Afrin, Syria: “Our men didn’t even enter Jableh,” claimed Brigadier General Mohammed al-Jassim during an extensive interview with Al Majalla on his base in northern Syria near the Turkish border.
Jassim, better known as Abu Amsha, said he had been in hospital in northern Syria when a massive attack on security forces, followed by the killing of hundreds of others, began on 6 March. Subsequently, he had to be moved to a hospital in southern Türkiye due to the seriousness of his condition at the time, he said.
He nonetheless sent some of his most trusted men to the coastal area to clear a road and assist the other forces on the ground—as “they (the government) asked us to do so, since they know we have the weaponry and men”—but stressed that these forces remained several kilometres away from Jableh itself.
Jableh, a town in Syria’s coastal area, was one of several sites of bloodshed in early March that started with the brutal execution of policemen and coordinated attacks on Syria’s still-developing security forces by former regime elements and others, followed by the killing of hundreds of civilians by, for the most part, still unidentified men.
A seven-member investigative committee was established by Syria’s new government on 9 March to “investigate the reasons, circumstances, and context of the events, look into violations against civilians, and identify those responsible”. On 9 April, it was granted a non-renewable three-month extension to present its findings.
Many with no direct knowledge of the incidents nonetheless immediately pinned the blame for what appeared to have been sectarian killings of civilians on Jassim and his forces, sanctioned by the US for alleged abuses of the local population under their control in the Kurdish-majority area of Afrin. However, he and others close to him said such claims were baseless.
“Abu Ouday visited me in the hospital” during the days in which the massacre was taking place, Jassim said in reference to one of his commanders, also present during the interview in April at his base. “And I told him to make sure that the village (where his forces were) was safe, with no transgressions (by his forces).”
Abu Ouday is one of several regime officers who defected during the early years of the war and now works under Jassim’s command.
“The mukhtar and the villagers asked us to stay,” he said, but the government in Damascus didn’t give me the responsibility, so they left."
“But we don’t have time to answer all this nonsense,” Jassim claimed, “when false claims keep being made against us every day. Those making up these lies have nothing better to do. We do.”
Disinformation and ‘dirty work’
Syria has for over a decade suffered not only massive destruction and loss of life but also information warfare waged by both state and non-state actors. With few professional journalists on the ground for the vast majority of the conflict, the targeting of media professionals as well as the former regime’s view of journalism as a state-supporting enterprise instead of an independent profession, separating truth from propaganda remains arduous, even with more freedom for journalists to enter the country than before.
The Kurdish-majority area under Jassim’s command is one at the heart of disputes over the presence of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and armed factions linked to it. The PKK is considered a terrorist organisation by Türkiye, the EU, and the US.
Residents of the Afrin area contacted by Al Majalla, who asked that they not be identified in any way, gave vague information on the alleged abuses of the local population, citing widely varying amounts allegedly demanded by their forces as “taxes” or extortion.
While one side claims that “everybody knows” that Jassim and the forces under him have long committed abuses with impunity, allegedly targeting especially individuals of Kurdish ethnicity, another claims that he is targeted precisely because he is one of the few original Free Syrian Army (FSA) commanders to have survived in a position of power for the past decade while at the same time amassing what appears to be significant wealth.
Jassim was sanctioned by the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control in August 2023 for allegedly ordering forces under his command in the Sultan Suleiman Shah Brigade to “forcibly displace Kurdish residents and seize their property” as well as “to kidnap local residents, demanding ransom in return for their release and confiscating their property”.
Al Majalla has been unable to verify Jassim’s claims and those of others voiced within this article.
Defence ministry and revolutionary past
Jassim was appointed Hama Brigade commander in early February by the new Damascus-based government, the core of which is individuals formerly in forces that were in the past at times also foes of those under and aligned with Jassim.
Hama is the brigadier general’s native governorate, where most of his family still lives. He noted that the brigade is not yet “ready and I can’t say when it will be,” but “we are preparing the military equipment and logistics.”
“The past regime didn’t produce anything at all. They stole everything and reported fraudulent data” about the quantity of weaponry, vehicles, and men, he said, rendering it exceedingly weak.
Syria’s president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, was the leader of Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham since the group’s founding in 2017 after his faction officially cut ties with Al-Qaeda after disbanding Jabhat al-Nusra, which he had also led, until the formal dissolution of the armed faction in late January. The US had designated both Jabhat al-Nusra and HTS as terrorist groups.
In late December, after an HTS-led offensive had managed to take the capital on 8 December and establish relative security across large parts of the country, the US dropped its $10mn bounty on al-Sharaa’s head.
The Free Syrian Army (FSA) factions Jassim previously belonged to, including the Syrian Revolutionary Front (SRF) under Jamal Maarouf, had at times engaged in deadly fighting against Jabhat al-Nusra, including for several months in 2014.
The brigade commander said that, “when I started my involvement in the revolution, I didn’t do it for me. I did it because children were oppressed,” and because “the government arrested me in June 2012 for eight months”.
He added that he had been transferred to several different prisons but that, at the Hama airport prison, “they started beating me viciously and at that point my family paid to get me out”.
“It was afterwards that we started taking weapons from the regime military,” he said, and working with various opposition factions.
“It was a great time,” he said, “I had a brigade in the SRF. We fought against the Islamic State (IS) and got them out of Idlib, but afterwards, there were problems with Jabhat al-Nusra. Some of the SRF went to Türkiye, but my fighters and I withdrew to this part of northern Syria.”
“I was injured twice in the fight against IS,” Jassim noted.
“We never wanted to fight Jabhat al-Nusra, but they started the fight against us. They attacked our soldiers,” he claimed. “We never had any problem with them until they stabbed us in the back.”
