Instead, it was meant to remove the excuse used by the worldwide community – led by the United States and Russian Federation – to “bombard and displace Muslims. under the pretense of targeting Jabhat al Nusra”.
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The leader of Syria’s Nusra Front says his group is changing name, and claims it will have no more ties with al-Qaida.
The group, also known as the al-Nusra Front, announced the decision in a video released on Thursday.
Last week, US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov said they had agreed “concrete steps” to save a failing Syria truce and tackle jihadists like Al-Nusra and IS.
In January, a report by the Institute for the Study of War and American Enterprise Institute said al Nusra was a greater threat to the United States in the long term than ISIS, making the United States’ focus on the latter group misguided.
He also urged the Nusra Front to unite with other factions against “Crusaders” and form a good “Islamic government”.
And both have arguably sought to convince the group to de-link itself from al-Qaeda to make it more palatable. It is Syria’s preeminent jihadist group, along with its key rival, the Islamic State group. Jabhat al-Nusra aims to epitomize the realization of al-Qaida’s evolved thinking.
The Iranian diplomat further called on the global community to pay special attention to the root causes of terrorism and its consequences, and to exert pressure on the founders and sponsors of these groups in order to eradicate them. Notably, one of those seated next to al-Golani in the video was Ahmed Salama Mabrouk, an al-Qaida veteran who is close to its leader Ayman al-Zahwari and who recently came to Syria to join Nusra a sign of how intertwined the group and the parent organization remain. The group would now be called Jabhat Fatah al-Sham.
Jolani left Iraq following the assassination of al-Zarqawi in a US raid in 2006, and went to Lebanon where he trained militants from Jund al-Sham, an organization linked to al-Qaeda.
“The aim of this “game” is an attempt to remove al-Nusra from the list of terror groups, but the despicable face of extremism and terrorism can not be purified through such moves”, the Mehr news agency cited him as saying.
An image released July 28, 2016, by Al-Manara al-Bayda, the official news arm of Al-Nusra Front, al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate, allegedly shows the group’s chief Abu Mohammad al-Jolani at an undisclosed location, in the first ever picture to be released of him.
De Mistura told reporters on Thursday that he understood Russian military experts “and perhaps (some) from the U.S.” were headed to Geneva, “most likely in order to discuss the devils in the details” of the two powers’ efforts to end the fighting in Syria.
Al-Nusra has, since 2012, been one of the largest and most influential groupings in the Syrian conflict.
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It could alter the strategic alignment on the ground in Syria if the renamed Nusra gains acceptance among other rebel groups fighting against President Bashar al-Assad. Rather, he said, it “reflects al-Qaeda’s gradualist approach of progressively radicalizing local populations, postponing the establishment of an Islamic state until popular support has been secured”. 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.
