War has a lot of symbolism, publicity, propaganda. Abu Mohamed al Julani, nom de guerre of the leader of the Sunni Islamist organization Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), has learned all this in the last decade. Back in late 2013, when an endless amalgamation of Syrian rebel forces had already wrested a good chunk of territory from Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Al Julani gave an interview to Syrian journalist from the Qatari Al Jazeera network Taysir Aluni, hated and persecuted. in Washington for having spoken after 9/11 with Osama Bin Laden. In the talk, Al Julani did not want to appear in front of the camera. His face remained hidden for several years, those in which the man who led the offensive that overthrew the dictatorship in a handful of days was synonymous with Al Qaeda, the most feared terrorist group in the West. This Sunday, Al Julani, with his face uncovered, took a mass bath in the Great Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, the Syrian capital, the temple where El Assad went to pray, next to the television cameras, in so many occasions. The latter has fled and his whereabouts are unknown. The blow has been extraordinary.
Al Julani, a Syrian national, born according to some biographies with the name Ahmed Hussein al Shara in Saudi Arabia, sometime between 1975 and 1979, to Syrian exiled parents, is, above all, a war veteran. After spending his youth back in Syria, in 2003, when the United States offensive and invasion of Iraq was launched, he crossed the eastern border into the neighboring country to fight the North American troops. This is where his link with the Iraqi branch of Al Qaeda begins. According to the Arab media, Al Julani was captured by the US military on Iraqi soil, a hallmark that has almost marked the biography of many of the militants of Al Qaeda, first, and the Islamic State (ISIS, in its acronym in English), later.
In that interview with the Al Jazeera reporter, Al Julani was at the head of Jabhat al Nusra, an armed jihadist group organically linked, as its spearhead in Syria, to Al Qaeda. He himself had sworn loyalty to the then leader of the terrorist network, the Egyptian Ayman al Zawahiri. With his back to the camera, Al Julani stated the following: “The battle is almost over, we have covered about 70% of it, and what remains is little. We will achieve victory soon.” It wasn’t like that. Washington had already included him on its sanctions list for his links to terrorism. In May 2017, he put a price on his head: $10 million for information about his whereabouts. The reward is still in effect.
The jihadist campaign undertaken by Al Julani – both the United Nations and Human Rights Watch have accused his armed group of arbitrary arrests, abuses and torture – which always expressed the defeat of the regime as its main objective, without forgetting in its preachings to attack the monarchies of the Gulf and Iran, was parallel to the terrorist offensive of Abubaker al Bagdadi at the head of the Islamic State of Iraq at that time. The two, linked to the aspirations of Al Qaeda in Syria, had very different agendas. The first wanted to amass a regional victory; the second, to launch a kind of caliphate.
Al Julani thus wanted to distance himself from Al Baghdadi and his jihadist project and broke their alliance in April 2013. Three years later he would do so with Al Qaeda and Al Zawahiri. While ISIS launched a terror machine in the north and east of the country and set up a cell to attack abroad, Al Julani focused the activities of his men on the war against the Syrian army, other rival factions – including units of Al Baghdadi—and in the conquest of territory around Idlib, Hama and Aleppo. In January 2017, it signed new alliances with armed rebel groups (Nur al Din al Zinki, Liwa al Haq, Jaysh al Sunna…) to form HTS. The lowest estimates of combatants are between 12,000 and 15,000. The highest ones exceed 30,000 troops.
In his penultimate interview with a foreign media, last Friday, sitting in front of a journalist from the American network CNN, in another turn full of political pragmatism, Al Julani spoke about government and institutions, about respect for the country’s minorities. And of his group, HTS: “It can dissolve at any time. “It is not an end in itself, but a means to carry out a mission: confront the regime.”
