Make No Mistake: Syrians Fighting in Azerbaijan Are Committed Jihadists

I n a recently leaked video shared on social media, a Syrian fighter walks around the dead bodies of Armenian soldiers, narrating the scene as he goes, showing all the fatayis (carcasses) of the Armenians and asking God to grant him strength over the pigs and infidels. He walks around the bodies, saying, “These are their pigs; these are their carcasses, in bulk. In bulk, oh brothers.” He walks a bit further and zooms in on the face of a dead soldier. “Of course you can tell from a Jew’s face that he’s a pig,” he says. The video, geolocated to Azerbaijan by analyst Alexander McKeever, is of a Syrian rebel in the Hamza Division, a Syrian rebel faction formerly backed by the U.S. The rebel has gone to Azerbaijan to fight jihad against the Armenians in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, at the behest of Turkey; the man’s accent suggests he’s from eastern Syria.

Syrian fighters like the man in the video have appeared on the scene of the ongoing conflict in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, inhabited by ethnic Armenians but claimed by Azerbaijan since the Soviets drew the borders that currently define the Caucasus. The two sides fought a bloody war over the region in the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed. Victorious, ethnic Armenians set up a state not recognized internationally and expelled the remaining Azeri population. Ethnic Armenians, meanwhile, were largely expelled from Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan’s current offensive into Nagorno-Karabakh, which began on September 27, has been supported by Turkey in the form of paying Syrian rebels large salaries to fight against Armenians for Azerbaijan.

The conflict at first looked like it might become a new front in the Turkish–Russian proxy war that has come to define the conflicts in Libya and Syria, but Russia has been hesitant to back the Armenian side forcefully. Armenia’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, has tried to steer the nation’s orientation away from Moscow, and Armenia has struggled to find international support. The geopolitics are complicated: Russia and the U.S. maintain reasonably good relations with both sides. Israel has close ties to Azerbaijan and supplies it significant weaponry. Armenia has recalled its ambassador to Israel over its support for Azerbaijan. Because Nagorno-Karabakh is not recognized as part of Armenia, many of the country’s allies have shied away from entering a conflict where the risk of all-out war with Turkey is a real possibility. Turkey and Azerbaijan share a Turkic ethnic heritage, and politicians in both countries have described them as “one nation, two states.” Azerbaijan’s cause has stirred up nationalist, and anti-Armenian, sentiment in Turkey.

Several ceasefire agreements have failed, but the foreign ministers of both countries are apparently set to meet separately with U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo on Friday, according to Politico. The United States has been largely absent from the issue so far, but both sides put a high priority on their relationship with Washington. This gives some hope that the conflict can be brought to an end. (Two of the first meetings I had in my role as the foreign-policy staffer for an incoming senator in 2015 were with the embassy of Azerbaijan and the Armenian National Congress of America. Nagorno-Karabakh was at the top of both sides’ agendas.)

In Azerbaijan as in Libya, Turkey has made use of its Syrian proxies (including the one in the video of the Armenian “infidels”), in this case to support the Azerbaijan government. But are these Syrian rebels really fighting jihad, or are they simply mercenaries? Elizabeth Tsurkov, a fellow with the Center for Global Policy, contended in a tweet on September 27 that “these fighters, however, are not jihadists, as they are sometimes portrayed. Their willingness to fight for Turkey, a state jihadists consider to be apostate attests to that. Thousands of them signing up to fight for Shia-majority Azerbaijan attests to that too.” Tsurkov rightly points out the many human-rights abuses of Turkey’s proxies in Syria, many of whom used to be the West’s proxies, but argues that they are not jihadists because of their support for Turkey, an officially secular state, and for Azerbaijan, a Shiite one. Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute echoed the claim that, because of its ties to Turkey, the Syrian National Army, the larger umbrella group to which the man in the video belongs, is not jihadist.

The argument about what constitutes a real jihadist is semantic. Lister and Tsurkov get lost in the details and miss a broader consideration. First, al-Qaeda and ISIS do not have a monopoly on “jihad,” however defined. More importantly, Lister and Tsurkov make the same mistake that has been made since the beginning of the Syrian conflict: to delineate groups according to ideology, categorizing them as “moderate,” “Islamist,” or “secular,” and so on. What defines a jihadist group as jihadist? Presumably it is a group whose members understand themselves to be fighting jihad. Syrians fighting against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, and now fighting for Turkey and Azerbaijan against Christian (infidel) Armenia, would largely consider themselves mujahideen, fighters of jihad. By the simplest definition, then, they are jihadist. That they are fleeing poverty to do so, as well chronicled by Tsurkov herself, does not change that fact.

Elizabeth O’Bagy, formerly of the Institute for the Study of War, will best be remembered for falsely claiming to have a Ph.D. from Georgetown while advocating for the U.S. to intervene in the Syrian conflict against the government of Bashar al-Assad. Unfortunately her more lasting contribution to our understanding of the Syrian conflict was her attempt to map the Syrian opposition by ideology. O’Bagy assigned neat categories to rebel groups, ranging from “secular” to “Islamist” to “Salafist.” That understanding of the conflict found a welcome home in Washington, D.C., and lives on in the analysis of Lister, Tsurkov, and others.

