The strange story of the US flirtation with extremists, including those who are not much different than the leaders of ISIS or planners of 9/11, has continued to be one of the stories of US policy in the Middle East over the years. From diplomats rooted in a Cold War mentality to others who tend to find extremists “exotic,” there has been a lobby that has seen Sunni Islamist extremists as potential allies against Iran, Russia, the Assad regime and others.Even of those groups blow up churches, ethnically cleanse minorities, kidnap westerners or merely create the circumstances for radicalization and the suppression of all human rights, get some sympathy. This has ramifications as the US considers its policy toward Hamas, Hezbollah and groups like HTS in Syria.
In an interview with PBS, James Jeffrey, a former Ambassador to Turkey who was Trump’s anti-ISIS envoy and Syria envoy, described the US connections to HTS. He notes that HTS was the strongest group in Idlib in Syria and that it controlled checkpoints. The US had labelled the group a terrorist group. But that didn’t sit well with everyone in the US government. Ostensibly some wanted to supply aid to the area and it would be difficult doing so via checkpoints run by terrorists.
HTS had grown out of a group called Nusra which itself had grown out of the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda. These were the furthest of the far-right, theocratic extremists. But for some US officials they were potential assets and could be worked with. Jeffrey said in his interview that “Al-Nusra was really interesting. We would have focused on it more, except that this was Syria, which was rich in high-octane problems, high-octane manifestations of the horrible conflict that it was."And you were pulled in a dozen directions by the Turks, by the Israelis, by the chemical weapons people…So therefore, as long as we didn't have to face decisions on al-Nusra — and nobody suggested we support them; nobody suggested we open channels to them directly. We opened indirect channels to them as soon as we could, and kept Secretary [Mike] Pompeo advised of it and what we were learning, but we never raised the subject of opening specific channels directly with them: in part because the Russians would exploit it, as would Assad; in part because we didn't want to make the Turks nervous.”
What do US officials do when one part of the US government has labeled a group terrorists, but other parts of the government want to do work in areas the “terrorists” control? US policy in the Middle East has generally suffered from a problem that doesn’t afflict Iran, Russia, Turkey or other states. Authoritarian states generally coordinate policy top-down. The US has lobbies within the government, and because the US changes administrations every four or eight years a different group of officials come to power, usually drawn from certain think tanks.Some US think tanks get funding, often indirectly, from states in the Middle East, or sympathizers with those states. Some think tanks are thus linked to Turkey’s far-right AKP regime, some are linked to Qatar, some are even close to Iran.Some Americans who came of age during the war on terror also have a view of the Middle East that boils it down into “Sunni versus Shia” and depending on their worldview they label one of those groups “bad.” Then they adopt a strategy that says the US must either work with the “Shi’ites” such as Iran, Hezbollah, the Badr Organization, the Houthis, or work with the “Sunnis” which generally means Turkey’s regime and the Muslim Brotherhood. They are not strictly pro-Sunni or pro-Shia, because they don’t really care about some groups, like Kurds, who don’t fit their paradigm. They also don't care about average people. They care about "geopolitics." Their theory is that “Sunni” groups like HTS might be used against those such as the Iranian-backed Assad regime, which they see as an “off-shoot of Shia.”
The US government has labelled some groups “terrorists” over the years in the region, including Hezbollah, Hamas, HTS, Al Qaeda, ISIS, the PKK and others. Under the Trump administration some of the pro-Iranian militias were labelled terrorists. The Trump admin also labeled the Houthis terrorists but the Biden administration withdrew the label.
Jeffrey explained to PBS that in the case of Idlib when the US wanted to deal with HTS, even though it was a terrorist group, they would go “through people in the media, people in the NGO world who did have direct contacts. With them and these people would share their views with us; they would ask us if we had messages. We would not send specific messages to them. We would basically tell them that we were very interested in this; that while they were on the terrorism list, we would repeat the obvious: ‘The United States is not targeting these people. The United States is focused on our policy in Syria, which is mainly to put pressure on the Assad regime.’”
This reveals how the US government passes messages to groups it labels “terrorists.” It may use media or NGOs or others. The US had labelled HTS a terrorist group but wasn’t targeting its leader Jolani. HTS was sending increased messages to the US, apparently after August 2018. Jeffrey says these messages boiled down to: “We want to be your friend. We're not terrorists. We're just fighting Assad.”He notes that “They somehow had picked up the idea that we were now, really, once again, for the second time — initially with Obama, it was the whole ‘overthrow Assad through the Free Syrian Army’ thing that then never had much juice behind it. Well, it had a lot of money behind it, but it didn't have Obama's juice behind it, and it eventually faded.” This time the US was supporting Turkey. Turkey invaded and ethnically cleansed Afrin of Kurds in January 2018. For some this was a disaster but for those who were in the pro-Turkey camp in Washington this was good. Ethnic cleansing of Syria would be done through Turkish-backed proxies until no minorities were left. Yazidis, persecuted by ISIS, would not be ethnically cleansed by NATO-member Turkey, with quiet support from some in the Trump administration. All this would serve the larger “geopolitical” cause of getting Turkey to side with the US against Iran. HTS in Idlib could be part of that.
The interview reveals that some in the US administration were concerned that Jolani might be killed. The interviewer wonders why the US would have trusted a known terrorist who worked with Al-Qaeda and had worked with ISIS.
