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2016 - Jabhat Fateh al-Sham

After the battles that forced ISIS to retreat in the eastern regions of Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra moved to rebuild itself, without any structural or ideological change. It was able to restore its strength and control and build its military power by attacking local factions, such as the Syrian Revolutionaries Front led by Jamal Maarouf in July 2014, relying on the mobilization for the battle as if it were attacking corruptors and bandits. This was followed by an attack on the Hazm Movement in November 2014 under the pretext that it supported the Syrian Revolutionaries Front. The clashes continued intermittently between the two factions until Hazm announced its dissolution and its joining the Levant Front in early March 2015. Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra), the most important and prominent component of the new formations, considered the Astana conference to be part of a conspiracy against the Syrian revolution, and that the political path that accompanied the revolution since its beginning did not serve its goals, but rather was a series of what it described as conspiracies. It considered Russia's sponsorship of the Astana talks to be a humiliation of the sacrifices of the Mujahideen, and that Russia occupies Syria and bombs and destroys many of its cities, and was a kind of direct acceptance of the Syrian regime's president, Bashar al-Assad, remaining in power.

Military confrontations erupted between Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and other Syrian factions against the backdrop of these factions’ participation in the Astana conference. These confrontations paved the way, among other things, for the establishment of the new body. Hashem Al-Sheikh (Abu Jaber) was chosen to lead the new formation. He was an engineer who previously headed the Ahrar Al-Sham movement , before announcing his separation from it, then joining the new body and heading it.

In his first public appearance the jihadist group was formed in 2012, on 27 July 2016 the head of Syria's Jabhat al-Nusra, Abu Mohamad al-Jolani, appeared, unveiled, in a video clip, announcing the severing of ties with al-Qaeda and changing the name of Jabhat al-Nusra to Jabhat Fateh al-Sham. Just hours after al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri gave his blessing for the severing of formal ties, al-Jolani said Jabhat al-Nusra would change its name to Jabhat Fateh al-Sham. He expressed gratitude to the "commanders of al-Qaida for having understood the need to break ties."

In November 2016 Khaled Khouja, the head of the National Coalition of the Syrian Opposition Groups, called on al-Nusra to end its association with al-Qaeda, stressing that his coalition was committed to a political solution to the Syrian war. Jolani had indicated previously that his group affiliation with al-Qaeda was not something "holy" and that if Muslim scholars deemed it permissible to end this affiliation, he would do just that. Analysts said this would not absolve them from the "terrorism" label many in the West and the region had given them.

The context had a major impact on the decision to disengage. ISIS, which al-Julani had previously described as being from the Nusra Front family, had formed an international coalition against it led by the United States targeting areas under its control. Aleppo was also on the verge of a siege by the Syrian government forces and their allies Russia and Iran, and thus the possibility of losing it was likely, which would mean losing the most important urban center of the revolution, and the areas outside the control of the Syrian government would shrink to Idlib and parts of the western Aleppo countryside.

The context shows that the decision to disengage had objectives on two levels: the first was local, by expanding the societal acceptance of the Front among local communities and factions as a national faction, and the second was international, in the hope that countries that classify the Front as a terrorist organization would lift their classification.

However, these hopes were met with a solid rock on the ground, as local factions continued to deal with the newly emerging front based on its Al-Qaeda background, and countries announced - since the announcement of the disengagement - that Jabhat Fateh al-Sham is still on the terrorist lists. All this led to the next step.