HTS jihadists with links to Al-Qaeda have been crucial in defeating Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Most Western headlines won’t focus on this, but a terrorist group (with a wanted terrorist at its helm) was largely responsible for the ‘rebel’ victory they’re praising. And now, the UK is considering taking the group off its terror list to help legitimise the new Syrian regime.
Sorry, WTF?
While mainstream media outlets have focused on using fairly neutral words like ‘rebels’, ‘insurgents’, or ‘militias’ to describe Syria’s jihadist victors, the fact is that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) was the group at the forefront in the last battle against Assad.
Currently, the UK has proscribed “Al Qa’ida (AQ)” on its terror list. And it notes that “Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham” and others “should be treated as alternative names” for the group. Because of this, lawyer Iain Darcy points out:
if any British politician associates with the new regime, they will be breaking British law
HTS and its leader Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani have tried to convince the world not to focus on their record of human rights abuses, particularly against women. They’ve miraculously ‘changed’, apparently.
For now, however, al-Jawlani still has a $10m bounty on his head. And HTS remains on the US terror list.
So it looks like the US and the UK may need to drop their ban on HTS and its leader if they’re going to deal with the new Syrian regime.
If HTS comes off the terror lists, so must the Kurdish freedom fighters who defeated Daesh
At the end of November, the British police went after people it claimed were supportive of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The PKK and its allies in Syria were at the centre of the fight against Daesh (Isis/Isil), and were pivotal in defeating it.
Around the First World War, the UK and France artificially divided the Middle East between themselves (and the emerging state of Turkey), leaving people like the Kurds stateless. After Turkey came into existence in 1923, in the shadow of the Armenian genocide, it thoroughly repressed its Kurdish population. After increasing social tensions in the 1970s, a right-wing coup occurred in 1980. The PKK arose in this context and has been fighting the Turkish state since the 1980s.
Because Turkey claims the PKK are terrorists, its Western allies agree. But it’s important to note here that Turkey’s war criminal leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has also called anti-war students “terrorists”. It also ignores the fact that Turkey’s government ended peace talks with the PKK in 2015 largely because a left-wing, Kurdish-led revolution had emerged in northern Syria and had attracted international attention for its brave resistance to jihadist attacks. It saw this, and decided to attack both the PKK and its allies in Syria (as it continues to do today).
The UK echoes Turkey’s claims that the PKK is “a separatist movement that seeks an independent Kurdish state in southeast Turkey”. But as the BBC has reported, the group changed its aims in the 1990s, with military leader Cemil Bayik insisting:
we don’t want to separate from Turkey and set up a state… We want to live within the borders of Turkey on our own land freely… The struggle will continue until the Kurds’ innate rights are accepted
The PKK and its allies have condemned all attacks on civilians. They’ve reportedly never attacked Western targets. And European courts have previously criticised the political weaponisation of the ‘terrorist’ designation. But their left-wing ideology includes a desire for self-governance, which centralised states like Turkey oppose.
