US OKs Syrian Military Integrating Foreign Islamist Fighters

The position of the United States on the Islamist Syrian government has been complex since the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) took power in December. The HTS, after all, was effectively al-Qaeda’s Syria branch up until it distanced itself from the parent group, with al-Qaeda’s blessing, and started trying to present itself as a more palatable group with effectively the same ideology.

The US has very publicly warmed to HTS in recent weeks though, with President Trump praising HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa (formerly know as al-Qaeda in Iraq’s Abu Mohammed al-Jolani) as an “attractive” and “tough guy.” Keeping the HTS purely internal to Syria was seen as a key though, contrasting them to international Islamist movements with global aspirations. It was insisted that HTS exclude foreign Islamist fighters, despite many of the group’s high-ranking members actually being foreign Islamists.

Yet US officials are now confirming that they have blessed a plan whereby the HTS will directly integrate several thousand foreign Islamist fighters into the Syrian Army. The army is even creating a new division, the 84th Division, which will be made up of some 3,500 jihadist fighters, mainly Uyghurs.

Many of the Uyghurs are from the Turkestan Islamic Party, which is designated by China (and others) as a terrorist group. China had reportedly been pushing Syria to ban the group, though the strategy of the HTS seems to be just claiming the party no longer exists and have its members fully integrated into the military.

Looming large in this US-endorsed plan is the massacre of huge numbers of Syria’s Alawite minority, violence which began in March but has continued to this day. The HTS has tried to present the incidents as unrelated to their ongoing crackdown against Alawite militias in the same area at the same time, but the Alawites told a very different story.

Indeed, to the extent it wasn’t uniformed Syrian Defense and Interior Ministry personnel dragging Alawites into the street and shooting them, which was heavily reported as well, the killers were described consistently as foreign Islamists, including Uyghurs.

If the massacres continue to rage, and every indication is that they will, it will be increasingly difficult for the HTS to try to claim it’s not plainly their own newly integrated membership carrying out the sectarian killings.

Foreigners have even made into top ranks of the Sharaa (Jolani) government in Damascus...

People defending the move are arguing if the HTS tries to exclude the jihadist fighters, they’ll just go join ISIS or some other such movement.

While that may be true, it also underscores that the HTS isn’t particularly dissimilar from ISIS in the first place, it’s simply the one that the Trump Administration has decided to support.