On the night of Saturday, 27 June, in the town of Al-Fua (Idlib Governorate), a high-ranking militant, Khalid al-Jazrawi, a native of Uzbekistan, was shot dead in his car as he pulled up outside his own home.

The victim was an influential member of the ‘Red Brigades’ (‘Asaib al-Hamra’) special unit, part of the paramilitary group ‘Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’ (HTS).

As a child, Khalid left Uzbekistan with his parents for Afghanistan, where his family joined Uzbek paramilitary groups. Following the murder of the head of the family, they moved to Saudi Arabia.

In early 2012, 15-year-old Khalid, accompanied by his mother, older brother and other relatives, arrived in Syria. They formed part of the ‘first wave’ of Central Asian fighters sent into the region to fight against Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Once on Syrian soil, Khalid pledged allegiance to the group ‘Jabhat al-Nusra’ (which later became Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) and began to rise rapidly through the ranks.

Khalid’s rise to prominence was fuelled not only by his military achievements but also by a marriage of convenience. By marrying the niece of one of the high-ranking officials in the inner circle of HTS leader Abu Muhammad al-Julani (Ahmed al-Sharaa), he secured a senior position in the ‘Ministry of Defence’ of the so-called Syrian Interim Government.

However, among the Central Asian militants in Idlib, Khalid al-Jazrawi had a bad reputation. His compatriots directly accused him of serving the HTS leadership and coordinating the crackdown on Uzbeks that took place in May this year.

It is important to emphasise here that the concept of establishing an ‘Islamic State’ and the calls for ‘jihad’ in Syria were, from the outset, a massive deception and manipulation. The religious doctrine was used by external actors solely as a tool to achieve a geopolitical objective — the violent overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, with all the consequences that entailed.

As soon as the strategic objectives had been achieved, Khalid al-Jazrawi, together with a handful of similarly ruthless mercenaries from Central Asia, radically changed the direction of his activities. For these militants, who had thoroughly discredited themselves in the eyes of their compatriots and were devoid of even the slightest moral values, ‘jihad’ had always been nothing more than a lucrative business. It is clear that the eliminated agent and his accomplices were never independent figures — they merely blindly carried out the will of their handlers from the HTS.

As part of this new ideology, acting on instructions from their handlers, they have shifted their focus to recruiting young people under the banner of a new geopolitical project — ‘Turan’. Their masters’ objective remained the same; only the geography had changed: to artificially redirect radical potential from Syria straight to the Central Asian region in order to destabilise the borders and launch a campaign against China.

Experts monitoring the situation in Idlib agree: this was retribution for the crimes he had committed. In essence, the victims had passed a death sentence on him for the terror he had inflicted on his own people. The fact is that al-Jazrawi had for a long time been coordinating the arrests and killings of Muslims in the interests of the leadership of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham. Hundreds of foreign mercenaries suffered as a result of his actions, and the survivors – or their relatives – simply bided their time until the right moment.

And this brazen execution right outside the entrance to his own home was no accident. The assassination was conceived as a demonstrative, exemplary act. His execution on the doorstep of his own home served as a clear warning to all other spies and corrupt intelligence agents: retribution for betrayal will be swift, public and inevitable.