Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria

by Raphael Lefevre

  The first Islamic terrorist organizations were formed by Syrian members of the Muslim Brotherhood [and al-Tali’a al-Muqatila] who had fled repression by the Asad regime and settled in Spain in the late 1980s. Police believes Palestinian radical Anwar Adnan Mohamed Salah, also known as ‘Chej Salah’, and Syrian al-Qaeda member and propagandist Mustafa Setmarian, also known as ‘Abu Mus’ab al-Suri’, played a critical role in organizing Syrian exiles in Spain to support the international jihadist movement.26

  Upon Abu Mus’ab al-Suri’s departure in 1994 for London, where he wished to work more closely with the Algerian Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA), and Salah’s exile to Pakistan where he went to work with al-Qaeda’s leadership, a Madrid-based Syrian named Imad Eddine Barakat Yarkas led the jihadist group in the Spanish capital—giving rise to what has become known as the “Barakat Yarkas network”, allegedly responsible for the 2004 bombings in Madrid. “From 1995 until his 2001 arrest, Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas led the Syrian group in Spain, during which period this cell expanded its activities and aided the development of other Islamist extremist groups,” the US Embassy cable read. “Yarkas and many of the other Syrian extremists were relatively educated, prosperous and projected the appearance of being well established in Spain.” The twenty-four men allegedly involved in the “Barakat Yarkas network” had, according to the US Embassy, “direct links to al-Qaeda”.27

  Abu Mus’ab al-Suri’s increasingly global outlook did not mean, however, that he and his Syrian jihadist friends had lost interest in the situation in their home country. On the contrary, it seems as if they temporarily took on the flag of “global jihad” while waiting for the right time and opportunity to return to Syria in order to fight the Ba’ath regime to the finish. It is believed that, in the 1990s, Usama Bin Laden entrusted Abu Mus’ab al-Suri with a jihadist project, and that Al-Suri’s organization, Jama’at e Jihad al-Suri, drew resources from the “Barakat Yarkas” network in Spain and from other Syrian exiles such as Abu Dahda and Riyad al-Uqlah, but that his attempt to build a Syrian branch of al-Qaeda on the model of Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi’s Iraqi group eventually failed.28 Shortly after the death of Hafiz al-Assad in June 2000, al-Suri published a text in which he branded the Syrian jihad of the late 1970s and early 1980s as the starting point of the global jihadist movement and encouraged his fellow Sunnis residing in the country to finish the job started then or face the threat of eternal domination by the Alawi minority. In the text, he asked the Sunnis of Syria who had remained in the country after February 1982: “have you acquiesced to trade, to [university] degrees, to menial jobs, or to farming and the tending of cows, have you acquiesced to food, drink, travels and picnics, have you acquiesced to restaurants and resorts[…]?”29 The ideologue of al-Qaeda advised his fellow Sunni Syrians that the easiest path to repentance was to wage jihad against the regime. In al-Suri’s eyes, jihad against the Ba’ath was also an imperative if the Sunni community was to survive: “A threat that places us [Sunnis] in Greater Syria before a fact in which […] we either remain or disappear: do we and the [Sunnis] in Greater Syria remain as guardians of the religion of Allah in the blessed Greater Syria or shall the heretical sects, comprising the Jews, the Crusaders, the Alawi-Nusayris and the other deviating sects, remain in it?”30

  Abu Mus’ab al-Suri’s overtly sectarian tone is representative of most Syrian jihadists who fled the country in the early 1980s while not giving up on their struggle against the Syrian Ba’ath. Amongst those is Abu Baseer al-Tartousi, a London-based jihadist scholar originally from the coastal town of Tartous, situated in the Latakia region from which many Alawis belonging to the Syrian regime also originate. It is clear to see that his view of the minority community is filled with sectarian bias. Beyond castigating the Alawis as being a sect situated outside the “realm of Islam” and the “glory of Arabism”, he adds that “[the Nusayri-Alawi sect] can never be patriotic or safeguard the safety and power of the realm of Muslims […] for I am one of those who has lived among and interacted with the Nusayris in their mountains and plains, and learned their secrets and their dangerous esoteric doctrines… the [loyalty] of the Nusayri is merely to his lusts and cravings and he has no other [loyalty] but to that […]”31 Ever since the uprisings started in Syria, this prominent jihadist figure has been active in trying to recruit fellow Arab jihadists across the Muslim world to launch a renewed jihad against the Syrian Ba’ath.32

