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The new HTS government in Syria: an instrument in the imperialist struggle for control of the Middle East Germany, France and Britain have all met with HTS representatives in Damascus. British diplomats held talks with al-Sharaa and had their photographs taken with him, even though HTS is a banned terrorist organization in Britain and supporting the group is a criminal offense. London announced it would provide 50 million pounds ($63 million) in humanitarian aid to Syria and Syrian refugees. Qatar has restored diplomatic relations with the country's new leaders. Turkey, which for a long time denied any direct support despite its close ties to HTS, has reopened its embassy in Damascus. Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan told Turkish television: "Nobody knows this group better than Turkey." President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has promised HTS military and logistical support and is also trying to gain the support of the Gulf states. Al-Sharaa then announced that Syria would build strategic relations with Ankara. He told the Turkish newspaper Yeni Safak : "There will be strategic relations. Turkey has many priorities in rebuilding the new Syrian state." Thirteen years ago, the proxy war for regime change began in Syria, and the CIA, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Israel financed, orchestrated and supported that war to harass and isolate Iran. Today, 13 years later, the imperialist powers and Middle Eastern governments are deepening their collaboration with al-Qaeda-aligned proxies to plunder Syria as part of their broader struggle to control the region's oil and gas resources and to push back the influence of Russia, Iran and China in the Middle East. Despite all the rhetoric about the war on Islamist terrorism, the United States has a long history of working with reactionary Islamist groups in the Middle East and Asia to suppress left-nationalist and socialist movements there, including the CIA-MI6 overthrow of the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953 and the CIA-backed military coup in Indonesia in 1965 and the massacre that followed. Al-Qaeda, just one of the most well-known groups, was founded by the CIA and Pakistani intelligence with the help and financial support of the Saudi monarchy. Its leader was Osama bin Laden, the son of a Saudi construction contractor. This was during the US-led war against the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan in the 1980s. At that time, Islamist mujahideen fighters were smuggled into Afghanistan across the Pakistani border, where they fought as US proxies against the Soviet Union. These Islamist groups were able to gain some support among the region's poorest workers and peasants by exploiting the social discontent of broad sections of the population in the Middle East, whose poverty was largely due to the failure of secular nationalist regimes and parties (often allied with the Stalinist regime in Moscow) to improve social and economic conditions or achieve genuine independence from imperialism. Al-Qaeda and similar Sunni jihadist groups are characterized by religious fanaticism, a commitment to capitalism and fierce anti-communism. They use violence to combat Shiite Islam, Shiite-majority Iran and the Alawites (the community to which Assad belongs). Washington's relationship with these groups has veered from alliance and proxy force to arch-enemy and back again, depending on the circumstances, with all the lies and hypocrisy that entails. Al-Julani was born in Saudi Arabia in 1982 to a middle-class Syrian family and grew up in a wealthy district of Damascus. His father's cousin, Farouk al-Sharaa, was a long-time foreign minister and later Syria's vice president until 2014. After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Al-Julani went to Iraq and joined the Sunni insurgency against the US occupation, which was led by al-Qaeda. In 2006, he was captured by US troops and spent the next five years in Iraqi prisons. When protests against Assad broke out in 2011, al-Julani returned to Syria to set up the al-Nusra Front on behalf of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was the then leader of the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), a splinter group from al-Qaeda since 2004 that later included a number of Sunni insurgent factions in Iraq.) The al-Nusra Front's goal was to unite the various Salafist jihadist groups, including al-Qaeda and ISL groups, overthrow the Syrian regime and create an Islamic state. A year later, the United Nations designated the al-Nusra Front as a terrorist organization. What followed were more than a decade of mergers, splits and deadly conflicts with other jihadist groups, while al-Nusra continually sought to gain broader support, particularly from the United States and Turkey, by distancing itself from some of its former allies and the most heinous practices. The al-Nusra Front had some early successes against Syrian regime forces, particularly in northwestern Syria (in Aleppo, Hama, Latakia and Idlib), prompting al-Baghdadi to call for the expansion of the ISI into Syria under the broader umbrella of the Islamic State. But the factions soon clashed over influence over fighters in Syria, killing thousands in the process. In April 2013, al-Julani released a recorded message breaking with ISIS and declaring: "The sons of the al-Nusra Front pledge allegiance to Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri." Ayman al-Zawahiri, who had led al-Qaeda since the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, began providing fighters, weapons and money. Al-Qaeda-linked militias dominated the anti-Assad forces, including Islamist fighters from Turkey, Iraq and Libya, as well as from Chechnya and China's Xinjiang region. They became the biggest beneficiaries of the CIA's nearly $1 billion annual budget allocated to the mission to overthrow the Assad regime. At the same time, the CIA officially claimed that its weapons and funds went to "vetted" and "moderate" Syrian "rebels." The US and its allies had thus built up the Islamic State (IS) as the main force in the fight for regime change in Syria. However, in 2014, when IS spread from Syria into northern Iraq, its dominance began to pose a threat to US interests. Now Washington changed horses and made the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) its main proxy force. Its backbone consists of the US-backed Kurdish nationalist People's Protection Units (YPG). When the US began