In an op-ed article published in The Washington Post, Ahrar al-Sham’s foreign relations head Labib Al Nahhas criticizes the US administration’s strategy in the fight against ISIS in Syria, describing it as an “abject failure.”
Nowhere is this failure clearer than in the consequence of the misguided way that Syrian revolutionaries are labeled as either “moderate” or “extremist.”
“We consider ourselves a mainstream Sunni Islamic group that is led by Syrians and fights for Syrians. We are fighting for justice for the Syrian people. Yet we have been falsely accused of having organizational links to al-Qaida and of espousing al-Qaida’s ideology,” Nahhas added.
“The moral case against Assad should have been enough to discount him as an option, but now the facts of war have made it clear that he is finished. The only remaining question is who will deliver the coup de grace: the Islamic State or the Syrian opposition. That question should prompt Washington to admit that the Islamic State’s extremist ideology can be defeated only through a homegrown Sunni alternative — with the term “moderate” defined not by CIA handlers but by Syrians themselves,” he said.
The Syrian Coalition earlier described the strategy of the US-led anti-ISIS coalition as fundamentally flawed and doomed to fail unless it is recalibrated through stepping up coordination and support for the Free Syrian Army as the only force capable of countering the Assad regime and ISIS. (Source: Syrian Coalition + Agencies)
