Amid Syria’s upheaval, a wariness over the rebels’ Islamist roots
"When a patchwork of rebel armies threatened Syria’s capital a decade ago, governments from Washington to the Middle East were forced to confront a jarring possibility: A collapse of Syria’s brutal autocracy might lead to the rise of something even worse.
At the time, the United States and its allies were pouring billions of dollars into arming pro-democracy rebels fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. But the militias that posed the greatest threat to Damascus were led by religious extremists bent on turning Syria into an Islamist caliphate.
What if Assad fell, analysts asked, only to be replaced by groups that Washington regarded as terrorists? The scenario was given a name: the “catastrophic success.”
The question is being asked anew as intelligence agencies around the world contemplate the meaning of the lightning success by Syrian rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, which swept in Damascus on Saturday.
The rebel victory ended the reign of a Syrian leader who infamously used poison gas and barrel bombs to kill thousands of his own citizens, while also dealing a crushing blow to the territorial ambitions of Iran and Russia. But the militia group that now rules Damascus also has a troubled past, with historic ties to both the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. From Jerusalem and Amman to Washington and Paris, governments are watching with wariness as Syria comes under sway of a faction that the United States has officially labeled a foreign terrorist organization.
While HTS claims that it has changed, some of Syria’s neighbors remain skeptical.
“They may have evolved, but their essential ideology is still the same,” said one Middle Eastern official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss military assessments, as reports of fresh HTS conquests streamed in late last week.
U.S. and Middle Eastern officials acknowledge that the situation in Syria is profoundly different compared to a decade ago. Russia now has multiple military bases in Syria and has shown a readiness to use air power to ensure the survival of its most important Middle East ally. According to a broad array of analysts and Syria experts, HTS also has changed, not just in its rhetoric but in its actions, including at least an initial public embrace of tolerance and religious freedom in areas that it has come to occupy.
Whether HTS’s professions of reform are genuine is far from clear. It is one unknown among a swirl of uncertainties in a crisis changing so rapidly that Western intelligence analysts acknowledge they are struggling to keep up.
HTS’s blitz through Syrian’s largest cities raised questions over how the group would wield power if successful. Also unclear was whether other armed groups would exploit the collapse of Syrian authority to gain new territory. Among the possible beneficiaries of the current crisis is the Islamic State, which has cells in villages and towns in Syria’s central and eastern deserts.
The outcome could have major security impacts for Syria’s neighbors as well as the hundreds of U.S. service personnel deployed at military outposts in southern and northeastern Syria. The consequences could be even more profound for ordinary Syrians, including the 14 million — more than two-thirds of the country’s population — who are internally displaced or living as refugees, and the vast numbers of others who are simply exhausted after 13 years of conflict.
“We’re not in 2014 anymore, and the groups we’re seeing in 2024 are not the same,” said Charles Lister, director of the Syria program at the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank. “Despite concerns about some of the groups that are leading these advances, the idea that there could be some change around the corner is not necessarily being seen by Syrians as a bad thing. Until 10 days ago when all this started, there had been no light at the end of their very dark tunnel.”
A ‘black swan’ event
Almost no one saw it coming.
For years, the conventional wisdom held that Syria’s civil war was a frozen conflict. After teetering on collapse against an onslaught of rebel militias, Assad was rescued in 2015 by Russia and Iran, which committed their own militaries to ensure the survival of a crucial ally.
Assad’s forces had been struggling for three years against a sustained onslaught by a fractious network of rebel groups with competing interests and goals. The largest of the secular, pro-democracy factions was backed by the United States, which sought to tip the scale by providing military training and massive quantities of weapons and ammunition under a covert CIA program known as Timber Sycamore. The aid was partly intended to prevent a rise to power by Islamist groups such as the Islamic State — the “catastrophic success” that U.S. policymakers feared in early 2015.
Yet, over time, the rebel side came to be dominated by the Islamists. Among these was a powerful al-Qaeda-linked group known then as the al-Nusra Front. Today, after numerous attempts at a remake, it is called HTS.
The militia group was among the principal targets when Russian warplanes, backed by thousands of Iranian and Hezbollah fighters, began a drive in 2015 to expel the rebels from Syria’s major cities. In 2016, Iranians helped direct the siege of rebel-held Aleppo, a metropolis of nearly 3 million people that was nearly destroyed in the fighting.
After al-Nusra’s retreat, an uneasy stalemate emerged, with Turkish-backed opposition forces controlling a narrow buffer zone along Syria’s northern border and U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters dominating the eastern provinces. Islamist rebels, led by HTS, retreated to a small enclave around the northern city of Idlib. Despite occasional skirmishes, the lines barely moved for years. Russia, Iran and Hezbollah built military bases in Syria to ensure that Assad could never be forcibly removed from power.
