Rebels ousted Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad on December 8, 2024, after nearly 14 years of civil war during which the Assad regime, among other atrocities, bombed cities, deployed chemical weapons against Syrian civilians, and ran a prison system of systematic, unspeakable cruelty.
The ‘mainstream’ Sunni Islamist reaction to Assad’s fall in Britain includes a fixation on Israel and Jews.
The anxiety within Syria and beyond over what comes next stems from the swift 11-day insurgent offensive that ultimately toppled Assad, led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). This organization is headed by Ahmad al-Shara (Abu Muhammad al-Jolani), a former emir of the Islamic State (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda’s recognized leader in Syria before publicly severing ties with Al-Qaeda in 2016.
Under Al-Shara’s rule, HTS has undergone a significant evolution in its governance methods and, apparently, its ideology. During the final offensive, HTS engaged in extensive messaging to reassure Syria’s minority communities. Nonetheless, HTS remains a Sunni Islamist group, and its victory was welcomed as such by counterpart groups in Britain.
CAGE Statement
Two days before Assad fell, 81 Muslim organisations, “scholars,” and activists released a statement under the rubric of CAGE International, a prominent Islamist organization headquartered in the United Kingdom. The first line of the statement declares: “We affirm the undeniable right of the Syrian people to resist the genocidal regime of Bashar al-Assad, just as we support the rights of the Palestinians to struggle for freedom.”
The statement argues that Assad was not an “anti-imperialist” ruler because he had been “a complicit partner in the West’s so-called ‘War on Terror.’” The signatories expressed outrage over the “rendition” of terrorists to Assad’s Syria, naming, among others, Mohammed Haydar Zammar, a recruiter of the 9/11 death pilots, and Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, better known as Abu Musab al-Suri, considered one of the greatest strategic thinkers the jihadist movement has produced.
The statement condemned Western leftists who supported Assad but offered no introspection as to why anti-imperialist leftists have consistently supported despotic imperial powers since the days of the Soviet Union. Rather, it claimed the anti-imperial Left had engaged in a “profound betrayal” by “recycling … conspiracy theories, securitised discourses, and Islamophobic narratives that are championed by neoconservatives and Zionists” – poorly concealed euphemisms for Jews. Having criticized those who deny “agency” to the Syrians, the statement concluded by turning the focus to Israel, declaring that an attack on Syria or “Palestine” was an attack on all the people of the Levant.
The Signatories
CAGE International, a nominal “human rights” group that works on behalf of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, provided two signatories: Asim Qureshi, best known in Britain as the man who said the ISIS killer Mohammed Emwazi (“Jihadi John”) was “a beautiful young man,” and Moazzam Begg, himself a former Guantanamo inmate, arrested “at an Al-Qaeda safe house” in Pakistan in 2002, and an “extremist” agitator in Britain since his release in 2005.
Another signatory, Muhammad Ahmad, is an official of the Ummah Welfare Trust (UWT), a charity that has made public statements supportive of Hamas operatives and has been questioned about its links to money laundering or terrorism, since it has worked in such overtly close alliance with Hamas fronts.
UWT has garnered praise from Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), the Islamist activist outfit that trades in antisemitism and works to undermine British counter-extremism policies. MEND itself had a signatory on the statement: Azhar Qayum, an activist who has deployed the “Islamophobia” charge to silence critics of Islamism.
Other signatories included Salman Butt, a prominent contributor to the British Islamist publication Islam21c, who was in the news recently for winning a legal case, under Britain’s notorious libel laws, against a government minister who described him as an “extremist.”
Islam21c’s Response
Islam21c, a well-known extremist publication, turned to Haitham al-Haddad, a radical preacher whose hostility to Jews, support for the subordination of women, and criminalization of homosexuality have been extensively reported.
Al-Haddad wrote that HTS’s victory in Syria meant it was “time for the Western world to realise and acknowledge that the so-called “Islamists” are not terrorists,” but merely people who “want freedom for their country, and the end to injustice in any place in the world.” Any attempt to stifle the ambitions of Syria’s Islamists, Al-Haddad warned, was a mark of “the Zionist agenda that destroys the reputation of the sincere Muslim people.”
5PillarsUK
5PillarsUK, perhaps the nastiest Sunni Islamist publication in Britain, has been rather restrained in its “official” coverage of Syria, publishing a sympathetic if not quite hagiographic, biography of Al-Shara; a more or less straight news report about Israel’s strikes to destroy Assad’s heavy weapons; and pictures from Syria after Assad’s ouster.
On Twitter, the 5Pillars editor, Roshan Salih, commented on Syria mostly through the prism of Israel, lamenting that the destruction of Assad’s weaponry meant the new Syria could not threaten the Jewish state. He praised the Houthis, the unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) based in Yemen, for being the only force directly attacking Israel at the present time.
Muslim Brother Networks Response
The Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) and the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), two elements of the Muslim Brotherhood network in Britain, offered intriguingly varied reactions. The MAB joined most of the other Sunni Islamists in declaring its hope that events in Syria were a harbinger for Palestine and Kashmir.
The MCB, a coalition of Muslim Brotherhood and South Asian Islamist forces, pointedly did not mention Palestine. The reason for this could lie in the MCB’s campaign over the past year to pressure the government to end its blacklist of the organization, dating back to the group’s activities in the 2000s. The MCB may calculate that even implied support for Hamas in official statements risks scuppering its efforts to legitimize itself.
Trying to Please Americans?
Some of the more hardline Islamists in Britain are wary of HTS and Al-Shara’s makeover, seeing the transformation as a distasteful effort to please the Americans and as a dangerous trajectory that might impel the new government to accept concessions to their Islamist program, with some fearing Syrian recognition of Israel. Posters responding to a post on X put forth by Salih at 5Pillars, referred for example, to HTS as proxies of NATO, the CIA or the “Jews.”
For the moment, however, these views are in the minority. The “mainstream” Sunni Islamist reaction to Assad’s fall in Britain includes a fixation on Israel and Jews, but with more optimism: a hope that the momentum from the Islamist triumph in Syria will spill over into the West Bank and Gaza; and seeing HTS’s victory as a chance to shift the narrative on Islamism away from concerns about security and terrorism and towards a normalization of Islamism as something akin to what we would once have called a “national liberation movement.”