The lightning victory of Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in its stunningly successful offensive to unseat the more than 50-year-old Assad family-led Baathist dictatorship in Syria was highly reminiscent of the manner in which the Taliban pushed down the house of cards that was the nominal Afghan government when the US withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. It took the Taliban ten days to race to victory and HTS a mere week to unseat Bashar al-Assad. In both cases the existing regime’s military forces mostly disintegrated, virtually without a fight.
But the echo is louder. The most significant through line between the Taliban and HTS victories is that they signal a new phase in the Sunni radical fundamentalist militant movement: back to the future, or at least back to the early 1990s.
“Nationalist jihadism” is the order of the day in Syria, Afghanistan — and potentially soon other countries in the region.
We are used to thinking about radical Sunni jihadism in terms of internationalist or transnational terrorist projects. But that wasn’t always the case. The self-described salafist-jihadist movement coalesced in Afghanistan during the war to expel the Soviet invaders in the 1980s. There, various strains of Sunni Muslim radicalism intermingled to create the modern jihadist movement.
With a degree of poetic irony, this new ideology was directly and deliberately promoted by three countries — the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan — that have ever since been bedeviled by its adherents. But the initial project, the defeat of the Soviet invaders, was accomplished when the USSR withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989.
Foreign fighters and volunteers drawn from around the Muslim-majority world, and especially Arab countries, returned home, imbued with their radical new ideology and grandiose self-congratulation at having brought down the godless communists of the mighty USSR. Many continued to cling to their revolutionary zeal and ambitions, and some set to work trying to depose local authoritarian states and create new “Islamic” governments in their own countries.
The most dramatic example of this nationalistic jihadism was in Algeria, where in the 1990s there was a horrendous three-way conflict among the radical Islamic Armed Movement (MIA), the more extreme Armed Islamic Group (GIA) and the ruling military government that brutally rounded up thousands of suspected Algerian Islamists, keeping them in ghastly and near-unendurable makeshift prison camps in the Sahara. There were massacres and atrocities on all sides, but the GIA was so brutal that eventually the MIA declared a unilateral ceasefire with the government, which ultimately “won” the war.
The national jihad project had failed.
But right around that time, another of the “Arab Afghans” (the term for the volunteers from the Arab world who fought in Afghanistan), Osama bin Laden, returned to Afghanistan and began preaching the need for an internationalist jihad against the West. He merged forces with the Egyptian fundamentalist radical Ayman Zawahiri — along with another Egyptian organization and one each from Pakistan and Bangladesh — to create Al Qaeda.
This new organization rejected the nationalistic jihad that suffered its most emblematic failure in Algeria, and it began attacking Western, and especially American, interests. They argued that the battle against the “near enemy” — governments in Muslim-majority countries — could not succeed until a decisive victory was secured against the “far enemy” — the West and especially the U.S. — driving them from the Islamic world and ending their crucial support for these “apostate” pseudo-Muslim governments and societies. These attacks grew in scope and scale, culminating in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The response of the US — particularly unseating the Taliban in Afghanistan and killing, capturing, and scattering Al Qaeda leaders and fighters, rendering the organization far more ineffective — proved a decisive blow against this form of internationalist jihad. But Sunni fundamentalist terrorism was not done for. Instead, the war in Iraq provided even more radical Sunni fundamentalist extremists the opportunity to explore a new project: transnational caliphate jihad.
A Jordanian jailbird called Abu Musab al-Zarqawi formed Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which developed a new style of jihad that focused on spectacular acts of public cruelty, such as beheading videos, and specialized in attacking Shiite mosques and even Sunni targets deemed insufficiently “Islamic.” Zarqawi and his successors were killed by the US and Iraqi militaries, especially during the “surge” in 2006-07, but that didn’t stop the group from morphing into ISIS.
ISIS’ new leader, Abu Baqar Al-Baghdadi, was able to dispatch a set of fighters into Syria, including Abu Mohammad al-Jolani. Jolani established a group called the Nusra Front, which initially identified itself as an ISIS front group in Syria. With this alliance, ISIS was able to form a “caliphate” in 2014, linking large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria and creating a mini-state of its own.
ISIS and its “caliphate” were destroyed in an international campaign led by the US, and during that period Jolani and the Nusra Front began a series of name changes and ideological transformations. First, they switched allegiances from ISIS to Al Qaeda. In 2016, they broke with Al Qaeda altogether, joining forces with other radical Sunni Islamists in Syria to create HTS.
HTS declared that it was not only separate from Al Qaeda — but also more moderate and nationalistic. It claimed to be strictly interested in overthrowing the Assad dictatorship in Damascus and had no concern about events outside of Syria. It was a return to the orientation of the early 1990s arising directly from the end of the Afghan war: nationalistic jihad.
On this basis it was able to garner support from various other Sunni Islamist factions, some more moderate and some more extreme, as well as Turkey-backed Islamist Syrian militias and, in many cases, Turkey itself (even though Turkey officially considers HTS a terrorist organization). In recent years, HTS established control over Idlib province in northern Syria, near the Turkish border, from which it plotted the downfall of the Assad regime.
Just over a week ago, HTS burst out of Idlib and began its race to Damascus. The Assad regime crumbled under this pressure, lacking the direct military backing of Russia, Hezbollah, and Iran that had saved it from a similar crisis from 2015 to 2020. Russia is distracted in Ukraine, Iran is loath to commit its own forces to foreign soil and was told by Israel that if its troops entered Syria, they would be attacked relentlessly by the Israeli air force, and Hezbollah has been battered and devastated beyond recognition — and beyond ability to help Assad — by its war with Israel over the past year.
The 50-year-old dictatorship collapsed when Assad fled the country without putting up a fight for the strategically crucial city of Homs, let alone Damascus or his Alawite communal homeland in the coastal and mountainous northeast.
Between the Taliban, which similarly announced a strictly nationalistic Sunni Islamist project in Afghanistan, and the HTS-led victory in Syria, the Sunni Islamist jihad movement has apparently returned to its origins in the early 1990s: nationalistic jihad. This is a direct result of the striking failures of Al Qaeda’s internationalist jihad against the West and the ISIS transnational caliphate jihad project.
Sunni Islamist movements around the world are surely taking note of the success of the Taliban and HTS and will seek to copy this new, and apparently successful, approach to Sunni Islamist jihad. For these radicals, back to the future and back to the 1990s, the approach that emerged directly out of the victory over the Soviets in Afghanistan: nationalistic “jihad.”
This articles was originally published on MSNBC on December 12, 2024.
Cover photo: An anti-government fighter steps on a torn up portrait of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad in Hama, a day after rebels captured the central-west city, on December 6, 2024. – In little over a week, the offensive by rebel forces has seen Syria’s second city Aleppo and strategically located Hama fall from President Bashar al-Assad’s control for the first time since the civil war began in 2011. (Photo by Mohammed AL-RIFAI / AFP)
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to see and interact with our latest contents.
If you like our stories, events, publications and dossiers, sign up for our newsletter (twice a month).