The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime and the accession to power in Damascus of Ahmed al-Sharaa’s (Jolani’s) administration set in motion a process of global realignment in Middle Eastern security. Whilst Washington and Tel Aviv are hastily legitimising yesterday’s radicals, and the Mirziyoyev regime is investing millions in Syrian commercial projects, a brutal war between the secret services has unfolded on the shadow front in Idlib. A series of high-profile assassinations of senior security officials has laid bare the cynical underbelly of this grand game. As the “Erkin O’zbekiston” movement has uncovered, in order to safeguard Uzbek investments in Aleppo, the Syrian and Uzbek secret services have resorted to provocations against their own compatriots, whilst the failures of their intelligence network are now being hastily covered up with a fabricated “Chechen link”.

Why was an Uzbek agent passed off as a Chechen militant?

On 6 June 2026, on a road near Idlib in Syria, unidentified individuals on a motorbike opened fire on a Hyundai Santa Fe. The car was carrying two operatives from the local security service, which reported to Ahmed al-Sharaa’s administration. One of them was killed instantly; the other survived but sustained multiple injuries.

On the instructions of the Syrian and Uzbek security services, local news agencies and social media deliberately misinformed the public. Official reports claimed that the deceased was named Mustafa al-Rusi; he was allegedly a native of Chechnya and had fought against Bashar al-Assad’s regime as part of the “Red Brigades”, a group linked to “Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham” (HTS).

However, according to reliable sources from the “Erkin O’zbekiston” opposition movement in Syria, the deceased was not Chechen but an ethnic Uzbek named Mustafo Gulistoniy, a native of the Syr Darya region of Uzbekistan. He arrived in Syria in 2019 and joined the ranks of the Uzbek-speaking paramilitary group “Tawhid wal-Jihad”.

It soon emerged that Gulistoniy maintained close ties with the Uzbek security services. Reportedly, he managed to evade prosecution and continued his activities within other armed groups. His knowledge of Arabic facilitated his interaction with local militant factions.

Following the seizure of power in Syria by Ahmed al-Sharaa’s forces in December 2024, Mustafa Gulistoniy was enlisted in the Idlib security services. This region is home to a large concentration of Uzbek militants, known for their high level of organisation and combat readiness. There, he gathered intelligence on the sentiments among his compatriots, whilst simultaneously working for the intelligence services of both Syria and Uzbekistan.

Uzbek militants: new challenges for the Syrian authorities

Having arrived in Syria swept up in a wave of romanticisation of radical ideas, foreign militants, including those from Uzbekistan, quickly came face to face with the brutal reality of a protracted war. In practice, the professed religious ideals were largely supplanted by criminal activity, internal conflicts and political strife.

When Abu Muhammad al-Julani (now operating under his real name, Ahmed al-Sharaa) led the coalition of opposition forces, he promised the military units under his command that, once Damascus had been taken, he would establish an Islamic state.

However, upon coming to power, his administration did not subject life in Syria to Sharia law. This course of action caused acute disappointment and resentment amongst foreign fighters, who felt they had been deceived, which ultimately led to increased tensions.

According to various sources, there are up to 5,000 ethnic Uzbeks from Central Asian countries in Syria who possess combat experience and firearms. While some of them have integrated into the armed formations of the new Syrian army, the majority have blended in with the civilian population without surrendering their personal weapons.

As a result, Uzbek armed formations have evolved into an independent military-political factor that Ahmed al-Sharaa’s administration is forced to reckon with. This has repeatedly complicated Damascus’s position, creating the risk of direct armed confrontation. For instance, in October 2025, several hundred Uzbek militants blocked the movement of government troops. Acting on a request from Paris, Damascus attempted to arrest two French militants from the “Firkat al-Ghuraba” group led by Omar Diaby, but faced fierce resistance from the Uzbek contingent. Ultimately, the Syrian troops retreated, and the French radicals remained under the protection of Uzbek formations, exposing the weakness of the central government.

In January 2026, an armed group of Uzbek militants surrounded a police station in the town of Ma’arrat Misrin. They demanded that the security operatives who had raided the home of one of their comrades be held accountable. As in the first instance, the Syrian authorities chose to back down and make concessions.

