Maybe Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), who is now the leader of Syria, really has changed. Maybe he has matured, as he told CNN, as if his years as an al-Qaeda terrorist leader were a youthful indiscretion.
But the world cannot simply take the pragmatic rebel at his word. On December 8, after Bashar al-Asaad fell and Jolani took over control of Syria, U.S. President Joe Biden said, “We’ve taken note of statements by the leaders of these rebel groups in recent days and they’re saying the right things now. But as they take on greater responsibility, we will assess not just their words but their actions.”
But judge them just by their words is precisely what the Biden administration has done. HTS is designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, and the State Department has a $10 million reward for information leading to the capture of Jolani. Despite the designation and the bounty, U.S. State Department officials met with Jolani on December 20, at which time, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf told Jolani that “based on our discussion,” the U.S. “would not be pursuing the Rewards for Justice reward offer that has been in effect for some years.” The decision was based, not on Jolani’s actions, but on his words, on “our discussion.”
In proxy wars and regime changes, there are always three parties: the country undertaking the action, the government or country the action is aimed at, and the domestic group that is being used or that is intended to replace the current regime. The history of overt and covert U.S. operations is littered with disasters that resulted from a third party that was as, or more, nefarious than the regime it replaced. In order to avoid immersing itself in the turbulent seas of direct action, the United States has dipped its toes into some pretty fetid proxy waters. The challenge after is to rebrand the proxy group to sell it to the international community.
Abu Mohammad al-Jolani has traded his al-Qaeda name for his given name, Ahmed al-Sharaa, and his rebel clothes for Western style clothes. The founder of the al-Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, has renamed and rebranded his organization. He has made politically pragmatic promises to the United States. But terrorists are not always to be trusted. And whether he is al-Jolani or al-Sharaa, he must be judged by his actions, as Biden and Leaf insist, and not by his words.
The most recent and best place to judge his ruling style is the Syrian province of Idlib, where he has ruled for the last number of years. While governing the province, he did not force women to completely cover up, and he did not carry out massacres in the style of ISIS. But he did crush rival factions. And he has been accused of abusing dissenters in a manner that the United Nations classified as war crimes. A European Union Agency for Asylum report from September 2020 lists reports of “serious human rights abuses, including harassment, assassinations, kidnapping, and torture, as well as unlawful detention of civilians” for HTS while ruling Idlib.
In governing Idlib, Jolani’s government established “a religious council guided by Sharia, or Islamic law.” And he has already declared that Syria under his governance will operate according to Sharia law. HTS has praised the Taliban and held them up as “a model for effectively balancing jihadist efforts with political aspirations.” Although in Idlib HTS did not force women to completely cover, a spokesman for HTS has said that a woman, “in accordance with her being and her psychological and biological nature,” cannot participate in government. Barbara Leaf has said that the U.S. fully supports “an inclusive and representative government, which respects the rights of all Syrians, including women.”
Time will tell whether political necessities force Jolani to keep his political promises and reform, but the U.S. is way out ahead of its promise to determine that by actions and not words.
A similar unsavoury marketing campaign has, since the beginning of the war, been undertaken in Ukraine where ultranationalist neo-Nazi organizations, like Svoboda Party, Right Sector, and the Azov Battalion have been undergoing a Western-led campaign of rebranding. The openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion has been officially incorporated into the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and the equally openly neo-Nazi Svoboda Party and Right Sector have been given key ministerial positions in Ukrainian government.
Though the Ukrainian government since 2014 has memorialized Nazi collaborators of the past and rebranded ultranationalists of the present, their monist view of a pure Ukraine purged of Russian culture, even in the ethnic Russian regions of Ukraine, has not substantially changed. Yet they are presented by Ukraine and the West as reformed.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has continued to court the ultranationalists and their oversized influence and power by officially honoring the Azov Battalion and by celebrating ultranationalist heroes like Stephan Bandera. Sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko, research associate at the Institute of East European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, has recently said that the West tries “to portray the Ukrainian far right as less dangerous than the Western far right.”
But the Ukrainian ultranationalists are far more extreme than any comparable organizations in Europe or the United States. Ishchenko says, for example, that “in France, the far right, mainly the Rassemblement national, Le Pen’s party, is much less extreme than the movements that we are talking about in Ukraine. Le Pen’s party probably does not use Nazi symbols and has a more sophisticated attitude toward the Vichy collaboration during World War II.”
Ishchenko explains that, in Ukraine, Stepan Bandera “is openly glorified” as is “the Waffen-SS, especially by members of the Azov Battalion. The degree of extremism of the Ukrainian far right is much greater than that of the West’s far right.” But the United States and its NATO allies have rebranded the Ukrainian far right “because it is fighting on the right side of history against a Russia that is the more important enemy.”
Meanwhile, the monist project of forced cultural and ethnic homogenization goes on in Ukraine where religious groups with ties to Russia, including the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, have been banned, media outlets and political parties seen as too pro-Russia have been barred, Russian culture has been abolished, and Russian language has been severely restricted, including no longer being taught in schools or used in official spaces. A recently introduced bill that has already been approved by the Minister of Education would ban speaking Russian in schools, not only in the classroom, but even in the playground.
In both Syria and Ukraine, the United States hopes to justify and sell its partnership with unsavory parties by disingenuously rebranding them. In Ukraine, there has long been a project of rebranding neo-Nazi parties as reformed, and in Syria the same project is now being undertaken with HTS, its leader, and their terrorist past. The marketing campaign in Ukraine is demonstrably dishonest; the marketing campaign in Syria is forging ahead before its veracity can be ascertained by more than just the words of the terrorists. In both cases, the rebranding is undertaken because the unsavory party is seen as less unsavory than the foe the U.S. is fighting. But though the strategy may attain for the United States what they are seeking, the support for, and cooperation with, HTS in Syria and the ultranationalists in Ukraine may one day prove to be very painful for the people of Syria and Ukraine. It may also prove harmful to American credibility.
