OMAR HAJ KADOUR / AFP
- Rebels toppled the Assad regime in Syria after a brutal 13-year civil war.
- Once again, the region’s power dynamics have been dramatically reshaped.
- And there are risks and opportunities for the US.
In a lightning two-week campaign that shocked the world, Syrian rebels led by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham group on Sunday, President-elect Donald Trump said the US should stay out of the conflict.
Edmund Fitton-Brown, a senior advisor to the Counter Extremism Project, an international organization formed to combat the threat from extremist ideologies, said the main US concerns revolve around whether the HTS would seek stable governance, or continued insurgency.
“Some aspects of their rule in Idlib have been exclusionary and tyrannical,” he said, “yet they claim to have cut ties with Al-Qaeda and to embrace diversity (Christians, Kurds, etc.) as part of Syria’s identity.”
Yaniv Voller, a senior lecturer in Middle East Politics at the University of Kent, meanwhile, said he struggles to see how Washington could work with al-Jolani directly unless he completely abandons his jihadist rhetoric and animosity toward Israel.
“Jolani is associated with al Qaeda and throughout much of his ‘career’ has expressed staunch anti-American and anti-Western views,” he said.
However, he said another risk is that Syria breaks into territories controlled by competing militias and warlords, which he said would turn Syria into a potential base for terrorist activities.
From a US perspective, that would arguably be far worse.
