By Kanisorn @Adobe Stock
Aaron Y. Zelin of War on the Rocks reports that the patient efforts behind Hayat Tahrir al-Sham have led to success in Aleppo. He writes:
“God willing,” the militant told his lieutenants, they would “be able to celebrate Eid al-Fitr in Aleppo and Damascus soon.” That militant was Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani, the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — the Islamist coalition that took Aleppo by storm last week. As it turns out, his remarks — delivered in April to the leaders of his group’s militant wing — were not mere whimsy. He had a plan. And Eid al-Fitr is still four months away.
It has become a common refrain in recent days that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham was able to take Syria’s second largest city in a matter of days only because of Russia’s distractions elsewhere and the hammering the so-called Axis of Resistance has taken since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. To be sure, that is part of the story alongside a weak regime, but only a part. This would not have been possible had Hayat Tahrir al-Sham not transformed itself over the last four and a half years. […]
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has an interesting and unique history. It started out as a branch of the Islamic State’s predecessor group, the Islamic State of Iraq, when it was founded in January 2012 as Jabhat al-Nusrah. However, when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi overtly brought the organization from Iraq to Syria in April 2013, Jawlani disavowed Baghdadi and pledged allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri, then the leader of al-Qaeda. In another twist, Jawlani disavowed al-Qaeda and global jihad in July 2016 and transitioned to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham by January 2017 with a focus on only fighting locally. At the time, there were questions about how real all of this was considering the group’s history. However, in the intervening time, not only has Hayat Tahrir al-Sham destroyed the Islamic State’s presence in the Liberated Areas, but it also dismantled al-Qaeda’s attempt at building a new branch in Syria called Huras al-Din in June 2020. At the same time, the group still espouses an Islamist worldview, which is why I describe its members as more political jihadists than salafi jihadists because of their greater pragmatism vis-á-vis politics and theology not driving decision-making as it does with the Islamic State or al-Qaeda. […]
Either way, however the current dynamics play out, I do not think anyone can predict what will happen. Yet if the new territories that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has gained become stabilized and it is able to extend its bureaucracy and institutions to other parts of Syria, it is plausible that in the future, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham once again could be on the march. It would be even more surprising than Aleppo if it was Damascus by this coming Eid al-Fitr. Nevertheless, one of the key lessons in the case of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is that although many still view it through the old lens of being part of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, the group and the government it has built in northwest Syria have changed tremendously in the past four and a half years. Understanding this new reality is crucial to identifying how things might evolve in the future. And it also likely will not be quite as surprising when one realizes how sophisticated of an enterprise the forgotten Hayat Tahrir al-Sham polity has become. Understanding all of this makes what has happened in recent days make much more sense.
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