Westerners who think the new government in Damascus will turn out to be moderate and willing to compromise with the west are kidding themselves, according to Middle East scholar Harold Rhode.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), is the coalition of Sunni Islamist insurgent groups which overthrew President Bashar al-Assad in December, toppling a Baathist dictatorship which ruled Syria for more than half a century. Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani, who previously served as head of the Nusra Front, al-Qaida’s branch in Syria, is head of HTS as well as Syria’s new president.Jawlani is his nom de guerre; these days, he goes by his given name, Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa.
Jawlani/Sharaa “doesn’t talk for Syria,” Rhode told a JPC webinar Thursday. “He talks for his terrorists.”
Rhode, who served as an advisor on the Islamic world in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 1982 to 2010, characterizes HTS as “”al-Qaida in another form.”
There are two groups inside Syria’s complicated ethnic/political mosaic with a history of good relations with Israel: First, there is the Druze community, mostly in southern and western Syria near the Golan Heights and Lebanon, which is establishing, in large part, closer ties with Israel. Second are the Syrian Kurds, in particular the Syrian Democratic Forces SDF), a Kurdish-dominated militia that signed a peace treaty with the HTS government earlier this month.
A critical question is what the SDF will do with thousands of ISIS prisoners it has been guarding for almost a decade in the wake of the US-led military campaign against that group:Specifically, would the Kurds release a large number of violent, dangerous prisoners to curry favor with HTS?
Rhode doubts that would happen.