Despite all this, Uzbeks—much like other foreign ethnic fighters—do not view Syria as their final destination, treating it merely as a temporary staging ground. In the long term, they envision returning to Uzbekistan and participating in domestic political processes back home. This makes them an autonomous and difficult-to-control force whose interests do not always align with the goals of the new Syrian leadership.

The show trial of the coordinator of the crackdown

The incident involving Mustafa Guliston is by no means the only sign that the situation in Idlib is escalating. Three weeks later, on the night of 27 June 2026, in the town of Al-Fua, another high-ranking figure of Uzbek origin – Khalid al-Jazrawi – was shot dead in his car outside the entrance to his own home.

Like Mustafa, the victim was an influential member of the elite “Red Brigades” special unit within the HTS. The “Erkin O’zbekiston”’ movement had already informed its audience about this incident.

Al-Jazrawi had a notorious reputation amongst Central Asian militants in Idlib. His compatriots directly accused him of coordinating the arrests carried out against Uzbek units on 6 May 2026. At that time, Damascus, under the pretext of incitement to armed conflict, arrested around 20 Uzbek citizens, some of whom were promptly extradited to Tashkent.

According to observers, the shooting of al-Jazravi on his doorstep was an act of revenge and a demonstrative warning to anyone who cooperates with the security services.

This incident demonstrated that militants who survived the crackdown, or their relatives, are prepared to take radical retaliatory measures, whilst the transitional government is unable to guarantee the safety even of its key personnel.

Moreover, the elimination of al-Jazrawi, who had been actively promoting the project to create a unified Turkic state in the interests of external actors, laid bare the direction of profound transformation within the Central Asian contingent in Syria. Following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime and the end of the active phase of the civil war, some of the field commanders, who had turned their participation in the conflict into a lucrative business, began to refocus their activities on other objectives. Through social media, they turned to recruiting young people under the banner of a new geopolitical project — “Turan”. Its strategic aim is to redirect the radical potential accumulated in Syria back to Central Asia in order to destabilise borders and wage proxy wars in the interests of third parties.

It is precisely this tangle of problems—comprising mutual distrust, crackdowns and espionage—that explains why the Syrian knot is tightening ever further.

Realpolitik: why is it in Tashkent’s and Damascus’s interests to conceal the Uzbek connection?

To understand why the ethnicity of the slain agent was altered, one must examine the tectonic shifts in the security architecture of the Middle East and Central Asia. The new transitional government of Ahmed al-Sharaa, which received initial recognition from Washington and Tel Aviv following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, now urgently needs to normalise relations with the rest of the world in order to attract foreign investment. And Washington is responding: Donald Trump’s administration has already officially removed the former militant leader from US terrorist lists and revoked the State Department’s long-standing $10 million reward for his capture.

The legalisation of the former opposition leader automatically changes the status of the groups under his control. If al-Sharaa is recognised by the West and the UN, then the Uyghur, Uzbek and other foreign units under his command are no longer considered terrorists at the international level. They are now the official security forces of the new Syria. For Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s regime, this creates a dangerous legal impasse. Within Uzbekistan, these people remain, by law, mercenaries and extremists. However, there is no choice: the security of Uzbek commercial projects in Syria now depends directly on yesterday’s militants.

At the same time, Netanyahu’s government and the Trump administration are actively expanding the geographical scope of the Abraham Accords to include Central Asia. The de facto foundation for Uzbekistan’s integration into this axis was laid as early as 2021, when Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s regime transferred $50 million to the Abraham Fund.

Kazakhstan’s subsequent official accession to the bloc in November 2025 merely cemented this trend, paving the way for large-scale geopolitical shifts in the region.

In this scheme, Washington and Tel Aviv are using Tashkent as a convenient intermediary. The US and Israel cannot directly inject capital into war-torn Syria, so they are acting through intermediaries. Uzbekistan simply acts as a legal ‘financial front’, getting involved in Syrian projects under the pretext of the so-called ‘restoring the Great Silk Road’.

For President Mirziyoyev, such a mission is not merely a lucrative commodity that can be exchanged for American handouts, Israeli technology and Arab billions. It is a strategic guarantee for the survival of his own regime and a shield against Western criticism. However, the flip side of the deal is the loss of geopolitical autonomy: Uzbekistan’s key industries are effectively coming under the external control of multinational companies.

