The photo toured Syrian social media in the blink of an eye. Published in early February by journalist Martin Smith on his Twitter account, she shows it in the company of Abu Mohammed Al-Joulani, the leader of the group Hayat Tahrir Al-Cham (HTC), an offshoot of Al-Qaida in command of the rebel province of ‘Idlib, in northwestern Syria. Interviewed for the show “Frontline”, broadcast on the American channel PBS, the thirty-something with the big brown beard, who cut his teeth in the anti-American insurgency in Iraq, wears a navy blue blazer and a carefully buttoned shirt. A versatile outfit, the opposite of the trellis-turban-Kalashnikov style that he usually likes.
This theatrical makeover is not innocent. It aims to anchor the idea that the former Salafist and jihadist warlord, classified as terrorist by the United Nations, has changed. Arrived on the Syrian battlefield in 2013 as commander of the Al-Nusra Front – the spearhead of the rebellion, which multiplied suicide attacks against the regime’s positions and claimed his affiliation with Al-Qaida – he now leads hui an organization breaking with the discourse and methods of this transnational nebula.
Purged of its most radical elements, opposed to any attack abroad, HTC presents itself as a revolutionary Syrian Islamist movement, preoccupied above all by the preservation of its minifief: a pocket of 3,000 square kilometers, populated by 2.6 million inhabitants, of which 50% are displaced, and which constitutes the ultimate possession of the anti-Assad. The operation to reconquer this territory, launched in spring 2019 by the Syrian regime with the support of the Russian air force, came up against the Turkish forces deployed there. After months of bombing causing a humanitarian disaster, Ankara and Moscow agreed in March 2020 on a ceasefire, which is still in effect.
“What HTC aims above all is survival, explains Patrick Haenni, an analyst at the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, a mediation NGO, who has visited Idlib several times in recent years and recorded his observations in a long report, recently published. Joulani knows that the capture of Damascus is not on the agenda and that he must hold out in a war of attrition. HTC’s watchword is resilience, much more than jihad. “
It was in the spring of 2015 that the Al-Nusra Front and other Syrian armed groups seized the city of Idlib. The need to unite the rebel ranks against the Russian army, which came to the aid of the Assad regime in September this year, prompted Joulani to get rid of the cumbersome Al-Qaida label. The divorce with the international founded by Osama bin Laden was pronounced in July 2016, at the same time as the front renamed itself “Fatah Al-Cham”. Six months later, this movement merged with four other Islamist formations to give birth to Hayat Tahrir Al-Cham.
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