Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, today’s de facto ruler of Damascus, has an eloquent history: he began his jihadist militancy in al-Qaeda’s ranks as an associate of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the “caliph” who founded ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, in 2013. In 2011, during the preparatory phase, al-Baghdadi sent him to Syria with large sums of money for the creation of the al-Nusra Front, a formally autonomous faction but in reality, part of the Islamic State.
The al-Jolani faction has been involved in the US-NATO operation to destroy the Syrian state since its inception. One of the reasons for this operation is the fact that in July 2011 Syria, Iran and Iraq signed an agreement for a pipeline that would connect Iran’s South Pars field, the largest in the world, to Syria and then to the Mediterranean and Europe. This would create an alternative energy corridor to those through Turkey and other routes controlled by US and European companies.
The covert war in Syria begins with a series of terrorist attacks, mainly in Damascus and Aleppo. Hundreds of elite British SAS specialists operate in Syria alongside US and French units. The operation is commanded from NATO ships in the Turkish port of Alexandretta. The strike force consists of an army of Islamic groups from Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Libya and other countries.
The weapons arrive via an international network organised by the CIA, which supplies them to groups infiltrated into Syria, who have already been trained in camps set up on Turkish and Jordanian territory. The operation was directed from the advanced headquarters of the US Central Command at the Al Udeid airbase in Qatar. At this point, in 2015, Moscow decided to intervene directly in support of the Syrian army, at the request of Damascus. The intervention, carried out with air power, showed that the US-led “anti-ISIS coalition” was pretending to fight ISIS. In just over two years, the Russian-Syrian coalition has liberated about three-quarters of the country’s territory that had fallen into the hands of ISIS and other US-backed movements.
In 2016, al-Jolani formally severed ties with al-Qaeda and renamed the group Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, and later in 2017 Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).
Under Jolani, HTS became the dominant force in Idlib, the largest ‘rebel’ stronghold in Northwestern Syria. With the support of Turkey in particular, al-Jolani’s faction is in preparation for a year-long operation in Syria. It is being armed through clandestine channels and trained by the Khimik special forces of Ukrainian intelligence.
After entering Syria on 8 November, al-Jolani’s armed Islamist faction advanced rapidly and captured Damascus on 7 December.
The Syrian army put up no significant resistance, a symptom of internal disintegration, as evidenced by the fact that while President Assad was given asylum in Russia, the Syrian embassy staff in Moscow hoisted the flag of the Islamist “rebels” who had just taken Damascus.
While the USA confirms that it is in contact with the “rebels” through Turkey, Israel seizes another piece of Syrian territory in the Golan Heights and carries out hundreds of so-called “defensive” air strikes against Syrian ports and airports. The seizure of Syria by these forces is a major blow both to Iran, which sees its front of resistance to the Israeli offensive in the Middle East, supported by the USA, NATO and the EU, weakened, and to Russia, which will almost certainly lose access to the Syrian port of Tartus, the only berth for its military ships in the Mediterranean, and risks the slowing down or interruption of the north-south transport corridor through the Middle East that allows it to bypass the blockade in the West.
