Enab Baladi Issue # 96 – Sun, Dec. 22, 2013

Ismael Haidar

In an interview which is the first of this type, Abu Muhammed Joulani, Al-Nusra Front leader, appeared on Al-Jazeera TV with the journalist Tayseer Allouni to present the point of view of Al-Nusra Front concerning most of the pressing issues, stressing at the same time that Al-Nusra Front is not going to rule Syria by itself and exclusively but it will share the rule with others.

Such statements constitute a violation of what Al-Nusra brigade used to say at its beginning when it used to say that it did not come to control the Syrians but it came to liberate them and then let them choose whoever they want.

Of course, it is very naive to say that people have trusted them because not anyone can imagine how a brigade can get the authority through providing loads of sacrifices and blood to give it to someone else in “cold blood”.

Al-Nusra Front is no longer enjoying the same centrality that they had a year ago because of several factors; and the most notable one is the emergence of strong military formations that competed Al-Nusra Front over its share of the scene. Al-Nusra Front is not the only one who claimed to call for Jihad in the Muslim world since the Islamic brigade preceded them in presenting a political program with a view to establish an Islamic state “wise” and apply the Sharia and others.

Another factor is the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (ISIS) that split from Al-Nusra Front and contributed effectively and unintentionally to the distortion of Al-Nusra Front’s popularity and Islamic tendencies.

Public people, who now make up the main mass of these formations, do not care about all of these details.

Let us imagine a Sunni Muslim citizen who lives in Daraya and let us call him Mahmoud. Mahmoud is a moderate Muslim who is also moderate in his commitment to the Islamic rituals as a whole, and he is not very committed to the public issues. Mahmoud is a middle-class man and he is now a refugee in Lebanon where he works as a beggar. Regime forces killed several members of his family and arrested the remaining; they destroyed all his possessions that he spent his life collecting. This man once went to a well-known opposition politician perhaps Mahmoud finds what he is looking for. When this politician heard that Mahmoud is from Daraya, he immediately blurted out the questions: Do you have Al-Nusra Front in your area? Do you have jihadists and Salafists among combatants in your area? Mahmoud did not understand what the relationship is between these questions and his humanitarian situation; and however he returned home empty-handed.

Mahmoud heard about a global campaign calling for the release of the kidnapped nuns, and then heard that the Security Council failed to issue a statement condemning the throw of the explosive barrels on children in Aleppo, then he heard Lavrov saying that the West has become aware that the Islamists are more dangerous than Bashar al-Assad and the world in its east and west cares about al-Nusra Front and similar groups; while there is little mention of Hezbollah and his similar militias.

Mahmoud did not understand from all of this but it is “a strategic war on Sunni Islam in Syria that has been waged by the crusade global powers in cooperation with the Shia rejectionist movements in the region”. So, he returned to Syria and joint to al-Nusra Front; or decided ta take action in Lebanon.

It does not seem that Syrians have other choices than giving their allegiance to al-Nusra brigade and joining it collectively, and this is what it seems that the world wants them to rush to.  The world is explicitly asking them to choose between two choices either crushing and slaughtering by the regime’s side or asking al-Nusra brigade for their protection.

The world’s approach in dealing with the Syrian revolution is very strange. The world considers that the excessive violence of the regime has contributed to the radicalization of the Salafi jihadist status and instead of working on the overthrow of the regime; they see that the Salafi jihadist’s violence is more dangerous than the regime’s one.

There is no place for speeches and analysis in such a situation. As long as the regime with its knives and missiles are present over the heads of the Syrians and their necks there will be no merit or justification for any action to deal with the secretions and results of this violence.

In fact, is not strange to have this attitude from the international community but the strange is to have parties that are considered to be part and parcel of the revolution and the opposition and they share the same view of the international community. Just by coincidence, these parties are often from the noble minorities groups.

Translated by Ruba Al Jarf