Nafeez Ahmed writes:
Apparently, Ahrar al-Sham al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Movement of the
Free Men of Syria), one of the largest rebel groups in Syria, is going through
a moderate ideological transformation.
At least that’s what one would
think from the recent spate of PR, suggesting Washington should ally with the group.
Ahrar plays a lead role alongside
al-Qaeda’s Syrian arm, Jabhut al-Nusra, in the wider rebel coalition, Jaish al
Fatah (the Army of Conquest).
The Army of Conquest, which
includes “moderate” rebels, receives weapons, funding and logistical support
from US-led coalition allies, especially Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey.
In April, US commanders at the
operations room in southern Turkey green-lighted coordination between Islamist factions
and “moderate” vetted rebel groups.
Then in July, the US agreed to Turkish
demands to create a de facto “safe zone” in northwest Syria along the border,
supported by US air
cover – a move that if
implemented would empower Ahrar and al-Nusra.
Around
the same time, former US Ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, urged the
Obama administration to open talks with Ahrar al-Sham, or face being “left
behind” from the race to “influence” the “fate of Syria”.
Similarly, last month Syria
analyst Sam Heller pointed to interviews where Ahrar
representatives disavowed past connections to “Salafi-jihadism,” raising the
prospect of a more moderate “revisionist school” of jihadism.
Ahrar’s professed rejection of
“Salafi-jihadism,” argued Heller, manifests in fundamental disagreements with
Islamic State (IS) and al-Nusra on popular inclusion, Sharia (Islamic law) and political strategy.
“It is a sort of Salafist
reformation within jihadism itself, casting off some of the accumulated
mythology of Salafi-jihadism,” wrote Heller.
“In that sense, some have compared
it to the big-tent, pre-Salafi-jihadist militancy of Abdullah Azzam – albeit
filtered through the region’s newly charged sectarianism – a comparison with
which interviewees agreed.”
But Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin
Laden’s mentor and founder of the pan-Islamist jihad against the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan, was not “pre-Salafi”.
Salafism, a movement within Sunni
Islam, advocates returning to “authentic” Islam as encapsulated by the first
three generations of Muslims after Prophet Muhammad.
What Heller and others
fail to grasp – and what the ideologues of Ahrar are obscuring – is that
“Salafism” itself is a broad tent.
Salafis are simply those who, in
demanding strict emulation of the Prophet, reject a role for human reason and
experience in understanding Islam.
The focus on banishing deviant
traditions by adhering strictly to its own purportedly literalist readings of
Islamic texts, distinguishes Salafism from majority Sunni and Shia sects.
But like those schools, Salafis
still differ as to what such alleged literalism means, and is therefore a
diverse tradition that has undergone profound changes,
with numerous regional variations.
While many Salafists reject political
participation as a form of shirk (polytheism),
others embrace party political engagement to defend society from secularism,
while increasingly, Western Salafists see democracy as legitimate if it permits Muslims to practice
freely – and a minority,
of course, embrace military jihadism.
As noted by Shane Drennan of the University of
St Andrew’s Centre for the Study of Terrorism & Political Violence,
Abdullah Azzam was the first theorist of “Salafi jihadist ideology” calling for
“unification of the ummah [global Muslim community] through defensive jihad”.
His
and bin Laden’s Maktab al-Khidmat (Services
Bureau) “created the organisational archetype
for the current manifestation of the global Salafi-jihad and al-Qaeda
specifically”.
Azzam’s approach to
Salafi-jihadism was about defending and uniting the Muslim ummah “from invasion
by kuffar (infidels or nonbelievers),” rather
than engaging in takfir (excommunication
of other Muslims as apostates).
By reverting back to Azzam’s
Salafi-jihadism, Ahrar al-Sham is not moving away from Salafism, but merely
watering down its takfiri policies
to strengthen the pan-Islamist Sunni jihad, while
temporarily restraining its draconian political programme to engender popular
support.
Instead of apostatising
non-Salafi Sunni Muslims, like IS does, Ahrar prefers to only apostatise Muslim “heretics” like
Shias and Alawites.
Much has been made of Ahrar
al-Sham leader Hashem al-Sheikh’s Al-Jazeera interview in April, confirming
that a post-Assad Syria would consist of a government chosen by the people
based on a Sharia-based constitution; that minorities would be protected; and
that Ahrar disagreed with al-Nusra on “politics” and “its connection with
al-Qaeda”.
But there is nothing new here. In
an earlier 2014 interview with Al-Jazeera, Ahrar’s former leader, the late
Hassan Aboud, acknowledged his group’s collaboration across the spectrum of
rebel forces to enfranchise the Syrian people.
When asked about Ahrar al-Sham’s
relationship with al-Qaeda in Syria, Aboud made clear that their disagreement
was not fundamental:
“They, like other Islamic groups, my brother, we meet with
them in points and disagree on other points
and militarily meet in matters of tactics and disagree with them on other
tactics… We may agree with them that Islam is the adjudicator of our work and
we may disagree on some points.”
When asked how the post-Assad regime
would be selected, Aboud endorsed anything other than democracy:
“The method of
selecting a ruler varies in the Islamic state. There are those like today’s
monarchies, for example, where the king appoints his successor, and also there
are those where leaders are selected by senior nobles and wise men, and there
are those consulted by citizens. All these methods are legitimate and nothing
is wrong with them.”
But he described “democracy” as a
“sword hanging on everyone that Western powers want… Democracy is to control
people via people according to what they think of rules. We say that we have a
Divine system prescribed for his Caliph and slaves… It is the system where the
rule is for the pure Islamic law. Allah’s law is complete, and you need only consider
the texts and derive rules.”
Ahrar’s rejection of Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi’s declaration of the “Islamic State” – and curtailing of al-Nusra’s
fledgling Sharia courts – is not theological, but strategic:
“The most
important duty now is to punish the unjust aggressor enemy of our nation and
our people. Now is not the time for enforcement of the projects of each group,
if they exist… There is no doubt that many in this country want to be governed
by the laws of Allah and for the state’s constitution to be the Quran, but what
nature, shape and timing? This is where we disagree and agree with many of the
elements.”
And
despite the sweet-talk about minorities, Aboud made clear that Ahrar al-Sham’s
vision was fundamentally sectarian.
Referring to a “Shiite sickle” encircling
“our Muslim East,” he lambasted Russian and Iranian designs, pinpointing the
Shia threat, which he described as “a sickle stabbed into the side of this
ummah, the Persian Safavi populist sickle – its purpose is to be an obstacle to
the advancement and restoration of the glory of the Muslim nation.”
Aboud also threw light on Ahrar
al-Sham’s regional and global ambitions to destroy national borders through a
new Islamic super-state:
“We look forward to the day that we destroy with our
hands Sykes-Picot’s walls which were imposed on us… We look forward and hope to
see this [global Muslim] ummah as one entity again.”
Ironically, the escalation of
Russian and Iranian involvement in Syria fans the flames of this apocalyptic
vision.
By intervening directly in the Syrian quagmire, they will not end the
conflict, but stoke the fires of a regional sectarian war to dominate the
Middle East.
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