A Syrian rebel leader with a $10m (£8.3m) US government bounty on his head has appealed for urgent international aid to help the north-west province of Idlib after the earthquakes that have killed thousands and brought the last opposition-controlled area to its knees.
“The United Nations needs to understand that it’s required to help in a crisis,” said Ahmed Hussein al-Shara, better known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, amid a humanitarian crisis that had already reached critical levels in Idlib before the twin earthquakes last week.
Jolani was officially designated a terrorist by the US in 2013 because of his former leadership of al-Nusra Front, a splinter group of al-Qaida. Jolani now heads Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a group that claims to have made a break with its past in an effort to secure links and support from the outside world.
“From the first hour of the earthquake, we sent messages to the United Nations asking for aid,” he told the Guardian in Idlib. “Unfortunately, no support for our search and rescue teams arrived, as well as no specific aid to combat this crisis.”
While Washington has lifted sanctions on earthquake aid to Damascus, a political fight continues between international actors, the rebel administration in north-west Syria and the government of Bashar al-Assad over how to ensure that aid safely reaches badly affected areas around Aleppo.
Some international actors have proposed the reopening of other crossings into northern Syria, notably Bab al-Salam, which leads to areas in the far north of Aleppo province still under rebel control.
Many in rebel-held areas, including Jolani, say the Assad regime cannot be trusted to deliver aid, and that humanitarian assistance should pass via the north-west and into other areas affected by the quake, which has left an estimated 5.3 million people homeless in Syria.
A UN spokesperson said on Sunday that aid passing through opposition-controlled territory had also been held up by HTS due to “approval issues”, while Washington demanded that Assad’s government grant immediate access to all humanitarian assistance to regime-held areas in northern Syria.
“All humanitarian assistance must be permitted to move through all border crossings,” a spokesperson for the US national security council said on Sunday.
After a visit to the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, the sole lifeline from Idlib to the outside world, the UN emergency relief coordinator Martin Griffiths said: “We have so far failed the people in north-west Syria.”
Jolani and others in the north-west insist the crossing has remained open but the aid that has been sent by the UN is insufficient. Fifty-two trucks have brought aid into north-west Syria in the week since the earthquake struck.
The area has been repeatedly targeted with airstrikes by the Assad regime as well as its backers in Moscow. The US has demanded that the UN security council, which oversees aid through Bab al-Hawa, “vote immediately” to increase the flow of aid into north-west Syria. This sets up a potential fight with Russia, which has worked to stymie aid access during previous votes.
“The international community needs to be involved in our rebuilding,” Jolani said, although beyond the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, he did not clarify which foreign powers may be willing to engage with HTS or be responsive to efforts to rebrand the group as a model of governance in Syria.
He added that only officials from a ministry within Idlib’s Salvation Government, a political organisation that rules over the province despite Jolani being demonstrably in charge, were in touch with international actors.
Jolani has worked to present this group’s control of Idlib as an essential break from the past, where HTS now represents a unified coalition of jihadist groups that have abandoned their former ties to al-Nusra Front. HTS has fought other al-Qaida splinter groups as well as members of the Islamic State for control of Idlib.
Jolani and HTS were keen to welcome any international presence in Idlib to see the scale of the crisis, and to play down the former links to al-Qaida. A 4x4 filled with masked armed men tailed journalists as they toured the province, allegedly a security force rather than a militia.
“The regime of Bashar al-Assad and the Russians turned this place into an ongoing earthquake the past 12 years,” Jolani said when asked whether he thought his efforts to rebrand HTS had been successful. “Still we have built a government that fulfils the needs of our people. We have to be able to build governance and sustain people. But this place still requires much more.”
Asked whether HTS had the ability to care for the people of Idlib, a province that has swelled with internally displaced people, many of whom are now displaced a second time by the earthquake, Jolani said: “Our capabilities have reached their limits.” He added: “We did all we could.”
Despite Idlib’s dependence on Turkey as its lifeline to the outside world, the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has repeatedly threatened to send troops deeper into northern Syria as well as attempted to re-establish relations with Assad, moves that risk throwing Idlib deeper into turmoil.
Jolani said the 7.8- and 7.6-magnitude quakes that had destroyed swaths of southern Turkey and northern Syria could upend Erdoğan’s plans. “The history of this region after the earthquake will be different to what it was before,” the rebel leader said.
