Experiments with Frankenstein

Dhanuka Dickwella

A great reason for rebranding is to avoid being outdated. It was not just the big corporations that took this famous comment by Sir Richard Branson to heart and proactively rebranded their organisations. A Syrian terrorist leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, did one of the most dramatic rebranding of our times. Leading Jabhat al-Nusra, an al Qaeda affiliate during the Syrian civil war, he realised the importance of branding his terror outfit as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham to survive the powerful state actors from Russia to the United States (US) who hated everything, even a decimetre close to al Qaeda.

When his organisation was put on the proscribed list of transnational terrorist entities, he went for another rebranding. This time he chose a user-friendly, innocent sounding acronym ‘HTS’. The letters stand for ‘Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’ or ‘Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant’. Whatever the objective of liberating the Levant meant for al-Jolani, his preferred methodology was armed violence directed against a state, a group, a religious minority, and the very idea of freedom. Unlike the previous times, Jolani was not alone in the last rebranding. Syria-based Salafi-jihadist terror groups such as Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zinki, Liwa al-Haq, Jaysh al-Sunna, and Jabhat Ansar al-Din became the wingmen of al-Jolani.

True to the promise of the very concept of rebranding, his efforts paid. al-Jolani managed to avoid the spotlight and survive another day while all his jihadi colleagues were sent to where any evil man would be sent to by the Syrian, Iranian, Russian, and American forces in the Syrian war. From being a merciless jihadi hailing from the notorious al Qaeda, whose purpose was beheading every living being who opposed his extremist ideas to becoming a ‘jihadi light’ where state intelligence apparatus tolerated his existence, Jolani’s HTS has been a success story. He is even given media coverage and portrayed as a moderate rebel who fought for the liberation of oppressed Syrian people. If only those who were brutally murdered by him and his terror faction could speak!

Now he is back at it. Tearing apart the fragile agreement known as ASTANA format between Russia, Iran, and Turkey, which guaranteed the peace and stability of Syria, he along with tens of other organisations have overthrown the Syrian government, with the tacit support of Turkish President Erdogan. Surprisingly, the westerners whose alarm bells should have been ringing continuously seem to be cheering this onslaught.

Deposed Syrian President Bashar Al Assad has taken refuge in Russia (Picture courtesy X.com)

Their reason is an oversimplification of the ground facts by interpreting what is unfolding in