Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham - Activities
For years, armed opposition factions controlled small areas in the northwest of the country, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. The areas under the control of the opposition factions in northern Syria have no commercial or humanitarian outlet except with the Turkish side. Although these areas are connected by several border and internal crossings, it was not easy for civilians to flee to any other area, in the event of the outbreak of any new military operation, due to the barriers and the difference in areas of control between the warring parties. Since 2020, the lines of control between the influential actors in Syria have not changed. This includes opposition factions in northern Syria and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the northeast of the country.
In July 2017, it launched an attack against the Ahrar al-Sham movement , and the clashes eventually led to the signing of a ceasefire agreement, under which Ahrar al-Sham withdrew to its positions in the southern Idlib countryside and the northern Hama countryside, and the organization took control of the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, which made the financial revenue from the crossing flow into its coffers.
Finally, it attacked the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement , which was originally a component of it, but decided to defect to the ranks of the National Liberation Front in August 2018. The attack began in early 2019 on Darat Izza and extended to Qubtan al-Jabal, the main stronghold of the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement. The clashes ended with the signing of a ceasefire that stipulated the transfer of the Zenki fighters to the northern Aleppo countryside, where the National Army is in control.
The remnants of the Ahrar al-Sham Movement battalions, which were previously fought in 2017, supported the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement in its fight against the organization, which prompted the latter to head to fight the movement in its positions in the northern Hama countryside after the end of its battle with al-Zenki, and the battles ended with the control of the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham over the entire region in January 2019.
In mid-2020, in the context of abandoning its previous approach, Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham escalated its confrontation with the Guardians of Religion organization, which had announced its allegiance to al-Qaeda, after a period of adopting a policy of containment towards it. The escalation came after the organization's attempts to strengthen its alliances with defectors from the organization and other factions, so the organization launched a broad security campaign against it, including raiding its headquarters and arresting a number of its leaders, and forced "Guardians of Religion" and its allies to close their bases, hand over heavy weapons, and withdraw from the front lines.
The sequence of events shows that Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham worked systematically to eliminate any potential competitor in the region, to become its sole ruler. It also ended all forms of "extremism" within its ranks through a policy of containment, and in the region by attacking anyone who tries to show himself as a competing force.
Idlib's most powerful rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al Sham, eventually eschewed much of Al Qaeda's ideology after decoupling from the group in July 2016, and it sought to portray itself as borne out of resistance to the Assad regime and ridding the country of Iranian and Russian forces. Leader Abu Muhammad al Jolani signalled in late February 2020 that the group was willing to move towards a more political manifesto, but it was far from a monolithic entity and as the regime advances on Idlib it could lose its bargaining power. The danger for al Jolani was whether his rhetoric in English language mediums and Arabic become so disparate that the rank and file become disillusioned.
"He [al Jolani] was sending a message to the US and other countries that he was ready to change HTS towards a more local group and if there will be a safe zone around Idlib, HTS can disappear," said Muhsen Almustafa, a researcher at Omran, an independent think tank based in Istanbul, speaking to TRT World. Al Jolani, however, would have a tough balancing act and will need to carry HTS with him, which was far from a monolithic organisation. One activist on Idlib's frontline, who wished to remain anonymous, told TRT World: "There is nothing wrong with seeking international legitimacy; however, it shouldn't be at the expense of one's principles."
As for political discourse, the Salvation Government formed a Political Affairs Department in April 2022, which was responsible for formulating and publishing political statements that represented it. The first political statement it published on its X account was a comment on the Al-Tadamon massacre, a video of which was circulated at the time, showing a number of Syrian army soldiers executing a number of Syrian and Palestinian detainees in the field, and throwing them into a hole in the Al-Tadamon neighborhood in Damascus. It then published a number of political statements on various local, regional, and international events and issues.
The dominance of the civil administration of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham - represented by the Salvation Government - over the northwestern region of Syria raised fears among non-governmental organizations and the local community of a decline in the flow of international support to the region, which would negatively affect the lives of millions of displaced people and refugees there, until al-Julani conducted a television interview with the American channel "PBS", in which he appeared for the first time in a formal suit instead of the usual military uniform, and indicated the organization's desire to get rid of its classification on the terrorist list.
This interview had a positive impact on the local community’s view of HTS, and a group of analysts at the International Crisis Group said that it was time to remove the group from the terrorist classification and open channels of communication with it, because continuing the classification “exacerbates the humanitarian crisis.”
HTS employs arbitrary detention and criminal prosecution for a variety of reasons, including punishing as “slander and blasphemy” individuals’ private conversations related to religious matters. In May 2021, HTS personnel apprehended two men praying in an Aleppo governorate mosque and arrested them for incorrect praying practices. The arrestees, who are students from the Memorizing the Holy Quran Institute of Mus’ab Bin Omair Mosque, suffered detention and suspected torture. Markaz alFalah—formerly a branch of the Hesba religious police and rebranded in September 2021 as a “morality police”— enforce religiously-justified dress codes against women, arresting them for being “inappropriately dressed” and for using or participating in entertainment banned on religious grounds. In 2021, the Syrian Network for Human Rights estimated that at least 2,246 Syrian citizens were “still detained or forcibly disappeared” in HTS detention centers.
Religious minorities suffer serious harm within HTS’s authoritarian regime. Since 2015, religious minorities such as Christians and Druze have lost their homes and land to HTS and its predecessors. Under the present Salvation Government, the Properties Committee (formerly the “Spoils of War” Committee) continues to misappropriate Christians’ private properties and either redistribute them to HTS members and their families or rent them to internally displaced persons for the Salvation Government’s profit. Evidence suggests that this confiscation scheme, which includes the “targeting” of Christians, may amount to the war crime of pillage.
As part of a broader effort to accelerate his public relations campaign, HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani met with Idlib’s Christians in July 2022, agreeing to form a committee to review requests by many Christian owners whose properties were seized and restore their confiscated lands, orchards, and shops. Likewise, in the summer of 2022, the Jolani regime publicized its building of a well to supply water to Druze-majority villages in the northern Idlib area of Jabal al-Summaq. At the well’s inauguration in June, al-Jolani made statements distancing HTS from the 2015 massacre of 20 Druze residents by HTS’s predecessor group.
Despite such overtures toward religious minorities, HTS forces continue to harass religious minorities and prevent them from the free practice of their religion, forbidding Christians’ ringing of church bells or holding some religious ceremonies. HTS’s highly sectarian appeal to Sunni identity continues to assert itself in both direct and indirect ways, including its unamended policy requiring Druze to renounce their faith and declare conversion to Sunni Islam. Education was another sphere in which HTS’s restriction of religious freedom has been deeply burdensome, especially to women and girls. Although some observers have suggested that the group’s religious curriculum promotes slightly less “harsh interpretations” of Shari’a relative to the schools of other radical Islamist groups, HTS-established schools still leave little room for theological or ideological dissent from the group’s Salafi-jihadist version of Islam.
As compared to Syrian opposition militias that receive direct backing from Turkey, such as factions of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), HTS has a more complicated symbiotic relationship with Turkey—a powerful military aggressor seeking to secure its border against Syrian Kurdish foes and to potentially resettle in northern Syria millions of displaced Syrians who are currently living as refugees in Turkey. Turkey has designated HTS as a terrorist organization, yet, perhaps in tacit exchange for HTS’s services as a watchdog and security force, it has not actively impeded the rebel group from gaining administrative power in Idlib.
Some analysis affirmed HTS’s narrative that it has successfully expelled foreign fighters and kept at bay transnational jihadist activity in areas it controls. However, others have questioned whether HTS has effectively subdued the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in particular.
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