Although Nusra’s consultative council voted to break ties, Golani has not renounced his declaration of fealty to al-Zawahiri and it is not clear whether veteran al-Qaeda fighters and ideologues dispatched to Syria have been ordered to return to base on the Afghan-Pakistan border.
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The US has listed the Nusra Front as a terrorist organisation and it was excluded from February’s cessation of hostilities agreement.
The leader of al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al Nusra, announced the end of his group’s operations and the creation of a new entity named Jabhat Fatah al Sham today.
Al-Nusra Front has been targeted by US-led airstrikes on several occasions, but less often than the IS.
The defeat of al-Nusra Front in Syria is only possible with assistance from Russia, US Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL (Daesh) Brett McGurk said at the Aspen Security Forum.
And since Al Qaeda is thought to be slowly relocating its leadership to Syria, the group might not even be considered “external” to Syria anymore. He added, “We judge a group by what they do, not by what they call themselves”. Its tactic of re-branding itself as a type of moderate Syrian resistance group is also undermined by Jowlani’s previous assertion in a TV interview that JAN had about 30% foreign fighters, as well as the fact that one of the three people featured in the announcement was an Egyptian, Abu Faraj al-Masri.
The Nusra Front was created in January 2012 and emerged as one of the strongest groups fighting against the forces of Assad and his allies, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
In the brief recording, Jolani, who was flanked by two bearded men, said the split from al-Qaeda was aimed at “protecting the Syrian revolution”.
The reason for the split, and the reason al-Qaeda endorsed it, was to “remove the pretext used by powers, including the US and Russian Federation, to bomb Syrians”.
Senior Nusra Front figures have been discussing plans to dissociate from al-Qaida.
“The United States continues to assess that Nusra Front leaders continue to maintain the intent to conduct eventual attacks in and against the West”, White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters Thursday.
There has been no official reaction, as yet, from the Kremlin about al-Nusra’s rebranding.
Analysts are divided on the potential significance of the separation and its consequences for al-Qaeda, which has struggled to maintain its allure in the face of a rising Islamic State, a group that favors a combination of heinous acts of violence and jihadist propaganda.
“They have learned a lot from al-Qaida in that they play a much longer game than Isis”, the official said. Aid groups said a maternity hospital had been hit, but it was unclear which country’s warplanes were responsible.
The Cold War-era superpowers are running separate military missions in Syria against their common foe Islamic State, but are on opposite sides in the wider civil war, with Moscow supporting Assad, and Washington saying he must step down.
According to a 2005 designation by the U.S. Treasury Department, Masri’s real name is Abdullah Muhammad Rajab Abd al-Rahman.
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Perhaps it would have been more crafty for the al-Qaeda bosses to avoid admitting they ordered the “breakaway” as a propaganda ploy to “protect jihad”.
