The Syrian Jihad

"He is probably right about that. He even predicts that they will play a role for decades to come. I do not agree with everything Lister says in his book, but this is, as far as I know, the most detailed study about the Islamist opposition groups. For that reason alone it is an important book. There are often discussions about who are the moderates and who are the radicals. Lister argues that in the past, there were still a lot of moderate people and groups, but that by now, behind the scenes, many of those moderate groups have begun to adopt many of the same political positions as their Syrian Islamist compatriots. The problem is that in a war that has lasted seven years and may last even longer, people cannot remain fully moderate. And, of course, moderation is a relative concept. You can have moderation in political thought, you can have moderation in the way you fight, and so on. It is not always really clear what ‘moderate’ means. In the West, in general, the Islamists are seen as radicals, which they are. But if you asked Robert Fisk about moderates and radicals he would completely disagree with Charles Lister on this point. Still, this book is a very good way of getting a better idea of how the Islamic State came up—first as Al Qaeda in Iraq, then as the Islamic State in Iraq and then as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and then the Islamic State without any additions. They now consider themselves a movement which has no geographic restrictions. Lister also deals with the issue that Western countries supported these so-called moderate groups. But in their battles against al-Assad and IS these moderates would sometimes have to work together with Islamists purely for opportunistic or strategic reasons. This happened, for instance, if there was an attack by the regime or IS on a certain area where both Islamist radical organizations and the generally more moderate Free Syrian Army happened to be located together. In such cases the moderates involved faced a military choice: either they could die while refusing to cooperate with the Islamic radical organizations, or they could survive, but would then be accused of collaborating with the extremists. So temporarily and purely for non-ideological reasons they worked together. “The problem is that in a war that has lasted seven years and may last even longer, people cannot remain fully moderate.” Western countries do not want to continue to support moderate groups if they work together with Islamist radical organizations, let alone the group that stands for Al Qaeda (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, previously called Jabhat al-Nusra). But if Western countries do not support these so-called moderates, the indirect consequence is that they will become weaker vis-à-vis the Islamist groups. So that is one of the issues Lister discusses. This book is also a historically important survey. I found it a very useful book when I was working on my most recent book. That is true of all these books I am recommending, they are the books I considered the most useful in getting a richer understanding of the situation in Syria, in addition to my own experiences with the country over many years, most recently as the Dutch Special Envoy for Syria. Yes, they are a very important component. They started to overshadow the other, more moderate groups, already early on, from the start of the Syrian revolution. The most powerful groups that remain are the more radical Islamist groups. So the strongest group is the one that now call themselves Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham. Another strong Islamist movement is Ahrar al-Sham. And then there is Jaysh al-Islam, part of whose fighters were deported to Idlib Province after their defeat east of Damascus. Then there are many other smaller Islamist opposition groups. According to Lister, in 2015 at least 150,000 insurgents within as many as 1,500 operationally distinct armed groups were involved in differing levels of fighting across Syria. Some were within broader umbellas and fronts and others existed entirely independently. Interestingly, Ahrar al-Sham, an Islamist movement, together with the Islamist Jaysh al-Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood, all signed the Riyadh Declaration of December 2015. That declaration was an important and moderate compromise saying that Syria was to be a pluralist country where religious and ethnic groups would not be discriminated against and everyone would be equal. But the more radical Islamic groups do not really consider non-Sunni Muslims and Christians as equals. For political reasons, however, these opposition groups became salonfähig or acceptable for participation in the ‘Higher Negotiations Council’ because they signed that agreement. The leader of Jaysh al-Islam, Muhammad ‘Allush, was at the time even appointed as ‘principal negotiator’ of the opposition delegation for the negotiations with the regime in Geneva. But that doesn’t mean that if these radical groups had won the war they would have stuck to these agreements. That is a completely different thing. Charles Lister worked at the Brookings Institution in Qatar and was dealing with a lot of Track II meetings of the Syrian opposition, which ran in parallel with the intra-Syrian peace talks. In that context he met very many representatives of these military groups. I did as well, in my function as Special Envoy for Syria. I not only met people from these armed opposition groups, but I would also find out what they really thought. They may have signed the Riyadh Declaration but what they said in those Track II meetings gave a clearer picture of their real thinking. In Riyadh, the central identity and aim was to be Syrian. No other identity was to be more important than being Syrian. But then during the Track II meetings some people—from the Islamic current within the Free Syrian Army—said, ‘Yes, but we must also be very clear that Syria is part of the Arab nation and part of the Islamic world. The revolution cannot achieve its aim if the Islamic element is not there.’ Then the Kurdish representative would say, ‘Yes, but we already agreed on something else in Riyadh.’ Then another Kurdish representative would say, ‘Well. If you say you belong to the Arab nation, then I must say that we belong to the Kurdish nation of 50 plus million people.’ And so on. That is how some of these meetings went. Here some of them said rather different things than what their leaders had agreed upon in Riyadh and showed that, in practice, they would not fully subscribe to these principles. Because if ever the regime had been toppled it would have been toppled by the military and not by civilians. And the military are these people from Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam, the Free Syrian Army and others. They would have been the ones to decide what was going to happen and what wasn’t. So you have the world on paper and the world as it really is. Syria already had enormous economic problems, and the war has made things much worse. To survive, many had to join armed forces, and join the group that paid the most. For instance, I know of people from the Free Syrian Army who went to Al Qaeda or IS early on because they paid more. There is continuous movement. At a certain moment Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and Ahrar al-Sham were the strongest military opposition groups. The first wanted to incorporate the other. They refused. Then they started trying to get each other’s military over to their side. Many changed groups not for ideological reasons, but for practical reasons, to keep their families alive. Because after seven years of destruction and war, they hardly have anything to live on. This is a phenomenon that has continuously generated shifting alliances. Many of these alliances are what we call marriages of convenience. It is just for a certain strategic, pragmatic, temporary purpose. Look at the regime and the Kurds, the PYD in the north. Assad has provided them with arms, not because he likes them, but because he can use them against his other enemies. Assad has also been accused of cooperating with IS. If he did so, it was mainly as a kind of war economy, with limited means, to weaken as many of his opponents as possible. Then, when one group is eliminated, the other group which has helped him may be the next target. My guess is that if all the other groups are eliminated and the Kurdish PYD are still there, then Assad will not say, ‘Thank you for your cooperation against the others! You want autonomy, well you have earned it.’ Or perhaps Assad might temporarily give them some kind of autonomy if that were useful for him to use against Turkey. But these are alliances not of friendship but of perceived military necessity for that day or that period."