The leader and founder of the Syrian Salafi group Jaish al-Islam, Zahran Alloush, was killed in an air strike east of the capital Damascus while in a meeting with other armed Syrian groups on Friday. At least ten rockets reportedly struck the meeting.
It is not immediately clear whether or not this air strike was Syrian or Russian. Jaish al Islam’s largest footholds in Syria are in Eastern Ghouta and Douma. All near and around Damascus, areas the Syrian regime is launching an offensive to retake with close Russian air support. Meaning this aerial assassination could well have been carried out by Russian aircraft.
Jaish al-Islam is one of the Salafi groups that Saudi Arabia supports in the Syrian war against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Its Salafi ideology is quite extreme and is indeed not dissimilar from the root ISIS’s radicalism stems from. Alloush initially made no bones about it, he sought to replace Assad with a non-democratic Islamist order, deeming democracy to be a corrupt form of governance.
However, perhaps as a ploy to win western support against Assad, he would later change his tune claiming a post-Assad Syria would be a representative Syria. Even for the Alawite minority from which the Assad family hails, a religious minority that Salafis deem to be unforgivably heretical. Alloush even went as far as to claim that many of his own pronouncements were rhetoric, to win over youths with extreme Salafist ISIS-like views to his side as opposed to ISIS’s.
Strategically Saudi backing of Jaish al-Islam was clearly a bid to give it some leverage over its adversary in Damascus. It is after all the most powerful anti-Assad armed group in the Damascus area and with continued Saudi financial and arms support could well be in a position to exert pressure on Assad in his own capital.
Since the Russian intervention late last September Russian air strikes have indeed been focused on such groups rather than ISIS.
Primarily because these groups are, while not as bad as ISIS, extremely violent and fanatical and in a more immediate position to directly threaten Assad. The Jaish al-Fatah (Army of Conquest) Islamist coalition force seized the strategically-important northwestern Syrian province of Idlib last May with Qatari and Turkish backing. Like Jaish al-Islam the coalition consists primarily of Salafis and even has al-Qaeda’s Syrian offshoot Jabhat al-Nusra in its ranks. Russia has directed many of its air strikes against this group and has sought to close-off their supply links from Syria’s northwestern border with Turkey. The death of Alloush was likely a similar strike, aimed at weakening, dispersing and destroying his Salafi group.
Have the Russians raised the stakes by carrying out such a targeted assassination on the head of a Saudi-backed opposition group just ahead of the Geneva peace talks?
Even before the strike Moscow had made clear that regardless of the outcome of these talks it will continue bombing ISIS. Given the Kremlin’s loose terminology about who constitutes ISIS (Moscow are usually talking about all Salafis in Syria when they talk about ‘ISIS’) should this be interpreted as a not so subtle warning that Moscow will not cease such operations against groups it has determined to be terrorist regardless of who the Saudis, and possibly the Americans too, determine to be a legitimate opposition group in Syria who should be part of a negotiated solution to this nearly half-a-decade-old Syrian conflict?
