US bombing of Syria after Assad shows a real fear of what’s next

Washington seemed stunned by the sudden collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime in Syria over the weekend. Albeit not as “stunned” as whoever found themselves on the ground when the US Air Force unleashed dozens of air raids on 785 sites in Syria – while Assad was still on his way to exile in Moscow.

The Americans weren’t suddenly swinging in behind the rebellion that swept away more than 50 years of rule by the Assads. The Pentagon unleashed B-52 bombers, F-15 fighters and A-10 Warthogs because the coalition that roared into Damascus, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has its roots in violent global Islamist extremism.

The US, aided by small units of British Special Forces and MI6, has a significant presence in eastern Syria, where it uses bases protected by Syrian Kurds, and some desert hideouts, to campaign against what remains of the so-called Islamic State.

The sudden victory of rebels over the Syrian government meant that, no matter how newly moderate HTS and its allies may say they are, Isis will want to reclaim some of the territory it once ruled. And it’s got a lot more in common with Syria’s rebels now than it ever did with the ousted, secular, Assad regime.

In Damascus, the HTS leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, called for the establishment of a transitional government. His people have issued orders banning random shooting and insisting that women should not be forced into conservative Islamic dress. His message is “we’re not Isis”.

But he was. And he was also in al-Qaeda. And plenty of the militia who make up the coalition that has won this phase of Syria’s civil war are fellow travellers with the ideology of al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and Isis’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Just as some areas liberated from Assad after 2012 became a magnet for jihadi fanatics from around the world, so, inevitably, a Syria entirely freed from the dictator will draw extremists to a landscape that has been freed from the hypocrisy, murder and corruption that characterised Assad’s secular rule.

They will have overpowering resentments to draw on, too. Whatever the HTS-led coalition and transitional team may claim to want, many will flock to Syria to create a state they hope will be a beacon in the darkness that’s been cast across the Middle East.

Al-Sharaar’s nom-de-guerre is Abu Mohammed al-Golani – meaning father of Mohammed from Golan.

The Golan heights are Syrian territory taken by Israel in 1967. On Sunday, Israel took a bit more to establish a “buffer zone”. He’ll want to liberate Golan from Israel every bit as much as he wanted to save Damascus from Assad.

And as an Islamist who believes in the brotherhood of Muslims through the Umma (the worldwide Muslim community), he’s now presiding over a Syria that has vanquished Arab nationalism (in the form of Assad’s Ba’ath Party) and may now serve as a base to recover territory, and avenge lives, lost to Muslims.

The appeal to potential recruits is obvious.

Some 80 per cent of the 43,000 people killed by Israel in Gaza over the last 13 months have been women and children. The international criminal court has issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime Minister, and former defence minister Yoav Gallant, for war crimes. The UK seems vague about whether these Israelis risk arrest here. The US has rejected the ICC’s ruling outright.

Israel continues to get military aid from America, and to be able to buy weapons from the UK.

There’s no suggestion in the West that Israel, which continues to grab Palestinian land illegally in the West Bank and appears to have a plan to drive all 2.5 million Palestinians out of Gaza, will risk economic sanctions if it does so.

Compare that to the crippling sanctions that have been rightly imposed on Moscow, the ICC ruling that would mean president Vladimir Putin would risk being collared at Heathrow, and the aggressive weapons embargo facing the Russian Federation. Putin’s regime has killed, the UN estimates, about 12,000 civilians in just under three years.

To many non-extremists this looks like racism and hypocrisy on the part of the West. It’s just the latest example of how brown lives don’t matter to Western leaders. The US-led invasion of Iraq showed how little Washington knew, or cared, for the consequences of its violence.

Barack Obama’s refusal to make good on his promise to punish Assad for his chemical weapons attacks on his own people drove that point home, as did his earlier refusal to back the democratic forces that rose against the Assad regime in the first place.

Now Syrians, mostly Sunni Muslim, have solved their own problem by ridding their landscape of Assad.

As they did so the US smashed as much of Isis as it could to prevent extremists flooding west to Damascus, and Israel bombed all the sophisticated weapons it thought were in Syria to prevent anyone using them to, say, liberate the Golan.

Syria’s new leadership may want to create a safe sensible new nation to create a country that the millions of refugees want to return to and make good on their promise of safety for religious and ethnic minorities.

But the very success of the rebellion may be its undoing as it will attract many who have much more dangerous plans. America’s recent bombings show how close some of those dangers now are.