Assad’s prospects began to deteriorate, almost unnoticed at first, amid the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack. By decimating Hezbollah’s leadership and destroying much of its military capability, Israel undermined an essential pillar in Assad’s security infrastructure. Syria’s other benefactors, Iran and Russia, had become distracted meanwhile by problems elsewhere, including Moscow’s war against Ukraine.
Despite the warning signs, Syria experts admit they overestimated the stability of the defensive wall that Assad built around himself. Over the past year it had quietly eroded, up until the day that a reinvigorated HTS decided to give it a shove.
“Over time, Assad’s capabilities were going down, but it had to be put to the test,” Andrew Tabler, a top adviser on Syria for the Trump administration’s first National Security Council, said Thursday at a policy forum sponsored by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “So HTS, in their offensive, decided to poke the front line in a very dramatic way. That sudden collapse led to a sudden collapse of the entire front.”
In the first nine days of the HTS offensive, rebel fighters overwhelmed Syrian army troops in Aleppo and Hama and pushed to the outskirts of Homs, a major security hub for Assad’s forces. Still, many U.S. and Middle Eastern analysts were predicting that the offensive would grind to halt as Syrian forces, backed again by Russian air power, regrouped to defend the approach to the capital.
By late Saturday, the 11th day, with fighting underway in Homs and Syrian troops on the retreat in the country’s southern provinces, official predictions about Assad’s future had become much gloomier.
Despite Russian and Iranian statements vowing to back Assad, the official said U.S. analysts were seeing evidence that support for the Syrian leader was wavering. Both countries were advising their citizens to quickly leave the country, the official said.
Still, the end came with astonishing speed. By early Sunday, rebels were in control of the capital, and Assad had fled the country, his whereabouts unknown.
A new kind of rebel army?
By all accounts, HTS has evolved considerably since the days of the “catastrophic success” warnings. By 2015, the group formerly known as al-Nusra Front had changed its name and disavowed any ties with the Islamic State, its parent organization. In 2016, its leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, had also publicly broken with al-Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups.
Jolani has sought since then to cultivate a more moderate, tolerant image and to root out — sometimes brutally — Islamic State supporters in his enclave as well as extremists within his organization, analysts say.
Even as his army was on the march in the past two weeks, Jolani has gone out of his way to present his reformer’s credentials to Western audiences, offering interviews to CNN and the New York Times.
“No one has the right to erase another group,” Jolani said of Syria’s ethnic and religious minorities in a CNN interview broadcast on Friday. “These sects have coexisted in this region for hundreds of years, and no one has the right to eliminate them.”
Jolani even suggested that he might disband his own organization in order to build a new government that represented all parts of Syrian society.
“We are talking about building Syria,” Jolani said. “Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is merely one part of this dialogue, and it may dissolve at any time. It is not an end in itself but a means to perform a task: confronting this regime.”
Syrian advocacy groups say Jolani has generally followed through on his pledge of moderation by allowing freedom of worship and granting rights to women — including the right to pursue professional careers and attend college — in HTS’s Idlib stronghold, as well as the cities that have recently fallen to the group.
Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a Washington-based advocacy group with an extensive network in northern Syria, said Aleppo’s citizens have largely welcomed the HTS fighters. A prominent leader of the city’s Orthodox community told him that Christian neighborhoods were putting up Christmas decorations without rebel interference, Moustafa said.
“There are no reports of violations against citizens,” he said. Moustafa, who also spoke at the Washington Institute forum, chafed at calls by the Biden administration and other Western officials for an immediate de-escalation in the fighting. “De-escalation of what? The liberation of towns and cities from a Russian-Iranian-backed Assad regime?” he asked.
Still, several U.S. and Middle Eastern analysts said they are not yet convinced by Jolani’s claims of reform.
Some noted that Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers also promised a more tolerant governing style after seizing control of Kabul in 2021. Instead, Afghanistan’s conservative leaders have imposed draconian restrictions on the country’s female population, including a new prohibition against attending medical classes. Other officials noted that HTS has expressed support for Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack against Israel — echoing the stance taken by Hezbollah and Iran, Assad’s longtime backers.
The reality of the group’s nature and intentions may not be clear for weeks or months. By then, Jolani and his followers may already be deeply entrenched, analysts say.
“He’s still personally a very conservative Islamist figure,” said Lister, the Middle East Institute scholar. “He has created a trajectory that he cannot reverse. Now there is a question, and a justifiable one, as to whether or not he can sustain this kind of balance.”
Warrick and Nakashima reported from Washington. Missy Ryan, Karen DeYoung, John Hudson and Dan Lamothe contributed to this report.
correction
A previous version of this article misspelled the name of Aron Lund, a fellow at the Century International think tank and Middle East analyst at the Swedish Defense Research Agency."
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