Al Nusra Front set ‘to cut ties with Al Qaida’
Dozens killed in Aleppo as Russian war planes continue to bomb areas held by rebels
Abu Mohammad Al Julani, commander of Al Nusra Front was to announce yesterday his departure from Al Qaida, according to Islamist news outlets. His new group will be named Jabhat Fateh Al Sham (Levant Conquest Front).
By doing so, the group hopes to evade a new cooperation pact between the US and Russia, aimed at annihilating Al Qaida on the Syrian battlefield.
Originally founded by four Salafist militants back in January 2012, it emerged as one of the strongest forces in the war. Moscow insists that it is a terrorist organisation, no different from Daesh.
Its members were inspired by the teachings of Osama Bin Laden’s former right-handman, Abu Musab Al Souri.
After the US occupation of Iraq, Al Julani took up arms with the so-called Sunni insurgency, meeting his future friend, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi. They later became colleagues in Al Qaida.
The relationship between Al Julani and Al Baghdadi remained warm during the first few months of the Syria War. When Al Julani formed Al Nusra Front in 2012, Al Baghdadi wanted to either hijack it or destroy it.
Al Julani did not want to take orders from an Iraqi commander, arguing that the Syrian war was not Al Baghdadi’s to wage.
A few months later Al Baghdadi announced the formation of Daesh in a direct response to the creation of Al Nusra.
It was a direct response to the creation of Al Nusra Front.
Shortly after creating Al Nusra, just months after Bin Laden’s death in May 2011, Al Julani pledged loyalty to Al Qaida’s leader, Ayman Al Zawahiri — an alliance that expired yesterday. During the five-year war in Syria, Al Nusra went from making up one per cent of the rebel community to around 9.5 per cent. At the group’s peak in 2013, the number of Al Nusra members stood at 7,000, according to RAND figures.
Meanwhile on the ground, air strikes and barrel bomb attacks killed 16 civilians in rebel-held parts of Aleppo province yesterday, with rebel rocket fire on government areas killing three more, a monitor said. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 10 civilians had been killed in multiple air strikes on the town of rebelheld Atareb in Aleppo province.
The group said the strikes in the early hours of yesterday morning were believed to have been carried out by Russian warplanes, and hit several locations including a market area.
Russia is a key ally of the government and began air strikes in support of regime forces in September 2015.
In Aleppo city meanwhile, at least six civilians were killed in barrel bomb attacks by government forces on eastern rebelheld neighbourhoods, the Observatory said.
The monitor said the toll was expected to rise because of the number of people with injuries and still trapped under rubble.
An AFP journalist at the scene of one of the attacks in the Al Mashhad neighbourhood said Civil Defence workers were struggling to retrieve survivors who were trapped under heavy pieces of debris.
He said rescuers had managed to pull one boy alive from the rubble, but the rest of his family were dead and still trapped beneath the remains of a collapsed building.
Once Syria’s economic powerhouse, Aleppo has been ravaged by the conflict that began in March 2011. The city has been roughly divided between government control in the west and rebel control in the east since mid-2012.
‘Food shortages’
In recent weeks, government forces seized parts of the only remaining supply route into the city’s east, severing opposition neighbourhoods from the outside world and prompting food shortages and spiralling prices.
More than 280,000 people have been killed in Syria since the conflict began, and more than half the country has been displaced.