunisia. Tunisia is the exception that proves the rule. They have been too weak across the Middle East. They could not agree on a common vision of Syria and could not unite. The US gave them opportunities and sought to unite the international community with the Friends of Syria effort. A dizzying array of Syrians, of would be leaders, insisted that they could unite Syrians if only the CIA would give them the money and arms. Anyway, there have been a lot of recriminations. We may never know the truth of America’s squandered moderate opportunity.

Whom does America like today? It does not like any of the three major actors in Syria that could possibly win. They are Assad, Jaysh al-Fateh, and ISIS. The US has placed brutal sanctions on Assad and the 65% of Syrians that he controls; it arms rebels to attack him. It is bombing ISIS, which owns almost 50% of Syrian real estate; and it doesn’t like Jaish al-Fatah, which owns the province of Idlib because it has Al-Qaeda at its core and is dominated by Salafists. Consequently, America doesn’t have an answer. The result is that it will try to keep everybody weak. It doesn’t want Assad to win, but also doesn’t want ISIS or Jaish al-Fateh to win. The U.S. will let the Syrian swamp boil. As one U.S. military analyst joked to me recently: “We should build a stadium around Syria and sell tickets.” It was an attempt at gallows humor that horrified many State Department officials who were also in the room, but it expressed the dark mood and sense of futility many in the Obama administration share.

SS: So, I spoke recently to the former French PM Dominique de Villepin, and he told me that the federalization of Syria once ISIS is defeated may be the answer to its political problems. Do you think it will give Syria a chance?

JL: Each side in Syrian still believes that it can win. As long as they think they can win, they will not come to the peace table and talk about federalism, about ceasefires, and about sharing power. Federalism in this context is really about dividing Syria. Seventy percent of Syrians in a recent poll said that they were against dividing Syria. It will take more time before Syrians are ready to sit down and talk about federalism and dividing authority in Syria. They are still in love with their country as it used to be and cannot accept that it is gone.

SS: Professor, thank you very much for this interview. We’ve been talking to Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, influential commentator on Syria, making sense of the maze of country’s civil war and its effect on the region and beyond. That’s it edition of Sophie&Co, I’ll see you next time.

The Interview on video:

The post “Regime-Change without State Collapse is Impossible in Syria,” Landis Interviewed by RT’s Sophie&Co appeared first on Syria Comment.

A Trip to the “Caliphate,” Oppressive Justice under ISIS
By OMAR AL-WARDI (a pseudonym for a Syrian who was brought up in the Jazeera region of Syria, where ISIS now rules and who has visited the region many times since.)
For Syria Comment, Nov 21, 2015

Translated by Richard Hanania, a political science PhD student at UCLA

Many believe the subjects of the Islamic State (ISIS) live in a constant state of terror. Some may also think that there is no such thing as normal life in these areas. I myself have written a great deal about the crimes and inhumane acts carried out by the group in its territories in Eastern Syria, particularly Raqqa and Dar al-Zour. Indeed, most of what has been written on these topics is true. But most authors have written from a narrow point of view and with one eye closed. Many of these authors haven’t spent time on the ground and only imagine the reality. They accept the stereotypes repeated ad nauseam by the media. I grew up in the Jazeera and have traveled their a number of times since ISIS took over, spending time in different cities in order to explore the attitudes of acquaintances and relatives alike.

Region around al-Bukamal

When I traveled to al-Bukamal the first time since after had been conquered by ISIS in the summer of 2014, I believed that I was traveling to hell. I was terrified. At any moment, I expected to be picked out on my vehicle, manically and tortured. I thought I would never return from ISIS-controlled territory alive. I had internalized the notion that ISIS rules only through terror. I nearly passed out from fear at the checkpoints along the way. But, aside from the natural intensity of security barriers and checkpoints, I did not see a picture that fit with the ISIS stereotypes that I had accepted and which had been propagated by the media.

