RUTHFULLY YOURS

The overthrow of Bashar Al-Assad’s despotic regime in Syria this weekend has been cheered on by the UK government as well as much of the mainstream media.

Speaking on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg on BBC One, deputy PM Angela Rayner said that she ‘welcomed’ the news of Assad’s fall. Yesterday, foreign secretary David Lammy celebrated the Syrian president’s toppling, telling MPs that Assad is a ‘monster’, a ‘drug dealer’ and a ‘rat’.

In a sense, the government’s response is understandable. No one should mourn the end of the Assad dynasty’s brutal decades-long rule. Furthermore, Assad’s fall deals another significant blow to his despotic backers, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Russia, depriving both of a key strategic ally. Lammy’s geopolitical analysis leaves a lot to be desired at times, but he is right to say that Assad’s defeat is a humiliation for both Moscow and Tehran.

Yet too often, this understandable happiness over the fall of the Syrian dictator has morphed into an endorsement of the Islamist forces that toppled him. Sir John Sawers, the former head of MI6, even went so far as to describe Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group that led the offensive against Assad, as ‘a liberation movement’.

It’s enough to make you wonder if parts of the British state have mislaid their critical faculties. The HTS-led forces now vying to replace Assad should be viewed much more cautiously.

After all, HTS, which had previously been confined to the Idlib province in Syria’s north-west, is a Sunni Islamist paramilitary group. Its leader, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, was once aligned with the Islamic State (ISIS), and headed up HTS’s predecessor movement, al-Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. In 2017, the US State Department put up a $10million reward for information that could lead to his capture. This came after its decision in 2013 to classify him as a ‘specially designated global terrorist’. Likewise, the British state lists HTS as a proscribed terrorist organisation, although the government has now mooted removing it from the list.

Jolani has attempted to present himself and his militia as a more ‘moderate’ force in recent years. In 2016, he severed al-Nusra’s ties with al-Qaeda, renaming his group Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, before rebranding it again a year later as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Leading the group in the late 2010s, he proceeded to fight and defeat both al-Qaeda and ISIS affiliates as he fought to establish HTS’s so-called government of salvation in Idlib. Yet despite claiming to have moved away from hardline Islamism, few are convinced. In 2022, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom said that HTS ‘restricts religious freedom’ and threatens the safety of religious minorities in the part of Idlib it controls. This does not bode well for Syria’s Shia, Alawite, Christian and Druze religious minorities.

The UK and the West more generally should remember what has happened in Afghanistan since the Taliban took over in 2021. At the time, the Taliban, like HTS, also offered a rebranded, moderate image of itself to the world. Within months, however, it had turned Afghanistan into a hardline ‘Islamic Emirate’, something it was close to being before the Western occupation began in 2001. There is little reason to think HTS does not harbour similar aspirations.

Still, the status of HTS as a proscribed terrorist organisation may become a major headache for the UK government – especially if it wants to secure the organised return of Syrian refugees. After all, how could it justify such a return if HTS assumes control of Syria, but remains a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK?

Assad’s fall is to be welcomed. But that doesn’t mean Britain or the West should uncritically embrace HTS. When it comes to Islamist militias, you would hope that caution would be every politician’s watchword.

Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.