Qaeda seeks to reposition on terrorist map: U.S. report

Nahla Abdel Monem

US officials are voicing alarm about a Qaeda affiliate in Syria plotting attacks against the West by exploiting the chaotic security situation in the country’s northwest and the protection inadvertently afforded by Russian air defenses shielding Syrian government forces allied with Moscow., a New York Times report has said.

The rise of this latest Qaeda branch in Syria, as well as the operations of other Qaeda affiliates in West Africa, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan, underscore the terrorist group’s enduring threat, according to the report.

The new Qaeda branch, called Hurras al-Din, emerged in early 2018 after several factions broke away from a larger affiliate in Syria. It is the successor to the Khorasan Group, a small but dangerous organization of hardened senior Qaeda operatives that Ayman al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s leader, sent to Syria to plot attacks against the West.

The Khorasan Group was effectively wiped out by a series of American airstrikes a few years ago. But with as many as 2,000 fighters, the successor Hurras al-Din group is much larger and is operating in areas where Russian air defenses largely shield them from American airstrikes and the persistent stare of American surveillance planes.

Hurras al-Din is considered so dangerous that the Pentagon in at least one instance took the unusual step of using a special hotline with Russian commanders in Syria to allow the American military to conduct uncontested airstrikes against Qaeda leaders and training camps in Aleppo and Idlib provinces in June and August.

“Al Qaeda has been strategic and patient over the past several years,” Nathan A. Sales, the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator, said last month about the terrorist group and its affiliates. “It let Daesh absorb the brunt of the world’s counterterrorism efforts while patiently reconstituting itself.”

Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg, the Dutch counterterrorism coordinator, added in an interview, “There is still a general threat out of Al Qaeda, slowly building.”

“Hurras al-Din,” the assessment said, “is believed to have between 1,500 and 2,000 fighters, half of whom are foreign terrorist fighters, a much higher proportion than in the case of” Hayat Tahir al-Sham. Hurras al-Din also has a much more international focus, the United Nations assessment concluded.

“This is an opportunity Al Qaeda can use to put them back on the map,” said Colin P. Clarke, a senior fellow at the Soufan Center, a research organization for global security issues.

While the two groups share a common lineage and ideology, the policy differences have stirred mutual distrust, and analysts say the two groups continue to spy on each other.