In al-Bukamal, I found a city that was surprisingly safe; one where individuals are unable to attack others, defraud people in the market, or festoon the streets with cigarette butts. Indeed, the city looked cleaner and seemed healthier than I had ever seen it; smoking has disappeared completely, as did any appearances of people sitting around wasting time in cafes as they used to do. It was a city completely different than the one I knew at the outbreak of the Syrian crisis. A consensus among its inhabitants, which number around 400,000 in the city and its surrounding towns, has emerged regarding ISIS rule. Perhaps the biggest proof of this is the fact that ISIS areas are among the regions of Syria from which young people are least likely to flee to Europe, a point that many seem to have missed. For if life were truly hellacious in this city and its surrounding towns, everyone would have migrated to Germany, Austria, or even Turkey. Yet most people have stayed put; they do not abandon their homes and land.

I disregarded the well-known question: Do you hate ISIS? This is because I already know the answer of why some people hate this group, and the question I had come to answer was how others can love such a bloody and criminal organization, which cuts off heads and drags people in the street after killing and cutting them up. The answers I was given were realistic and coherent, converging on a single theme: ISIS had brought “justice” to the city.

With my own eyes, I saw how the people of al-Bukamal are not as oppressed as they had been in the past. In al-Bukamal most of the people that ISIS have imprisoned are ISIS members themselves. The ISIS regime does not hesitate to punish its own members when they break the law. Even an ISIS emir was prosecuted and thrown in prison by the local governor when it was found that he had abused his power and assaulted innocent people.

This is the model of justice that ISIS is strives to bring the residents of al-Bukamal as well as to Raqqa. The cities of the region have embraced ISIS and ceded their right to use violence in order to punish those who commit crimes or do wrong. They forfeit the use of violence willingly in order to live a life of greater justice and equity. The strong are not permitted to dominate the weak, nor the rich exploit the poor, nor tribal leaders their tribesmen. All live under ISIS law equally, without “wasta” or exception.

The single most important factor that has persuaded people to accept the “Caliphate” is the fact that citizens can go out at any time of day or night without being harassed by the Free Syrian Army or being robbed blind by men claiming to be from Jabhat al-Nusra. This is most true in the tribal areas of the province.

More than one person has told me that the honor of women is never violated. Even the enemies of ISIS in the region concede this. They admit that since ISIS assumed authority, not a single incident of assault against a woman or young girl has occured. This is contrary to the desultory state of social life when Jabhat al-Nusra ruled al-Bukamal. Then, brothels operated openly. Today, you can rest assured that traveling from Dar al-Zur to al-Anbar, a distance of some 350 kilometers, you will not be harmed as long as you obey the law.

One of the main reasons ISIS has been accepted by a vast majority is that corruption was rampant in the area during the first years of the uprising against Assad. First, the militias that called themselves the Free Syrian Army ruled. They disported themselves no differently than thieves and bandits. Civilians lived in a state of anxiety that their possessions would be lifted from them one after the other and fear that they would be harassed and possibly killed. Then came al-Nusra, which was concerned only with power and gave little care to justice or good government. Between the Free Army and Nusra, society was lost. No one dared approach the authorities to resolve disputes. Once the Caliphate established control over the region, however, people have breathed easier and feel less oppressed.

In fact, the residents of al-Bukamal cannot hate members of the organization and those who work with them when they see them trying to deliver water and electricity to the people at affordable prices. Nor can they hate the organization when prices are set at reasonable levels. The ISIS fighters are vigilant on their behalf and up into the night in order to provide for them. This reality destroys hatred, and although some people in the area may not want the organization to remain in power, the weak do, as do the poor who have no one else to fend for them. It is true that some fighters have special privileges, but these are a minority and do not compare to those enjoyed by the officials who were previously aligned with the government, or the fighters of the Free Syrian Army or al-Nusra.

ISIS has all the moral and material capability it needs in order to rebuild the cities it controls. More importantly, it possesses the will to provide a better life for the people. It is still unable to adopt the modern techniques necessary to improve the lives of its people as it promises, but it strives to attain them.

The planes that fly over ISIS-controlled territories have had only one real victory. It is not the killing of fighters or the obstruction of the movement of the organization. Rather, they have simply prevented the group from delivering services to the community, and this is the only real achievement of the coalition fighting ISIS.

I seek to draw a realistic image of ISIS, one that can be compared with and contrasted to the picture of a bloody organization. For it is impossible for a bloody murderous regime to rule without inducing physical and societal security. But this is rarely mentioned in order to tarnish the image of the organization, one that does not need any more than the truth to do so.

