It’s jihadists vs secularism in Syria again. Aleppo crisis is a dangerous new turning point

Members of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham—or Commission for the Liberation of the Levant—brushed aside the Army’s 46 Regiment and captured Aleppo for the second time last week.

Members of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham—or Commission for the Liberation of the Levant—brushed aside the Army’s 46 Regiment and captured Aleppo for the second time | Photo: Reuters

From the turret of his tank, General Shafiq Fayadah had addressed the citizens of Aleppo in 1980: The commander of the Syrian Army’s Third Division declared he was prepared to kill “a thousand people a day to rid the city of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Early in 1979, Muslim Brotherhood-linked terrorists had begun a war on the regime, murdering government functionaries, members of religious minorities, and even Sunni religious leaders like the head of Aleppo’s Grand Mosque, Sheikh Muhammad al-Shami. Full-scale urban warfare followed the next year, with General Fayadah’s soldiers washing the streets in blood.

Every infidel would be killed, the jihadists proclaimed. To protect the republic, the socialist Ba’ath party regime replied that it was “willing to fight a hundred wars and sacrifice a million martyrs.” They both meant it.

Last week, members of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham—or Commission for the Liberation of the Levant—brushed aside the Army’s 46 Regiment and captured Aleppo for the second time. The jihadist triumph could have global consequences. Even though Tahrir al-Sham has marketed itself as a post-jihadist organisation committed to combatting transnational terrorism, a video has surfaced showing Uzbek, Chechen, and even Pakistani terrorists embedded among its ranks.

Emerging from inside al-Qaeda’s branch in the Levant, Jabhat al-Nusra, Tahrir al-Shams publicly celebrated the victory of the Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan. Forcible conversion of minorities like the Druze, and the confiscation of Christian-owned property, is widespread. The organisation, United Nations human rights investigators have said, has “committed torture and cruel treatment which may amount to war crimes.”

Four years after President Donald Trump proclaimed he had crushed the Islamic State, a jihadist territorial entity is rising again. This incarnation is just one of many the Islamist movement in Syria has birthed over a century. Israel, Iran, Turkey, the United States and Russia have all fed this crisis, but its consequences will fall far beyond them.

Rivers of blood

Lit up by the morning sun, the bodies languidly floated down the Queiq River: Each victim, investigators would discover, had been gagged with duct tape, their hands bound with plastic ties before being neatly shot through the back of the head. In 2012, as the so-called Arab Spring had erupted in Syria, a plethora of Islamist-leaning groups had evicted President Bashar al-Assad’s government from the east bank of the Queiq. Led by Brigadier Ali Melheim, the country’s military intelligence units in Aleppo hit back. At least 230 people—carpenters, tailors, and teachers—were tortured for information before being tossed into the river.

This brutal war for Syria’s cities didn’t begin, as we sometimes imagine, with the Arab Spring. Early in 1924, a hundred years ago, what was then the French-colonial city of Hama saw its first communal violence, pitting the city’s Sunni community against Christians. The crisis was precipitated, historian NE Bou-Nacklie has recorded, by an influx of Christians, many refugees from ethnic cleansing in Turkey, as well as labourers recruited from the ‘Alawi minority.

Even though just a single Sunni was killed in the riot, it consolidated communal faultlines. “Tomorrow we’ll massacre the treasonous Christians,” Sunni-affiliated newspapers proclaimed as per Nacklie’s book, and “Any Muslim who opens his shop tomorrow will pay with his blood.”

After the riot, anti-French resistance hardened among the Sunnis. Fawzi al-Qawuqji, a Lebanon-born Arab nationalist, led a rebellion in 1925. Lower-ranking Sunni clerics founded the parallel Hizbullah militia, espousing fundamentalist religious beliefs. French forces easily crushed the rebels, but the foundations for a longer crisis had been laid.

Fin de siècle Syria saw the growth of networks like al-Gharra, or The Noble Society, which used Islamic populism as a tool of protest against colonial rule. The bodies of women, in particular, became a battleground, historian Raphel Lefevre has written in his book Ashes of Hama. Al-Gharra organised mass protests in 1942 after women from elite Francophile Damascus families attended a theatrical show. The group demanded women be compelled to wear the Hijab and be excluded from attending cinemas or theatres.

Fighting for survival

Founded in 1928 in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood gave ideological structure and discipline to Islamic populism. Led by the charismatic Hassan al-Banna, the Brotherhood argued that Muslims needed to regain the purity of the faith of the Prophet Muhammad to challenge colonial domination. These ideas profoundly influenced two Syrian students of Islam in Egypt, Mustafa al-Sibai and Mohammed al-Hamid. The two men began setting up units of the Brotherhood in Syria in 1936, bringing together the scattered fundamentalist movement.

