How The Washington Post Got Taken In by Syria's Taliban
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_the_washington_post_got_taken_in_by_
syrias_taliban_20150714/
Posted on Jul 14, 2015
By Juan Cole
Informed Comment
This post originally ran on Juan Cole's website.
Making alliances of convenience is a perennial temptation in Washington,
where policy-makers often have more ambition than ethics or common sense.
Thus, the Washington Post just published a slick op-ed by a representative
of the Islamic Movement of Syrian Free Men (Ahrar al-Sham) claiming that
the group is "moderate" and not "extremist." The implication is that the US
should feel comfortable allying with this Salafi Jihadi group.
Here's what's wrong with that scenario:
The Free Men want to see Syria become what they call an Islamic state, just
as the Taliban wanted Afghanistan to be their idea of an Islamic state.
Islam is an old and diverse religious tradition, but these people don't mean
any old "Islam." They have a rigid fundamentalist interpretation of it that
makes no room for people who disagree with them. They say they will accept
some sort of pluralism, but this is frankly a lie and can be shown to be so.
The Free Men are closely allied with the open al-Qaeda affiliate, the
Support Front (Jabhat al-Nusra). This is not a mere alliance of
convenience. They have formed joint operation offices. They coordinate
closely militarily. They have a common rubric in Idlib Province of the Army
of Conquest (Jaysh al-Fath).
When the two groups of holy warriors and their allies took over the city of
Idlib this summer, they conquered 18 villages north of that city largely
inhabited by members of the esoteric Shiite Druze religion. The Free Men
leadership gave control of the Druze villages to al-Qaeda, which promptly
began stealing their property and killing them when they objected. Some 23
were massacred.
The al-Qaeda oppression of the Druze, enabled by the Free Men, tempted many
members of that group to get off the fence and support the Syrian regime of
Bashar al-Assad. In Israel, members of the Druze minority pressured the
Israeli government to attack al-Qaeda so as to protect the Syrian Druze.
(Israel appears to have an alliance of convenience with al-Qaeda in the
Golan Heights against their common foe, the Lebanese Hizbullah, and brings
wounded anti-regime fighters fighters over the border into Israel for
treatment. Druze in the Israeli-held Golan rioted and attacked these wounded
jihadis recently, alleging that the injure who were being transported in an
Israeli ambulance were al-Qaeda).
Note that the Free Men did not have to give the Druze in Idlib Province to
al-Qaeda. They could have administered that territory themselves. That
they thought al-Qaeda a suitable overlord for a group viewed by hard line
Salafis as unbelievers and idolators shows that they just don't care about
human rights. They want a Salafi , Taliban-style Islamic state. We know
exactly what happened to Shiite Hazara under the Taliban in Afghanistan.
They were massacred.
If the Free Men are so moderate, they would renounce their close alliance
with al-Qaeda and stop coddling the terrorists, who report directly to Ayman
al-Zawahiri, a mastermind of the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001.
That this intertwining of the Free Men with al-Qaeda is all right with the
Washington Post is just baffling.
Another hint at the Free Men's lack of pluralism is their hatred for the
leftist Kurds who have fought so effectively against Daesh:
June 21, 2015
The Free Men, in alliance with al-Qaeda, made an incursion in late May into
the Kurdish-majority Shaykh Mahmoud District of Aleppo, trading live fire
with the YPG leftist Kurdish militia. A truce was later worked out.
One of the founders of the Free Men was Hasan Aboud, who in 2013 told an
Egyptian newspaper that secularism would not be allowed and tried to assure
its readers that "the rejection of democracy" does not mean domination, but
rather consultation. Aboud was killed in fall of 2014, but there is no
reason to think the organization has changed its mind about those evil
secularists or about the undesirability of doing more than "consulting" with
the governed.
The weasel words in the WaPo op-ed notwithstanding, just a month and a half
ago, Sam Heller notes,
"On 26 May, Ahrar al-Sham's chief shari'ah officer "Abu Muhammad al-Sadeq"
issued a treatise on Twitter titled "And the Idol Has Shattered" - the
"idol," in this case, being democracy. Drawing on Algeria and Egypt's
aborted democratic experiments, Abu Muhammad argued that democracy is, in
real practice, a trap for would-be Islamist participants."
