In recent days, we have witnessed a ceremony of confusion around the Levant Liberation Organization (Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, in Arabic). As is well known, this group is the main, although not the only one, responsible for the dazzling advance of the rebel forces towards Damascus that ended the 25 years of Bashar Al Assad’s dictatorship on December 8.
Various analysts, out of ignorance or interest, interpret that the ideology of Hatay Tahrir al Sham (HTS) does not differ excessively from that of its parent group – the Al Nusra Front, the Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda – and that the objective of said group is to turn Syria into a Taliban emirate similar to the one that exists in Afghanistan.
However, in the last decade Ahmad Al Sharaa, better known as Abu Muhamed Al Jolani, has disassociated himself from the transnational jihadist movement and has reaffirmed the national credentials of the movement he leads. In 2013, the Al Nusra Front broke with the self-proclaimed Islamic State and, in 2016, it did the same with Al Qaeda. Since then, clashes with both formations have been frequent and, in fact, HTS has eradicated them from the territories under its control, fighting the jihadist Hurras Al Din and eliminating the head of the Islamic State: Abu Al Hussein Al Qurashi.
It must be remembered that the priority of these jihadist organizations was none other than establishing an Islamic State governed by Sharia as a prior step to the establishment of a global caliphate. To achieve this, they did not hesitate to resort to sectarianism to attack the various confessional minorities (not only Christians, but also Druze, Alawites and Ismailis) and to impose by force their rigorous interpretation of Islam, based on the maxim of “ordering good and prohibit evil” (al-amr bi-l-ma’ruf wa nahi ‘an-l-munkarin Arabic), which applied corporal punishment against those who violated Islamic law.
Although in the past the Al Nusra Front also persecuted these minorities, currently Al Jolani has expressed his willingness to respect the diversity of society: “In the Syria of the future, diversity is our strength and it is not a weakness.”
Since its establishment in 2017, HTS’s top priority has been to efficiently manage Idlib. This province in northwestern Syria, bordering Turkey, has an area of about 6,000 km² and is home to more than four million inhabitants, two thirds of them internally displaced. His government responsibilities have forced him to move away from jihadist rhetoric and negotiate with local actors. To try to gain the support of a heterogeneous population that does not necessarily agree with its Salafi ideology, HTS has opted for pragmatism through dialogue with tribal leaders, resorting to the well-known carrot and stick strategy. That is to say: applying coercion to persecute secular sectors critical of his management, but offering the population basic services such as water or electricity to gain their support.
In the last decade, HTS has imposed an Islamic government in Idlib, although in a much sweetened version of that which was in force in the jihadist pseudo-caliphate led by Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi in Iraq and Syria years ago. In fact, Al Jolani has noted: “The government must be consistent with sharia, but not according to the standards of the Islamic State or Saudi Arabia.” Although it is true that gender separation is not imposed in public spaces, women are forced to cover themselves with the veil. Unlike in the Taliban’s Afghanistan, in Idlib girls are schooled and women can go to university, but in segregated classes.
This turn towards pragmatism is probably forced by circumstances, since Syrian society is extremely heterogeneous and one in three Syrians belongs to confessional or ethnic minorities. Furthermore, it should be taken into account that, as in other countries in the region, a significant percentage of the population is secular and distrusts the HTS’s attempts to impose an extremely rigorous reading of Islam.
It seems evident that governing a small rural province such as Idlib is not the same as directing a territory as complex as Syria, which is also devastated after a bloody civil war, a Herculean task that will require the participation of all components of the diverse Syrian society.
In recent years, Al Jolani has not stopped winking at the West to try to gain its trust and stop viewing HTS as a terrorist organization. Firstly, it has made it clear that it will not allow its territory to become a jihadist sanctuary from which attacks against the West are launched. Secondly, he has indicated that he will respect the diversity of society and will not persecute minorities given that, as he pointed out in a recent interview, “these sects have coexisted in the region for hundreds of years and no one has the right to eliminate them.” Thirdly, he pointed out that the end of the war will create the necessary conditions for the return of refugees welcomed both in the surrounding countries and on the European continent. All of this has paved the way for the United States and the European Union to establish preliminary contacts with HTS.
In any case, the critical situation in which Syria finds itself after 14 years of conflict should not be downplayed one iota of seriousness. While it is true that the Assadist dictatorship has ended, it is also true that it could be replaced by another one of an Islamist nature. In fact, the appointment of Mohamed Al Bashir as interim prime minister is not a good sign, since this decision has not been agreed upon with the rest of the rebel groups and opposition forces. The same can be said of the governors of Damascus and Aleppo, the two most important cities in the country, who are also two senior HTS officials.
The main unknown to be resolved in this period of uncertainty into which we now enter is what type of transition will be undertaken and to what extent the opposition forces will be integrated into the new government structures. Al Jolani, Syria’s new strongman, has pointed out in an interview with CNN that “HTS is only part of the equation and can be dissolved at any time, since it is not an end in itself.” He has also stated that “Syria deserves a system of government based on institutions and not one where a single ruler makes decisions arbitrarily.”
Today, it remains to be seen whether these good intentions will translate into the establishment of a full democracy in which all citizens, regardless of their confession or ethnicity, have the same rights, as demanded by the protesters who took over in 2011. the streets to demand the fall of the regime and the end of the Al Assad dictatorship.
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