In the early decades of independent Syria, the Brotherhood competed for influence with increasingly powerful, Left-leaning Arab nationalist forces. Al-Sibai began espousing the idea of Islamic socialism to expand the Islamist constituency. And according to Lefevre, Muhammad al-Mubarak, his rival inside the Brotherhood, dismissed this as “a Muslim drink in a Marxist cup.”

Early in 1963, a military coup brought the Arab nationalist Ba’ath party to power. The Brotherhood found itself in opposition to the secularising, new order. Early the following year, Lefevre writes, prayer leaders in Hama began preaching against the Ba’ath regime, igniting brutal clashes in which the city’s largest mosque was destroyed. Fighters led by the Islamist commander Marwan Hadid surrendered after an entire month of warfare, following the resignation of junta chief General Amin al-Hafiz.

Arab nationalism proved resilient, though. The new constitution authored under Hafiz al-Assad’s rule in 1973 removed Islam as the state religion. Land was confiscated to set up cooperatives and factories, a move that targeted the traditional Sunni base of the Brotherhood in the agricultural powerhouses of the Hama-Homs belt, as well as the Aleppo region.

Even though an influential section of the Brotherhood counselled restraint, young radicals in its ranks initiated an armed revolt against the government. Led by the jihadists Adnan Uqlah and Ibrahim al-Youssef, the Fighting Vanguard would conduct a series of savage killings. The summer of 1979 saw the slaughter of 83 military cadets, mainly ‘Alawi, in Aleppo. Figures linked to the Ba’ath party, as well as their families, were murdered—leading up to General Fayadah’s brutal crackdown on Aleppo.

Thousands were killed in the regime’s brutal war of extermination against the Islamists. Large swathes of the old city of Hama were levelled by the military, a carnage that still scars the political imagination of the country.

Generation jihad

Following the crushing of the Hama jihad, large numbers of Islamist leaders fled Syria. Among them was Aleppo-born Mustafa Nasr. London— where, journalist Abdel Bari Atwan has written, the United Kingdom’s intelligence services provided safe havens to many jihadists they saw as allies against the Soviet Union—proved a welcoming home. Later, Nasr moved to Afghanistan, becoming a trusted aide of al-Qaeda’s founding chief, Osama Bin Laden. The Syrian jihadists, with their long combat experience, formed al-Qaeda’s hard core.

Ahmed Hussein al-Shar’a—better known by the pseudonym Abu Mohammad al-Julan—was among a younger generation of jihadists who occupied centre stage as al-Qaeda reestablished itself in Iraq after 2003. The son of an oil engineer who fled Hafiz al-Assad’s Syria for Saudi Arabia, al-Shar’a emerged as a key leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. He was captured by United States troops in 2006 and spent several years in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison before being repatriated to Syria.

Flailing in the face of the terror threat from al-Qaeda’s presence in Iraq, President Bashar al-Assad—Hafez al-Assad’s son and successor—sought to buy peace with the jihadists. Al-Shar’a was among many jihadists and Islamist leaders released by the government in 2011 who went on to join al-Qaeda’s chapter in Syria, al-Nusra.

Al-Nusra was defeated by 2016, though, under the weight of attacks by Syria’s allies, Iran and Russia. Al-Shar’a began rebranding his movement in its one remaining territorial base, Idlib, casting it as a locally focused Islamist organisation that was committed to imposing religious law but hostile to transnational terrorism. Though the Tahrir al-Sham retained elements of al-Qaeda among its ranks, researcher Aaron Zelin has written, it cooperated with Western counter-terrorism operations against the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.

Even as Iran’s forces in Syria came under Israeli attack, and Russia’s military presence withered because of the war in Ukraine, the Tahrir al-Sham saw an opportunity. Turkish and Western intelligence services were drawn to the organisation, seeking it as a useful tool to undermine Bashar al-Assad’s government and serve their own regional counter-terrorism needs.

As scholars Rahaf Aldoughli and Azzam Al Kassir note, efforts to rehabilitate Tahrir al-Sham “seem to suffer from a kind of cognitive convulsion that sometimes appears when evaluating the label ‘terrorist’ in relation to Western security needs.”

The long war in Syria is on the cusp of yielding a jihadist haven yet again. Even if Tahrir al-Sham’s proto-state contains transnational terrorism, it is certain to be an incubator of violent ideas that will reach far beyond its borders. That’s a price some in the West might think is worth paying— but it’s a course fraught with danger.

Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.

(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)