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“This will be a war against a powerful enemy,” he said. “And the Muslims will win. You are here on a humanitarian mission, so you can leave. But don’t stay long.” I did not, but over the next 18 months, in five more trips to northern Syria, I witnessed the relentless rise of the jihadis in Idlib and Aleppo provinces. They steadily captured swaths of land in both provinces, particularly in the countryside, imposing their will with an increasing ruthlessness and defying the writ of the other rebel units, who had their guns trained on Assad’s army, and wanted a new nation-state to rise from whatever was left of Syria. The jihadis saw Assad as part of the problem, but they had a bigger goal – and that meant subjugating the rebel cause. Wherever they were able, they were transforming the battle for Syria’s destiny from a fight against one type of tyranny into nihilistic chaos.
By the time another young jihadi, Abu Issa, was freed from Aleppo’s central prison in late 2011, the Trojan horse act that was Isis was well under way – fuelled by Turkey’s porous borders, the savagery of the Syrian regime, feckless attempts to organise opposition fighters into a cohesive force, and the release of militant prisoners like himself. A Syrian with historical links to the group’s earliest incarnation, al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Issa was released along with dozens of men like him as part of an amnesty given by Assad to Islamist detainees, which was touted by the regime as a reconciliation with men who had long fought against them.
Most of the accused al-Qaida men had been in the infamous Syrian prison system for many years before the uprising against Assad began. “We were in the worst dungeons in Syria,” said Abu Issa, who was a member of the various forerunners of Isis, and fought against the US army in 2004 and 2005 before fleeing Baghdad in 2006. “If you were charged with our crimes, you were sent to Political Security prison, Saydnaya in Damascus or Air Force Intelligence in Aleppo. You could not even speak to the guards there. It was just brutality and fear.”
But several months before Abu Issa was released, he and a large group of other jihadis were moved from their isolation cells elsewhere in the country and flown to Aleppo’s main prison, where they enjoyed a more communal and comfortable life. “It was like a hotel,” he said. “We couldn’t believe it. There were cigarettes, blankets, anything you wanted. You could even get girls.” Soon the detainees were puzzled by another prison oddity, the arrival of university students who had been arrested in Aleppo for protesting against the Assad regime.
“They were kids with posters and they were being sent to prison with the jihadis,” he said. “One of them was a communist and he talked about his views to everyone. There was a guy from al-Qaida in the prison and he was usually very polite but he got angry with this guy. He said if he saw him again he would kill him.” Abu Issa and the other Islamist detainees soon formed the view that they had been moved to the Aleppo prison for a reason – to instil a harder ideological line into the university students, who back then were at the vanguard of the uprising in Syria’s largest city.
full: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/17/why-isis-fight-syria-iraq _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
