[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
After Muslim terrorists attacked the St. Elias church in Damascus, killing 25 Christians and wounding over 60 others, there were more questions than answers about the attack.
While the official Syrian government position is that it was a lone ISIS gunman, Christian witnesses report multiple attackers, and in Syria, ISIS is a term that conceals more than it reveals. Especially when the government is run by members of Islamic terrorist groups with their own ties to Al Qaeda and ISIS. A terrorist government that despite playing up to President Trump, to America and Europe is not actually very friendly to its Christian population.
Some of that coolness was conveyed by former Al Qaeda warlord Ahmed al-Sharaa’s statement which, despite false claims by the media, failed to call the murdered Christians “martyrs”. Syria’s Christians are equally cool to Al-Sharaa whose Al Qaeda terror group, then going under the name Nusra Front, had murdered priests and kidnapped nuns before being welcomed by the United States and Europe into the community of civilized nations and world leaders.
While news reports blamed ISIS, the official claim of responsibility came from a supposed group calling itself ‘Saraya Ansar al-Sunnah’ or the Sunni Brigades which had previously claimed credit for massacring members of Syria’s former Alawite ruling class. While Ansar al-Sunnah is active on social media, it’s not at all clear that the supposed terrorist group actually exists. SAAS claims to be active all across Syria, but its online presence is amateurish and it keeps revising its logo. After 5 months of attacks, actual information and intel on the group is negligible.
That may be by design.
Syria’s Jihadist landscape is littered with Al Qaeda and ISIS affiliates that underwent name changes and that entered or left coalitions. The most famous of them is the Al Nusra Front which had been set up under Al Qaeda and the Caliph of ISIS and was led by Al-Sharaa who then went by Abu Mohammed Al-Jolani before cutting a series of deals with Turkey and Qatar to have his Jihadi coalition, now calling itself Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, seize power and become the new government.
The path that led Al-Sharaa from a $10 million dollar reward by the State Department on his head to a meeting with the president began when he pulled out of a proposed merger with ISIS. Reports suggest that Al-Sharaa had agreed to the merger before pulling out and staying with the more moderate Al Qaeda under Ayman Al-Zawahiri who had replaced Osama bin Laden.
This led to a power struggle between Al Qaeda and ISIS with Sharaa heading up the Al Qaeda side in Syria. As Al Qaeda turned into a spent force, Qatar encouraged Sharaa and his terror group to rebrand. The Nusra Front changed its name to Jabhat Fatah al-Sham and later to the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham coalition. It stopped mentioning its ties to Al Qaeda and took over Syria.
Western nations then agreed to meet with and aid an Al Qaeda terror group once tied to ISIS.
Al-Sharaa or Al-Jolani’s entire story shows why names are illusory and can mean little. His terror group, which now runs Syria, underwent multiple name changes and is now considered a government. Who is actually lurking behind the SAAS name and who attacked the church?
When Al-Sharaa conducted his rebrand of the Nusra Front into JFS and then HTS, members of Nusra split off to form Hurras al-Din, a more explicit Al Qaeda affiliate, which was supposedly in conflict with HTS. But, curiously, Hurras al-Din announced it was closing down operations after HTS took over Syria. Next month, Saraya Ansar al-Sunnah or SAAS appeared out of nowhere.
SAAS may be Hurras al-Din or more exactly one of the operations rooms set up by HAD and other Jihadist groups to form a regional terror coalition. The throwaway name is a front. But the entire Syrian ‘opposition’ was one layer of fronts after another. One front would claim to be ‘secular’, ‘democratic’ and seeking to create a free Syria while another would be Al Qaeda.
The best way to understand Jihadist groups is not by which series of pseudonyms Al-Sharaa’s old allies are using while they massacre non-Sunnis in Syria, but by what they do. The most significant fact about SAAS is that they have avoided any attacks on HTS and its Jihadist ‘army’. The old Al Qaeda and ISIS groups targeted the Syrian military, SAAS however is killing Druze, Kurds, Alawites and Christians in a spasm of ethnic cleansing while avoiding fights with the same government and military that they have denounced as hypocrites and apostates.
If SAAS really believed its fatwas declaring Al-Sharaa and his government to be illegitimate apostates, it would be fighting them. Instead the Al Qaeda regime running Syria enjoys plausible deniability for the kind of massacres it was carrying out not all that long ago, while blaming the attacks on ISIS. Blaming the attacks on ISIS right now is as good as blaming them on the wind.
ISIS would not have given Al-Sharaa and his government a pass unless they had a backdoor arrangement. But the attackers are likely not ISIS, just members of the Jihadist coalition that we backed and continue to back, who are using a front to do what the ‘legitimate’ government can’t.
Listing the various front groups is an endless hobby for counterterrorism researchers, but is meaningless for anything except actionable targeting because the real backbone of Jihadist groups are smaller units, often from members of the same families, clans or tribes, or Jihadis who fought together frequently, who come and go from various branded terrorist groups.
As we have already seen with Al-Sharaa, who moved around Al Qaeda and ISIS, before becoming a moderate renaissance leader, a Jihadi can go through multiple incarnations and names which are just there to achieve his larger goals. HTS’s goal was to subjugate Syria under their particular flavor of Islamic law. That is what his government is dedicated to nothing no matter how it pretends otherwise. And what his government can’t do without alienating America and Europe, their fellow Jihadis who don’t wear suits and join the government will go on doing.
A decade after the whole Free Syrian Army hoax under McCain unraveled, we’ve fallen for a deadlier variant of the hoax all over again. And once again, Christians are being killed by the Jihadis we support, while we shake their hands and believe that they really are ‘moderates’.
The St. Elias church bombing is a test to see whether we will respond. If we do, then the Syrian government will go through a show of hunting down a few Jihadis to show off for us. Much as the Taliban play a game of hunting down ISIS-K members to blame for Islamic terrorism.
And if we don’t, the Jihadis in charge of Syria will know it’s open season on Christians.
But if we really don’t want to see more massacres of Christians, we should make it clear to Syria’s Al Qaeda government that we will hold it accountable for any future attacks on Christians by any Jihadists, no matter what names they go by or what identities they’re using right now.
We should also ensure that Syria’s Christians have the right to carry weapons in their own defense, rejecting any disarmament of Christians by the Al Qaeda government, and that they know America has their back. To do any less would be to add yet another betrayal to the list.
Who really bombed the St. Elias church? Whoever really did it, there are good odds that we once backed them or the Jihadi coalitions they were part of. And we still might be.