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members have rescinded on agreements.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
