Whose kids are ISIS and Nusra?

In Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces’ operation continues against Baghuz, the final area in ISIS’s hands. On the other hand, US President Trump’s blustering in the direction of his allies also continues to the accompaniment of his “ISIS is going, going, gone” tweets. Trump, saying in one of his recent tweets on the subject, “We do so much, and spend so much. Time for others to step up and do the job that they are so capable of doing,” has threatened his European allies with the release of the 800 ISIS militants they have caught if they don’t take them and try them.

The US declared its “Strategy for Combatting ISIS” in 2014 (in the Obama period) when its policy of reshaping the region (the Middle East) through intervention in Syria backfired and it began to lose some of its footholds. As such, for the US combatting ISIS is a strategy that serves to bind its allies to its own strategy and reconsolidate its position that had begun to weaken in the fight for dominance with Russia. Today, even while proclaiming “withdrawal from Syria,” Trump forcing his allies to assume greater “responsibility” shows that even the withdrawal process is part of this strategy and is a process being conducted by the US in relation to the fight for regional dominance.

Rather than east of the Euphrates as Erdoğan had expected, topping the agenda at the Syria summit held last week between Putin, Erdoğan and Rouhani in Sochi was Idlib and Putin’s words that they would no longer tolerate terrorists in Idlib. Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Bogdanov’s words, “an operation against the terrorists occupying Syria's Idlib is inevitable” came on the heels of this summit. At just such a time, Sputnik Arabic aired an arresting claim, the allegation that the leader of Nusra-continuation Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), al-Julani, had been seriously injured in an explosion in Idlib and was receiving treatment in Antakya.

ISIS, which has for a long time held sway east of the Euphrates (not just in Syria but also in Iraq) and, on the other hand, Nusra, which today is pressurizing Idlib. Two bloody organizations plaguing Syria and the region. By now, all forces party to the Syrian war entering its eighth year badmouth these two organizations. All well and good, but how did it come to pass that these organizations developed sufficient strength to plague Syria and the region? Who authored the policies that have given such succour to these organizations? It might be beneficial to recall these things once more today.

There is an initial need to note that Al-Qaeda was an organization that was set up with US support “to oppose a potential Soviet occupation” in Afghanistan in the 1980’s.

Following the 11 September 2001 attack in the US for which Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility, Bush adopted a strategy named “preventive war” and, by means of this strategy, the US asserted the right to intervene wherever it perceived there to be a threat even in the absence of any actual attack against it.

Two reasons were put forward in floating the notion of intervening in Iraq within this strategy. The first was the “presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq” and the second “Saddam’s support for al-Qaeda.” Even if the US, having overthrown Saddam, set up a system based on a sharing of power and resources between Shiite and Sunni Arabs and the Kurds, there has been unceasing tension and conflict between these forces since 2003 in Iraq. It was precisely following the overthrow of Saddam and not at the time of Saddam that al-Qaeda rapidly gained influence among the Sunnis who had lost the strength and position they had held in the Saddam days despite making up around fifteen per cent of the population. Iraqi al-Qaeda, which staged many bloody incidents in the country following 2003, assumed the name of Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) in 2004. The sectarian policies of Shia Maliki’s administration further strengthened this organization.

The imperialists, using the revolts in Arab countries at the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011 to reshape the region and North Africa in line with their own interests, first sprang into action in Libya. The overthrowing of the Gaddafi regime by radical Islamist gangs with al-Qaeda involvement was staged in Libya with the intervention of NATO forces in which the US and France played a leading role. Next, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, once more with US and French support, were put to work to pull off the same stunt in Syria. With the regimes heading the intervention being regimes that had pretentions of assuming leadership of “Sunni Islam” and the involvement in this war on the side of the Syrian regime of Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah, viewing the toppling of the Syrian regime as a threat, this before long lent the appearance of sectarian conflict (Shia-Sunni) to this war. Hence, Syria soon became a centre of attraction for jihadi gangs.

It was in just this period that the ISI militants who had moved into Syria set up the al-Nusra Front under Abu Mohammad al-Julani’s leadership. Seeing the rapid entrenchment in Syria of the Islamist militants arriving from all four corners of the globe from Chechnya to Europe and from Libya and Tunisia to Turkey, ISI leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed in a sound recording released in April 2013 that the al-Nusra Front was the Syrian arm of ISI and the two organizations had united under the name of “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.” However, al-Nusra leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani announced that there was no such unification and they were answerable to al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Nusra was thus split in two. However, ISIS rose to prominence in the post-split internal conflict. ISIS established an “emirate” centred on Raqqa in Syria. Going on to capture Mosul in Iraq in June 2014, ISIS also increased its influence in Iraq as well as Syria – and it is instructive with regard to the relationship between sectarian tension and ISIS’s rise to recall that Mosul Governor Atheel al-Nujaifi who abandoned Mosul to ISIS was the brother of Osama al-Najaifi who had come to the fore as the Sunnis’ representative vis-à-vis the Maliki administration.

With ISIL becoming a threat to the order the US had set up in Iraq, as we stated at the outset, the US set out to strengthen its own regional footholds dubbing this “combatting ISIS.”

The Erdoğan administration in Turkey, seeing the Kurds becoming status holders in Syria as a threat to its own Kurdish policy, supported ISIS’s siege of Kobani. The US and Turkey first came into confrontation in Syria in this period.

The same Erdoğan administration, at a time when it thought ISIS’s role to have ended, now staged the “Euphrates Shield” operation, this time justified in terms of the anti-ISIS fight (but actually to prevent the Kurdish cantons from unifying, the Kurds having attained superiority over ISIS).

Coming to Nusra, in 2015 Turkey and Saudi Arabia were pivotal in the formation of the “Fateh Army” that Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham headed and supported the Fateh Army in taking over Idlib. The Erdoğan administration has until today seen the existence of these jihadi groups as a card strengthening his hand at the Syria table. However, even if the administration in Turkey’s relations with the groups headed by Ahrar has continued following the “Idlib Accord” Turkey made with Russia whereby it guaranteed to eliminate the jihadi groups in Idlib, the tension and disagreement between it and Nusra-continuation HTS has also increased. At this juncture, two possible readings can be attached to the Russian news agency Sputnik’s claim that al-Julani is being treated in Turkey: First that despite the tension between them, relations and dealings between Turkey and HTS are continuing and, second, Russia is trying to leverage this claim to force Turkey into the operation against Idlib.

In a nutshell, in a period in which ISIS and Nusra have come to an end, the authors of the policies that created these bloody organizations now appear/are paraded before us as the heroes of the fight against these organizations.

Are we to be taken in?

Translated by Tim Drayton