The Telegraph
Men freed from the same prison in 2011 went on to play senior roles in Isil, al-Nusra and other extremist groups. Why they were released - and who later killed them - are some of the key questions of Syria's brutal war.
One was struck down by a missile in Damascus. Another, Jihadi John’s boss, was taken out by an American “pinpoint strike”.
The third died with a bunch of comrades in Turkey in a mass killing of Syrian rebels that has still never been explained: theories range from an accident to an al-Qaeda car bomb.
The fourth, a personal envoy of Osama bin Laden with alleged but unproven links to the 9/11 attacks on America, was blown up by a suicide bomber in Aleppo.
Until May 2011, these four prominent Islamists key fighters in the Syrian war, were guests at President Bashar al-Assad’s pleasure: inmates of the country’s most notorious political prison, Sednaya to the north of Damascus.
Why Mr Assad released them, what they did next, and who killed them represent three of the greatest mysteries of the grinding Syrian war. Answering these questions would give us a clue as to who has the power to end it - and even murkier questions of the international politics that have led to this multi-sided war that has so paralyzed the great powers.
When Wael Essam, a Syrian journalist, met Amr al-Absi three years ago, he struck a relaxed figure. Lying on a couch in his lair in the embattled city of Aleppo, his beard long and his hair wild, he asked a question flippant enough for Mr Essam to reply in kind.
“Why does that man say bad things about us?” he asked.
“Perhaps because you slapped him around?” Mr Essam replied, waiting for the response. But al-Absi, better known by his nom de guerre Abu Atheer, did not take offence, instead going on to talk about the matter in hand - the fate of “that man”’s son.
“That man” was Dimitri Bontinck, a Belgian father who had come to Syria to find his radicalized son Jejoen, and it was only natural that his searches, helped by Mr. Essam, had brought him to Abu Atheer.
As leaders of a militant group called Majlis Shura Mujaheddin (MSM), Amr and his older brother Firas al-Absi had set themselves up in 2012 as the Syrian uprising degenerated into all-out violence. Firas was an acquaintance of the notoriously brutal Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the man who founded Isil’s predecessor al-Qaeda offshoot in 2002 and devised its theory of conquest through extreme violence.
This band of originally Syrian brothers became known not just as a small but feared fighting force, but for two other things: its links with the Belgian Islamist group Sharia4Belgium, which it used for recruiting western foreign fighters, and for kidnapping.
They were already fanatical: but after Firas was killed in August 2012 by a rival, non-militant rebel group in a fight for control of the all-important Bab al-Hawa border crossing with Turkey, Abu Atheer took over the leadership and became even more so, by all accounts.
Among his followers was Najim Laachraoui, who blew himself up during the attack on Brussels airport in March and was the presumed bomb-maker for that and last November’s Paris attacks. Laachraoui was Belgian, as was Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the master-planner of the Paris attacks, who as it happens was also briefly close to Abu Atheer, according to Kyle Orton, a researcher for the Henry Jackson Society who monitors Syrian jihadists.
Back in 2013, Abu Atheer folded MSM into Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), and was appointed its wali, or governor, for Aleppo, running at least two prisons in or near the city, for both Syrians and foreigners. They were notorious for their cruelty; in one, a children’s hospital, scores of corpses were found in early 2014. They had been prisoners killed as Isil was driven out of Aleppo by other rebel groups.
By this time Jihadi John - real name Mohammed Emwazi and Britain’s most famous jihadist in Syria - was also working for Abu Atheer.He had ended up in Syria after being smuggled into Belgium, his colleagues in Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham revealed in an online tribute last month, and had impressed Abu Atheer enough to become one of his jailers.
A number of local independent activists and journalists who refused to keep out of Isil’s affairs were also held here under Abu Atheer’s watch.
Somewhere here, too, were held for a while Abu Atheer’s most famous captives - like the British and American journalist team, James Foley and John Cantlie, and aid workers Alan Hemming and David Haines. Emwazi (“Jihadi John”), Laachraoui, and a handful of other foreign jihadis were put in charge of them.
By now, Abu Atheer had become the figure of terror that was the natural culmination of his path to Isil warlord. “He spoke very angrily,” said Ahmed Primo, a Syrian activist and former captive who was brought in a blindfold to be interrogated by him. “The questioning was very hostile.” It was Abu Atheer, added Mr Primo, who was behind the development of Isil's social media platforms as powerful propaganda tools.
Less than three weeks before the Brussels attacks of March 22 2016, Abu Atheer was killed in an American air strike.
And here are the two questions: who located him for the American - it is presumed - jet that killed him? And how was he released from Sednaya prison in the first place?
Sednaya Prison, north east of Damascus, Syria, as seen by Google Earth. Thousands of political prisoners have been held here by President Assad's regime
The answer to the first question remains a mystery, but it is clear that with the number of well-known jihadists hit by US strikes in recent months - up to at least one a week, according to the Pentagon - intelligence has improved since 2014, when Washington appeared to be largely in the dark.
