Click the following link for a safe PDF copy: Hay’at Taḥrīr al-Shām’s Department of Political Affairs — Twelve Years Of the Constant Struggle
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The first half of the title of this release is in reference to Qur’anic verse 4:78. Here it is in full: “Wherever you may be, death will overtake you, even if you should be within towers of lofty construction. But if good comes to them, they say, ‘This is from God’; and if evil befalls them, they say, ‘This is from you.’ Say, ‘All [things] are from God.’ So what is [the matter] with those people that they can hardly understand any statement?”
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In recent years, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) has been attempting to develop its own polity. This process has not been linear and there has been a maturation process over time. Beyond governance though, an important part of nation-building is creating a similar narrative of people’s own history and shared memory. As Benedict Anderson notes in his famous Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, nations or “imagined communities” are socially constructed, since not everyone in a polity knows someone, but are believed to share a similar history and experience. This is no different for HTS, which has since mid-August been publishing “briefs” through its municipal governance structure the “Administration for the Liberated Areas” on different cities, villages, and regions in the areas it controls. Therefore, there is an interplay that HTS is attempting to build between different areas it controls, connecting real world history that will hopefully bring people in its territory together to illustrate their similarities and thus establishing an “imagined community” amongst HTS’s polity.
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Abstract: Once allies in the same organization, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the Islamic State have an interesting history that turned them into ‘frenemies’ from April 2013 to February 2014 and then outright enemies over the past nine years. This led to a broader global fight between al-Qa`ida and the Islamic State. Yet, HTS continued to tread its own path by breaking from al-Qa`ida in 2016. From the spring of 2014 to the summer of 2017, the main avenue by which HTS and its predecessor group, Jabhat al-Nusra, dealt with the Islamic State was insurgent infighting. Yet since the summer of 2017, as HTS consolidated control over areas in northwest Syria and developed a governance apparatus, HTS has favored a lawfare approach to dealing with Islamic State cells in the territory it controls. Surveying the data on its arrest campaign against the Islamic State over the past half decade suggests HTS has been successful in countering the Islamic State. Yet, even if its fight against the Islamic State is deemed a net positive, HTS’ continued support for terrorism abroad and the authoritarian nature of its governance make it difficult for the West to countenance removing the group from the list of designated terrorist groups or engage with it.
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The title of this release is in reference to a weak hadith. Here it is in full: “That the city was shaken during the time of the Prophet and he said: Your Lord is asking you to admonish, so admonish Him.”
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