  It is clear that the sectarian dimension of Hafiz and then Bashar al-Assad’s rule on Syria has acted as a great source of motivation for contemporary jihadists. In their eyes, not only is Syria ruled by the secular Ba’ath Party, it is also heavily dominated by religious minorities. After decades of inactivity on the part of anti-regime jihadist circles inside Syria, a new group was formed on 27 May 2007, called “The group for monotheism and jihad in Greater Syria” (Jama’at al-Tawhid wel Jihad fi Bilad al-Sham). Its leader, Abu Jandal, declared shortly thereafter that “we are Muslim mujahedin from the blessed Greater Syria who are pained by the conditions of our Umma [Islamic community] that has languished under the Nusayri occupation for tens of years and the Nusayris—who resent the Sunnis—are creative in desecrating the sanctities and honor of the Muslims under the cruel guidelines set down by the Nusayri [Hafiz al-Assad].”33 Such radical jihadist groups are bound to flourish throughout the country as the anti-regime struggle of the Syrian opposition threatens to drag on for some time to come.

  The Syrian mukhabarat and radical Islam: a blowback?

  In retrospect, the Iraq War launched by the United States in 2003 can be seen as a turning point for the global jihadist movement. In Abu Mus’ab al-Suri’s eyes, the event was so significant that he compared it, in importance with the 1980s jihad against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—which subsequently saw the advent of a well-trained generation of jihadists. Accordingly, the young Arabs who went to join the Iraqi insurgency en masse would come to be recognized, in due course, as the “Arab Iraqis” who fought in the same vein as their “Arab Afghan” predecessors. For the Syrian ideologue of al-Qaeda, this “third generation” of jihadists learned during the street battles they fought in many Iraqi cities skills that would inevitably become crucial when, on their return to their respective countries, they would decide to wage jihad against their own non-Islamic governments.34

  In theory, the potential development of such a trend should have alarmed the Syrian security services, as concurring reports point out that, in addition to Syrian nationals representing the third largest contingent of foreign jihadist fighters and providing the highest number of jihadist detainees at the Iraqi Camp Bucca jail, the country also served as the entry point for 90 per cent of all foreign insurgents going to Iraq as of December 2008.35 Although terrorist attacks have touched Syrian territory on a sporadic basis since 2004, it nonetheless seems as if the Syrian mukhabarat, the country’s powerful security services, tolerated the flow of jihadist fighters going to Iraq from 2003 onwards—or, according to certain analysts, even encouraged it for dubious reasons. Paradoxically, the regime thus indirectly participated in the revival of a jihadist current within and surrounding its own borders, with potential disastrous security consequences for its survival. According to the analyst Michael Rubin, “this Syrian blind eye should raise concerns about the country’s future stability as it suggests a vulnerability to blowback should these same Islamist terrorists decide to return to Syria to take on the Assad regime.”36

  The Syrian Ba’ath has a long history of supporting groups with ties to political violence. It has actively helped the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the FPLP-General Command [in English], Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hizbullah and Hamas by providing a safe haven and, in some cases, material and financial support for their leaders. This policy saw the country put on the list of states sponsoring terrorism by the US State Department as early as 1979—a designation with significant commercial and political implications for US-Syrian relations. There were more accusations that the S
yrian government was using groups involved in political violence to serve its interests after the US intervention in Iraq. For various reasons, ranging from the intensity of the regional climate to a willingness to safeguard its security interests in a post-Saddam Iraq, the Syrian regime indeed appeared to have been particularly interested in keeping its hand in the flow of jihadist fighters crossing its territory to go to fight the US invaders in Baghdad.

