On Sunday, a massive suicide bomb attack tore through the important Greek Orthodox church Mar Elias in Damascus, killing 27 and wounding dozens more. The huge attack just added to the spate of sectarian violence across Syria, which undercuts the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) government’s claim to be protecting religious minorities.
The HTS was quick to blame ISIS for the Mar Elias bombing, and on Monday announced the arrest of a number of ISIS associates who they claimed were involved, vowing to bring them to justice. Now that whole narrative seems in doubt.
ISIS never took credit for the Mar Elias bombing, which, since it was the biggest attack in Damascus in a very long time, would be an unusual oversight. Now, another group, Saraya Ansar al-Sunnah (SAAS), issued its own statement claiming credit for the attack.
SAAS, which was said to be formed in February, went on to say that the government’s claims of arresting people involved with the attack were “untrue, fabricated.” The group is being presented as an ISIS splinter group by some reports, but the reality is substantially different.
SAAS does indeed have some ISIS defectors within, according to reports, but it also has a substantial number of HTS defectors. SAAS founder Abu Aisha al-Shami was an HTS member, and said he broke away and formed his own group because he perceived HTS as being too soft on Shi’ites and other “rejectionists.”
While HTS has undergone a massive reformation in its presentation in the media, the group was a renamed al-Qaeda affiliate that retains its deeply Salafist ideologies. While playing nice with religious minorities in Syria on paper, they’ve tended to turn a blind eye to attacks on them, notably the massacre of the Alawites, where well over 1,300 Alawites were killed in March, many by security forces. Those killings continue to this day, and the promised investigation never seemed to go anywhere.
Speaking of Alawites, SAAS played a part in these massacres as well. The group regularly brags of carrying out attacks on Alawites and Druze Syrians, including what they called the “Harvest of Ramadan,” where they listed attacks and vandalism done during the holiday on the Alawite town of Qardaha.
That they would be behind the Mar Elias attack is not out of keeping with the way the group has operated in its brief existence. It provides a messaging problem for the HTS though, since the government has not done much about the SAAS at all since it came into existence.
Syrian Christian leader Patriarch John X. Yazigi issued a statement after the attack criticizing the government for its inability to protect religious minorities, saying “condolences are not enough for us” and that the government has a fundamental duty to protect all its citizens. For now, though, that has begun and ended with blaming ISIS to justify ongoing operations against ISIS in the east.