Jeffrey said that “I had to be very careful that I was not seen as someone who was advocating support for HTS…there was a lot of controversy about this Syria policy. Syria had been a disaster in the Obama administration. … So I didn't want to give ammunition to the people who basically thought that this was a fool's errand by saying, ‘This is going to include reaching out to HTS in any way.’ So therefore I never reached out to them; I never gave them a message. I just did everything I could to be able to monitor what they were doing and ensuring that those people who spoke to them knew what our policy was, which was to leave HTS alone and would communicate — and I assumed would communicate that to them.”
This is how the US government’s own officials seem to do the opposite of what US policy actually is. The US labels a group terrorists but then has officials who don’t see them as terrorists and quietly work through others to make the terrorists know what the US is thinking.
Why is HTS important for some in Washington? Because for those who see the region as a new Cold War where the Russians and Iranians can be beaten by US proxies, HTS can be relevant. Even if HTS doesn’t actually do anything except suppress women and minorities, it can apparently be an asset against Iran and Russia, even if it doesn’t actually fight Russia or Iran. The interviewer noted “because they're a linchpin preventing the security arrangement that's been in place for decades from shifting from the Americans to the Russians and the Iranians.”
Jeffrey said Syria is of the utmost importance due to its strategic location and history. It is a “pivot point for whether an American-managed security system in the region [continues].” He points to the Abraham Accords as. an example of a successful US policy. But he notes it is under “pressure, and the stress point is greatest in Syria. You can lose Yemen; you have lost Lebanon.”
Much as a young Osama Bin Laden, who was adored by the West at the time as an “anti-Soviet warrior” had once done outreach, it seems HTS is doing the same. The interviewer at PBS notes that Jolani is on a charm offensive. The US diplomat responds: “And the fact that we haven't targeted him ever, the fact that we have never raised our voice to the Turks about their cohabitation with them.” In fact Jeffrey makes a larger point, comparing the US role in Eastern Syria working with the Syrian Democratic Forces, the man force that defeated ISIS, to Turkey’s work with HTS. "It's just like you [Turkey] in Idlib. We want you to be in Idlib, but you can't be in Idlib without having a platform, and that platform is largely HTS. Now, unlike the SDF, HTS is a UN-designated official terrorist organization. Have I ever or has any American official ever complained to you about what you're doing there with HTS? No."
HTS appears to know that Turkey and some in the West, who loathe Iran, Russia and Assad, need HTS, much as Bin Laden and his group and the extremists were apparently needed in Afghanistan.“Jolani and the HTS are about as good an example as there is out there of the kind of complicated movements you have in the Middle East, where traditional nation-states, traditional international rules and norms and behavior do not obtain…when there is not the normal setup of nation-states and of international norms and rules and behavior and international law, you wind up with groups like this, that do things you don't like, that have a genealogy that is very troubling. But in the here-and-now are the folks you have to deal with to avoid even worse things.”
He compares the importance of Idlib with the “our efforts against the Soviets in Afghanistan and against Iran in southern Iraq from 1982 to 1988, we have an end state we would like to see.” The goal, in Jeffrey’s view, is to keep Iran, Russia and Assad from winning in Syria. It’s unclear how HTS achieves that since usually extremist groups and even Turkey, tend to merely partition parts of Syria and then destroy everything and invite in the Russians to run things.For instance, when Turkey ordered the US with withdraw from part of eastern Syria in October 2019 claiming it would fight ISIS, the US withdrew and Turkey signed a deal with Russia. Turkey has done the same in Idlib. For those who thought ISIS would fight Iran in Syria, in fact it ended up destroying part of Syria and Iraq and Iran was able to rush in. The Cold War mentality that sees backing extremists as a success against Russia or Iran has generally led to empowering Russia and Iran and extremists, especially since some of these extremist groups like Hamas are backed by both Turkey and Iran.
HTS and Jolani have been seeking more interviews in the West, hoping to portray themselves as exotic and “moderates” to sell themselves as the natural enforces of authoritarian extremism in Idlib. This is likely facilitated with Turkey which has been supporting extremist groups and using them to destabilize Armenia, Libya, Syria and other countries. Jolani already got his PBS interview and an interview with Crisis Group, and his goal is to remove the terrorist designation HTS is under.
The potential whitewashing of Jolani is part of the wider narrative among those who tend to sympathize with Turkey in the region and want a region controlled by groups like the authoritarians in Ankara, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. This goes back to the old concept of the Cold War of using authoritarians extremists to fight the Soviet and “bleed” the Soviets.The concept of turning Syria into a “quagmire” was part of this. So far it hasn’t worked. Syria became a bloodbath for its own people, but not Russia. Russia benefits more. Oddly, the US has a close relationship with a successful group in eastern Syria known as the SDF that has mobilized more than 100,000 fighters to defeat ISIS. However for some the SDF relationship is not idea because they are too moderate and stable and HTS is preferable because of its extremism and suppression of women and minorities. It’s unclear why some in the West who tend to like women’s rights and minority rights at home tend to embrace the HTS-like groups of the Middle East, whether Hezbollah, Hamas, or fellow travelers.It may be simply latent Orientalism and the tendency to like “exotic” extremists abroad, rather than want people in Syria to enjoy the same rights and freedoms that people in the US or Europe tend to have. Syrians under the boot of an Assad, Erdogan or an HTS can be counted on not to challenge the commentators who come and do interviews about what is the “best” option for Syria. Either way, what is clear is that Jolani and HTS want US support.