Abdelaziz Salame, the highest political leader of the Tawhid
Brigade in Aleppo, has issued a statement online where he claims to speak for
13 different rebel factions. You can see the video or read it in Arabic here. The statement is titled “communiqué
number one” – making it slightly ominous right off the bat – and what it purports to do is to gut Western strategy
on Syria and put an end to the exiled opposition.
The statements has four points, some of them a little rambling. My
summary:
·
All military and civilian
forces should unify their ranks in an “Islamic framwork” which is based on “the
rule of sharia and making it the sole source of legislation”.
·
The undersigned feel that
they can only be represented by those who lived and sacrificed for the
revolution.
·
Therefore, they say, they are
not represented by the exile groups. They go on to specify that this applies to
the National Coalition and the planned exile government of Ahmed Touma,
stressing that these groups “do not represent them” and they “do not recognize
them”.
·
In closing, the undersigned
call on everyone to unite and avoid conflict, and so on, and so on.
The following groups are listed as signatories to the statement.
1.
Jabhat al-Nosra
2.
Islamic Ahrar al-Sham
Movement
3.
Tawhid Brigade
4.
Islam Brigade
5.
Suqour al-Sham Brigades
6.
Islamic Dawn Movement
7.
Islamic Light Movement
8.
Noureddin al-Zengi Battalions
9.
Haqq Brigade – Homs
10.
Furqan Brigade – Quneitra
11.
Fa-staqim Kama Ummirat
Gathering – Aleppo
12.
19th Division
13.
Ansar Brigade
Who are these people?
The alleged signatories make up a major part of the northern rebel
force, plus big chunks also of the Homs and Damascus rebel scene, as well as a
bit of it elsewhere. Some of them are among the biggest armed groups in the
country, and I’m thinking now mostly of numbers one through five. All together,
they control at least a few tens of thousand fighters, and if you trust their
own estimates (don’t) it must be way above 50,000 fighters.
Most of the major insurgent alliances are included. Liwa
al-Tawhid, Liwa al-Islam and Suqour al-Sham are in both the Western- and
Gulf-backed Supreme Military Council (SMC a.k.a. FSA) and the SILF,
sort-of-moderate Islamists. Ahrar al-Sham and Haqq are in the SIF, very
hardline Islamists. Jabhat al-Nosra, of course, is an al-Qaida faction.
Noureddin al-Zengi are in the Asala wa-Tanmiya alliance (which is led by
quietist salafis, more or less) as well as in the SMC. And so on. More groups
may join, but already at this stage, it looks – on paper, at least – like the
most powerful insurgent alliance in Syria.
What does this mean?
Is this a big deal? Yes, if the statement proves to accurately
represent the groups mentioned and they do not immediately fall apart again, it
is a very big deal. It represents the rebellion of a large part of the
“mainstream FSA” against its purported political leadership, and openly aligns
these factions with more hardline Islamist forces.
That means that all of these groups now formally state that they
do not recognize the opposition leadership that has been molded and promoted by
the USA, Turkey, France, Great Britain, other EU countries, Qatar, and –
especially, as of late – Saudi Arabia.
That they also formally commit themselves to sharia as the “sole
source of legislation” is not as a big a deal as it may seem. Most of these
factions already were on record as saying that, and for most of the others,
it’s more like a slight tweak of language. Bottom line, they were all Islamist
anyway. And, of course, they can still mean different things when they talk
about sharia.
Why now? According to a Tawhid Brigade spokesperson, it is because
of the “conspiracies and compromises that are being forced on the Syrian people
by way of the [National] Coalition”. So there.
Mohammed Alloush of the Islam
Brigade (led by his relative, Mohammed Zahran Alloush), who is also a leading
figure in the SILF alliance, was up late tweetingtonight.
He had a laundry list of complaints against the National Coalition, including
the fact that its members are all, he says, “appointed”, i.e. by foreign
powers. He also opposed its planned negotiations with the regime. This may have
been in reference to a (widely misinterpreted) recent statement by the
Coalition president Ahmed Jerba. Alloush also referred to the recent deal between the National
Coalition and the Kurdish National Council, and was upset that this will (he
thinks) splinter Syria and change its name from the Syrian Arab Republic to the
Syrian Republic.
Is this a one-off thing?
