Nowhere to go and ready to die – Idlib’s foreign fighters

From far and wide, they flocked to Syria to wage war.

Now, foreign militants face a fight to the last to hold on to Idlib, their final bastion.

Syrian troops, backed by Russia and Iran, have massed round the northwest province before an expected onslaught against the largest rebel-held zone left in the country.

Since 2015, Idlib has been home to a complex array of anti-regime forces: secular rebels and Syrian and foreign fighters with ties to Al Qaeda. The foreigners include fighters from Uzbekistan, Chechnya and China’s ethnic Uighur minority who cut their teeth in other wars but then swarmed to Syria.

“These are people who cannot be integrated into Syria really, under any circumstances, who have nowhere to go and who may just be ready to die in any case,” says Sam Heller of the International Crisis Group. “So they’re a real stumbling block to any solution.”

The top three power brokers in Syria’s war – Russia, Iran and Turkey – agreed last week to work together on stabilising Idlib to avoid an offensive.

But they revealed few details. A large obstacle to a substantive agreement, observers say, is the fate of militants, including foreign hardliners.

Chased out of their own homelands and targeted in Afghanistan and Pakistan, experienced foreign militants embraced Syria’s war as their own, starting around 2013. Many joined ISIS but others stuck by Al Qaeda and its Syrian affiliate, which now leads the Hayat Tahrir Al Sham alliance dominating Idlib.

One of the largest groups is the Turkestan Islamic Party, whose members belong to the Uighur minority who face a crackdown in China’s Xinjiang region.

They gained fighting experience in Afghanistan before heading to Syria and helping to oust regime troops from Idlib in 2015.

Their fighters, estimated to number anything between 1,000 and several thousand, are based around the town of Jisr Al Shughour in Idlib’s south-west.