Well, I'm not too familiar on the exact ethnic makeup of HTS's fighters, but just to be clear for many "Afghans" the original Taliban might as well have been foreigners despite being nominally a part of Afghan territory. Being mostly ethnic Pashtun, speaking a mutually unintelligable dialect with Dari, and being made up of youths who spent their entire childhoods in refugee camps outside of Afghanistan and knew nothing of the struggles or traditions that defined Afghanistan in the 80s and 90s. The reality of all nations with artifical colonial borders.
HTS and its allies are comprised of multinational Takfiris from all over the Middle East, Turkey, Central Asia, and Xinjiang, China. They have their own Syrian leadership, but they are directed by foreign actors. So no, HTS and their kind are not the same as the Taliban.
Neither did the Taliban care whether native Afghans wanted their ultraconservative intrepretation of Islam. To say that Taliban had little care for minorities like Hazaras is the understatement of the century.
I have never said that the Talibans are saints. I do not like them too. But comparing them to HTS is still inaccurate. One is homegrown, the other is foreign.
Yeah, its a messed up situation. What can anyone do to change it? China has been mostly uninvolved in Syria, with all the heavy lifting to save Bashar's regime being in the hands of the Iranians and the Russians. Russia and Iran certainly didn't lack in terms of their application of extreme violence to win back Assad's territory, but did they put in equal effort to ensure Bashar's legitimacy? Bashar based memes being spread by tankies does not grant one legitimacy, the only undisputed metric of legitimacy is quality of life which as we've seen hardly got better for Syrians in government controlled territories and the idea of a united Syria hardly penetrated Syrian society to the extent its soldiers would be willing to die for it. (If anything, funny enough, it was mostly Bashar's online fanboys that romanticized the idea of a united Syria)
True. China is not directly involved in Syria, and it did the right thing to stay mostly out of that mess. The fault of the current disaster in Syria falls mainly on the Assad government and it's immediate allies. They were duped by Turkey, Israel and the West again, and they've failed to build on that hard fought limited victory that they had won years ago.
As for the ramifications this will have for extremism in Central Asia and China's BRI? Well that's a discussion for another thread, but I for the moment don't think Syria's various conflicts will have that many ramifications for it. More immediate will be China's diplomacy in the region, both direct and economic, especially as Russian power declines.
I think the ramification of a fallen Syria are not good for BRI. The fall out will not be immediate as the various terrorists in Syria will initially fight each other to grab the spoils of that nation's carcass. Some might continue their terrorism into Lebanon.
But before they begin to fix their eyes on Israel, Erdogan and the West would want to setup a new rat line to send these terrorists eastwards. They have plenty of terrorist pets from Pan-Turkic ethnicities like Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Uighurs in Syria right now. The West desires to use them to mess up Central Asia and Xinjiang. While Erdogan and his gang wants to spread their Pan-Turkic "Empire" as far as they can go. Why do you think the West, Qatar, and Erdogan continue to peddle the Uighur Genocide myth? It's end goal is to prepare and motivate Takfiri terrorists to target China.
