In June 2022, HTS arrested several workers of the Al-Qalb al-Kabir (Big Heart) organization in Idlib on charges of corruption, forcing them to pay $60,000 as a settlement before releasing the detained employees.
Al-Julani and his HTS have a particular hatred of any projects aimed at females. Any NGO or aid group, including the UN, must first submit a proposal for any project including females to be allowed.
Mohammed al-Yunis, originally from Idlib and currently based in France, is a former employee of Subul al-Salam. He told Al-Monitor that HTS stopped several projects that aimed at supporting women, especially camp residents.
He noted that HTS has recently banned all projects concerned with supporting, empowering, and educating women, prosecuted several feminist activists in its area of control, and closed down centers providing training, psychological support, and counseling for women, notably in the city of al-Atareb in the western countryside of Aleppo.
Yet, the US State Department and the UN are complicit in keeping HTS in power and keeping the 3 million civilians held hostage to an armed Radical Islamic terrorist group.
In November 2017, the Salivation Government, headed by Al-Julani, formed the so-called Organizations Affairs Management Office, to control the humanitarian aid and development projects funded by foreign organizations in northern Syria, in addition to extorting levies on all relief projects and materials introduced by NGOs into the area.
On February 1, 2023, Julani opened the Al Hamra shopping mall in Idlib, the equivalent of any mall located in a mid-sized city in the US. The mall was financed from the extorted funds the aid agencies have paid to HTS. Customers can ride the escalators even though most of Syria has just 30 minutes of electricity three times per day. The powerful gasoline generators are running day and night with fuel supplied from Turkey which buys the Syrian oil stolen by the US military who occupy the main Syrian oil wells in the northeast. This mall has all types of its merchandise on sale, among which is humanitarian aid which is overstocked and sold by Julani to civilians who are not on the list of those loyal to his terrorist group.
The UN and Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez are part of the aid fraud. For over a decade, the UN has been trucking in aid to the HTS terrorists and the unarmed civilians they hold as human shields. The group has always been in sole charge of what aid enters and who will be allowed to use it.
While the western media was showing videos of utter devastation and suffering following the recent earthquake, Al-Julani was controlling every movement of aid into Idlib, among the 3 million civilians qualifies for aid, and who are deprived.
The American journalist, Bilal Abdul Kareem, was held in prison in Idlib for more than six months by Al-Julani for criticizing HTS. Kareem has worked for CNN and BBC reporting from Idlib. He reported that he had been tortured by HTS and that Tauqir Sharif, a British aid worker had been restrained in a tire and beaten while in HTS custody.
Al-Julani administers Idlib as a dictator, and his Salvation Government is following Islamic Law (Shariah) as the only civil criminal code. Thieves have their hands chopped off, prostitutes are stoned to death, and homosexuals have their heads chopped off by the official judiciary under the hand of Julani.
The US government is firmly in support of the rights of the LGBTQ community worldwide, but not in Idlib.
The US State Department under Secretary Antony Blinken has planned for Julani to be installed in Damascus as leader of the proposed Islamic State of Syria. Barbara Leaf, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs traveled in September 2022 to the Middle East, but never visited Damascus. She and the US government she represents do not recognize Damascus as the government, but they do recognize Al-Julani and the Salvation Government, who they promote as the legitimate representatives of Syrians, even though the area they exist in is a mere 1% of the territory of Syria.
The UN charter states that every member must fight Al Qaeda everywhere on earth. Idlib is under the control of Al-Julani, who began his terrorist career in Iraq under Al Qaeda, then aligned himself with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, who directed Al-Julani to go to Syria and establish a branch there.
The US under President Trump found and killed al-Baghdadi, the ISIS leader, in Idlib where he was protected by Al-Julani. The US has a 10-million-dollar bounty on Al-Julani, and yet he is the man the US coordinates with to prohibit his capture or death by Russian and Syrian Arab Army attacks.
Steven Sahiounie is a two-time award-winning journalist
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