So I think we know what sort of society the Free Men want to build in Syria.
It is apparently one where al-Qaeda has a free hand with minorities and
there is no democracy, and the Kurdish socialist, feminist experiment is
crushed. I think we also know what they have in store for Syria's women.
All that said, the Free Men are not al-Qaeda or Daesh (ISIS, ISIL). Indeed,
they expelled fighters who would not take on Daesh and have had several
battles with it. They don't go in for mass beheadings or anything, and they
did try to persuade al-Qaeda not to massacre the Druze (though they did
nothing to stop the Support Front from just, like stealing their property).
And, they don't want to blow stuff up in the West- they have local, Syrian
territorial ambitions.
But in all these ways they resemble the Afghan Taliban, who also were not
international terrorists, who also just wanted an Islamic state in their own
country, and who also had a soft spot for al-Qaeda, with which they were
allied.
The Free Men are counting on Washington being willing to overlook their
tight entanglement with al-Qaeda and their anti-democratic, sectarian Sunni
theocratic aspirations because they might be useful in fighting Daesh as
well as in overthrowing the Syrian regime.
We have seen this movie before, in the Reagan administration in the 1980s,
when the US allied with the Muslim extreme right, groups like Gulbudin
Hikmatyar's so-called Islamic Party (Hizb-i Islam) against the Afghan
socialists. Although CIA station chief in Islamabad Milt Bearden denied
that the US directly trained or funded the Arab volunteers who fought
alongside Hikmatyar and who were grouped by Usama Bin Laden under the Office
of Services, there isn't any doubt that CIA tradecraft was communicated to
al-Qaeda by American allies. That knowledge of cell formation, avoidance of
surveillance, and planning of covert operations, was then deployed against
the United States itself by al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001.
The al-Assad regime is evil and genocidal. But not all of its enemies are
worthy allies for the US. Friends of al-Qaeda are no friends of ours.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
How The Washington Post Got Taken In by Syria's Taliban
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_the_washington_post_got_taken_in_by_
syrias_taliban_20150714/
Posted on Jul 14, 2015
By Juan Cole
Informed Comment
This post originally ran on Juan Cole's website.
Making alliances of convenience is a perennial temptation in Washington,
where policy-makers often have more ambition than ethics or common sense.
Thus, the Washington Post just published a slick op-ed by a representative
of the Islamic Movement of Syrian Free Men (Ahrar al-Sham) claiming that the
group is "moderate" and not "extremist." The implication is that the US
should feel comfortable allying with this Salafi Jihadi group.
Here's what's wrong with that scenario:
The Free Men want to see Syria become what they call an Islamic state, just
as the Taliban wanted Afghanistan to be their idea of an Islamic state.
Islam is an old and diverse religious tradition, but these people don't mean
any old "Islam." They have a rigid fundamentalist interpretation of it that
makes no room for people who disagree with them. They say they will accept
some sort of pluralism, but this is frankly a lie and can be shown to be so.
The Free Men are closely allied with the open al-Qaeda affiliate, the
Support Front (Jabhat al-Nusra). This is not a mere alliance of convenience.
They have formed joint operation offices. They coordinate closely
militarily. They have a common rubric in Idlib Province of the Army of
Conquest (Jaysh al-Fath).
When the two groups of holy warriors and their allies took over the city of
Idlib this summer, they conquered 18 villages north of that city largely
inhabited by members of the esoteric Shiite Druze religion. The Free Men
leadership gave control of the Druze villages to al-Qaeda, which promptly
began stealing their property and killing them when they objected. Some 23
were massacred.
The al-Qaeda oppression of the Druze, enabled by the Free Men, tempted many
members of that group to get off the fence and support the Syrian regime of
Bashar al-Assad. In Israel, members of the Druze minority pressured the
Israeli government to attack al-Qaeda so as to protect the Syrian Druze.
(Israel appears to have an alliance of convenience with al-Qaeda in the
Golan Heights against their common foe, the Lebanese Hizbullah, and brings
wounded anti-regime fighters fighters over the border into Israel for
treatment. Druze in the Israeli-held Golan rioted and attacked these wounded
jihadis recently, alleging that the injure who were being transported in an
Israeli ambulance were al-Qaeda).
