Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has done the lion’s share of the fighting in the past two weeks—but who is behind this group?
After more than 50 years in power, the Assad regime has fallen, and former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has fled to Moscow. Who does that leave in charge of Syria?
There are at least five different groups in control of different parts of Syria. Here’s who they are.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham
The main terror group—which seized Aleppo, Hama, and Homs in a whirlwind offensive starting on Nov. 27 and culminating in the Assad regime collapse on Dec. 7—is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which means Organization for Liberating Syria, in Arabic.
HTS began as al-Nusra Front, an affiliate of al-Qaeda, the Islamist terrorist group founded by the late Osama bin Laden. The group was designated a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department in 2018.
Its leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, who uses the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Golani, is the subject of a $10 million bounty by the United States.
In his first televised interview in 2014, al-Golani told the Qatari network Al Jazeera his goal was to see Syria ruled under Islamic law and said there was no room for Alawite, Shiite, Druze, and Christian minorities.
The group has committed human rights abuses “including torture, forced disappearance, rape and other sexual violence, and killing in detention,” that the United Nations documented through 2020, according to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.
“Having taken over government prisons and established additional jails, HTS has used sectarian motivated detention and related abduction and demands for ransom against members of minority groups,” the Commission said.
Al-Golani has changed his tune considerably in the past decade.
In 2021, he told a U.S. journalist from the PBS network that HTS poses no threat to the West.
“Yes, we have criticized Western policies,“ said al-Golani, who then sported a blazer and slicked back hair. ”But to wage a war against the United States or Europe from Syria, that’s not true.
“We didn’t say we wanted to fight.”
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