by Austin Michael Bodetti. He is a student in the Gabelli Presidential Scholars Program at Boston College and a reporter for War Is Boring. He focuses on the relationship between Islam and conflict in Syria and Sudan.

Zahran Alloush, who spoke at a wedding in July 2015, led the Jaish al-Islam. The group recently agreed to participate in a political process seeking to end the five-year-old conflict. Alloush was killed in an airstrike, December 2015.
Many Western analysts saw in al-Saleh a mediator between moderates and extremists and a Syrian leader with whom the international community could work to reform the country. The airstrike that killed him only days before the formation of the Islamic Front ended that possibility. “Mr. Saleh’s story, much like that of the movement for which he left his life as a seed trader and father of five, unfolded as one of optimism and possibility diverted by war’s disappointments and, it seemed, its moral exigencies and dark alliances,” wrote The New York Times. He had existed in a region of moral ambiguity, trying to settle conflicts between the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) yet contradicting his seeming ideals of pluralism by often obliging the extremists. Though Ahrar al-Sham, Jaish al-Islam, and the Suqour al-Sham Brigade would distance themselves from terrorism, their leaders tended to lack al-Saleh’s Western-friendly pragmatism.

Pro-Kremlin Twitter satirist Lev Sharansky published this cartoon lampooning the idea of a moderate Syrian opposition (Anna Shamanska, “Three Memes: How Pro-Kremlin Tweeps Are Framing The Syrian Debate“, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, 09.10.2015).
Jaish al-Islam pursued its own goals, strengthening itself around Damascus. Alloush reigned over the eastern suburbs of the Syrian capital, threatening the Syrian government with artillery and soldiery. Even so, an airstrike, maybe Russian, managed to kill him too only last month. The New York Times claimed that Jaish al-Islam might struggle to copy Ahrar al-Sham’s ability to rebound from such a loss, noting, “The Army of Islam could be particularly vulnerable because it was organized around a single charismatic individual, more so than many other rebel groups.”

The Good and Bad of Ahrar al-Sham: an al-Qaeda–linked group worth befriending according to Michael Doran, William McCants, and Clint Watts (Foreign Affairs, 23.01.2014).
The only faction of the Islamic Front that could rival Ahrar al-Sham no longer possessed its best competitor. “He reflected the difficulties in identifying moderate rebels from extremists and other militants in Syria,” said another article by The Associated Press. “He was widely known to be supported by Saudi Arabia and Turkey but also fought pitched battles against rival Islamic State group near Damascus, with many crediting his group for keeping IS from making further advances toward the Syrian capital.” Alloush represented one of the last revolutionaries to have joined the Syrian opposition from the start. When he died, so did another opportunity to finish the war.
Jaish al-Islam weakened, Ahrar al-Sham is trying to position itself within the balance of power between Islam and the Western world. “The Ahrar al-Sham movement is totally independent,” one of its spokesmen told The New York Times. “It is a Syrian movement and it has no links, organizationally or ideologically, with any international organizations.” It concerned American officials, however, that Ahrar al-Sham worked with members of al-Qaeda, even harboring some of them. Hassan Abboud’s faction of the Islamic Front, like its diminished allies, continues to exist in ambiguity.
Ahrar al-Sham often leads the Syrian opposition, fighting alongside moderates and extremists and hoping to unite them. If America and Ahrar al-Sham want to cooperate (whether against terrorism, the Syrian government, or both), they must find common ground. One of them will need to compromise its ideals to achieve cooperation. The moderate may have to submit to the extremist.
Bodetti ends up confirming the very Kremlin Memes he sets out to disprove.
To be clear: the editor added the cartoon and the link to Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty — not the author. I don’t think the intention of the author was to disprove “Kremlin’s Memes”, to prove that these revolutionaries were moderate or not. If you read the article carefully, actually, he didn’t take side in this judgment. But fact is, if you follow the history of these groups and read several assessments about them, to call them “moderate” would be a sham. On the other hand, the long, grim civil war in Syria leaves almost no room for “real” moderate groups and plays in the hand of extremists like the al-Nusra Front or the Islamic State (see also Edward Dark, “Syrian FSA fades in shadow of Saudi-backed opposition front“, al-Monitor, 11.12.2013).