U.S. Permits al-Qaeda Linked Syrian Rebel to Enter Country

According to a McClatchy report on May 21st, 2016, the United States government permitted Labib al Nahhas, a foreign affairs director for the Syrian rebel group Ahrar al-Sham, to enter the country last December. While inside the country, Nahhas planned to speak with third parties who might be able to influence U.S. officials and policymakers, yet the report does not state with whom the meetings were with or if any meetings actually occurred.

Labib Nahhas is a Spanish national born in Madrid to a Spanish mother and a Syrian father. After the tragic death of both of his parents, at the age of four, Nahhas returned back to Syria to live with his extended family. Little is known about Nahhas’s childhood after moving back to Syria, but he appeared back in Europe in the late 1990s, when he attended Birmingham University in the United Kingdom. After graduating in 1999, Nahhas went on to work for a tech company in London, but still frequently traveled between France, the Netherlands, and the US.

In 2010, Nahhas returned to Syria and began working in the telecom industry while residing in Homs. By 2011, Nahhas had gotten involved in the Arab Spring demonstrations, which eventually transitioned into violent rebellions against President Bashir al-Assad’s government. In 2014, he relinquished himself from his role as director of the UK tech firm and increased his focus on the civil war, becoming a founding member of a rebel group that has since merged with Ahrar al- Sham.

Labib Nahhas is the current foreign relations director of Ahrar, while his brother sits on the Shura council of the group. The group, fully named, “The Islamic Movement of Ahrar al-Sham”, seeks the implementation of a Sunni Islamic state in Syria, and after its founding in 2012, the group began fighting alongside other Syrian rebel forces, such as al-Nusra and Islamic State.

In addition to military action, Ahrar al Sham is also known to engage in governance activities in cooperation with other Islamist factions, including providing food aid, security, and law through sharia courts. The group serves as the leading member of the Islamic Front coalition of Islamist Syrian militias, and Ahrar al-Sham is currently the head of the IF political office in Syria.

Labib Nahhas has written several opinion pieces for prominent news sources, such as Telegraph and Washington Post, seeking to separate Ahrar from other “extremist groups.” Nahhas’s attempts to differentiate Ahrar ranges from stating they are “ultra-conservative” to claiming they are a “mainstream” Sunni Islamist group. Oftentimes, Nahhas claims the group is both in favor of a “moderate future for Syria that preserves the state and institutes reforms that benefit all Syrians,” while also a jihadist movement.

Nahhas, attempting to conjoin both Western and jihadist thinking, is at best contradictory and at worst intentionally deceptive in some of his claims.

In a Telegraph opinion piece, Nahhas stated: “there needs to be a major role for religion and local custom in any political arrangement,” a statement that appears juxtaposed to Ahrar’s desire for a moderate future.

Nahhas also declares in a Washington Post op-ed that his group has been falsely accused of having organizational links to al-Qaeda; however, Abu Khalid al-Suri, founding member of Ahrar al-Sham, is known to have been a member of al-Qaeda, and was even photographed with Osama Bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders.

Links to al-Qaeda don’t simply end with Suri either. A senior al-Qaeda figure, Sanafi al-Nasr, claimed to have sent al-Qaeda jihadists to assist Ahrar al-Sham in Syria back in 2014.

Ultimately, Nahhas’s claims of his group and their interests change both over time and with respect to who is listening, and such uncertainty with Ahrar al-Sham’s interests begs the question: why was Nahhas allowed into the United States in December of 2015.

One reason for his admission into the U.S. could be simple oversight because of his European passport and the fact that Ahrar remains off the list of terror organizations. Yet, it is most likely that U.S. officials knew he was coming due to how high profile a leader Nahhas is within the Western community.

According to McClatchy, several national security analysts said that U.S. authorities were likely to have known about Nahhas’s arrival due to his group’s connection with al-Qaeda’s Syria branch. Syrian specialist with the Atlantic Council, Faysal Itani, even claimed to have known about the visit during the time it occurred.

Regardless of the claims, knowledge of Nahhas’s arrival would only indicate that the current administration is accepting informal diplomatic discussions with questionable Syrian rebel groups, a method of diplomacy that appears both covert and precarious.