Al-Mayadeen – HTS was groomed for years prior to its violent palace coup by Inter-Mediate, an MI6-linked consulting firm run by Jonathan Powell, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s national security advisor.
Since January 13, the newly reconstituted Syrian Arab Army has torn across North East Syria. It marks a brutal end to an autonomous region – typically referred to as Rojava – effectively governed by the US-backed, Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces for over a decade. While a Washington-brokered ceasefire agreement provides for the SDF’s integration into Damascus’ Western-appointed government, the de facto HTS-controlled SAA shows every sign of seeking to permanently erase and neutralize every trace of Rojava.
Civilians and SDF fighters have been slaughtered since the region’s takeover. The SAA has been assisted in this massacre by former inmates of local detention centres, among them a profusion of former ISIS butchers. These facilities were created in 2019 to accommodate the population of the territory once claimed by the Islamic State and today house tens of thousands of people. Markedly, government forces specifically targeted the prisons when their assault on Rojava commenced, strongly suggesting igniting mass jailbreaks locally was a deliberate objective.
Rojava’s ISIS refugee camps posed a complex and seemingly irresolvable problem for the autonomous territory. Inhabitants could only be repatriated with the consent of their home country’s government, which in many cases refused. The al-Hol camp proved particularly problematic. Housing exclusively women and children, many detainees were the wives, sons, and daughters of Islamic State fighters. The former, in some cases, never renounced their commitment to ISIS, while the latter are stateless.
A September 2019 Washington Post report painted a horrifying picture of al-Hol as a “cauldron of radicalization,” in which hardcore ISIS adherents enforced the group’s strictures upon the wider population through brutal violence, including murder. SDF guards could do nothing but attempt to “contain” offenders physically, while the Islamic State’s extremist ideology spread “uncontested”, with tens of thousands of children a literally “captive audience”. The facility was struck by the SAA on January 20, sending clusters of its captives and the SDF fleeing.
Al-Hol is now under government control, and the fate of its approximately 30,000 inhabitants remains uncertain. However, there are grounds to believe the camp’s population has been primed in advance to expect, and welcome, the arrival of Ahmed al-Sharaa’s forces. Leaked documents reviewed by Al Mayadeen English expose how The Global Strategy Network, a psychological warfare specialist founded and staffed by British intelligence veterans, has maintained a secret presence in al-Hol for years, covertly perpetuating British government-approved propaganda messaging every step of the way.
The putative Syrian government’s destruction of Rojava significantly consolidates its hold on power nationally. The SDF occupied territory home to the country’s primary oil- and wheat-producing areas, seizure of which provides a sizeable windfall. There is moreover zero prospect of a breakaway Kurdish state emerging, which the territory’s leaders had repeatedly mooted following HTS’ December 2024 capture of Damascus. These developments will be warmly greeted throughout Western corridors of power – first and foremost, perhaps, London.
As this journalist has previously exposed, HTS was groomed for years prior to its violent palace coup by Inter-Mediate, an MI6-linked consulting firm run by Jonathan Powell, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s national security advisor. Inter-Mediate has maintained a dedicated office within Syria’s Presidential Palace ever since. Starmer cheered Bashar Assad’s fall as an opportunity for London to “play a more present and consistent role throughout the region.” That plan is now being put into action.
