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people have fled, many of their empty homes looted and ransacked by
their would-be liberators, fearful of returning to rebel reprisals. Aleppo’s
Islamist leaning al-Tawhid Division, ostensibly part of the FSA, contains
numerous-armed factions, including many Salafi Islamists, who,
themselves, are varied, ranging from Brotherhood types to al-Qaida-like
extremists. There is also quite noticeable and significant Salafi literalist
influence among the armed rebels generally. The disparate factions that
make up the FSA are largely Islamist-dominated. Its battalions contain
thousands of fighters of the Salafi/Jihadi group, Jabhat al-Nusra, a
mainstay of the al-Tawhid in Aleppo.
In a situation of decentralized and disparate commands, such people
are there at the front lines. All these groups, including the FSA, have an
uneasy, distrustful relationship with the newly minted National Coalition
of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces, as they previously did with
the now discarded Syrian National Council, and as they have with the
western powers. Fortunately, Syria does not have a tradition of extremist
political Islam. On the contrary, given its pluralist diversity, its
geostrategic location, and secular nationalist history, Jihadi-type
extremism does not fit in Syria.
The chaos and physical destruction, the ever-present danger of the
regime-Sunni war transmuting into a sectarian civil war are deeply
worrying, and the Salafists thrive on such an environment. No question,
though, in its militarist, violent manifestations, this is essentially a
rebellion of the Sunni Muslims, at core from the regions of Hama and
Homs, and battle-tested foreigners, including Salafis, supported by the
Sunni autocracies and wealthy donors of the peninsula. It is unlikely that a
literalist Salafist regime will come to power, much less global Jihadis, but
likely that a Sunni-Brotherhood dominated regime, sidelining the National
Coalition, will.
The defunct National Council’s main obsession was arming without a
clear political programme. The new National Coalition has got itself
political recognition as a sort of provisional government—even as Syria
remains a member state of the UN led by the al-Assad government—from
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, France, Britain, and Turkey, followed by the US,