The rapid fall of the Assad regime is “a moment of historic opportunity for the long-suffering people of Syria”, U.S. President Joe Biden said – before noting that American bombers would continue to target Islamic State in the region, with B-52 bombers, F-15 fighter jets and A-10 aircraft having already conducted to 75 airstrikes against ISIS camps and operatives.
Israel is now striking inside Syria too, saying the bombing is aimed at preventing weapons from falling into the hands of “extremist elements” – another reference to ISIS. Russia and Iran, distracted by the conflicts in Ukraine and with Israel, did not intervene to assist Assad, and the speed at which the rebels advanced took allies on both sides by surprise.
It’s a reminder that events in the Middle East are rarely uncomplicated, and that interference, from both East and West have added considerably to the war, chaos, violence, terror and loss of life. It would be naïve to believe that the U.S. has been opposed to the rule of Assad out of concern for the rights of the Syrian people. As has happened in Iraq, in Libya and elsewhere, America is looking after its own interests in the region, and seeking to weaken alliances in the area with its old antagonist, Russia.
Similar supposedly humanitarian interventions did not end well for the people of Iraq – or of Libya, which now has open slave markets, appalling poverty, food insecurity, and is on the brink of yet another civil war as the anarchy caused by violent militias, including ISIS, continues.
The civil war in Syria, which has dragged on for thirteen years, has claimed more than half a million lives, according to estimates. Both sides in the conflict have been bolstered by extensive external support, with Russia and Iran backing Assad, while NATO members, particularly the U.S., Britain, and France have supported rebel factions. Turkey has given military assistance to anti-Assad forces – and been accused of supplying weapons and ammunition directly to ISIS. The Turkish occupation of northern Syria has been in place since August 2016. Saudi Arabia also backed Islamist rebel groups in Syria. There are a lot of moving parts in this war.
Russia launched a military intervention in Syria in 2015, saying it was responding to requests for support from the Assad government, and insisting it was a “war against terrorism” as ISIS were being targeted. The Russian intervention ensured the recapture of Aleppo in December 2016, and effectively secured the Assad regime – but human rights groups said that Russian air strikes had killed up to 7,700 and carried out indiscriminate aerial bombings.
For its part, during the conflict, America focused on providing military assistance to the many militias who had sprung up in opposition to the Syrian government. It led to weapons in the hands of ISIS fighters.
“The [US] program pumped many hundreds of millions of dollars to many dozens of militia groups. One knowledgeable official estimates that the CIA-backed fighters may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies over the past four years,” the Washington Post reported in 2017. But what was likely not predicted at the outset was that many of the US-backed fighters amongst the multiple rebel factions were hardline Islamic militants, or had drifted towards the same.
The insanity of the situation was captured by a 2016 Los Angeles Times piece headlined: “In Syria, militias armed by the Pentagon fight those armed by the CIA”.
“Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and trained in the bitter five-year-old civil war.
The fighting has intensified over the last two months, as CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones have repeatedly shot at each other while maneuvering through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo, U.S. officials and rebel leaders have confirmed.”
The LAT correspondent explained that “the attacks by one U.S.-backed group against another come amid continued heavy fighting in Syria and illustrate the difficulty facing U.S. efforts to coordinate among dozens of armed groups that are trying to overthrow the government of President Bashar Assad, fight the Islamic State militant group and battle one another all at the same time.”
“It is an enormous challenge,” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who described the clashes between U.S.-supported groups as “a fairly new phenomenon.”
“It is part of the three-dimensional chess that is the Syrian battlefield,” he said.
Three-dimensional chess is one way of putting it. Another might be that the careless disregard for the likely impact of arming lunatic factions who hate Western culture and have sworn to eradicate Christianity is to cause more harm and more bloodshed in an already chaotic region.
With Assad overthrown and seeking asylum in Moscow, the key rebel group leading the offensive in Syria is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS. It “has been designated by the US as a terrorist organization,” CNN reports, with a senior US official telling the platform on Sunday “that the US believes significant portions of HTS maintain strong links to ISIS”.
The leader of HTS was known as Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, has dropped that nom de guerre as BBC described it, and is now using his real name, Ahmed al-Sharaa, in order to downplay “his jihadist past”.
