Since that day when the world, stupefied, saw on television planes exploding against skyscrapers that burned like torches until sinking into the belly of Manhattan, the unthinkable became everyday. A long and strange name appeared on the billboard on the world stage: Osama bin Muhammad bin Awda bin Laden. The creator, director and screenwriter of a horror reality show called Al Qaedawhose scenes shook the global audience.
The 21st century began with the first terrorist attack that reached a genocidal level and was broadcast live. The United States was attacked on its own territory, but the attacker was not a country or an alliance of countries, but a terrorist group. Al Qaeda was the number one enemy of the secular governments of the Muslim world and of the open society, the liberal-democratic system and the Western way of life.
In its matrix an even more delusional and criminal group was incubated, which was presented to the world by televising beheadings: the Islamic State Iraq-Levante (ISIS). Both organizations profess the most radical version of Wahhabism, the already extreme branch of Sunni Islam that governs Saudi Arabia. Terrorism was no longer a local phenomenon of extremist ideologies, like the Red Brigades in Italy; the Rotee Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction) which the Germans called Baader-Meinhof; nor separatisms like the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) in Spain, or the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) in Türkiye, among others.
9/11 was the official presentation of global terrorism. Al Qaeda had already attacked the Americans in a port in Yemen and in the embassies in Nairobi and Dar el Salam. But with commercial planes impacting the Pentagon and the twin towers, the dimension of the new conflict became clear. One of the metastases of the organization created by Osama Bin Laden and his Egyptian lieutenant, Ayman al Zawahiriwas Al Qaeda Mesopotamia, organized by the Jordanian lieutenant that both had in Afghanistan, Abu Mussab al Zarqawi. In Iraq, Al Zarqawi recruited the Syrian Ahmed al Sharaa, who took the jihadist name Abu Mohamed al Golani.
Al Zawahiri sent Al Golani back to his country to lead Jathab al Nusra, the arm of Al Qaeda in Syria. For the last few years he was entrenched in his stronghold of Idlib, but in just ten days he reversed thirteen years of a conflict that seemed to be going through its death throes with Bashar al Assad as virtual winnerafter being saved from the debacle by Iran, Hezbollah and Russian forces leaving their military possessions in Syria, an air base in Hmeimim and the naval base in Tartus. The lightning offensive conquered Aleppo without much effort, then triumphantly entered Hama and, immediately afterwards, assumed control of Homs. From there he advanced towards Damascus and brought the capital under his control without firing a shot, because the Syrian army had disbanded and the dictator had fled to Moscow.
Six years before that unexpected end of the Alawite regime, an unprecedented metamorphosis had occurred. Abu Mohamed al Golani left his nom de guerre and resumed his real name, Ahmed al Sharaaas part of a Copernican turn that included breaking with Al Qaeda, adopting a centrist and multiethnic position, allying with pro-Turkish militias, and obtaining the support of Ankara as well as, possibly, Israel. Upon defeating the regime, Al Sharaa proclaimed that minorities (Alawites, Druze, Christians and Kurds) will be respected and that all militias, except ISIS, will be able to join the new Syrian army.
He still needs to create a stable government; that Israel withdraw to its territory after having destroyed the arsenals, bases and barracks of the ancien regime with bombings; and keep your word install a moderate government that collaborates with pacifying the Middle East and respect your neighbors and Western powers. If that happens, it will be a case without precedent. Whenever ultra-Islamism reigned, it imposed insane leviathans. Abu Sayyaf on the Philippine islands of Jolo and Basilan; The Taliban in Afghanistan, ISIS in its Syrian-Iraqi caliphate, Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the Houthis in Yemen and Al Shabad in Somalia, are some examples of that iron rule.
By the way, it cannot be ruled out that Al Sharaa has simulated moderation and, having consolidated its triumph and power, imposes in Syria a religious dictatorship as brutal as the fallen secular regime. Just as Ulysses and Epeus resorted to the great wooden horse as a strategy that deceived the Trojans and allowed the Greeks to enter the walled city, Al Sharaa may have hatched the strategy to deceive Turkey, Israel and the United Statesin order to put together a coalition of pro-Turkish Islamist militias and obtain the support of intelligence information provided by the MIT (Milli Istihbarat Teskilat), the Mossad and the CIA. An Islamist extremism has never governed in any other way than by imposing delirious totalitarianisms. And never did a leader born in the womb of Al Qaeda become a reasonable statesman and peacemaker. But that seems to be what is happening.
So far, nothing has managed to destroy Al Qaeda. Not the American coups that decimated their forces in Afghanistan, nor the execution of Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, nor the assassination of Aymán al Zawahiri in Kabul. Although it has been in a vegetative life for years, none of the many military defeats it has suffered could put an end to the parent organization of global terrorism. However, what the devastating military blows received did not achieve, the metamorphosis of Ahmed al Sharaa is likely to achieve: the leader who cut his ties with Al Qaeda and years later defeated the Syrian regime.
Perhaps the course of history will show that the most lethal blow has been delivered by that militia created in its own womb with the name of Jabhat al Nusra al Ashn al Sham (People’s Victory Front of the Levant) and converted into Hayat Tahrir al Sham (Levant Liberation Organization). It would be one more sign that the world is going through a chapter in which the extraordinary has become normal. The chapter that began when the world saw live the planes that exploded against the twin towers, lighting them like torches that burned until they sank into the belly of Manhattan.
Image gallery
