Syria’s main insurgent group moving away from Al Qaeda

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham rose to notoriety over the past decade by claiming fatal bomb attacks and threatening revenge against Western ‘crusader’ forces

The leader of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Syria is trying to distance his insurgency group from its Al Qaeda origins, spreading messages of pluralism and religious tolerance in a bid to be rid of its Western terror designations.

Abu Mohammed al-Golani, leader of the group that rules much of northwest Syria, rose to notoriety over the past decade by claiming fatal bomb attacks, threatening revenge against Western “crusader” forces, and dispatching Islamist religious police to crack down on women deemed to be dressed inappropriately.

As part of a rebranding, al-Golani has cracked down on extremist factions and dissolved the notorious religious police in the region. For example, a Mass was recently performed for the first time in over a decade at a church in the Idlib province, AP News reported.

“We don’t want the society to become hypocritical so that they pray when they see us and don’t once we leave,” al-Golani told a gathering of religious and local officials, saying Islamic law should not be imposed by force. He pointed to Saudi Arabia as a sort of role model, which has relaxed its social controls in recent years after decades of strict Islamic rule.

The pivot comes at a time when HTS is increasingly isolated, as countries that once backed insurgents in Syria’s uprising-turned-civil-war are restoring relations with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. At the same time, the United States and United Nations still consider HTS a terror group, a designation al-Golani has called “unfair” and “political.”

“We didn’t them we want to fight” the West, the leader told PBS in a 2021 interview, saying his involvement with Al Qaeda has ended.

Source: i24news