A few days ago, the seemingly moribund Syrian conflict suddenly came to life once again, as anti-government forces burst out of their enclave in the northwesterly Idlib province and swiftly overran the city of Aleppo and much of the surrounding regions. As of this writing, the Syrian army, bolstered by Russian air support, appears to have finally checked the rebel advance around the city of Hama, to the south of Aleppo, and militia reinforcements from neighboring Iraq are rushing to the government’s aid. It is likely that over the next few days or weeks the front line will stabilize, and the Syrian government and its allies will begin the probably quite arduous task of stuffing the rebel toothpaste back in the Idlib tube.
The point of this post, however, is not to provide a blow by blow account of the action up to this point, or to ponder future developments. For example, the brief recapitulation of events above did not even begin to address the fighting around the Kurdish enclave of Tal Rifaat to the north of Aleppo, or the rebel offensive’s implications for increasingly complicated Russo-Turkish relations. Rather, I wanted to take a moment to underscore just who these “rebels”, “fighters” and “anti-government forces” really are.
For starters, these people have a name. Or, rather, the dominant rebel group that, by all accounts, has been running the Idlib province for a number of years, and is now chiefly executing the offensive in and around Aleppo, has a name – Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (“HTS”). This name is actually a rebranding of sorts. During the “hot phase” of the Syrian Civil War, which ended in 2017 with the liberation of Aleppo and the retreat or repatriation of most of the remaining rebels to the Idlib province, HTS was actually known as Jabhat al-Nusra (“al-Nusra”). In turn, al-Nusra was in effect that part of Al Qaeda in Syria and Levant that chose to remain and fight in Syria, as opposed to the fighters that went eastwards to northern Iraq to form the Islamic State or ISIS.
Yes, that Al Qaeda. And that ISIS.
In other words, HTS is a direct descendant of the very same groups of Sunni Islamic radicals that had carried out innumerable terrorist attacks around the world since the 1990s, that have as their explicit goal the establishment of an Islamic state governed by religious, not secular law, and that the US, via its proxies, fought against in Iraq during the late 2010s. Of course, it would be wrong to describe all such Islamic radical groups as identical, as while they all desire a broadly similar end, the precise means by which this is to be brought about can differ considerably1. Thus, the leadership of al-Nusra, apparently, believed that it is best to focus solely on the conflict in Syria, at least for the moment, while their more radical counterparts in ISIS, having established themselves in northern Iraq, essentially declared war on everyone all at once, with predictable results. As well, at some point al-Nusra leaders realized that the Al Qaeda association was bad brand management, and “renounced” their prior parent organization without substantively changing much else. The subsequent renaming to HTS was similar brand management, with the added benefit of dissociating the group from al-Nusra’s defeats at the hands of the Syrian government and its allies.
Different names, same beheadings. Whatever the criticisms of the present Syrian regime, many of them quite valid, the situation can hardly be improved by turning even a portion of the country over to, essentially, murderous religious fanatics. Who have already begun posting execution videos of captured Syrian army soldiers, one of whom apparently implores his “fellow Muslims” for clemency to no avail.
To be sure, there is always a possibility that the leadership of HTS, inspired by the example of the Taliban in Afghanistan, will now attempt to moderate their rule over the newly occupied territories somewhat, so as to present a still religiously conservative but fairly tolerable alternative to the secular Syrian regime. In fact, CNN’s recent explainers on just who is who in the Syrian conflict, while broadly echoing the narrative above, nevertheless make a point of highlighting how HTS has become less extremist with time, and does not pose any danger whatsoever to the West2. And let us even suppose for a moment that this is actually true.
The Taliban, however, came about under very different circumstances, and among other things must manage being an ethno-nationalist movement in a multi-ethnic state. The Taliban’s religious conservatism, therefore, especially in the movement’s current iteration, is a means of unifying the country’s fairly disparate ethnicities into a single cohesive state. Nor is there a viable secular alternative extant in Afghanistan at present, in no small part thanks to the actions of the US since the early 1980s. HTS, by contrast, has up to this point been more a gathering of crusading revolutionaries fighting against an established secular government, and its ranks have always included a fair share of Islamic radicals from other parts of the world. As such, whatever happens with HTS, and I would be very skeptical about this particular leopard changing its spots until and unless emphatically proven otherwise, at the very least these foreign fighters will undoubtedly wish to spread the gospel to their home countries, for example in Central Asia, with predictably violent results.
To belabor the point, HTS, al-Nusra, Al Qaeda, ISIS – these have all been cancers on Syria’s body for many years. Trying to “limit” these groups to the Idlib province may have been a shrewd short-term measure in 2016-2017, but a fairly short-sighted one in the long run. We shall see whether this time around Syria’s allies will prove able to excise the Idlib tumor once and for all.
Footnotes:- This is not dissimilar to the state of the socialist movement in late Imperial Russia, with everyone wanting to bring about a revolution, but no consensus whatever on the best way of so doing.[↩]
- Salem, M., “Rebel groups have taken Syria’s second-biggest city. Here is who they are.”, CNN, December 2, 2024, retrieved December 2, 2024.[↩]