Born in Saudi Arabia, he fought with al-Qaeda in Iraq and was sent to Syria with funding to establish al-Nusra Front, a covert faction tied to ISIS, in 2011. He has since sought to distance “himself from IS’s brutality and emphasising a more pragmatic approach to jihad.”
Under Jawlani, HTS became the dominant force in Idlib, north-west Syria’s largest rebel stronghold and home to about four million people, many of whom were displaced from other Syrian provinces.To address concerns about a militant group governing the area, HTS established a civilian front, the so-called “Syrian Salvation Government” (SG) in 2017 as its political and administrative arm.
The SG functioned like a state, with a prime minister, ministries and local departments overseeing sectors such as education, health and reconstruction, while maintaining a religious council guided by Sharia, or Islamic law.
Under Sharia law, Idlib, became a cold house for Christians. “On Christmas Day, Michel Butros al-Jisri, one of the last Christians in the Syrian city of Idlib, didn’t attend services, because the Islamic rebels who control the area had long since locked up the church. Nor did he gather with friends and relatives to celebrate around a tree because nearly all of his fellow Christians have either died or fled during Syria’s 10-year civil war,” the New York Times reported in a piece entitled “‘Now there is no one’: The lament of one of the last Christians in a Syrian city”.
Communities across the Middle East and North Africa – some of which trace their roots to Christianity’s early days – have been struggling for decades with wars, poverty and persecution. A British government report in 2019 found that Christians in the Middle East and North Africa had fallen to less than 4 percent of the population from more than 20 percent a century ago.
The past decade has been particularly brutal as the upheavals have left Christians in parts of Iraq, Syria and beyond under the control of Islamist militants. They were subject to the whims of their new rulers, who banned their religious practices, seized their properties and even singled them out for death at times.
Over nine decades, Mr. al-Jisri went from being a member of a Christian community in Idlib that blended easily into the city’s social fabric to one of only three known Christians who remain there.
Already, amongst images of the scenes of celebration in Syria and the West’s idiotic embrace of the rebel victory as solely a good thing, videos are appearing of what appears to be Islamists rounding up Christians. While all such footage should be treated with caution given the fog of war, as Irish journalist Ian O ‘Doherty said yesterday: “All the talk is of a new, more pluralist and democratic Syria but hundreds of Muslim rebels screaming Allahu-Akhbar while firing guns into the air doesn’t exactly fill one with confidence.”
While HTS says that they will respect religious diversity in Syria, Switzerland-based group Christian Solidarity International said the Islamist group’s ideology and history “give religious minorities in Aleppo serious reason to doubt these promises.”
HTS has often targeted Christians throughout Syria in violent attacks and kidnappings, repeatedly killing Christian civilians and confiscating their property, CSI told Christian Post.
“In the Salafist worldview that animates HTS, Christians are not heretics to be destroyed (like the Alawites and the Druzes), but ‘people of the Book’ — followers of religions that were revealed before the coming of the [Islamic] prophet Muhammad. In lands ruled by Islam, they should be made dhimmis — a protected people who are kept in legal subjugation and pay an additional tax called the jizya,” CSI said.
“Until now, HTS has avoided imposing dhimmi status on Christians in Idlib by referring to them as musta’min, or temporary residents,” the group acknowledged. “But how long will HTS maintain this distinction?” CSI asked.
For Christians in Syria, the dramatic events of the last fortnight “have stirred memories of prior persecution during the Islamic State’s reign over parts of Syria. IS systematically targeted Christians, destroying churches and engaging in mass kidnappings before being defeated in 2019”.
As one Christian woman wrote on X: “So many ignorant statements about how we should be so happy right now. Assad is gone and the airstrikes from Israel started again with no air defense, people were dancing on the streets yet looting the second they got the chance. There is no system, no one to control anything or any order. Just praying that the situation will somehow get stable.”
The continual self-serving interference by powerful countries in the turbulent tinderbox that is the Middle East has only added further to the difficulties of the unfortunate people living there amidst terrible war and suffering. We should pause the celebrations and join that woman in praying that the worst fears of Christians regarding the empowerment of ISIS-like factions does not come to pass.