Most FSA brigades used religious rhetoric and were named after heroic figures or events in Sunni Islamic history. Many of the par­ticipating groups had strong Islamist agendas and some groups had similar ideologies as other jihadi groups, following the strict Salafist interpretation of Islam.

 

Among the FSA’s Islamist members was the Muslim Brotherhood itself, which existed “on the ground” working 'under the FSA umbrella'. One of the Brotherhood-affiliated guerilla groups was the Tawheed Division, which led the fight against the Syrian Government in Aleppo.

 

One FSA com­mander told recruits:

 

“Those whose intentions are not for God, they had better stay home, whereas if your intention is for God, then you go for jihad and you gain an afterlife and heaven.”

 

This was hardly the exhortation of a secularist.

 

As Western powers provided arms to the supposedly moderate opposition, a striking development occurred. The opposition to Assad became a fragmented movement dominated by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Al-Qa’ida franchise Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic Front, consisting of six or seven large rebel military formations numbering an estimated 50,000 fighters, whose uniting factor was Saudi money and an extreme Sunni ideology similar to Saudi Arabia’s version of Islam.

 

The Saudis saw the Islamic Front as capable of fighting pro-Assad forces as well as ISIS. But Riyadh’s objections to the latter appeared to be based on its independence of Saudi control rather than revulsion at its record of slaughtering Shia, Alawi, Christians, Armenians, Kurds or any dissenting Sunni.

 

The “moderate” rebels were completely marginalised. Their plan since 2011 had been to force a full-scale Western military intervention as in Libya in 2011 and, when this did not happen, they lacked an alternative strategy. The U.S., Britain and France did not have many options left except to try to control the jihadi Frankenstein’s monster that they helped create in Syria.

 

At other times, they repackaged some rebel warlords, thinking they would be considered “moderates” simply because they were backed by the West and its regional allies.

 

Reviving jihadis

 

In February 2021, the U.S. government media organisation the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) conducted an interview with Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the latest among the name-changing jihadis the mainstream press still refers to as Syria’s “moderate opposition”. PBS' exchange with Jolani is a piece of a documentary on Jolani that PBS’ Frontline program plans to air in the future.

 

The HTS was formed in 2017 out of the remaining jihadi groups that had gathered in Idlib in 2015. The main pillar of the HTS is the al-Qaeda branch in Syria, the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and before that the Jabhat al-Nusra.

 

The other groups that joined the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham to create the HTS include the four main omnibus jihadi groups: the Jabhat Ansar al-Din, the Jaysh al-Sunna, the Liwa al-Haq and the Haraka Nour al-Din al-Zenki.

 

These are hardened groups of fighters, many of them coming in and out of each other’s platforms and even fighting each other viciously.

 

For the past several years, the HTS has tried to rebrand itself as “moderate”. In 2015, after it became the dominant force in Idlib, the outfit took on its new name and withdrew its pledge of allegiance to al-Qaeda.