  At first glance, it seems as if the regime was only guilty of displaying some kind of benign neglect towards the array of foreign insurgents crossing the Syrian-Iraqi border for attacks on American and British troops. As a former senior British Intelligence official put it, “Let’s say that the Syrian security forces could have controlled the border and did not!”37 This is confirmed by several media reports detailing jihadist fighters who crossed the Syrian-Iraqi border without being checked by local security forces. A Syrian radical interviewed in 2005 by The Guardian goes as far as stating that “the call to jihad was encouraged by the Syrian government.” “It arranged for buses to ferry fighters, speeded up the issuing of documentation and even gave prospective jihadis a discount on passport fees,” and recalled that he had witnessed “Syrian border police waving to the jihadi buses as they crossed into Iraq.”38 In several reported instances, US troops have also captured foreign fighters carrying Syrian passports including entry permits and stamped with the mention “volunteer for jihad” or “join the Arab volunteers”.39

  The Syrian regime’s deliberately passive stance on its border with Iraq was explicitly demonstrated when, as a retaliation for an American Special Forces raid into Syria—with the aim of killing al-Qaeda operatives smuggling fighters into Iraq—the local security forces withdrew from their posts, thus leaving the border open for jihadists to pass safely. At the time, the US Embassy in Damascus stated in a cable that “the Syrian government can do more to interdict known terrorist networks and foreign fighter facilitators operating within its borders.” It went on, “Syria’s ability to turn the flow of fighters off and on for political reasons was apparent in the wake of the alleged 26 October [US] military incursion into Syria when the Syrian government’s self-described response was to remove border guards from key border checkpoints along the Iraqi-Syrian border.”40

  Such reports also suggest that Syrian involvement went a step further than benign neglect. Indeed, a close look at concurring sources hints at the possibility that the Syrian mukhabarat might have played a much more active role than is generally accepted in the smuggling and help of foreign insurgents going to Iraq. According to some sources, the Syrian regime might even have been actively involved in the financing of groups directly linked to the Iraqi insurgency. In January 2005 Muayed al-Nasseri, then the commander of the “Army of Muhammed”—a paramilitary organization set up by Saddam Hussein in the wake of the US invasion to resist the foreign occupation—confessed on Iraqi television the clandestine links connecting the insurgency to the Syrian security services:

  Cooperation with Syria began in October 2003, when a Syrian intelligence officer contacted me. Sa’ad Hamad Hisham [the first commander of the Army of Muhammed] and later Saddam Hussein himself authorized me to go to Syria. So I was sent to Syria. I crossed the border illegally, then I went to Damascus and met with an intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel “Abu Naji” through a mediator called “Abu Saud” […]. They organized a meeting for me with a man named Fawzi al-Rawi, who is a member of the national leadership [of the Ba’ath Party] and an important figure in Syria. The Syrian government authorized him to meet with me. We met twice. In the first meeting, I explained to him what the Army of Muhammed is, what kind of operations we carry out and many other things. In the second meeting, he told me that Syrian government officials were very pleased with our first meeting. He informed me that the Army of Muhammed would receive material aid.

  “The Syrian government was fully aware of this and the Syrian intelligence cooperated fully”,41 he concluded.

  In addition, there is an increasing amount of evidence that the regime in Damascus also tacitly—if not actively—encouraged, through proxies, members of the Iraqi insurgency explicitly linked to al-Qaeda to carry out terrorist attacks on Iraqi soil. Such accusations were voiced time and again in an increasingly assertive fashion by Iraqi intelligence officers who told American diplomats about “Syrian support for Iraqi Ba’athists [linked with the former regime],” in turn suspected of having cooperated with al-Qaeda in Iraq—though these were said to have done so by “disguising their Ba’athist sympathies”.42 The US Embassy in Damascus designated “several Iraqis and Iraqi-owned entities residing in Syria which provided financial, material and technical support for acts of violence that threatened the peace and stability of Iraq.”43 In 2007, the US Treasury Department gave a specific list of seven individuals who brought significant help to the Iraqi insurgency—six of them former Iraqi Ba’athist officials now all based in Syria.44 It is widely suspected that former elements of Saddam Hussein’s regime residing in Damascus have provided the al-Qaeda insurgency in Iraq with financial help, material aid and media support. In a thinly veiled accusation aimed at Damascus, the Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari stated in the aftermath of an August 2009 bombing in Baghdad that “one or more of the neighbouring countries have conspired with al-Qaeda.”45

