The Guardian reports:

Islamist insurgents have captured the Syrian city of Hama in a battle to seize a vital location on the road to Damascus, marking the latest challenge to Bashar al-Assad’s control of the country.

Militants led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) entered the city from the east on Thursday after surrounding it during five days of fighting with forces loyal to Assad.

Video circulating online suggested that the insurgents had captured a military airport outside Hama, and released prisoners held in a fearsome state detention facility.

As night fell, militant representatives said they had “fully established control over the city of Hama,” and called on police and militias in the city to defect.

“This victory will be without revenge and merciful,” said the leader of HTS, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, in a message to the people of Hama.

The Syrian defence ministry initially denied that insurgents had enteredHama, calling its defensive lines “impregnable”. But as fighting intensified and drew closer to the city centre, the Syrian army said it had withdrawn, redeploying its forces “to preserve the lives of civilians and not to involve the people of Hama city in these battles”.

Positioned on a highway that runs down the western side of Syria towards the capital, Damascus, Hama was the site of mass uprisings against Assad in 2011, and then fierce battles when opposition forces attempted and failed to take control of the city in the ensuing civil war.

Hama is also the site of a notorious 1982 massacre, when forces loyal to former president Hafez al-Assad besieged the town to prevent an uprising led by Sunni Muslim opponents of his rule. [Continue reading…]

Middle East Eye reports:

Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, known in English as the Committee for the Liberation of the Levant, was created in January 2017 as a merger of several political and military Syrian opposition groups, most of which were guided by some form of ultraconservative jihadist ideology.

Yet at its heart, HTS is the latest rebrand of Jabhat al-Nusra, also known as the Nusra Front, a hard-line rebel group founded by Jolani in 2012 to oppose Bashar al-Assad’s rule and turn Syria into a Sunni Islamic state.

In its earliest months, Nusra coordinated with the Iraqi group that would later become the Islamic State (IS). However, in 2013 it pledged its allegiance to al-Qaeda, and Nusra and IS became enemies and rivals.

Over time, the al-Qaeda label began to hang heavy on Nusra, and Jolani began to distance himself from al-Qaeda’s transnational jihadi ideology, expressing a desire for international legitimacy.

Nusra officially broke links with al-Qaeda in 2016, rebranding as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, and gradually rooted out elements committed to carrying out attacks outside Syria.

“HTS is a Salafi organisation that is national oriented,” Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, an expert on hard-line groups in the Syrian war, told MEE.

“It is not trying to form a caliphate, like IS or al-Qaeda,” he said, adding that such transnational groups do not believe in the concept of a nation state.

In fact, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham has at times fought the Islamic State, as well as Hurras al-Din, an al-Qaeda-linked group that split from HTS when it began to pursue a more moderate, nationally focused line.

HTS is nonetheless listed as a terrorist organisation by the United States and the UK. [Continue reading…]