The enemy of an enemy is not always a friend. The Middle East can be quite a bit more complicated. It is easy to celebrate the fall of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime. The Assads, backed by Russia and Iran, dominated Syria for more than a half-century. After a 1982 uprising in Hama, Hafez Assad surrounded the city and killed upwards of 12,000, though he liked to brag that the true figure was actually higher.
Across think tanks and the media, there has been a makeover for Turkish-backed opposition leader Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani, who led the final drive toward Damascus.
In 2007, Israel destroyed a plutonium processing plant that the Syrian regime was building in cooperation with North Korea. Had the Israelis not acted, Bashar Assad would have had nuclear weapons at his disposal rather than the chemical weapons that he used to great devastation against the civilian population during former President Barack Obama’s administration. Assad’s brutality and his deliberate targeting of the civilian population to change local demographics destabilized the region and sent more than 5 million refugees out of Syria. Through it all, Assad enabled Iran’s land bridge of weaponry to Hezbollah, leased Russia a naval base to operate in the Eastern Mediterranean, and allowed the Russians to build an air base in northern Syria. Simply put, the Assad regime’s fall is cause for applause.
The question is whether the opposition’s victory is, likewise, a reason to celebrate. Across think tanks and the media, there has been a makeover for Turkish-backed opposition leader Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani, who led the final drive toward Damascus. He was an al-Qaida acolyte until 2016 and has a $10 million FBI bounty on his head, though, recently, he has filled his rhetoric with promises of tolerance and moderation. Promises are easy. After all, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made similar promises when his party won a supermajority in Parliament in the 2002 elections through a quirk of election law — he had only won 32% of the vote. Pragmatism was a tool only to consolidate power, and then Erdogan’s pro-Hamas, pro-Islamic State, anti-American rhetoric showed through.
Likewise, when Jawlani gave his first address, he chose not the presidential palace or Parliament as his backdrop, but rather the Umayyad mosque. The late Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-appointed caliph of the Islamic State, chose the Nouri mosque in Mosul. Its credentials were that it was old, but Jawlani chose the heart of an actual caliphate. How Jawlani paints himself symbolically to his own followers matters more than what he and his media-savvy aides promise Western diplomats, journalists, or think tankers.
Today, the Kurds imprison the bulk of Islamic State fighters and their families. If Turkey had its way, these prisoners would go free.
Erdogan makes no secret, either in published maps or frequent statements, of his rejection of Syrian Kurds. In Turkish, he describes them as crusaders. He denies the legitimacy of the beliefs of Kurdish Muslims because they take a more moderate, mystical approach to Islam, while he considers non-Muslims such as the Yezidi to be unworthy of life or freedom. A decade after the Yezidi genocide, the remaining enslaved Yezidis live almost exclusively inside Turkey or in areas of Syria dominated by Turkish-backed militias such as Jawlani’s Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham.
Jawlani may say he preaches moderation, but if he and his backers turn on the Kurds, they are essentially paving the way for the return of the Islamic State. The Syrian Kurds, more than their Iraqi counterparts or Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, were the ones who defeated the Islamic State in partnership with U.S. Special Forces and airpower. The United States turned to the Syrian Kurds in desperation in 2014 after it became clear the Turks, at best, were not serious about tackling the Islamic State and, at worst, fueled it. Put another way, the Turks did toward the Islamic State what Pakistan did with the Taliban: They demanded aid and assistance to tackle Islamist extremists but fueled rather than fought what had become their cash cow.
Today, the Kurds imprison the bulk of Islamic State fighters and their families. If Turkey had its way, these prisoners would go free. If they do, Americans, Israelis, and moderate Arabs may long for the days of Assad.
