About a week of heavy rebel infighting in northern Syria’s Aleppo
Province continues to rage, with the Turkish-backed rebel factions deploying growing numbers of reinforcements in the area to try to stave off gains by al-Qaeda’s Tahrir al-Sham faction.
Al-Qaeda reported last week that the Turkish rebels attacked them first.
After that, al-Qaeda launched a major, growing counteroffensive, and has seized at least 20 towns and villages of the immediate area along the Aleppo-Idlib border.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is also reporting some major
losses being sustained in this fighting, saying the Noureddin al-Zinki
having lost more than 100 fighters in fighting against al-Qaeda.
Russia reportedly carried out an airstrike against one of the seized
towns, killing two civilians. While Turkey seems to be trying to get a
handle on this situation, mounting al-Qaeda gains could force Syria and
Russia to get more involved in rebel territory just to keep it from
being unified under al-Qaeda forces.
Al Qaeda Al Nusra seems to me these were rebel forces fighting Assad . But Russia and Assad always considered them the same as ISIS . I sure hope the people fighting don’t get as confused as I might be .
Why should it be confusing?
Al Qaeda did not exist in Syria or Iraq in the 90s, though in Syria defeated Muslim Brotherhood cells did exist and were probably covertly sustained by Qatari and possibly Turkish money. Meanwhile in Jordan, jihadis who had been cheerfully sent off to Afghanistan by the Hashemite monarchy unexpectedly began to come home (they had been expected to die fighting the USSR and the Najibullah government). They were now a security threat that the Hashemite monarchy immediately began to imprison on any pretext. One such jihadi was a certain Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who was later released and allowed to go to Afghanistan again. After the American invasion of 2001 he went with other jihadis to the so called Kurdistan in Iraq, outside the Saddam Hussein government’s control, where the allegedly anti jihadi Kurds let him set up a base which he ruled like a mini caliphate. After the invasion of Iraq he came down to the Arab part of Iraq and independently set up his own al Qaeda franchise, Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). The official al Qaeda leadership only reluctantly granted him recognition of the franchise, but only because AQI’s spectacular brutality had attracted so much jihadi support that they had no choice. Zarqawi was killed in 2006, but by then AQI was so firmly established in Iraq that even the so called “Anbar Awakening” where America paid Iraqi militias to fight AQI rather than the occupation failed to stamp it out. Once America began its proxy terrorist war against Syria in 2011, with the dysfunctional and shambolic Iraqi regime hardly able to rule that country either, AQI quickly regained strength (allegedly under a new leader, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, but I have reasons to doubt that any such person really exists). By 2012, in any case, AQI was all over Western Iraq and Eastern Syria, and set up its own al Qaeda franchise in Syria, Jabhat al Nusra under al Golani. Baghdadi and Golani soon fell out over jurisdiction and oil revenues; the al Qaeda leadership under Ayman al Zawahiri supported Golani (a Syrian), ordered al Baghdadi to confine himself to Iraq and leave Syria to al Nusra. This was not acceptable to al Baghdadi, who split al Nusra, repudiated the al Qaeda leadership, and set up ISIS. But at all times this remained a purely jurisdiction and revenue clash; both al Nusra as ISIS believe in the same Wahhabi ideology. So anyone who claims that ISIS and al Nusra are the same is essentially correct. Anyone who claims that al Nusra is anything but an al Qaeda front is lying through their teeth.
As for al Zinki, Ahrar al Sham, etc, their ideology is all jihadi of either the Wahhabi or Muslim Brotherhood flavour. The latter are backed by Turkey and Qatar, the former by the Saudi Barbarian headchopper regime and likely the UAE.
With a little help from their friends in the CIA