Note that the Free Men did not have to give the Druze in Idlib Province to
al-Qaeda. They could have administered that territory themselves. That they
thought al-Qaeda a suitable overlord for a group viewed by hard line Salafis
as unbelievers and idolators shows that they just don't care about human
rights. They want a Salafi , Taliban-style Islamic state. We know exactly
what happened to Shiite Hazara under the Taliban in Afghanistan. They were
massacred.
If the Free Men are so moderate, they would renounce their close alliance
with al-Qaeda and stop coddling the terrorists, who report directly to Ayman
al-Zawahiri, a mastermind of the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001.
That this intertwining of the Free Men with al-Qaeda is all right with the
Washington Post is just baffling.
Another hint at the Free Men's lack of pluralism is their hatred for the
leftist Kurds who have fought so effectively against Daesh:
June 21, 2015
The Free Men, in alliance with al-Qaeda, made an incursion in late May into
the Kurdish-majority Shaykh Mahmoud District of Aleppo, trading live fire
with the YPG leftist Kurdish militia. A truce was later worked out.
http://www.juancole.com/images/2015/07/Flag_of_Ahrar_ash-Sham.svg_.png
http://www.juancole.com/images/2015/07/Flag_of_Ahrar_ash-Sham.svg_.png
One of the founders of the Free Men was Hasan Aboud, who in 2013 told an
Egyptian newspaper that secularism would not be allowed and tried to assure
its readers that "the rejection of democracy" does not mean domination, but
rather consultation. Aboud was killed in fall of 2014, but there is no
reason to think the organization has changed its mind about those evil
secularists or about the undesirability of doing more than "consulting" with
the governed.
The weasel words in the WaPo op-ed notwithstanding, just a month and a half
ago, Sam Heller notes,
"On 26 May, Ahrar al-Sham's chief shari'ah officer "Abu Muhammad al-Sadeq"
issued a treatise on Twitter titled "And the Idol Has Shattered" - the
"idol," in this case, being democracy. Drawing on Algeria and Egypt's
aborted democratic experiments, Abu Muhammad argued that democracy is, in
real practice, a trap for would-be Islamist participants."
So I think we know what sort of society the Free Men want to build in Syria.
It is apparently one where al-Qaeda has a free hand with minorities and
there is no democracy, and the Kurdish socialist, feminist experiment is
crushed. I think we also know what they have in store for Syria's women.
All that said, the Free Men are not al-Qaeda or Daesh (ISIS, ISIL). Indeed,
they expelled fighters who would not take on Daesh and have had several
battles with it. They don't go in for mass beheadings or anything, and they
did try to persuade al-Qaeda not to massacre the Druze (though they did
nothing to stop the Support Front from just, like stealing their property).
And, they don't want to blow stuff up in the West- they have local, Syrian
territorial ambitions.
But in all these ways they resemble the Afghan Taliban, who also were not
international terrorists, who also just wanted an Islamic state in their own
country, and who also had a soft spot for al-Qaeda, with which they were
allied.
The Free Men are counting on Washington being willing to overlook their
tight entanglement with al-Qaeda and their anti-democratic, sectarian Sunni
theocratic aspirations because they might be useful in fighting Daesh as
well as in overthrowing the Syrian regime.
We have seen this movie before, in the Reagan administration in the 1980s,
when the US allied with the Muslim extreme right, groups like Gulbudin
Hikmatyar's so-called Islamic Party (Hizb-i Islam) against the Afghan
socialists. Although CIA station chief in Islamabad Milt Bearden denied that
the US directly trained or funded the Arab volunteers who fought alongside
Hikmatyar and who were grouped by Usama Bin Laden under the Office of
Services, there isn't any doubt that CIA tradecraft was communicated to
al-Qaeda by American allies. That knowledge of cell formation, avoidance of
surveillance, and planning of covert operations, was then deployed against
the United States itself by al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001.
The al-Assad regime is evil and genocidal. But not all of its enemies are
worthy allies for the US. Friends of al-Qaeda are no friends of ours.
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