Politics can be described in many ways—better said, it has many interpretations. However, in dictionaries, politics is described as 'activities associated with the governance of a country or area, especially the debate between parties having power'.
For the young generation, here's some classroom:
On September 11, 2001, a terrorist group, called al-Qaeda, carried out a series of attacks in the United States by using planes full of passengers to plow them into the Twin Towers in New York, and into the Pentagon but a third plane crashed somewhere in Pennsylvania when passengers tried to take over the plane. In New York, at the Pentagon, and on board the crashed plane, a total of nearly 3.000 people were killed, and thousands were wounded. The United States was then in a time of peace. That changed in January 2002, when President George W. Bush's speech during the State Of The Union at the Joint Congress in January 2002.
During that speech, Bush made several remarks that would change the way how governments rule. I haven't forgotten them. "We will smoke them out in every hole", "Countries who harbor terrorists will be treated as terrorists", and "Either you with us or you with the terrorists.", while declaring war on terror.
If a head of state issues a declaration of war, it means his country has been put in a stage of war thus having lifted the situation in which his country is: those of a time of peace. That is what Bush did. The declaration has never been lifted to the time of today.
In Syria, the United States is technically a war belligerent who then has to be obliged to apply itself to international treaty laws such as the Law of Sovereignty and Independence and the Law Of Belligerent Occupation as the US is occupying a part of Syria while carrying out attacks outside this territory but in Syria.
I started following the country when the situation in Syria was still calm amid the Arab Spring in other Arab countries because nothing started to happen. That has a reason.
The people were well aware of who was ruling the country: the Assad family. The head of the family was Hafez al-Assad who left his brutal and bloody history behind.
One of his episodes is the Hama massacre. Many Syrians seem to have forgotten how and where the onslaught started. It was in the central prison of the city where Hafez held hundreds of members of the Muslim Brotherhood. When residents of Hama protested the onslaught in that prison, Hafez sent his army to crush the protest. In my view, it was genocide as 40.000 people were murdered.
The people started raising their voices after news reports about the execution of Colonel Gadaffi in Libya reached the country. The news encouraged the people to go onto the streets to call for freedom and democracy. The Syrian Uprising began this way on February 16, 2011, which turned at the end of that year into an escalation of an armed confrontation between defecting soldiers and high-ranking military and the rest of the army who remained on the side of Assad.
The situation at that time created a power vacuum particularly in the north of Syria, which was an opportunity for foreign Jihadists to enter the country before ISIL emerged.
I remember two videos. In the first video taken inside Syria, a group of Chechens vowed to establish a caliphate. So, ISIL wasn't the first to have such an idea. In the second video, I could watch armed men entering Syria from a border area in Lebanon. They were dressed like doctors and reported as from Libya. So, how come many people in the Western world only know how groups emerged in Syria, not where members of groups originally came from?
It is the International Red Cross that determined the situation in Syria as one of a civil war when the armed confrontation reached its peak in July 2012. This war lasted until December 8, 2024. So, Syria was never in a time of peace
When on social media people are posting that al-Quaeda is by the United States, they only write in the context of aiding, funding, and arming. They don't write about how and where al-Qaeda emerged. The group is in Syria but has its origin in Afghanistan where Osama Bin Laden formed the group before the September 11, 2001 attack.
The leader of Hay'at Tahir al-Sham is Ahmed Hussein al-Shar'a, better known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani. However, he is from, and the founder of the al-Nusra Front (in full: Jabhat al-Nusra). This group had an alliance with al-Qaeda until 2017. There was a civil war in Syria during the whole period of the alliance. So, how can it be a terrorist organization in a country where the people faced terror by the Assad family for nearly 50 years?
I wonder who the person is who started to spread conflating noise about HTS and al-Qaeda as terrorist groups. Only al-Qaeda is as it is formed in Afghanistan and was behind the September 11 attack in 2001. Jabhat al-Nusra was formed inside Syria amid the civil war and so is the merging of this group and other groups into Hay'at Tahir al-Sham.
He was born Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa in 1982 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where his father worked as a petroleum engineer The family returned to Syria in 1989, settling near Damascus.
In 2003, he moved to Iraq, where he joined al-Qaeda in Iraq as part of the resistance to the United States invasion that same year.
The American invaders arrested him in Iraq in 2006 and held for five years. After his release, al-Julani tasked with establishing al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria, al-Nusra Front, which grew its influence in opposition-held areas, especially Idlib.
He coordinated in those early years with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, head of al-Qaeda’s “Islamic State in Iraq”, which later became ISIL (ISIS).
In April 2013, al-Baghdadi suddenly announced that his group was cutting ties with al-Qaeda and would expand into Syria, effectively swallowing al-Nusra Front into a new group called ISIL. Al-Julani rejected this change, maintaining his allegiance to al-Qaeda.
In the following years, al-Julani appeared to distance himself from al-Qaeda’s project of establishing a “global caliphate” in all Muslim-majority countries, seeming to focus instead on building up his group within Syria’s borders. The split appeared to be a bid, according to analysts, to stress his group’s national, as opposed to transnational, ambitions to groups in Idlib.
Then in July 2016, Aleppo fell to the regime and the armed groups there started to head to Idlib, which was still opposition-held. Around the same time, al-Julani announced that his group had changed to Jabhat Fateh al-Sham.
By early 2017, thousands of fighters poured into Idlib fleeing Aleppo and al-Julani announced the merging of a number of those groups with his own to form HTS.
Unlike al-Baghadi and Osama Bin Laden, Al-Julani was involved in resistance during George W. Bush's Iraq war.
I still remember how Bush sought justifiation to invade Iraq. It was by claiming that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons. The Secretary of State at that time, Collin Powell, tried to convince the Security Council by showing a vial containing a white powder he said it is anthrax.
The now pro-Russian Scott Ritter was a UN weapons inspector at that time. He was in Iraq to verify the claim but found no such weapons there. In 2011, the now late Colin Powell admitted that the claim was false.
So, if George W. Bush did not have play such a dangerous game, there wouldn't be an eight years long American war in Iraq (2003-2011), he wouldn't be the godfather of the militarization of the words 'Either you with us or you with the terrorists." That is how the world became to have the misperception about what terrorism and terrorists really are.
