Tag Archives: Abu Muhammad al-Turkistani

Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham Announces a Ceasefire With Syrian Rebels, Forms a “Settlement Committee”

Leave a reply

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 4 December 2017

Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Syrian jihadi group previously under al-Qaeda’s command structure, which has recently arrested some al-Qaeda loyalists in Syria, has been engaged in assaults on the Syrian rebellion for many years in an effort to assert its own hegemony. On 2 December, HTS declared a ceasefire with all other insurgent units and the formation of a Settlement Committee or Reconciliation Committee. Though HTS claims this Committee is independent, it is quite clearly within HTS’s shari’a department. The Committee issued its first statement on the same day it was announced, a translation of which was made by Al-Maqalaat, and is republished below. Continue reading →

Al-Qaeda Leader Calls on Muslims to Unite Against the West

5 Replies

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 9 June 2017

Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda, released a nearly-six-minute speech today entitled, “One Umma, One War on Multiple Fronts,” as part of the “Brief Messages” series, this being “Brief Messages to a Victorious Nation 7”. A transcript of al-Zawahiri’s speech was released by As-Sabha Media and is reproduced below with some editions in transliteration and explanatory notes added.

Al-Zawahiri continues a theme he has emphasized in previous speeches in this series, namely that Muslims are a unitary block, and thus the interference of the jihadists in all these states is legitimate because these states are false, their borders drawn by colonialists so as to keep Islamdom weak and divided, and their governments are agents of external powers (and therefore a de facto foreign occupation). The historical examples that al-Zawahiri reaches for in describing the kind of “resistance” to this Western scheme that al-Qaeda supports include the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, and the first leader of the Taliban, Mullah Muhammad Umar. Continue reading →