State Department, U.S. intel memos unmask longtime terrorism ties of Syria’s new governing regime

When Bashar al-Assad's regime fell earlier this month in Syria, the West’s glee in seeing a brutal dictator deposed quickly melted to the harsh reality that the new governing rebels emanate from a designated terror organization with long ties to both Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

State Department and Director of National Intelligence memos reviewed by Just the News provide unvarnished assessments of the brutality of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group – designated a foreign terrorist organization for more than a decade – and its alliances with other terror groups dating to the notorious Jabhat al-Nusra, also known as the al-Nusrah Front.

In fact, as recently as last year the State Department raised strong objections to HTS in the agency’s annual human rights report on Syria.

“Armed terrorist groups such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham committed a wide range of abuses, including killings, kidnappings, physical abuse, and recruitment or use of child soldiers,” the report noted.

It added that “conditions in detention centers run by non-state actors, including terrorist groups such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), violated international law.”

You can read the full report here.

Rebranding itself

Such harsh assessments are certain to complicate any U.S. decision whether to recognize the former HTS leaders who now govern Damascus or to remove their terrorism designations as they rebrand themselves as Syrian liberators committed to a new era of tolerance and peace, officials told Just the News.

“The problem is that the victors here, the HTS, are descendants of Jabhat Al Nusra and then ultimately of ISIS and al- Qaeda. They have very strong jihadist roots, and their leader, Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani, is named for the Golan Heights,” Victoria Coates, the former deputy national security adviser under Donald Trump, told the Just the News, No Noise television show recently.

“That is going to be a recurring theme in this discussion. He is a designated terrorist with a $10 million bounty on his head. So we can't really be celebratory of them. This is not at all clear cut," she cautioned.

Former CIA analyst and National Security Council chief of staff Fred Fleitz said U.S. officials are certain to be cautious even as the HTS officials who have taken governing roles since Assad’s fall have signaled they want to shift to a more moderate position.

“There have been positive signs so far,” Fleitz told the John Solomon Reports podcast. “They say they're going to have free elections. They say they're going to respect the rights of minorities."

“But they are an offshoot of Al-Qaeda, and they do appear intent on putting back or establishing Sharia law in the country. The rights of women are already being restricted. We need to keep a close eye on this,” he added.

HTS in recent years has  — at least publicly  — moved away from its Al-Qaeda and ISIS ties as it repositioned itself as a liberating force seeking to overthrow Bashir Assad.

But the DNI’s current assessment of HTS, still raises red flags about tactics, philosophy and intentions and specifically noted the group’s founder, Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, has expressed hatred toward the United States and called for terror strikes on Americans

“HTS primarily focuses on attacks against the Assad regime and seeks to replace it with a government guided by a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law,” the DNI says in a description of HTS’ terrorist intentions. “HTS uses suicide attacks, guerilla tactics, and small-arms units to conduct attacks. The group places a priority on anti-regime activities to enable its long-term survival in northwest Syria, although in 2014 Jawlani — as head of the Nusrah Front and before his break with al-Qaida — called for retaliatory attacks against the US-led coalition in response to airstrikes in Syria.

Jawlani himself has spent the last few years trying to rebrand himself from behaviors and rhetoric that caused the State Department to personally sanction him as an individual terrorist.

That personal designation provides details on how Jawlani rose through the ranks of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, temporarily aligned with ISIS and then drifted from ISIS in a disagreement with its leader al-Baghdadi before temporarily re-embracing the main wing of al-Qaeda.

“Although al-Nusrah Front was formed by AQI in late 2011 as a front for AQI’s activities in Syria, recently al-Jawlani publicly pledged allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qa’ida’s leader,” the designation stated. “On December 11, 2012, the State Department amended the designations of AQI as a Foreign Terrorist Organization under the Immigration and Nationality Act and as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity under Executive Order 13224 to include al-Nusrah Front as an alias.”

“The violent, sectarian vision of al-Jawlani’s al-Nusrah is at odds with the aspirations of the Syrian people, including the overwhelming majority of the Syrian opposition, who seek a free, democratic, and inclusive Syria and have made clear their desire for a government that respects and advances national unity, dignity, human rights, and equal protection under the law – regardless of faith, ethnicity, or gender,” the report added. “Extremism and terrorist ideology have no place in a post-Assad Syria, and all responsible Syrians should speak out against al-Qaeda and other extremist elements.”

The dark history aside, Jawlani and HTS are already being embraced by Arab leaders in the Middle East and pressure is growing inside the United Nations and elsewhere to lift the terrorism designation so that a new government can form in Syria free of sanctions.

If the former HTS leaders continue to exhibit good behavior, such changes may become inevitable, experts say.

"Taqiyya"

Perhaps cynical, some observers of Islamic terrorism and Syria's human rights record have raised concerns about the sincerity of HTS' distancing themselves from Al-Queda. The Catholic Herald, in reporting on threats to the Christian community in post-Assad Syria said that "HTS is, in both doctrine and practice, an Islamist group that seeks to implement Sharia law. Under Sharia law Christians are tolerated but inhabit a legally inferior status to Muslims, and it is illegal for Muslims to convert to Christianity or any other faith."

The Jerusalem Post, although encouraged by the possibility of a free Syria also warned in an Op/Ed that Jawlani's speech at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus starkly contradicted his interview with CNN: "His speech adopted the rhetoric of jihadist groups that disregard nations, prioritizing the supremacy of the group, organization, or ideology. He attributed victory to the “mujahideen,” (jihadist warriors) not the Syrian revolutionaries, dedicating it to the Islamic nation as though Syria belonged exclusively to Islamists. [...] This reveals that his statements to CNN were likely made with Islamic taqiyya (pretense) in mind—a concept everyone understands."

As early as 2013, journalists began to question Islamacists who allegedly renounced radicalism under the mask of "taqiyya" – or deceiving society by concealing one’s faith – and its uses in jihadist circles. The recent car-ramming attack on a Christmas market in the east German city of Magdeburg that left five people dead and over 200 injured has reignited the queries about "taqiyya." The perpetrator of that attack allegedly abandoned Islam and left a digital footprint of material critical of radical Islam.  

Need for reconciliation

“If HTS were removed from the list of terrorist organizations, as Ahmad al-Sharaa has recently called for, and reconstruction aid tied to fair elections after six months, Western countries might gain some influence in shaping Syria’s political future,” Haian Dukhan of the Centre for Syrian Studies recently wrote in a Q&A with Brandeis University.

Dukhan said Syrians tormented by a decade of violent civil war and still facing threats from ISIS are in need of a reconciliation process, which may include HTS being recognized as a governing group and no longer a terror group. Others see that movement as well.

“I completely agree that some kind of reconciliation process will be necessary at some point—not in the pursuit of ultimate justice, which is unlikely, but to achieve a settlement that offers Syrians a sense of justice,” George Washington University foreign affairs professor Daniel Neep told the Brandeis Q&A forum. “Reconciliation processes are important for helping people process what has happened, so that they can start to rebuild their lives.’