Is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham withdrawing from the Aleppo countryside, or staying in the shadows?

PARIS — Turkish military leadership gave Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) until Friday evening to fully withdraw its security and military forces from territories in the northern Aleppo area of Afrin and its countryside that the hardline faction entered last week, local media reported. Turkish forces have also reportedly visited several checkpoints in the Afrin area to compel HTS members to leave for Idlib. 

But one HTS military source denied there was any Turkish deadline, telling Syria Direct that the faction itself has withdrawn a large portion of its forces, and “is still withdrawing new forces” that participated in the Aleppo countryside operation.

On October 11, HTS intervened militarily in clashes between Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) in the northern Aleppo countryside. The Idlib-based faction entered the fray on behalf of the Hamza Division (locally known as al-Hamzat) alongside the Sultan Suleiman Shah Division (al-Amshat). The Hamza Division was under attack by the SNA’s Third Legion, which began clashing with it after it was implicated in the assassination of media activist Muhammad Abdul Latif (Abu Ghannoum) and his wife in al-Bab city on October 7. 

After entering the Afrin area, which is under Turkish influence and supported by services provided by Ankara, HTS began to portray itself as administering services in the territory. The Directorate of Humanitarian Affairs, part of the HTS-backed Syrian Salvation Government (SSG) based in Idlib, published pictures of its personnel touring of several villages and camps in the Afrin countryside. 

Meanwhile, the Turkish-backed opposition Syrian Interim Government (SIG) attempted to prove the opposite: that it remained in Afrin city. The SIG published pictures of its own, showing President Abdurrahman Mustafa, accompanied by a group of ministers and SIG-affiliated local council figures in Afrin. 

A shadow presence

On October 18, activists circulated videos showing HTS military columns withdrawing from Afrin to Idlib, reportedly in response to Turkish pressure. But three sources, including two currently residing in Afrin city, told Syria Direct that—despite the apparent withdrawal—HTS still has security and military forces, as well as civilian employees, in the city. 

“HTS is still in Afrin,” but “under the cover of al-Hamzat, al-Amshat and the military police,” Afrin city resident Muhammad Khaldoun (a pseudonym) told Syria Direct on Wednesday. “HTS has started to spread more in terms of security.”

Ongoing HTS security deployment and the accompanying “momentum in HTS security and administrative movement” indicates that its withdrawal after Turkey’s intervention this week “is a formal withdrawal more than a complete withdrawal,” according to Maen Talaa, a researcher at the Istanbul-based Omran Center for Strategic Studies. 

Before intervening in last week’s fighting, HTS had its sights set on northern Aleppo through “security penetration, but today that has become clear security influence in the area it entered,” Talaa said. 

However, it appears that what matters most for Turkey, and the SNA factions and local councils it supports, is to “announce an HTS withdrawal, even if it has not actually withdrawn in reality,” a journalist living in the Afrin countryside told Syria Direct, requesting anonymity for security reasons. 

HTS gains

Through its entry into new territory, HTS seeks to gain economically “by intervening in the area’s resources and trade crossings,” said Firas Faham, a researcher at the Turkey-based Jusoor Center for Studies. 

HTS is looking to expand in the Afrin area, viewing it as “the flank of its areas of influence in Idlib,” al-Talaa said. Another goal, in his view, is for HTS to “impose its vision on the local SNA actors in a way that helps create a foggy view of international engagement with HTS.” 

At a time when the international community treats HTS in Idlib as a “terrorist force,” the faction expects “its entry into SNA dynamics could help improve the climate of the international community’s interactions with it,” he added. 

Although a reported agreement reached between HTS and the Third Legion during the latest fighting did not include terms related to crossings, al-Talaa agrees with Faham’s view that the “economic reason” is one of the group’s primary objectives. HTS, in his reading, aspires to “control the crossings and resources of SNA areas, and to control the roads, especially those linking Turkey with regime areas.” 

This kind of control “would make HTS a key party in negotiations between the regime and Turkey,” he added, especially “if we consider that freezing military operations has enhanced the conditions of commercial exchange between parties to the conflict, and brought the idea of internal crossings back to the fore.” 

HTS control over all northwestern Syria’s crossings “would make it a primary negotiating force,” Talaa stressed. But so far, HTS “has not fully achieved that. It has partially achieved it, through its security influence being present in SNA areas.” 

Commenting on that, the HTS military source said “cooperation on security issues with some SNA factions existed before the latest military operation.” He attributed such coordination to “our duty not to leave a margin for criminals, allowing them to move about between the two areas.” However, “it still hasn’t reached the necessary level,” he said. 

