Ibrahim Al-Jebin
It seemed like the culmination of preliminary steps to be detailed in these lines when the new Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar raised his voice, calling to strengthen ties with Kurdish and Druze communities in the Middle East. As he said during his inauguration ceremony, taking over from his predecessor Yisrael Katz, “Minorities in the region will need to hold together.” He continued, “The Kurdish people are a great nation, one of the great nations without political independence. They are our natural allies.”
Sa’ar did not hesitate to elaborate on his theory, adding that “the Kurds are victims of Iranian and Turkish oppression, and Israel should extend a hand and strengthen relations with them (…) This has political and security dimensions.” He also pointed to Druze minorities in Syria and Lebanon as “potential partners.”
According to Sa’ar, Israelis “must understand that in a region where we will always be a minority, natural alliances will be with other minorities.” He added, “Israel’s firm stance and achievements over the past year in the fight against the Iranian axis have made it a more significant regional and international player than before.”
This was an explicit declaration of a new minority alliance replacing the minority alliances previously led by Assad’s regime (father and son), which Iran strongly supported. Prior to this, there were three turning points involving the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Ahmed Jarba, and Qadri Jamil, which cannot be seen as anything but interconnected in a suspicious way easily visible to Syrians.
The first turning point was the memorandum of understanding signed by Qadri Jamil from Moscow with Ilham Ahmed, co-chair of what is known as the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC) and a central committee member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), whom Qadri Jamil has known well for years. He was among those assigned to support and provide all services to it and its leader Abdullah Öcalan in Damascus.
The second was the SDC conference held in Brussels, under the pretext of gathering democratic forces, primarily the PKK militia, to form a fabricated democratic bloc funded by looted Syrian resources including oil, water, and agriculture. This attempt sought to co-opt the Suwayda movement and Syria’s Druze into the dangerous terrain of this new minority alliance, a bald betrayal of those who supported the Suwayda movement among Arabs and Kurds who felt bitter seeing the Suwayda political committee, supervised by Sheikh Al-Hijri, placing its hand with the PKK, which committed massacres against millions of Syrians, plundered their resources, displaced them, and abducted their young girls.
The third turning point was a visible move by figures once affiliated with the Cairo Platform (an entity in the Negotiating Committee, like the Moscow Platform led by Qadri Jamil). This shift appeared as a coup against the Cairo Platform and the elected legitimate follow-up committee that emerged from its conference. This turning point manifested in the announcement of a memorandum of understanding with Qadri Jamil, without consulting the active representatives and members of the Cairo Platform. The intended purpose, according to the cleverness of Sheikh Jarba and the “Red Comrade” Qadri, was to “achieve lasting stability in Syria and unify efforts for the long-awaited political transition, based on the following principles: Syria’s territorial and national unity, the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Syria, including Israel’s occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights, and commitment to Resolution 2254 as the only way out of the crisis, to be fully implemented.”
After this embellishment, we reach what Sheikh Jarba and the Comrade are after, as expressed in paragraph 3, which proposes a new understanding of the role of the Syrian Negotiation Committee. The memorandum states, “In a step to enhance the effectiveness of the opposition, the statement emphasized the need to activate the role of the Syrian Negotiation Committee as the main body for conducting direct negotiations, not as a cover for any political party trying to impose its policies on others.” This leads us to clause 4, where SDF’s influence is evident, with the sounds of its gunfire echoing from the Qandil Mountains. Clause four says, “In cooperation with democratic national forces, in seeking a comprehensive political solution, both parties affirmed that the Moscow and Cairo Platforms are open to cooperating with democratic national forces outside the Negotiating Committee. The aim is to unify opposition efforts around a single vision for a solution, which is open and inclusive of all national groups.”
The Syrians are less interested in tracking further disputes within opposition political entities than they are in ending the exploitation of their cause for personal purposes.
The Cairo Platform, when established, represented the views of Syrians who wanted to propose a different approach from others, yet remained within Syrian national principles. It has not deviated from these principles since it joined the Negotiation Committee in Geneva. However, the deliberate manipulation by some to repeat the same deceptive performance for Syrians no longer fools anyone, as these methods and tricks are outdated and ineffective today.
The elected follow-up committee that emerged from the Cairo Conference, as the sole legitimate reference for the Cairo Platform, rejected this blatant maneuver by Jarba and Qadri Jamil and those who serve their interests. Their reaction was one of anger, and they accused the follow-up committee of being unknown, claiming everything issued by it is fabricated, launching a series of insults that neither add nor detract now that their project has been exposed along with the names behind it, all to serve the SDF, SDC, and the new minority alliance.
Today, Syrians rely on the “patriots” from the original founders and members of the Cairo Platform to reject this evident dive into the mud, which will tarnish only those involved with foreign terrorist militias, arms mafias, and symbols of corruption. Should the Cairo Platform become entangled in this path after being hijacked by these people, it is a well-known path that leads only to shame and failure.
