Syria for now, appears firmly in the grip of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a group once affiliated to Al Qaeda but whose leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani saw fit to distance himself from them over a decade or so.
In fact in 2019, says Bashir Ali Abbas, a research associate at the Council for Strategic and Defence Research in Delhi, Jolani had issued a directive that Syria should not be used as a staging ground for attacks anywhere in the world.
Abbas was on The Gist programme of StratNewsGlobal, analysing the motives of Jolani and what impact the fall of the Bashar Assad regime could have on Syria and the larger region.
He makes an interesting point, that the US never sought to enforce the $10 million bounty it had placed on Jolani’s head. Even more interesting, many of those wanted by the US were eliminated by Jolani. Not to forget the CNN interview just ahead of the fall of Aleppo.
Would the HTS under Jolani be any different from Assad? Abbas says that the Syrian people have only known Assad for the last 50 years, and the freedom the HTS has brought should give it a kind of honeymoon period with the people.
He notes that the kind of overtures Jolani has made, whether to minorities or to the world are similar to what the Taliban did. And everybody knows what happened once it took control of Kabul.
In his view, while Iran appears to have lost an ally and considerable clout or face in the region, the fact is they may not have been happy with Bashar Assad and his outreach to other powers including the US.
Iran retains its ability to activate various groups whether the Houthis at one end or even the Sunni Hamas at the other, to make things difficult for others.
Tune in to this conversation with Bashir Ali Abbas of the Council for Strategic and Defence Research.