The question is, has there developed an ISIS society, meaning has the organization integrated into the larger community? Until now, the group cannot speak of an “ISIS society” in any real sense; in that it is fear and terror that still rules the community. But with the passage of time, if the regime stays in power at least three more years, I expect that there would be a real ISIS society, and this is the biggest fear with regards to the Eastern regions. From this ISIS society will be born extremist and terrorist ideas.

In the next report: How ISIS exploits societal contradictions and historical grudges.

The post “A Trip to the ‘Caliphate’: Oppressive Justice under ISIS,” By Omar al-Wardi appeared first on Syria Comment.

by Aron Lund, editor of Syria in Crisis

Zahran Alloush

Rebel sources report that a missile hit a gathering of Islam Army leaders in the Eastern Ghouta region today, killing several of them, including Mohammed Zahran Alloush. Some reports also say that an allied rebel faction, Feilaq al-Rahman, had much of its leadership wiped out, and that the strike was carried out by Russia. (The Syrian government claims that its own airforce was behind the attack.)

This is big news and it has the potential to shift the balance of power in the Ghouta, a region of suburbs and agricultural towns into that rings the Syrian capital. It could also impact the Syrian peace process—such as it is—that is slated to begin this January.

First of All, Is It True?

Abu Humam Bouidani, reportedly the new Islam Army leader.

Seems like it. Pro-opposition media is awash with stories about Zahran Alloush’s death and there have been no signs of life, no denials, and no comments from his associates. Major rebel leaders and allies of Zahran Alloush and the Islam Army, including leaders of such major factions like the Mujahedin Army and Ahrar al-Sham, have posted their personal condoleances on social media. The Islam Army’s own media channels are still posting reports on military actions, but they have so far distributed nothing on the alleged attack. The fact that several top-ranking Islam Army figures have been silent since earlier today could mean that some of them, too, may have been killed or wounded in the strike.

About half an hour ago, at 21.40 Syrian time, the online news agency Sada al-Tawhid, which is aligned with the Islam Army, stated on Twitter that Zahran Alloush is dead and has been succeeded by Sheikh Abu Humam Bouidani. In other words, it would seem that Zahran Alloush is in fact dead.

Who Was Zahran Alloush?

Mohammed Zahran Alloush (1971-2015), also known as Abu Abdullah, was a salafi activist from Douma, a town east of Damascus in the Ghouta region. His father, Abdullah Alloush, is a salafi theologian resident in Saudi Arabia.

Alloush was arrested several times before the uprising for his religious and political activism and sent to the  ”Islamist wing” of the Seidnaia prison north of Damascus. There, he formed close connections to many other Syrian Islamists, including people who now run large rebel factions like Ahrar al-Sham. He was released from jail in June 2011 and quickly joined the armed uprising, eventually emerging as the strongman of his home region in the Eastern Ghouta and one of the most powerful rebel leaders in all of Syria.

He was also one of the most controversial ones. His supporters were taken in by his forceful personality and his personal bravery, as a commander who lived with his men in the warzone and visited the frontline. They admired his knack for organization and politics and credited him with the semi-stability that reigned inside the besieged Eastern Ghouta enclave—a bombed out and starved suburban region that resembles nothing so much as a giant version of the Gaza Strip in Palestine. The Ghouta has been under constant pressure since the marginalized Sunni suburbs of Damascus, where hatred against Bashar al-Assad and his government ran strong, began to throw out the police and security servies in 2011 and 2012. Since then, the region has been under siege and functioned as a world of its own. Holding the frontline in Damascus, where Assad has concentrated so much of his army, was no small feat and it was much thanks to Alloush’s men. Coordinating the rebels there and limiting their infighting was no less of an achievement, especially considering the all-out chaos that reigned in other areas of Syria, where conditions were much better. For many supporters of the opposition, defending and stabilizing the Eastern Ghouta despite unceasing war and artillery bombardment, including with nerve gas, was enough to make Zahran Alloush a hero of the Syrian revolution.

Zahran Alloush watches a military parade of Islam Army fighters from a podium in the Eastern Ghouta, in a propaganda tape released by the group.

