D
Deleted member
Guest
A very interesting and detailed analysis of the HTS strategic position in Idlib:
From War on the Rocks.
Excerpt covering the conclusion, please read the actual full article:
From War on the Rocks.
Excerpt covering the conclusion, please read the actual full article:
A Less Indispensable HTS?
The leaked al-Farghali audio offers a new angle on a Turkey-HTS relationship that has — understandably, for all involved — remained ambiguous.
Since Turkey’s first deployment inside Idlib in October 2017, HTS has taken an increasingly amicable tone toward Turkey in its public statements. The group has mostly hailed the Muslim Turkish people and “Turkey” generically — not the Turkish state, which according to jihadist doctrine is a false idol and an affront to God. Still, in a statement in response to Turkey’s March 5 deal with Russia, the group went so far as to thank “the Turkish government” for “its clear, supportive stance alongside the Syrian revolution, and its participation in defending and protecting civilians in this last battle,” even as it rejected the deal’s specific terms.
This sort of rhetoric is a far cry from Jabhat al-Nusra’s original announcement in January 2012, in which al-Nusra leader Abu Muhammad al-Jolani (and eventual head of HTS) said “the Turkish regime” was “America’s bludgeon.” “The form of the Turkish regime’s Islam has no content,” al-Jolani said at the time. “It’s an image with no meaning, and a body with no soul.”
Now it appears, however, that as recently as this February HTS leaders were still telling the group’s membership that the Turkish state was an “infidel” institution and that the Turkish soldiers deployed inside Idlib were “apostates.”
We don’t know, of course, that this rhetoric accurately represents the thinking of HTS’ core leadership, which may be more flexible ideologically but feels it needs to cater to a rank and file that has been acculturated to jihadist doctrine. The group’s mostly Syrian leaders have acquired a reputation for “pragmatism,” although a pragmatic approach doesn’t necessarily mean they have abandoned their base principles. We also don’t know that this rhetoric reflects the attitude of all the group’s foot soldiers. Some may have more extreme beliefs, while others may have no real beliefs at all, if they were drawn to the group by a paycheck or by personal links with other members.
Still, we know this is what HTS leadership told this collection of fighters to hold the group together and motivate them to fight. Al-Farghali apparently judged these ideas — the ungodliness of the Turkish state, the conditions for dealing with Turkish “apostates” — salient to at least part of the group’s rank and file. His speech appears to be a particularly clear example of how jihadist theory, which might otherwise seem abstract or dubiously relevant, can directly figure into an armed group’s morale and effectiveness in battle.
We also know that, in the moment, al-Farghali told the group’s own men HTS had lost control inside Idlib. The idea that HTS ever really had al-zuhour over the Turks may just be a story the group is telling itself, a self-serving rationalization. But whatever the reality was in the past, by February al-Farghali was telling HTS’ ideological membership that the group had been depleted by its successive losses and was no longer capable of imposing on the Turks.
Since the March 5 ceasefire, Turkey has only continued to multiply and reinforce its positions inside Idlib, even after an attack by what Ankara called “radical groups” killed two Turkish soldiers.
Previously, Turkey has taken the unconventional approach of executing its Idlib deals — which have stipulated both cessations of hostilities and steps to dislodge jihadist militants — consensually with HTS, an internationally designated terrorist organization that insists it will not lay down arms. Turkey’s implementation of these agreements seemingly contravened the intent of their other guarantors, something Russia has stressed.
The al-Farghali leak, however, suggests Turkey’s presence in Idlib is no longer consensual. That could mean Turkey does not have to reconcile the anti-HTS commitments it has made to Russia with the need for HTS’ cooperation on the ground. The situation inside Idlib remains complicated — Turkish reinforcements and troop rotations still transit zones of HTS control, as they enter from the Turkish border — but Turkey may now be newly free to act.
For Turkey and others motivated to save Idlib, HTS has long seemed like something unpalatable but also unavoidable. If that is no longer the case, that may open space for new Turkish-Russian arrangements — arrangements made at HTS’ expense — that could satisfy Russia and avert a Russian-backed Syrian military offensive for what’s left of rebel Idlib.
As ever, it is debatable whether the elimination of HTS and adjacent jihadists in Idlib would actually be enough for Russia. Moscow might just go on to insist that all militants who resist Syrian state authority are terrorists who must be crushed. Still, Russia continues to insist publicly on steps to combat HTS and other internationally designated terrorist groups, and to extract promises from Turkey to that effect, including the new March 5 protocol. Now this leaked al-Farghali recording may indicate that this type of Turkish-Russian accommodation is more viable than at any time in the past several years.
For the sake of Idlib and its residents, then, we have to ask: Is a post-zuhour HTS still indispensable? Or, as the original conditions on which the group insisted have become “void,” has HTS rationalized its way to obsolescence?