Al Qaeda’s Name Game in Syria
Washington’s neocon-dominated foreign policy establishment has long seen Al
Qaeda’s Nusra Front as a strategic ally in Syria – and now hopes a name change
will protect it through President Obama’s last months, reports Gareth Porter.
By Gareth Porter
The Nusra Front’s adoption of the new name Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and claim that
it has separated itself from Al Qaeda was designed to influence U.S. policy, not
to make the group any more independent of Al Qaeda.
The objective of the maneuver was to head off U.S.-Russian military cooperation
against the jihadist group, renamed last week, based at least in part on the
hope that the U.S. bureaucratic and political elite, who are lining up against a
new U.S.-Russian agreement, may block or reverse the Obama administration’s
intention to target Al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria.
The leader of the Syrian jihadist organization Mohammad al-Golani and Al Qaeda
leader Ayman al-Zawahiri both made a great deal of the public encouragement that
Zawahiri gave to separation from the parent organization. The idea was that the
newly rebranded and supposedly independent jihadist organization in Syria would
be better able to fulfill its role in the Syrian revolution.
But to anyone who has followed the politics of Nusra Front’s role in the Syrian
war, the idea that Zawahiri would actually allow its Syrian franchise to cut
loose from the central leadership and function with full independence is
obviously part of a political sham.
Charles Lister, the British expert on Syrian jihadism who is now a fellow at the
Middle East Institute in Washington, observed in May that Al Qaeda’s senior
leadership has acquired a huge political stake in Nusra Front’s success in
dominating the war against the Assad regime, which it views as the jewel in the
crown of its global operation, along with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
(AQAP), the group’s Yemeni franchise.
This was not the first time that the issue of possible independence from Al
Qaeda had come up in the context of the international politics of the Syrian
conflict. A year ago last spring, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the external
sponsors of the Nusra Front-dominated military command that had taken over Idlib
in April 2015, were concerned about the possibility that the Obama
administration would come down hard against their Nusra-based strategy.
Qatari intelligence reportedly met several times with Golani and offered
substantial direct funding in return for a formal move to renounce his loyalty
to Al Qaeda. Influential figures in Washington were being told by Nusra’s
external supporters in May 2015 that an important faction of Nusra Front was
likely to split from Al Qaeda. That never happened, of course, and Golani
himself repeated his allegiance to Al Qaeda in his first on-camera interview
with Al Jazeera in June 2015.
Al Qaeda’s Islamic State
Golani’s loyalty is now a core interest of Al Qaeda. The Nusra Front’s success
in northwest Syria, and in Idlib governorate in particular, has given Al Qaeda
its first opportunity to have its own sovereign state. (The so-called “Islamic
State” made a clean break from Al Qaeda in 2014.)
Al Qaeda’s hopes for its Syrian franchise were so high last spring that Nusra
Front began to make the first preparations for its transformation into an
“emirate.” It began holding consultations with other jihadist groups in Syria as
well as clerics that the leadership believed would be sympathetic to the idea of
the first Islamic state based on Al Qaeda’s ideological outlook.
Al Qaeda’s ambition for its Syrian affiliate also explains why a number of
senior Al Qaeda figures have moved to Syria over the past three years — and
especially after taking control of Idlib – according to Lister.
The stakes for
Zawahiri and his colleagues at Al Qaeda central transcend Syria, moreover. The
project for an Al Qaeda emirate is vital to counter the attraction that Islamic
State has exerted at the expense of Al Qaeda since the 2014 break.
So despite Zawahiri’s ostensible magnanimity in giving his blessing to the
independence of his group’s Syrian affiliate, and the soothing reassurance of
such independence from the new spokesman for the organization, there is no way
Al Qaeda could actually allow such independence.
In the newly renamed “Jabhat Fateh al Sham,” the term “Sham” refers to the
entire area that includes Syria, Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan. But the entire
rebranding involved is also a “sham,” in the sense of something that is bogus
being presented as real.
The real reason for the rebranding and creation of a supposedly independent
organization was the threat of a U.S.-Russian joint air campaign against Nusra
Front. Golani himself provided a very strong hint that it was the primary
consideration, declaring that it was intended to take away the excuse used by
the U.S. and Russia to “bombard and displace Muslims … under the pretence of
targeting Jabhat al-Nusra”.
Before word of negotiations over such military cooperation between the two
powers surfaced in June, Nusra Front had resumed preparations for the eventual
announcement of an emirate in Idlib, as Lister had reported based on his own
jihadist and Salafist contacts.
But a shift in U.S. policy to all-out air war against Nusra Front would be
nothing short of a calamity for the jihadist organization. The Obama
administration, which has regarded Nusra Front as a terrorist organization from
the beginning, had nevertheless effectively provided a partial shield for Nusra
Front fighters under the partial ceasefire agreement.
Although Nusra was formally exempted from the scope of the agreement, Secretary
of State John Kerry had reached an understanding with Russian Foreign Minister
Sergey Lavrov in February that Russian planes would avoid hitting Nusra targets
until the U.S.-supported “legitimate” armed opposition had been given a chance
to separate themselves from Nusra physically and in terms of joint command
structures.
That separation never happened, and several armed opposition groups that had
been given status as part of the Syrian political negotiations joined with Nusra
in a major offensive that essentially brought the ceasefire to an end. Even
then, however, the Obama administration continued to press the Russians to avoid
bombing that could hit civilians and armed opposition groups, which it said were
“commingled” with Nusra.
From Target to Asset
So it was obviously a blow to Nusra hopes when the U.S.-Russian negotiations on
a joint military effort against the group were revealed. But the deal still has
not been completed, and Nusra Front leaders knew from the Washington Post that
Pentagon and CIA officials were strongly opposed to U.S. cooperation with Russia
in Syria against their group. They knew the argument against such an agreement
was that it would play into the hands of the Russians and their Syrian client by
weakening the main source of military pressure on Assad.
In fact, most of the news media, think tank specialists on the Middle East, and
the Democratic Party political elite aligned with Hillary Clinton now lean
toward treating Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate as a strategic asset rather than a
security threat.
Even Lister has called the Nusra Front a greater long-term threat than Islamic
State. But he was quoted as saying that the rebranding “puts the U.S. and Russia
in a tricky situation,” meaning that it would now be harder to justify air
strikes against the newly renamed organization.
Golani and his colleagues understandably hoped that their foreign tactical
allies against Russian-U.S. cooperation in Syria would try to exploit the
rebranding operation to shoot down the agreement for joint air operations
against them.
The Obama administration has said clearly that the rebranding ploy will not
change its policy toward the jihadist organization, but now Golani and his
foreign supporters are undoubtedly hoping for a new approach in a Hillary
Clinton administration.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012
Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of the newly
published Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. [This
article first appeared at Middle East Eye.]