O’Bagy’s map of the conflict misses the main drivers of the motivations of those involved. The role that ideology plays in Syrian politics is tricky to determine. It is safe to say, however, that it is usually secondary to the role played by ties to family, tribe, sect, city, and other social entities. This is true beyond Syria. It is not to say that ideology plays no role in the conflicts of the Arab Middle East, but that role is often exaggerated. Did the Tikritis of Iraq’s Baath Party back Saddam because they believed in the party’s nominally secular ideology? Certainly not. The party was a tool to power, and that struggle for power, much more than any struggle between ideologies, has defined both Syrian and Iraqi politics since their independence from France and Britain respectively.

Of course it’s not just in the Middle East that the contradiction exists between the ideology of individuals and the political choices made by a group. Has the fact that Donald Trump’s daughter and son-and-law are Jewish deterred certain anti-Semitic elements in the U.S. from supporting him? Clearly not. Such a claim would be ridiculous given recent events, but no more ridiculous than the claim that Syrian rebels fighting in Azerbaijan aren’t jihadist even though they record themselves walking around Armenian “carcasses,” calling them “Jews,” “pigs,” and “infidels” (while, yes, ironically fighting for a majority-Shiite country, Azerbaijan, that is closely aligned with Israel). Tsurkov and Lister are right to call these fighters mercenaries, but to deny that religious intolerance is part of their core is to misunderstand the Syrian conflict, and more fundamentally to misunderstand Syrian society.

In February 2011, I was leaving Syria after a year of studying Arabic in Damascus. I went to Souq al-Hamidiyah, the city’s most famous market, to buy a gift for a family — a Christian family, as it happened — who had been especially good to me during my time in Syria. I had spent hours upon hours in their house eating and drinking coffee and trying to understand what the heck they were saying in Arabic. I wanted an appropriate gift to thank them. Walking around the souq I saw a shop selling Syrian antiquities of various sorts, including Christian religious icons. I asked about a picture of the Virgin Mary, hoping to try the limited bargaining skills I had learnt during my year in Damascus. The question prompted a discussion about religion, and the shop owner proceeded to tell me how everyone knows that Christianity is a lie. Even the pope knows it, he said, but he keeps up the act in order to stay in power. He assured me that if I asked the pope, just between me and him, the pope would tell me he knows that Islam is the only true religion. I thanked him for his time and left without buying anything. (I found another picture of the Virgin Mary elsewhere.)

About a month later the Syrian protests began, and nearly a decade later the conflict continues. I have no idea what became of that shopkeeper, nor any idea what his views on the conflict are. He might still be selling Christian icons to Russian soldiers as they shop in Damascus, or he may have joined a “moderate” rebel group, or he may have fled to Lebanon and been fed by a Christian charity while making his way to Europe. The Christian icons in his shop indicated very little about his views on Christianity, and indeed his views toward Christians and Christianity say very little about the political choices he likely made after the conflict started. Reading Syrian writers who know the reality of their country’s social fabric, writers such as Georges Tarabichi and Abdul Salam al-Ojeili, as well as the Iraqi Ali al-Wardi, has helped me understand the realities of Syrian society much more than have Beltway analysts who have spent no meaningful time in the country. I’ve learned that superficial labels such as “moderate,” “secular,” and “jihadist” give very little insight into the motivations of the various actors in the Syrian conflict.

Like everyone else, I was hopeful in 2011 that the protests would bring positive change to Syria. Even then, though, I had a nagging doubt that a rebel takeover of Damascus would be good for people like that Christian family, with their new picture of the Virgin Mary hanging alongside many others that were already in the house. The last ten years of conflict in Syria have proven that nagging doubt right. Few religious minorities have been able to survive opposition control, and the demographic map of Syria will reflect that sad fact for the foreseeable future.

The biggest mistake one can make when studying Syria is to take labels at face value: “Assad is the secular protector of the minorities,” or “All opponents of Assad are extremists,” or “The rebels are mostly moderates who want some form of secular democracy.” Or perhaps most ridiculously: “They can’t be jihadists because they’re fighting for secular Turkey and Shiite Azerbaijan.” These claims aren’t just incorrect, they avoid the most important questions that have defined the Syrian conflict. Above all, and alongside much else, the Syrian conflict has become a struggle for power. Ideological lines are rarely black and white, including between “moderates” and “jihadists.” Many of those Syrians fighting in Azerbaijan right now see themselves as true mujahideen, fighters of jihad, even if some analysts in D.C. tracking their every move on Twitter see them as mere mercenaries. But these fighters aren’t thinking in terms of secular Turkey or Israeli-allied Azerbaijan. They’re fighting infidels, and that’s all (in addition to a hefty paycheck) that matters to them.

But perhaps what is most revealing in this debate is that these analysts see Erdogan’s Turkey as secular. That is the strongest proof that they have yet to distinguish between false labels and the deeper truths lurking behind the smokescreen.