  The Syrian regime’s proximity to the al-Qaeda networks in Iraq does not seem to have been solely the work of former Iraqi Ba’athists supported by Damascus. Instead, there seems to have been a direct link between the regime and Syrian militants known for their close connection to radical Islamic insurgents in Iraq. Prominent al-Qaeda faciliator Suleyman Khalid Darwish, aka Abu Ghadiya, has safely operated for years on Syrian territory—in a country known for the high level of surveillance provided by its powerful security services. As his contribution to the smuggling of jihadist fighters into Iraq was prominent, it is doubtful that the Syrian mukhabarat was not aware of their presence. Over the years, the Syrian regime also strengthened its own ties with prominent Syrian Islamic radicals with the ultimate goal of better controlling the flow of jihadist fighters leaving for Baghdad as well as obtaining a renewed insight into the growth of jihadist networks on Syrian soil. “We are practical, not theoretical,” Ali Mamlouk, Syria’s head of General Intelligence, explained in a meeting with his US counterpart. “In principle we don’t attack or kill immediately; instead we embed ourselves in them and only at the opportune moment do we move.”46 In this respect, the figure of most interest is Abu al-Qaqaa. A radical Salafi cleric preaching at the popular al-Sahrour mosque in Aleppo, he had by the early 2000s become a loud advocate of anti-Americanism, attracting to his cause over 1,000 men—most of them wearing camouflage military trousers and highly trained in martial arts.47 In his influential sermons, al-Qaqaa encouraged young Syrians to go to Iraq to fight the foreign occupiers. “Our hearts are filled with joy when we hear about any resistance operations in Iraq against the American invaders. We ask people to keep praying to God to help achieve victory for Iraq against the US,”48 the radical Aleppine cleric used to preach. It is also reported that Abu al-Qaqaa himself was involved in providing material and financial help to the Iraqi insurgency.49

  Some of his radical followers, however, soon started to suspect that their leader might be a stooge for Syrian intelligence when, in the face of mounting criticisms, he maintained his support for the regime. One of his former disciples stated in retrospect that “in the 1980s, thousands of Muslim men died in Syria for much less than we were saying.” “We asked the sheikh why we weren’t being arrested. He would tell us it was because we weren’t saying anything against the government, that we were focusing on the common enemy, America and Israel […]. We thought ‘Oh, how strong our sheikh is that they do not touch us’. How stupid we were […]”50 In 2006, Abu al-Qaqaa was nominated head of the Khosrowiyya, Aleppo’s most prestigious school of Islamic law, as well as the lead preacher at a large mosque of the Halab al-Jadida in the city’s mos
t bourgeois district. Arnaud Lenfant, a specialist of Salafism in Syria, believes that “such career evolution would probably not have been feasible without the excellent relations entertained by [al-Qaqaa] with the security services.”51

  There was always a risk that the Syrian security services’ tacit support for certain radical Islamic activists could backfire. After all, perhaps that was even an effect sought to a certain degree by the regime. Despite maintaining his support for the Syrian Ba’ath, Abu al-Qaqaa called in his sermons for the advent of an Islamic state—the antithesis of the established Ba’ath Party ideology. “Yes, I would like to see an Islamic state in Syria and that’s what we are working for,”52 he declared in October 2003, while also attacking the “atheist dogs”53 in his sermons. Yet, while al-Qaqaa had personally pledged allegiance to the Syrian Ba’ath out of pragmatism, his disciples might not have shared his willingness to be on intimate terms with the regime. Some of them might even have been so convinced by the immediate need to establish an Islamic state in Syria that they took matters into their hands and started to aim at regime’s symbols. In June 2006, the Syrian State TV and radio headquarters became the targets of a jihadist suicide attack. This seems to have been partly inspired by Abu al-Qaqaa’s followers. While the US Embassy in Damascus suggested at the time that the suspects had been trained in martial arts in the way al-Qaqaa’s followers were, other reports pointed out that CDs containing sermons of the radical Aleppine cleric had been found by security officers on the attack scene.54 Shortly afterwards al-Qaqaa appeared before journalists and denied all responsibility for the attacks. The Aleppine preacher was shot dead in September 2007 by an unknown gunman—most probably an Islamist dissident who viewed al-Qaqaa as a traitor and spy working for the mukhabarat.55