But the methods that Alloush used to bring stability to the Eastern Ghouta were not pretty. He has been accused of stuffing the local administration with cronies and family members to assure that no one could threaten his grip on power, of monopolizing access to the outside world through a system of tunnels, of selling aid and food at inflated prices, and of suppressing dissent with brutal means, including torture and assassination. To his rivals, he was no hero, but power-hungry opportunist or worse: a warlord, a dictator-in-the-making, hell-bent on seizing the presidential palace for himself. Some even acidly compared his methods of governance to those of Bashar al-Assad.

One aspect of this intolerance for dissent was a ferocious manhunt for supporters of the extremist Islamic State. It was long warily tolerated, the way the Islam Army still works with the Nusra Front despite latent tension between the groups. But when the Islamic State began to seriously challenge the system Alloush had constructed in the Eastern Ghouta, in 2014, all hell broke lose. Zahran Alloush’s men drove the Islamic State out of several neighborhoods, in a violent crackdown that made Syrian human rights activists and Alloush’s other Islamist rivals go pale with fright. The purge was mostly successful and it won discrete international applause, though it seems to have been a turf war just as much as it was an ideological conflict and a political conflict.

Non-extremists were also in danger. The 2013 kidnapping of four well-known secular human rights activists in Douma, an area under strong Islam Army influence, was blamed on Zahran Alloush by their families, who noted that men under his command had previously threatened the activists. Alloush denied responsibility, albeit rather unconvincingly, and he seemed genuinely perplexed that so much attention could be attached to the fate of four individuals, when people were being killed in the Ghouta by their thousands every year. But the affair made him a bête noire of much of the secular opposition, with its powerful networks abroad, and made Western governments shy away from direct dealings with his group even as it sought to moderate its politics and connect to the UN-backed political process.

While Alloush was an unabashedly sectarian Islamist, inspired by Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi establishment, he was also pragmatic enough to maneuver his way through Syrian rebel politics and its shifting alliances. In the past, he threatened non-Sunni Muslim religious groups, referring to Alawites and Shia Muslims as ”filth” that would be cleansed from Syria. He condemned democracy and pronounced himself in favor of a Sunni Islamic theocracy, where sharia law would be applied in the fullest. But in the past year, perhaps under pressure from his foreign supporters, Alloush began to try to polish his image and gain acceptance in the West. His last interview, with a female Christian Syrian reporter working for the U.S. online journal The Daily Beast, was a good example of this. Alloush folded back his fangs and tried to come off as a constructive, responsible centrist, an anti-terrorist ally, and an all-around gentleman. You know, the kind you’d like to see in a coalition government.

What Is the Islam Army?

When Alloush was released from jail in summer 2011, he contacted friends and family in Douma to create an armed rebel faction in Douma, which he dubbed the Islam Brigade (Katibat al-Islam). The group later grew and added more men and more powerful weapons, rebranding itself as the Islam Brigade (Liwa al-Islam). It shot to fame or infamy—depending on which side of the conflict you’re on—in July 2012, when it issued a statement claiming responsibility for killing several top commanders in Assad’s army and intelligence services. The incident, reportedly a bombing of the National Security Office in Damascus, has never been fully explained. To me, it seems likely that foreign intelligence services were involved, perhaps allowing the Islam Brigade to claim credit to boost the group’s credentials. (But this is speculation!)

Whatever happened, the Islam Brigade quickly grew into one of the most powerful factions of the Eastern Ghouta, which gradually freed itself of government control. After initially being one among several groups, the Islam Brigade started elbowing its way to the top, striking deals with other factions or muscling them out of its way, as the situation required. It appears that generous foreign support, reportedly from Saudi Arabia, contributed to the rise of the Islam Brigade. In September 2013, the group renamed itself the Islam Army (Jaish al-Islam). Holdout groups continued to try to challenge Alloush’s growing dominance in the Eastern Ghouta enclave over the following months. Most were eventually forced to negotiate for their share of power in a system thoroughly dominated by Alloush.