Ten years later, many men on different sides are now working together as part of the official forces: their main enemy, regardless of the differences and blood lost between them, is now gone.
Olive groves and...oppression?
Rolling hills and vast groves of olive trees form the backdrop to this base with its sparklingly clean hallways and offices, gilded furniture, and various decorations extolling cooperation between Türkiye and Syria.
“We have 15,000 soldiers,” Jassim said, noting that although Türkiye continues to pay the salaries of some of the soldiers, it does not cover all of them.
He claimed that anyone saying his group are or ever was “Turkish mercenaries” doesn’t know what they are talking about or is pushing propaganda for the benefit of the PKK or the former regime.
Moreover, he said, the monthly wages are “about $95, and we need to add another 100 or 150, as soldiers will not work for less than $300”.
Jassim said “we have production projects” to make money as well as “friends in Europe, the Gulf, wherever in the world, that help us”, but refused to be more specific.
“I cannot say their names because it might cause problems for them,” he said.
“In the past, we worked with the Turkish army because we worked in the same area,” he said, “but Türkiye didn’t give us a lot of support. On the other hand, we got a lot of support from our friends who love us.”
Jassim scoffed at the question of whether he “taxed” local residents.
“We do not take money from people, we help these people,” he claimed, though in “some places we took from the PKK.”
“If the land was of the PKK, we would bring in local Kurdish people to work the land through the mukhtar. He sends them, they understand olive growing, we don’t”, and then profits are shared, he said.
However, “if there is an individual here and it is their land, of course we don’t do that,” he claimed. “And if the owner returns, then we have no problem. We will give it back to them. If anyone comes back and they do not give them back the land, we can provide video proof that they are lying. You can meet with the mukhtar and ask him. If you go with us, people might say he is afraid, so just go alone. We have no problem with this. Speak to whoever you want here.”
Growing visibly annoyed, Jassim claimed to have been “wronged by a lot of things, trivial things”.
“They come and complain to us about olives. Do you think (selling) food gave us such a large amount of money? Do you think this was the source of funds for this base? What profit could I ever get from this small area of Afrin?” he said, agitated. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“We don’t interfere with any local customs or traditions,” he continued. “We deal with the notables of the area, but we don’t interact with civilians.”
One of his commanders, whom he called in during the interview to speak briefly to Al Majalla, is Kurdish: though his family is originally from Qamishli, and the man speaks Kurdish, he was raised in Hama.
“We have courses in human rights for our forces as well,” Jassim said, “and the director for those courses is a Christian. I have both Druze and Christian men who are part of my security office”, and “we visit the Yazidi community despite that fact that they are not in the sector” under their control.
“We have good relations with the Yazidi community and have attended some Yazidi celebrations,” he added, also telling one of his men to find videos of women who work with them on anti-drug and other operations.
‘Lowly’ origins or son of a wealthy man?
Widely believed to be “lowly origins”, as his detractors often claim, Jassim told Al Majalla that instead, "my father was one of the largest contractors” in Syria.
“Don’t ask me: ask the people in my area, they know it,” he said, “go ask about my house, where I live.”
“We had a lot of projects across all of Syria before the uprising,” he said.
“Do you know why we were able to help people so quickly after the (6 February, 2023) earthquake? Because that is my sector, those digging machines,” he said.
“I have four daughters, but one was killed in the earthquake,” he added.
At one point, Jassim starts a video call with one of his daughters and a toddler in Hama.
Jassim, who was accused in 2019 of raping a woman, claimed that he was in Saudi Arabia at the time of the alleged crime and that the case appears to have been orchestrated by a man called Fadi Jibrail, who “offered the woman [who accused him] and her husband $4,000” to make what he says were the false accusations.
On reports of Jassim employing Syrian forces abroad, one man close to him claimed that he does, but only “a few hundred” in “Togo and another African country”, and that they are simply guards and not engaged in active fighting. He also claimed that another SNA commander has more Syrian fighters in Africa than Jassim himself.
In response to Al Majalla’s question on the matter, Jassim himself said he would “keep this matter to himself” and refused to comment further.
Fought even when fleeing was an option?
“I don’t know if all of them are untrue, but it’s not like it’s often portrayed. And at least he was doing something,” one of the men under him stated in a conversation in April when asked whether any of the multiple accusations against Jassim were true. “He worked hard here in Syria while so many were in Türkiye or Europe, complaining and living off others.”
Many in Syria note that, without Jassim and the others on the ground who risked their lives for years in very poor conditions, the brutal authoritarian Assad regime would still be in place and those returning now would not have had this opportunity; some claim that the “dirty work” had to be done by someone and that “no one in a war has their hands entirely clean”.
Others say the “dream of a new Syria” cannot be built if anyone accused of similar abuses remains unpunished.
“We are also from the ‘Sahel’ [‘coastal’] area of Hama, the Ghab Plains,” which extends towards the area more widely known as ‘the Sahel’: the coastal region of Tartous and Latakia.
“We know those areas and the people there know us,” he said.
When he was imprisoned early on after the 2011 uprising, Jassim said, “my father had relations with the Alawaite tribal sheikhs in the mountains and they helped me to get out,” he said, reeling off names of some of them: “Sheikh Haidar Abboud, Sheikh Ali Abbas – he died a while back, Shabaan Mansour”.
“When I got out of prison,” he added, the people in his area “saw the scars on my body. I didn’t even need to say anything. But some asked, is the state really like this? And I said yes – now you can see it with your own eyes.”
“I wish (more) foreign journalists would come to visit us and listen to us and others to find out what the truth is,” he said. “They can speak to whoever and not be afraid. It is a safe area. You can go anywhere. Everywhere is under control and under video surveillance.”
“They can see it with their own eyes,” he said. “Let them come.”
