Syrian opposition defends Eastern Ghouta situation - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East
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Another man from the area, a lawyer by profession now living in northern Europe but in daily contact with several individuals inside the area under JAI control, told Al-Monitor in a Skype conversation that the Tawbah prison is filled with several thousand people imprisoned without a fair trial by the groups active in the JAI-dominated area, and that the Al-Baton jail reportedly held a few hundred women and children taken prisoner from the Adra al-Omalia area. The men who had been taken alongside them are believed to have been executed, as were many fighters from the rival and recently disbanded Jaish al-Umma group more recently.
While the group has long called for a state run on the basis of Islamic law, Capt. Alloush sidestepped the question as to whether the group supported elections in a hypothetical post-Assad future, saying only that it wanted “what the Syrian people want.”
The extent of the group’s Islamist stance is unclear.
Zahran Alloush is the son of a Salafist preacher living in Saudi Arabia and was born in Douma, in the Damascus outskirts. He has three wives, as do several other major leaders in the opposition — including even Jamal Maarouf, who headed up the reportedly nonreligiously-associated Syrian Revolutionary Front prior to its routing from its base in Idlib by local al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra.
When asked for an opinion about Harakat Hazm — formed in early 2014 and the first to receive TOW anti-tank weapons from the United States, weapons that were later taken by Jabhat al-Nusra when it routed this group as well from the Idlib region in late 2014 — Capt. Alloush told Al-Monitor that it was “a very, very good group.”
He praised the high number of defected military officers and said that they were well trained with what he called “a good ideology,” that of moderate Islam.
JAI, like all the Islamist groups, does not use the “revolutionary national flag” since “there are so many extremist groups in Syria right now that would fight” the group if they did, Alloush said.
He noted that JAI had always fought against the Islamic State and was responsible for getting it out of the area now under its control. He admitted, however, that it was fighting on the same side as many other groups that have views similar to those of the group’s sworn enemy.
But while IS “has an ideology that is takfiri, and they kill everyone except IS,” other groups in the opposition may “have the same ideology but don’t make the same chaos — for their fighters, for our fighters or for the Syrian people.”
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