The fellow from the Tawhid Brigade
informed me that more statements are in the making. According to him, this is
not just an ad hoc formation
set up to make a single point about the National Coalition. He hinted that it’s
the beginning of a more structured group, but when I asked, he said it has no
name yet. On the other hand, Abdulqader Saleh – Tawhid’s powerful military
chief – referred to it on Twitter as al-Tahaluf al-Islami or
the Islamic Alliance, but that may have been just descriptive, rather than a
formal name.
Mohammed Alloush also wrote on Twitter, somewhat ambiguously, that
the member groups have their own offices and political bureaus, and there’s a
political program different from the National Coalition. He, too, hinted
that there’s more coming: “wait for the announcement of the new army”.
Who’s missing?
These are of course not all the rebels; far from it. Dozens or
hundreds of small and local groups are missing from this alliance, just like
they’ve been missing from every other alliance before it. Some really big
groups are also not in there, like the Farouq Battalions or the Ahfad al-Rasoul
Brigades, both of them quite closely aligned with the SMC and the National Coalition.
Most notably, the Islamic State of
Iraq and al-Sham – Syria’s most querulous al-Qaida faction – is absent from the
list. Given the recent surge in tensionbetween the Islamic State and
other factions, that seems significant. Does it mean the new coalition is in
fact aimed at isolating the Islamic State, while also upping its own Islamist
credentials? Striking a kind of third way between the Western-backed SMC and
its al-Qaida rival? Maybe. The question then remains, what should we make of
Jabhat al-Nosra being included, which is also an al-Qaida group.
In either case, the Northern Storm Brigade – which was routed
by the Islamic State in its home town of Aazaz just recently – has quickly
expressed support for the new coalition. In a statement posted online, they
fell over themselves to explain how they’ve always been all about implementing sharia law.
This is of course, how shall I put it, not true. The Northern Storm Brigade
leaders are, or so the story goes, a bunch of ex-smugglers from Aazaz, with no
particularly clear ideological agenda. They’ve allied with the West to the
point of hosting John McCain for a photo op – and as we know, he waltzed out
of that meeting firmly convinced that the rebels are all proponents of secular
democracy.
No: the reason that the Northern Storm Brigade has suddenly gone
all Islamist is that they desperately seek protection from Tawhid, after being
beaten up by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Perhaps they also
figure that this alliance might be the only thing big and mean enough to
actually crush the Islamic State. Size, money and momentum are the things to
look for in Syrian insurgent politics – ideology comes fourth, if even that.
That’s also why this statement seems so important.
On the other hand, the statement is in no way hostile to the ISIS.
It might in fact suit them pretty well, since it weakens the hand of the
Western-backed camp and adds weight to Islamist demands. When I asked a
representative of Tawhid, he said the reason they’re not on the list of
signatories is just because they’re not members. If they want to, and share the
principles, they could join. The members already present will decide.
Is it just a local thing?
There’s also not that much of a presence from the Syrian south.
The Furqan Brigade is an exception – founded in Kanaker, and now stretching
from the western Ghouta to Quneitra. Then you have the Islam Brigade in
Damascus, the Homsi Haqq Brigade, and so on. Generally speaking, however, this
list of names has a heavy northern flavor to it, specifically Aleppine.
On the scanned original statement, there’s even an
addition of “Aleppo” next to the name of “Abdullah al-Shami”, who signed for
Jabhat al-Nosra. The Tawhid spokesperson, again, says that this doesn’t mean
they only signed on for the Aleppo branch. He insists that the alliance is
intended for all of Syria. I guess we’ll find out.
Are you sure about this?
No, I’m not sure about this. There’s always good reason to be
cautious about Syria’s notoriously unstable opposition politics. Things like
these will shift quicker than you can say يسقط بشار. The wind could easily turn again, signatory groups could drop
out, foreign funders could put the squeeze on groups that have not grasped the
magnitude of what they just said.
That sort of thing already happened
once, in Aleppo in November 2012, when Tawhid, Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham and many
other groups signed a statement denouncing the then-newly formed National
Coalition. I wrote about it for Carnegie at the time. The
difference between then and now is that the November 2012 statement seems to
have been very poorly anchored, and basically sprung on everyone by Jabhat
al-Nosra who (I heard) gathered local commanders and had them sign a statement
without consulting their top leadership properly. So it fell apart very
quickly.
This time – we’ll see.
By Aron Lund; Syria Comment
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