“We aim to develop this coordination, as increased coordination tightens the noose around criminals and enemies of the revolution,” the HTS source said. 

A complex picture

The speed with which HTS brought in civil institutions affiliated with it, the day after its forces entered Afrin, pointed to the faction’s prior intent to expand into SNA areas.

That prior intent is further demonstrated, the Afrin countryside journalist said, by the case of the administration of the Bab al-Hawa border crossing in Idlib—located in HTS territory—paving the Bab al-Hawa-Jenderes road in August, including “the portion under SNA control at the time.” 

So far, the shape of ongoing HTS presence in Ankara-backed SNA areas remains unclear. But there are “large discussions taking place at the economic and administrative level between HTS, the Third Legion, the SIG and Turkey,” al-Talaa said. He added that an ongoing presence for HTS in northern Aleppo would make “the SIG’s role surface-level only, while control is in HTS hands.” 

For his part, a source in the Afrin Local Council, which is affiliated with the Ankara-backed SIG, said on Wednesday that “the local council is working as before, despite HTS presence in the city.” 

“There are HTS members at the door of my office as we speak,” he told Syria Direct, “but they haven’t interfered with our work so far.” 

At the time when pictures spread online of SSG service institutions in Afrin, “we were also present and working,” the source said. Still, “the future form of their presence is unclear. They could have a presence through the [HTS] General Security Service, but nominally under the Afrin Military Police, as well as an undisclosed role in administrative institutions.” 

The local council source added that SIG President Mustafa had informed the council that his government “will manage Afrin city, but I expect some issues will be handled jointly between the two governments”—the SSG and the SIG. 

Whatever the future shape the administration of the northern Aleppo countryside, “it will negatively impact the Syrian scene if HTS is part of it,” researcher Talaa said. “Practically and operationally excluding the opposition contributes to the decline of its influence.” 

In that scenario, the situation in Syria’s north would become one of “the regime and terrorist parties in a nationalist guise [referring to the SDF] and others in religious guise [HTS],” as he put it, with the Syrian opposition “absent from geostrategic and political influence.” Such a balance of powers would bring the area “into a new stage, with scenarios that bode poorly,” Talaa said. 

Who does the future belong to? 

Hayat Thaeroon for Liberation, an SNA body made up of the factions closest to Turkey, has so far taken a position of neutrality. Amid recent fighting, it also became, to some degree, “separation forces, filling a vacuum” following the HTS attack on the Third Legion, Talaa said. 

With that, “Thaeroon sent a strong message to all SNA parties, that any operation to uproot its components will be met with a Turkish response, guaranteeing its existence and strengthening its alliance with Turkey,” the researcher added. 

Thaeroon’s role as a separation force amounted to a “security takeover in Afrin and its environs,” Talaa said. But at “the strategic level, if the scenario of HTS expansion strengthens, Thaeroon’s fate will be like other military allies of HTS, which uses parties to bolster its own strength, then abandons them.” He cited examples of previous alliances with Nour al-Din al-Zinki, Ahrar al-Sham and others. 

Any immediate benefit for Thaeroon from its positioning during the recent infighting could come with a later cost, researcher Faham said. Thaeroon “was counting on benefiting from weakening the Third Legion, which is its main competitor. But it is clear that HTS has become a greater competitor.” The hardline faction “will not abandon financial resources or any faction, and will intervene in the affairs of all the factions if it establishes control.” 

From the start of HTS’s attack on the Third Legion until Thursday evening, Turkey appeared content to “monitor the escalation without decisive intervention, because it saw what the Third Legion had done [in attacking the Hamza Division] as aiming to reshuffle the cards and military balances in northern Syria,” Talaa said. So Ankara chose to “let the escalation take its course, so that this balance would be automatically corrected. When it failed to do so, it intervened.”

Turkey’s current intervention can be explained at two levels, according to the researcher. The first “reflects the balances of power within the Turkish administration, as well as diverging perspectives between security and political actors,” Talaa said. While political actors see HTS penetration into SNA areas as having negative political results, “since they are areas under Turkish supervision,” security actors see “a need for there to be a disciplined security force to help stop security deterioration” in the area. 

The second level of intervention, Hayat Thaeroon’s role as a separation force, revolves around the fact that, as an alternative to HTS, the faction “achieves the security and political conditions at the same time. Thaeroon receiving the Third Legion’s positions would restore the balance on one hand, and help maintain the political and administrative status quo, in addition to absorbing tension.” 

This report was originally published in Arabic and translated into English by Mateo Nelson.