In August 2014, the Islam Army spearheaded the creation of the Unified Command in the Eastern Ghouta, which also included the Ajnad al-Sham Islamic Union, Feilaq al-Rahman, Ahrar al-Sham, and other groups. Alloush was appointed its leader. However, other rebels guarded their influence and it was not a mere puppet body. For example, control of the Sharia court system in the Eastern Ghouta in fact fell to Khaled Tafour, an Ajnad al-Sham ally, rather than to Samir Kaakeh, who ran religious affairs in the Islam Army. (At the time of writing, it remains uncertain whether Kaakeh survived today’s airstrike.) Conflicts continued to occur, with Ajnad al-Sham and Ahrar al-Sham occasionally at odds with the Islam Army, sometimes trading harsh accusations with Alloush. Some factions remained outside the scope of the alliance entirely—most notably the jihadis of the Nusra Front (al-Qaeda) and the Islamic State.

According to some reports, leaders of Feilaq al-Rahman were also present at the meeting targeted today and killed in the strike, and the Syrian state press has also said local Ahrar al-Sham leaders were among those killed.

What Happens to the Group Now?

The death of Zahran Alloush does not necessarily mean that the Islam Army will fall apart. Another strong leader could emerge, perhaps backed by foreign supporters like Saudi Arabia, or by other rebels in the area, all of whom are presumably anxious to preserve basic stability in the Eastern Ghouta at a difficult moment.

Islam Army logotype

Some rebel factions in Syria collapse quickly when a central leader or founder is lost. Others fade away gradually. For example, the Tawhid Brigade in Aleppo was weakened and split after the death of Abdulqader Saleh in November 2013, and it has now folded into another faction—but it took a while. And Ahrar al-Sham somehow survived the killing of nearly all its leaders in September 2014, relying on strong institutions and foreign support.

But in the case of the Islam Army, it has virtually been synonymous with Zahran Alloush throughout its existence, going back to the days when it was known as the Islam Battalion. Many of the most prominent leaders and representatives of the Islam Army were close friends or relatives of Zahran Alloush himself, such as Mohammed Alloush, who served as the group’s lead negotiator and political chief; he is a cousin of the Islam Army leader. If Zahran Alloush has now been killed, possibly alongside other top leaders, it could amount to a decapitation strike.

Add to that the fact that the Islam Army’s dominance has created so much resentment among other factions over the years, and the situation seems very unstable. It looks likely that the Eastern Ghouta is in for major change in the coming months.

How Does It Affect the Syrian Peace Process?

A Syrian peace process was recently launched in Vienna by the International Syria Support Group, a coalition including the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other governments. In early December, a meeting in Riyadh created an opposition body to participate in negotiations with Bashar al-Assad’s government. According to the United Nations, which will convene the talks, they are currently planned for Geneva in late January 2016.

Though Zahran Alloush couldn’t attend in person, the Islam Army was the most powerful and the most hardline faction to sign on to the Riyadh talks (after Ahrar al-Sham backed out), despite fierce opposition from al-Qaeda aligned jihadi groups. If the Islam Army has trouble getting its house in order after Zahran Alloush’s death, or is caught up in rivalries with factions seeking to increase their share in the Eastern Ghouta’s war economy, or is weakened, this could have a negative effect on the opposition’s ability to conduct talks in Geneva.

On the other hand, the peace process has plenty of other problems to stumble over—whether or not the Islam Army is on board just adds to a long list of reasons it looks likely to fail.

What Happens in Damascus?

A lot of things are happening in Damascus. Less than two weeks ago, the Syrian Arab Army and its Shia Islamist allies attacked and retook the Marj al-Sultan air base in the southern part of the Eastern Ghouta, threatening the enclave.

Also, just before the news about the airstrike that killed Zahran Alloush, it was revealed that a UN-brokered arrangement will evacuate insurgents from several neighborhoods in southern Damascus, including the Yarmouk refugee camp. These areas have been mercilessly starved by the government over the past few years, and bombed, and bitterly contested both between Palestinian factions, the Syrian government, various Sunni rebel factions, and the rival Islamic State. Now, some 4000 Sunni fighters will be escorted to their respective strongholds in northern Syria and the neighborhoods will revert to some form of government control under a ceasefire arrangement. If the deal is followed through, this marks a major advance for Bashar al-Assad’s government.

With so much up in the air, and rebels threatened on multiple fronts, Zahran Alloush’s death is important. If it leads to instability and infighting among the rebels, or weakens command and control in the Ghouta, we could start to see a shift in the balance of power in the Syrian capital over the coming months.

— Aron Lund is the editor of Syria in Crisis

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