Three months ago, Bashar al-Assad’s brutal Syrian regime crumbled in the face of an insurgency headed up by Ahmed al-Sharaa, the leader of Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Ever since then, Western politicos, officials and pundits have been all over Syria’s new ruler like a cheap suit.
Despite HTS, a former al-Qaeda affiliate, being blacklisted as a terrorist organisation by the US, UK, EU and UN, American, British and European officials have spent the past few months heading over to Damascus to gleefully break bread with the new regime. There have been smiling photo-ops featuring Sharaa and several delegations from the EU and even International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Karim Khan. Last month, French president Emmanuel Macron publicly ‘congratulated’ Sharaa on overthrowing Assad, and even invited him over to Paris for a cosy confab.
Few sights better capture the absurdity of the Western establishment’s embrace of this battle-hardened jihadi than the appearance of Sharaa last month on the The Rest is Politics, a UK-based podcast for centrist dads. Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, its two co-hosts, sat with big beaming grins across their faces, treating Sharaa more like a Lib Dem leader than the head of a violent Islamist insurgency.
Now, the tragic events of the past few days have exposed this embrace of Sharaa and HTS for what it always was – a product of desperate wishful thinking.
On Thursday, in a village just south of Jableh, a coastal town in north-western Syria, alleged pro-Assad gunmen ambushed a government security patrol. This soon sparked violent, one-sided clashes throughout the local area, between militias supportive of the new regime and members of Syria’s Alawite minority – the Shia Muslim sect from which the Assads descend, and whose members live in Syria’s coastal regions.
By Saturday, more and more armed groups assembled under the banner of Sharaa’s provisional government had joined the fray, and some coastal towns had been set ablaze. This looks to have been less about restoring order than exacting retribution. According to eyewitness accounts and assorted videos shared by residents and fighters, local Alawite men and even women and children were brought out on to the streets and humiliated. Some were then shot at point-blank range. Others were killed in their homes. Although the death toll is still to be verified, the provisional government’s forces are reported to have killed nearly a thousand civilians.
Sharaa has condemned this mass slaughter of Alawites, and claimed that ‘anyone whose hands are stained with the blood of Syrians will face justice sooner rather than later’. Yet there’s an unmistakably hollow sound to his words, given the involvement of his own forces.
This weekend’s violence, as old ethnic grievances were pursued with new HTS-backed vigour, ought to shatter any illusions that Western politicos and pundits have about Sharaa’s new Syria.
The question is why so many harboured such illusions about Sharaa and HTS in the first place. Just look at his background. He is a product of the militant Islamist reaction that has swept parts of the Middle East over the past few decades. As a teenager, he was inspired by Hamas’s first uprising against Israel at the turn of the millennium and later al-Qaeda’s attack on the Twin Towers in 2001. By the mid-to-late 2000s, he was fighting for al-Qaeda in Iraq against the US and its allies, after which he returned to Syria to take up arms against Assad, eventually taking a leading role in al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front, during the Syrian civil war.
In Syria in 2016, al-Nusra Front, which was to become what we now know as HTS, broke with al-Qaeda. Sharaa and his Islamist militia developed a formidable reputation as a fighting force, specialising in suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices and merciless attacks on the Syrian military. By 2017, HTS had taken effective control of a significant part of north-western Syria where, backed in part by Turkey, Sharaa established the ‘government of salvation’, with its capital in Idlib.
Its governance of north-western Syria always provided a grim hint of what an HTS-run national government might look like – if anyone cared to look. Its militants menaced Christian and Druze communities, suppressed minorities’ freedoms and even carried out executions of some of those who refused to convert to Islam. Its rule was theocratic and repressive. Women were made to dress conservatively, and some were even forced to step down from public roles.
Despite Sharaa’s recent West-friendly talk of protecting minority rights, promoting women’s inclusion and establishing the rule of law, there’s little to suggest this is sincere. Many of the senior roles in Sharaa’s new provisional government have been filled by his associates from the government of salvation. There have already been attempts on the part of certain officials to suppress women’s freedoms and introduce an Islamic education system.
More disturbingly, there have also been ongoing reports that HTS security forces have been rounding up and executing alleged Assad supporters. Last week’s slaughter of Alawite civilians was not quite the aberration Sharaa is attempting to portray it as.
Yet despite the many reasons for maintaining a critical distance from Assad’s Islamist topplers, Western politicians and midwit pundits like Stewart and Campbell have rushed to embrace them. This is mainly because of their long-standing, simple-minded view of foreign affairs. Since the 2011 uprising against Assad, they have effectively spent the past 14 years calling for his regime to be toppled, viewing it as pure evil. Little wonder, then, that they were so willing to anoint Assad’s topplers as the good guys, the liberators, the bringers of peace – whoever they might be. They spent so long reducing the complex reality of the Syrian conflict to a battle between a wicked tyrant and virtuous rebels, that they have ended up celebrating a group of vicious Islamists.
The civil war may be over. But Syria remains a fractured, volatile country, pushed and pulled by forces both external and internal. HTS may be in control of central and north-western Syria, but Turkish proxies operating under the banner of the Syrian National Army dominate the northern border regions. And they are in conflict with the Kurdish-led and US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, which effectively govern the east.
Syria, as it stands, is a patchwork of violently antagonistic forces controlling far-from-secure territories, with regional and international powers still exerting influence from afar. Politically fuelled, ethnically framed friction abounds. To have ever seen Sharaa and HTS as Syria’s saviour was always beyond naive.
Tim Black is a spiked columnist.
