Just two weeks ago, much of the world was unaware of the strength of the rebel coalition inside Syria and the weakness of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime, which suddenly collapsed on Dec. 8. Just days after armed rebels streamed into the Syrian capital Damascus, overthrowing the 54-year al-Assad family dictatorship, there are many unanswered questions about the ideology and direction of the rebel movement led by onetime al Qaeda affiliate Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham or HTS. Their leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, who the U.S. designated as a terrorist more than 10 years ago, has in recent years distanced himself from al Qaeda, declaring that he’s renounced his past as an extremist and now embraces pluralism and tolerance.
As the people of Syria were celebrating the fall of the al-Assad regime, the U.S. bombed what they say are ISIS targets in northern Syria and Israel launched at least 300 of airstrikes on Syrian military installations and weapons sites, that they announced were carried out to prevent those weapons from falling into the hands of extremists. The Israeli Defense Force has also “seized” territory in Syrian-controlled areas of the Golan Heights, describing the actions as “temporary,” aimed at securing its border.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Phyllis Bennis, director of the Institute for Policy Studies’ New Internationalism Project. Here, she discusses what we know about the intentions of the rebel movement that ousted Bashar al-Assad’s regime and Israel’s apparent land grab in the Golan Heights.
PHYLLIS BENNIS: The leader of HTS, (Abu Mohammad) al-Jolani been trying publicly to distance himself, saying that he and the organization are no longer part of the the global — what they would refer to the global jihadi movement — that they had cut ties in a very highly visible way with al Qaeda. But what they actually believe remains very uncertain.
So they’ve been saying all the right things designed to reassure people from various minorities within Syria, reassure the West, reassure the global community that they are not likely to be imposing great restrictions on the lives of women, for example, those kinds of things. But again, those are words. We haven’t yet seen them in action long enough to know whether that’s real or not.
There have been reports from Aleppo where they, for the first major city that they took over, that they immediately invited the — I’m not sure what his title is, but the the leading church leader of the Catholic Church in Aleppo to become the mayor of the city – he turned it down because he didn’t want to take a political position, but it was an indication that they were willing to deal in a direct way and in a fair way, etc. with the wide range of religious and ethnic communities that exist in Syria, which is a very diverse country.
There were reports there from some women’s organizations that they were not facing any new restrictions, but there were also reports of large numbers of people fleeing from Aleppo out of fear because they didn’t know what was going to come next. They didn’t know what kind of restrictions there might be.
The one image that we have that I think, you know, is sort of clearly on the good side, something to cheer about is releasing huge numbers of prisoners who had been held for many, many years in really terrible conditions in the prisons created by the regime for specifically political prisoners.
Beyond that, we don’t really know what they’re going to do. There’s just all kinds of questions what this is going to mean for Syrians. Today, there was only one crossing open between Lebanon and Syria, and it was jammed with people who had been refugees in Lebanon.
There were a million Syrian refugees that had been living in Lebanon for years, 3 million in Turkey, all trying to go home. They’ve been desperate to go home and suddenly they can. So far, they can do so safely.
Now, again, how long that lasts, what that’s going to mean? What’s the economy going to look like? How will refugees be taken care of and be able to rebuild their lives? None of this is clear. This is just a moment of beginning.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, Phyllis, Israel has in recent days surrounding the events of the overthrow of the Assad regime. They’ve bombed Syrian military targets and seized Syrian land and the Golan Heights, long occupied by Israel. And that has provoked protests and anger by Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. A lot of anger across the Middle East. Is this a land grab, taking advantage of the upheaval during this conclusion of a long civil war in Syria?
PHYLLIS BENNIS: Absolutely. What we know from Israel is that they have said that the 100 air attacks that they launched across both the edge of the occupied Golan Heights but then into Syrian territory, into the so-called buffer zone between the occupied Golan Heights and the area of Syria that the government actually controlled.
There is a buffer zone that is controlled by the United Nations. The UNDOF deployment there. That’s where the Israelis were concentrating their bombing, although some of the bombing was also over that line into Syria itself.
Now, the Israelis are claiming that this was all about going after weapons caches which may or may not have any truth at all. If it does, this is one of those “even if” situations, even if these were weapons caches, they are weapons caches that belong to another country that would legally they’re under the terms of another government.
There is an internal process going on in Syria. This is internal to Syrians to determine what their government is going to look like. And Israel has absolutely no basis in international law to be able to carry out these attacks. It’s an absolute violation.
The other part of it, they’re sending troops across to occupy the buffer zone and potentially even further into Syrian territory. This is a land grab. And the Israeli claims “This is only temporary. This is because the situation is very uncertain.” These statements have to be taken in the context of the history of Israeli land grabs.
They are almost always explained as being only temporary, only for some emergency purpose, and then they become permanent. That is what the Israeli definition of creating facts on the ground actually looks like. So that is absolutely what this is.
One of the things that remains unclear right now is what role the United States troops, the 900 U.S. military troops that are still deployed in Syria are going to play. Right now, they seem to be staying in their barracks there in a set of bases around the Al-Tanf space on the eastern border of Syria, close to the borders with both Jordan and Iraq.
And the U.S. has also carried out at least 75 bombings that they’re acknowledging. There may have been more that we don’t know about, allegedly against ISIS targets. Now, there has been for a very long time, a tiny little scrap of land controlled by ISIS to the northeast of the center of the country, something like that. There is no indication that we’ve heard that anyone from ISIS was trying to break out of that area, or trying to join the armed mobilization that was moving against the government in some way.
But the U.S. felt that they somehow had the right under international law, let alone the right under U.S. law. This is not anything that was approved by Congress, this deployment or this attack. So the whole question of what the U.S. is doing in Syria remains a very open question right now.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Phyllis Bennis (29:03) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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