Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist militant group that has surged to global attention by launching a surprise and successful offensive in Syria over the past week, has long been the country’s most powerful rebel faction. Now its tens of thousands of fighters have seized a major city, cut a strategic highway and forced the military of Bashar al-Assad into a hasty retreat across a swath of the country, opening a new phase in a 13-year civil war that many presumed was over.

What is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham?

This sudden turn of events is shocking but not entirely surprising, veteran observers say.

“Everyone watching Syria knows it has been a tinderbox under very great pressure both domestically and from regional powers for years. The war has been continuing in the background … The scale of the gains made by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) is surprising but not the offensive if you look at what the group has been saying and signalling,” said Charlie Winter, a Syria expert and director of ExTrac, a UK-based risk intelligence platform.

For about five years, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which means Movement for the Liberation of Greater Syria, has controlled the north-western Syrian province of Idlib, where it has set up what it calls the Syrian Salvation government to run schools, clinics and courts for an estimated 4 million people. Idlib thus provides a secure territorial base but also a steady stream of funding from taxes among other resources.

The group’s forces are reportedly well-trained but lightly equipped, though heavier weapons have been seized from Syrian government troops during the advances of recent days. HTS leads a rough coalition of ideologically aligned smaller factions, including groups made up of Uzbek, Tajik and Turkmen militants who have been based in Syria for many years. There may be a “smattering” of veteran western European Islamists among them, analysts said.

Where did HTS come from and who is its leader?

Formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra, HTS was originally founded by al-Qaida to exploit opportunities offered by the collapse of Syria into civil war. It was swiftly successful, building a fearsome reputation for insurgent attacks and suicide bombings against regime forces and other enemies. Though broadly committed to the same project of establishing a new Islamic caliphate based in Syria and Iraq, the group became a bitter enemy of the Islamic State, and eventually split from al-Qaida too.

The leader throughout its 13-year existence has been Ahmed Hussein al-Shar’a, better known as Abu Muhammed al-Jawlani, who is 42 and is thought to have been born in Syria from a family that had fled the Golan Heights after the 1967 war during which Israel occupied the mountainous area.

Little is known about Jawlani’s early years but he has described fighting with insurgents against US-led coalition forces after the invasion in 2003 before being detained with thousands of other militants in 2006. He was then imprisoned for five years in a series of US-run and Iraqi prisons before being released in 2011 and returning to Syria with six others to lead al-Qaida’s push there.

View image in fullscreen

Experts say Jawlani not only distanced itself from al-Qaida but, having been targeted by Islamic State from early in the civil war, fought hard against its brutal rivals. Over the following years, Jawlani’s fighters sought, with limited success, to win the acquiescence of local communities by providing basic administration and security, rather than simply through fear. In 2021, Jawlani’s efforts to rebrand HTS culminated in an interview with US public broadcasters – though the $10m (£7.9m) reward for information leading to his arrest by US authorities remains.

This strategy led to a fierce debate among analysts. Though the US and Russia, Turkey and other states designate HTS as a terrorist group, some analysts have considered it as breaking with the extreme violence and fanaticism of many previous groups.

They point out that its aims are explicitly local, stripped of any broader vision of a much wider war against the west or Middle Eastern rulers that characterised Islamic State, and that the group has enforced Islamic codes of behaviour less strictly than many expected, recently withdrawing “morality police” from the streets after public protests.

Other experts are convinced that the group’s core thinking remains faithful to the main principles of extremist Islamist ideologies, even if its day-to-day behaviour and tactics are different. They point to thousands of arbitrary detentions in areas under its control and say any idea that HTS is a new and pragmatic form of Islamic militancy is entirely misguided.

Why launch an offensive now?

It is unclear why the HTS chose this moment to launch an offensive and recapture Aleppo, once a bastion of resistance to the Assad regime. One factor may be the military weakness of Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based militia that provided crucial support for Damascus but has been hard hit in its war with Israel. Another may be the distraction of Iran and Russia, both key supporters of Assad. HTS claims the “aggression” of the regime against the people of Idlib had become unbearable.

Whatever the truth, the offensive has already had a huge strategic impact. “It took 100 days for Aleppo to fall in 2016, and only 48 hours for it to be recaptured,” said Winter. “This takes us back to the middle of the last decade in terms of how the war could end.”