As part of this global deal, the media ploy of transforming Mustafa Gulistoniy into the Chechen “Mustafa al-Rusi” served several critical purposes at once.

Firstly, it saved Damascus’s international reputation. If, against the backdrop of the transitional government’s negotiations with Western countries on the lifting of sanctions, it had emerged that the new administration was carrying out secret extrajudicial arrests in collaboration with the Uzbek security services, this would have placed Ahmed al-Sharaa in an extremely awkward position.

Secondly, the cover story protected Tashkent itself from being branded a “mercenary of the CIA and Mossad”. After all, if the head of the transitional government is now officially not a terrorist, then the May special operations carried out by Uzbekistan’s State Security Service (SGB) in Syria would appear, in the eyes of the radical public, as nothing more than the wholesale extermination of Muslims to serve the geopolitical interests of Washington and Tel Aviv.

Thirdly, the cover-up ensured the safety of investments. As early as 21 May 2026, the “Uzbekistan–Syria” Trading House opened in Aleppo, with the participation of Davron Vakhobov, head of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

The revelation that their own compatriots — Khalid al-Jazrawi and Mustafa Gulistoniy — were behind the May provocation and the crackdown on the jama’ats, — and that the calm around Aleppo had been bought at the cost of the lives of their fellow tribesmen — would inevitably have provoked an armed uprising by the Uzbek community in Idlib, numbering in the thousands, and the destruction of the entire business infrastructure that was being established.

Fourthly, the “Chechen link” served as the perfect scapegoat. The theory that a Chechen named “Mustafa al-Rusi” had been eliminated artificially shifted the focus onto Russia, portraying the agent’s death as an “echo of the Caucasian wars” to which the actual signatories to the agreements had no connection whatsoever.

The use of the Caucasian context reveals an identical, time-tested operational modus operandi of the Uzbek security services. An analysis of the staged assassination attempt of October 26, 2024, proven to be organized by Saida Mirziyoyeva and Komil Allamjonov, reveals a persistent, recurring pattern when compared. In the Allamjonov case, the accusations levelled at Ramzan Kadyrov and the issuance of arrest warrants for two Chechens enabled the authorities in Tashkent to instantly shift the focus from the acute intra-elite struggle within the republic itself to the external arena.

In the Syrian case, portraying Mustafa as a Chechen served the same purpose: rather than admitting to a dangerous failure of intelligence work by the Uzbek security services, the international community and the domestic audience were fed a trite narrative about the death of a Caucasian militant in a criminal showdown. In both cases, the strategy relied on a half-truth: in Idlib, Mustafa was in fact part of the Uzbek-Chechen armed groups operating within the HTS sphere of influence, whereas in Tashkent, Shohrukh Akhmedov’s involvement was artificially linked to the Turkish “Chechen trail” in order to inflate the scale of the events and lend the case geopolitical significance.

Conclusion

The disinformation campaign launched by the security services turned out to be a temporary smokescreen, which failed to conceal the cynical alliance between Tashkent and Damascus for long. Against the backdrop of the public execution of Kholid al-Jazrawi by ethnic militias, it has become clear that the HTS security forces, which form the backbone of the new regime, are rapidly losing control of the region. Regular leaks of information within the security agencies of Ahmed al-Sharaa’s administration and the overall failure of the Uzbek security forces’ mission in Syria have completely exposed the local SGB intelligence network. This means that the elimination of operatives and informants working for Tashkent will inevitably continue.

It is clear that the wave of harsh arrests of Uzbeks in early May 2026 was nothing more than a forceful “cleansing of the perimeter” in preparation for the grand opening of the “Uzbekistan–Syria” Trading House in Aleppo. But the Syrian “testing ground” is closing, and the radical potential that has built up there has not disappeared. Fully aware of whose tip-off led to the dismantling of their jama’ats and in whose commercial interests this was done, autonomous Uzbek groups now view any projects of the Mirziyoyev regime as targets for sabotage.

This turns the complex opened in Aleppo and the associated Uzbek-Syrian commercial facilities into a high-risk area, vulnerable to armed attacks by former compatriots. In modern Realpolitik, a media shield is of immense value, but, as the situation in Idlib has shown, even it is incapable of protecting business platforms built on bloodshed and those behind them from imminent and inevitable retribution.