to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, al-Julani described the US airstrikes as an attack on Islam and declared that he would fight the "United States and its allies" and take the fight to Western countries. He called on his fighters not to accept any help from the West in their campaign against the Islamic State. In 2015, he changed tactics and denied that al-Nusra had any plans to attack Western countries, claiming that it was focused on fighting the Assad regime and its allies in Hezbollah, and that it was fighting the Islamic State. In 2016, the al-Nusra Front split from al-Qaeda and renamed itself Jabath Fatah al-Sham (JFS), but this caused discontent. A year later, it merged with four other armed Salafist jihadist groups to form HTS. The US insisted that it was still an al-Qaeda affiliate and described HTS as an attempt to "hijack the Syrian revolution" rather than a move toward moderation. The US designated HTS a global terrorist organization at the time. The force, numbering around 10,000 fighters, subsequently brought most other Islamist factions under its leadership. HTS gained control of half of Idlib province and the surrounding areas. Through a mixture of ruthless violence and political coercion, it became the dominant force in the region. Turkey, which stationed troops in the province, gave it considerable support. It used HTS and other Islamist militias against Kurdish forces that had established an autonomous enclave in northeastern Syria with US support. Turkey sought to prevent the establishment of a Kurdish state on its southern border in order to contain the growth of separatist tendencies among the large Kurdish population in Turkey itself. Ankara, which controls several provinces in northwestern Syria, has intervened both by directly supporting the Syrian National Army (SNA), the successor to the former Free Syrian Army (FSA), and by supporting HTS, despite designating the latter as a terrorist organization. Since 2016, Turkey has carried out several military interventions in Syria. Following ceasefire agreements with Russia and the Assad regime in 2018, HTS militias and their allies were evacuated to Idlib along with 2 million displaced people from other parts of Syria. This province, which is now home to 4.5 million people, became the last refuge of al-Qaeda-aligned Islamist militias that spearheaded Washington's war for regime change. As for HTS's rule in Idlib, several human rights organizations, including the UN Human Rights Council, have described it as a torture regime that rules with disappearances, public stoning, mass executions, imprisonment and a strict repression of any form of dissent. Washington rehabilitates HTS None of this stopped Washington from rehabilitating HTS, which suggests that al-Qaeda was once again useful in Syria, as the Assad regime maintained its power with the support of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah. HTS offered its services to the US and fought with IS cells in Saraqeb and Jisr al Shughur, both in Idlib province. When the US military killed IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Idlib province in 2019, HTS welcomed his death. In February 2021, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) program Frontline aired an extraordinary interview with al-Julani in Idlib aimed at whitewashing HTS' crimes in Syria. PBS gave him the opportunity to distance himself from his past ties to al-Qaeda, and al-Julani emphasized HTS's role in the fight against the Assad regime. Its mission is to "defend the people, defend their security, their religion, their honor, their property, and oppose a criminal tyrant like Bashar al-Assad." Julani portrayed himself as Washington's natural ally, pledging not to support attacks against the United States and calling the terrorist designation attached to him and HTS "unfair" and "political." He declared: "During our ten-year journey in this revolution, we have posed no threat to Western or European society: no security threat, no economic threat, nothing." When the conversation turned to the well-known allegations of violent repression of any form of dissent in Idlib, al-Julani accused those making such accusations of being "Russian agents" or "agents of the regime." On the same show, James Jeffrey, a former Middle East diplomat for the Trump administration, confirmed that al-Julani and HTS are a US "asset" in Syria. "They are the least bad option among the various options in Idlib, and Idlib is one of the most important places in Syria, which is one of the most important places in the Middle East right now." The following year, when IS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Qurashi was killed in a US military operation in Idlib, other Islamist groups accused HTS of collaborating with the US, while HTS itself officially condemned the US operation. Since HTS took control of Damascus, the organization has continued to demonstrate its loyalty to its backers in Washington. Significantly, HTS leaders have explicitly thanked Israel for its help in neutralizing Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Since then, Israel has occupied the demilitarized zone between Syria and the (Israeli-occupied) Golan Heights, which dates back to a 1974 ceasefire agreement with Syria. But al-Sharaa has not condemned Israel's illegal occupation, nor the expulsion of villagers from Quneitra province. Nor has it said a word about the hundreds of Israeli airstrikes that have destroyed Syrian military bases, the air force, ammunition depots, missile stockpiles and Syrian naval vessels, or the more than 75 US airstrikes that have violated Syria's sovereignty. Israel says it has already destroyed 80 percent of Syria's military facilities in its efforts to deprive the country of any defense capability. Instead, al-Sharaa claims that now that Israel has secured its interests through airstrikes, it will likely leave Syria in peace. He told the British Times : "We do not want conflict, with Israel or anyone else, and we will not allow Syria to be used as a launching pad for attacks [against Israel]." When British news channel Channel 4 News asked an HTS spokesman about Israel's attacks on Syria, his evasive answer was: "Our priority is to restore security, supplies and services, revive civilian life and institutions, and take care of the newly liberated cities." HTS has also promised to keep Iran and Hezbollah – the Shiite “axis of resistance” against Israel – out of Syrian territory. https://www.wsws.org/de/articles/2024/12/23/zfgs-d23.html? Back |
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