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Thursday 13 April 2017

It has recently been reported that the U.S. forces are working alongside al-Qaeda in Syria?

There appears to be no truth whatsoever to this rumor that can be found from any research into what is happening on the ground today.

There have always been affiliate factions [or individuals] which work alongside al Qaeda which/who may have sued for peace and surrendered.
In such cases, as I research it, in exchange for useful information which has saved U.S. and coalition forces lives, 'deals' may have been made to facilitate their exit from the war zone and relocation within the Arab Muslim world.
In some instances these 'deals' have gone wrong (see below) and released members have rescinded on agreements.

There has been a lot of tension between the Free Syrian Army and al-Qaeda precisely because the FSA have received backing from the U.S. government in opposition to al-Qaeda. So exactly the opposite of what is being reported is actually happening.
The FSA is now targeting not only the Syrian Army but also al-Qaeda members and groups locations.
A number of less prominent al-Qaeda and FSA members have recently been killed in what may be internal factional fighting between the two groups.

'***'Al-Qaeda in Syria took great pains from the outset to hide its presence. Operatives of what is now the Islamic State (IS), believed at the time to be a branch of al-Qaeda, infiltrated Syria in the summer of 2011, but did not announce its Syrian wing, Jabhat al-Nusra, until January 2012, and the Qaeda link was hidden until al-Nusra revealed it under pressure as its parent organization tried to assert control over it in April 2013. When Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was brought in to adjudicate the dispute, ruled in al-Nusra’s favour—that IS should return to Iraq and al-Nusra remain in Syria as an independent al-Qaeda branch (a decision IS rejected)—al-Zawahiri nonetheless rebuked al-Nusra’s leader, Ahmad al-Shara (Abu Muhammad al-Jolani) for “showing his links to al-Qaeda”. The idea was to “deal with people well, and then … tell them, ‘The al-Qaeda that was smeared in the media? This is it’.” Al-Qaeda wishes to shape, more than directly rule, the revolutionary areas—it will give up the name for the sake of the thing, which is intended to be a deeply-rooted emirate that can be used in time for external attacks and expansion toward the restoration of the caliphate. With the ostensible split from al-Qaeda when al-Nusra rebranded as JFS in July 2016, it basically re-set the initial conditions, and the formation of HTS is a further obfuscatory measure.''

To put it in a nutshell, as I have said in previous blogs, the 'actions' of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham has been giving the al-Qaeda 'corporate franchise brand' a 'bad name' in Iraq and Syria. The group has sought to put a distance between the Syrian affiliate and the Iraq affiliate so that excesses of one are not linked administratively to each other nor are they sanctioned directly by al-Qaeda.***

This has presented opportunities for dialog with some of the less fanatical affiliates of al-Nusra in Syria in particular and Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (al-Qaeda in Syria) especially since the 'corporate' merger between JFS and Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in January of this year. Some individuals and, it is rumoured, one senior commander, were 'unhappy' with this merger.
(The mergers themselves were also necessary to take account of changing patronage support (sic. of Turkey) and major advances by the Syrian Army with the support of (undeclared) Russian Special Forces (as volunteers and advisors to the Syrian armed forces) in Syria.**

I have covered the link with Palmyra in my book and it was a joy to see its liberation after so much death and suffering by its inhabitants.
It was hoped, at that time, that Russian forces would work alongside their U.S. counterparts to deliver peace in Syria. President Obama's insistence that Bashar al-Assad must step down and President Putin's refusal to cooperate in that process meant both superpowers have drifted further and further apart since the liberation of Palmyra, to a point where even greater suffering for the Syrian people has been prolonged indefinitely.

To summarize, there is no truth in the press reports that U.S. forces are working to support al-Qaeda but factional infighting between opposing Islamic ideological affiliates is, in addition to the suffering of the Syrian civilians, adding to the confusion turmoil and chaos in the Syrian civil war.


©Patrick Emek, April 2017


















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