Ayman al-Zawahiri as seen in one of his video messages.
Top leaders of the Syria-based terrorist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) have mourned al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri who was killed in a recent US drone strike on the Afghanistan.
HTS was first established in 2012 as the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s main branch in Syria. In 2016, the terrorist group changed its name and claimed that it had split from al-Qaeda. Since then, the group has been ruling over the northwestern Syrian region of Greater Idlib.
Despite the group’s constant attempts to distance itself from al-Qaeda, its top leaders were too emotionally effected by the assassination of al-Zawahiri.
Member of the Supreme Ifta Council and head of the Sharia Council in HTS, Abd al-Rahim Atoun, mourned al-Zawahiri, calling him as a “martyr” and praying for him.
“May God have mercy on Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri and accept him … and grant him the highest paradise with the prophets, the truthful ones, the martyrs and the righteous,” Atoun wrote in a post on his Telegram channel.
HTS’s prominent military commander Maysir bin Ali al-Jubouri wrote poetry mourning al-Zawahiri, while the group’s senior leader Abdul Rahman Al Idrisi said that the slain terrorist was a “mountain of steadfastness and sacrifice that history will remember, generation after generation.”
Al-Zawahiri was killed on July 31 in an early-morning drone strike conducted by the US Central Intelligence Agency in the upscale Sherpur neighborhood of the Afghan capital, Kabul, reportedly in a house owned by Sirajuddin Haqqani, a senior official in the Taliban government.
On the evening of August 1, delayed by two days to allow time for proper verification of the operation’s success, President Joe Biden announced that US intelligence had located Zawahiri as he moved into downtown Kabul in early 2022 and had authorized the operation a week prior. Biden also stated that the operation incurred no civilian casualties nor had it harmed any members of Zawahiri’s family.
“Now, justice has been delivered,” Biden said at the White House. “And this terrorist leader is no more; people around the world no longer need to fear this vicious and determined killer.”
None of HTS leaders who mourned al-Zawahiri threatened, or even blamed the US over the drone strike that claimed his life.
Al-Zawahiri took over al-Qaeda after the 2 May 2011 US raid in Pakistan’s Abbottabad, which claimed the life of the terrorist group’s leader Osama bin Laden. In 2016, al-Zawahiri opposed the split of HTS from al-Qaeda, stating that it was done without his consent. However, it didn’t take any move against HTS, likely because the al-Qaeda’s relations with the group didn’t change much after the split.
HTS split from al-Qaeda was more of a propaganda stunt orchestrated by group’s leader Abu Mohamad al-Julani, who wanted to appease the US and its Western allies. To this day, HTS remains the largest al-Qaeda-affiliated group in Syria. The group continues to follow the teachings of al-Qaeda’s and to foster its the ideology. At the same time, it is attempting to build relations with the US, who sees it as a strategic asset.
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