As for the second, it is well attested that President Bashar al-Assad ran hot and cold on jihadists throughout his reign. He encouraged them to go to Iraq to join Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda offshoot, the predecessor to Isil, and fight America after 2003, but also jailed many on their return home if they seemed to pose a similar threat to his own rule.
When the uprising in Syria began in spring 2011, he released hundreds of them under an amnesty. The amnesty, supposedly for political prisoners, was denounced at the time as a fraud, or too little too late. In fact, it was one of the most important political acts Mr. Assad made. The prisoners released were mostly Islamists, who went on to join or form a string of armed groups, while secular and peaceful protesters and activists continued to be jailed and killed.
The amnesty was one of the most important political acts Mr. Assad made !!
Whether Mr. Assad created jihad by accident or design remains hotly disputed, though universally believed by opposition supporters. It remains key to the question of whether powers like Russia, who still say he has a future in Syria, are right to put trust in him.
“They were high-profile people who were released,” said Aron Lund, who studies Islamist rebel groups for the Carnegie Endowment. “But at this stage also, the regime probably didn’t know what it was doing. Orders must have been flying in all directions.”
For two Islamists in particular, release from Sednaya provided an opportunity to become internationally recognized players on a previously unimagined stage.
Neither Hassan Abboud nor Zahran Alloush were well-known before the uprising, and neither seems to have been incarcerated in Sednaya for violent activities. Both adhered to Salafism - the purist version of conservative Islam, which had gradually taken hold in parts of Syria over the previous decade.
Upon their release, they emerged as leaders of two groups of armed fighters that were to become the most powerful actors of all in the Syrian uprising. Hassan Abboud’s group Ahrar al-Sham won backing from Qatar. Zahran Alloush’s Jaish al-Islam is backed by Saudi Arabia, where Alloush’s father Abdullah is a practising cleric.
Were they part of international jihad or would they join forces with pro-democratic forces to focus just on the Assad regime?
Their Gulf backing made them a magnet for religiously inclined fighters from Syria’s Sunni countryside, which has always been far more conservative than the multi-sectarian, sometimes freewheeling big cities. As the more secular Free Syrian Army (originally staffed by defectors from the regime’s army) struggled to find money and weapons, Abboud and Alloush’s strength only grew.
But their ideology made them deeply ambiguous to the West. Qatar and Saudi Arabia are both officially Salafi-Wahhabi states, whose support for anti-Assad Salafi groups was hardly surprising. They were also key allies of the United States and the West, who were insistent that the future of Syria should be democratic, not jihadist.
Maybe even America was responsible for their deaths, in the hope of being able to control the succession?
As the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra, which pursues an even more extreme Salafi vision, became more and more powerful, both eventually went into alliance with it. The strategic goal of the West ever since has been to separate off other rebels groups from Isil and Jabhat al-Nusra, to further the goals of the “moderate opposition”.
As their Saudi and Qatari sponsors came under ever greater pressure, both Ahrar al-Sham and Jaish al-Islam were forced to address their basic ideological positions: were they part of international jihad, keen to support militancy worldwide, or would they join forces with pro-democratic forces to focus just on the Assad regime?
Both leaderships started to say “moderate” things: Zahran Alloush partially disavowed threats he had made to the Muslim minorities in Syria like the Alawites and Shia. Hassan Abboud gave interviews to persuade western governments they could do business with him.
They were both in good odour in the west in any case, for having taken on - and in southern and north-western Syria defeated - the most feared jihadist group of all, Islamic State.
Death of Abboud and Alloush
But just as Hassan Abboud’s Ahrar al-Sham’s ruling council met to discuss its next steps, it was wiped out in one of the war’s most mysterious incidents. Gathering in an underground bunker in a house in south-eastern Turkey in Autumn 2014, Abboud and his colleagues were killed in some sort of explosion. Theories of what happened range from an accident in a weapons workshop being operated by the group next door sending poisonous gas into the room, to an Isil suicide bomb.
It remains a murder mystery with an Agatha Christie-like list of suspects: Isil and the regime were Ahrar al-Sham’s obvious enemies, but some have suggested internal opposition - whether pro- or anti-western - could have plotted against the leadership, or Jabhat al-Nusra, who wanted to ensure its alliance with other rebel groups survived.
Maybe even America was responsible, in the hope of being able to control the succession?
Similar conspiracy theories surround the death of Zahran Alloush in a Russian or Russian-assisted air strike on the Damascus suburbs that were his base, in late December last year. While the Russians had every reason to kill this opponent of their client President Bashar al-Assad, others also stood to gain. His whole-hearted endorsement of peace talks with the regime in Geneva - where his cousin Mohammed is lead rebel negotiator - was unpopular with hardline groups; but his own dictatorial tendencies had alienated other factions, including moderates.
At least one respectable Arab news website has claimed that the intelligence that helped inform the Russian strike was provided by Jordan, a part of the western coalition supporting the rebels.
Jordan’s role is certainly ambiguous: it has hosted the operations unit run by western governments to channel support for the opposition in southern Syria. But it has become disillusioned with the chaos the war has unleashed and concerned about the radical Islamist presence on its doorstep. It has also broken with its allies in forging closer ties with Moscow in the wake of its intervention in the war last autumn.
Those ties are not enough to break Jordan’s historic reliance on Saudi Arabia and the West. But even if Jordan did not tip off its new Russian friends as to Alloush’s whereabouts, the realignment indicates how the war has shifted the Middle East’s politics in Moscow’s favour and away from Washington.
As the Syrian uprising progressed, a member of the intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, approached the country’s two most senior jailed jihadists with an unusual offer: one of them would be released, but it was up to them to decide which.
The story, recounted to Charles Lister, author of a book on the Syrian jihad, is unverified. But it is certainly believed by many Syrian militants who regard the decision by Abu Mousab al-Suri to allow his friend and long-time associate Abu Khaled al-Suri to go free as a form of glorious sacrifice.
The two men had been on the run from Syria for years. Abu Mousab- real name, Mustafa Setmariam Nasar - had been one of the foremost theoreticians of international jihad from the early 1990s, in contact with London-based clerics like Abu Qatada, and accused of financing the 2004 Metro bombings in Madrid.
Here was an avowed associate of the West’s Public Enemy Number One, helping to lead an organisation that worked cap-in-hand with Turkey, a member of Nato, and Qatar, a base for US Central Command
Abu Khaled - real name Mohammed al-Bahaiyah - was a trusted Osama bin Laden courier, once accused of ferrying surveillance video of the World Trade Centre to his boss in Afghanistan in the late 1990s.
At some point after the war in Afghanistan began, both men disappeared, ending up in a Syrian prison sometime around 2005. It is almost certain both men were “rendered” back home by the United States. How they were captured has never been made clear.
'Secret' involvement in negotiations
Abu Mousab remains in prison to this day, as far as we know, but Abu Khaled went on to join Hassan Abboud, whom he presumably had got to know in Sednaya prison, in forming Ahrar al-Sham. His involvement - kept secret, but often rumoured - was the biggest embarrassment for the entire western project of backing non-Isil rebel groups.
Here, in their midst, was an avowed associate of the man who had been the West’s Public Enemy Number One, helping to lead an organisation that worked cap-in-hand with Turkey, a member of Nato, and Qatar, a base for US Central Command.
In 2013, Abu Khaled was assigned by al-Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to mediate in the growing split that had emerged between Isil and al-Qaeda’s Syrian arm, Jabhat al-Nusra. He failed.
So who was it who killed him, then, sending two suicide bombers to blow themselves up at his headquarters in the city of Aleppo, in February 2014, a month after the rift became open war?
Most people have preferred to blame Isil, whose modus operandi this was. Ahrar al-Sham, by this time, was openly fighting Isil in Abu Khaled’s northern Syria fiefdom.
However some are suspicious. There were plenty of others with an interest in his death; particularly those for whom he was the major obstacle to Ahrar al-Sham’s emergence as a force that the West could work with.
“I personally am sure the Americans were behind it,” said one of Aleppo’s best-connected political activists. Americans are said to be behind everything in the Middle East, of course: but they cannot have been sad to see him go.
Unanswered questions
The faces of Syria’s jihadists may seem literally and figuratively similar - bearded, heavy-set fanatics, opposed to western “democratic values”. But a study released this month of leading jihadists across the world showed that personal links between them were more important than ideology in recruiting for the interlinked wars they are waging from Nigeria in the west to the Philippines in the east. Jihadists are not just their organizations: they are their networks too.
From very early on, the problem for the West was that they couldn’t agree on how to forge a cohesive opposition
Aron Lund, Carnegie Endowment
It is often claimed that the policy pursued by the United States of attempting to weaken al-Qaeda groups by killing their leaders - by drones or other means - has backfired, allowing even more extreme versions to rise to the top, like Isil’s Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi.
The policy of trying to redirect jihad by assassination continues, however. America believes that taking out Isil’s leadership one by one - as it did with Abu Atheer, and a number of others - is paying dividends.
“We have killed one leader at mid- to high-level every five or six days over the past year,” Col Steve Warren, the anti-Isil coalition leader, said. “It causes confusion and hurts their ability to command and control their activities.”
So were the deaths of Abu Khaled al-Suri, Hassan Abboud, and Zahran Alloush also part of a more complex, multi-sided version of the game of “redirecting” the Syrian jihad?
When the revolution started, the United States initially refused to back the Islamists - unlike its regional allies.
But having initially rejected even the Muslim Brotherhood, it is now working through gritted teeth even with Salafi groups like Zahran Alloush’s.
“From very early on, the problem for the West was that they couldn’t agree on how to forge a cohesive opposition,” Mr Lund said.
After so many assassinations, the major non-al-Qaeda Islamist groups now all have new leaders. Whether to get behind these radical anti-western groups, or hand Syria back to Mr Assad, is now the dilemma facing the West.
If President Assad’s Sednaya amnesty was indeed a considered plan to subvert the revolution, it worked.
