Category: Syria

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By Sam Heller
In late October, ex-Jabhat al-Nusrah shari’ah official Sultan bin Eissa al-Atwi made what had been private recriminations over Nusrah’s loss of its eastern Syria stronghold very public. Over Twitter and TwitMail, Al-Atwi released a hyper-critical open letter to the global jihadist community, and the letter in turn sparked a series of acrimonious rebuttals. The episode may have been the most public, detailed airing of grievances from members (or ex-members) of a single al-Qaeda branch since the splits in Somalia’s al-Shabab in 2013. Many of the points were personal and hyper-specific, often revolving around the leadership of Nusrah’s former top shar’i (religious-legal official)Abu Mariya al-Qahtani. To the extent that Abu Mariya has been identified with a specific intellectual and political strain within Nusrah, however, the personal here is also political. Even the most ad hominem elements of these texts, which I’ve translated below, reflect real divisions within Nusrah over its strategy and identity as it works to retain relevance opposite the Islamic State (IS). They also help us partially reconstruct the slow-motion fall of eastern Syria to IS.
For much of the first half of 2014, Jabhat al-Nusrah in al-Sharqiyah – eastern Syria, and primarily oil-rich Deir al-Zour – had waged a losing battle against IS (then the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, ISIS). In May, Nusrah had taken the exceptional step of uniting with other Deir rebels (including “Free Syrian Army” elements) to form the Mujahideen Shura Council and defend the province against IS, yet IS continued to make headway. By the summer, IS had effectively encircled Deir and was picking off outlying towns. Still, it was only after IS staged its dramatic June surge in Iraq, including the capture of Mosul, that Deir resistance to IS really imploded. IS quickly funneled the advanced weaponry it had captured from a collapsing Iraqi army back to Deir al-Zour, using it to totally crush rebel and jihadist resistance. By July, IS had taken all of Deir al-Zour and linked its Syrian holdings in Aleppo and al-Raqqa with Iraq’s al-Anbar.
More than any other part of Syria, it was the East where Jabhat al-Nusrah had been the undisputed dominant force. When IS took the province, Nusrah lost its desert stronghold, as well as the province’s lucrative oil fields. Those members left alive were forced to flee across the al-Badiyah desert to western Syria.
Among them was Saudi national Sultan bin Eissa al-Atwi (AKA Abu al-Leith al-Tabbuki). Al-Atwi had been one of Jabhat al-Nusrah’s top officials in the East. He had reportedly risen from a shari’ah official and judge to become al-Nusrah’s emir (commander) for the al-Shamiyah (western) bank of the Euphrates River. He was also one of Jabhat al-Nusrah’s most prominent representatives on social media, sometimes to al-Nusrah’s chagrin – al-Atwi was occasionally accused of inflaming the escalating conflict with IS with his public belligerence.
Two other Nusrah shar’is in the East who enjoyed similar prominence were Kuwaiti Ali al-Arjani (AKA Abu Hassan al-Kuwaiti) and Iraqi Maysar al-Jubbouri (AKA Abu Mariya al-Qahtani, al-Gharib al-Muhajer). The latter was, at the time, Nusrah’s top shar’i and reportedly one of its top officials and strategists. He seems to have since stepped down (or been pushed aside) in favor of the Jordanian Dr. Sami al-Oreidi, but he reportedly continues to steer events in the southern province Dara’a (more on which later).
In July, it was announced that al-Atwi had been removed from his leadership position and expelled from Nusrah. Abu Hassan seemed to (obliquely) deny this at the time, but all parties now seem to have confirmed that al-Atwi either quit or was run out of Nusrah in June / July of this year. Al-Atwi himself didn’t confirm that he had left Nusrah until October, about the time he began to take a more critical tone with Nusrah and advocate more forcefully for a truce with IS. This came amid a new wave of prominent jihadists inside and outside Nusrah defecting publicly to IS.
Still, it was al-Atwi’s 23 October open letter, promoted with the hashtag “#لله_ثم_للجهاد” (#For_God_Then_the_Jihad), that really set off this ugly public back-and-forth. Al-Atwi accused the commanders of Eastern Nusrah of, among other things: disregarding the leadership of Nusrah leader Abu Muhammad al-Jolani; acting as a tool of the al-Shuheil clan; squandering oil wealth; indulging corrupt and useless FSA partners; posing on Twitter instead of leading their troops; and obsessing over IS, both dragging all of Deir into a losing war and unjustly purging their own ranks of those tarred as “Dawa’ish” (IS members or supporters). Al-Atwi spools out a narrative in which he was one of the lone voices of right and reason. He maintains that he fought IS until the end, but he acknowledges that he pushed for some sort of truce and encouraged Deir locals to take deals if offered. Since fleeing to Dara’a, he claims to have been targeted by vindictive members of Eastern Nusrah after repeatedly complaining about Abu Mariya to al-Oreidi.
The key rebuttals to al-Atwi are translated below, including angry tweets from Abu Mariya and al-Atwi’s erstwhile friend Abu Hassan. The most interesting comes from Abu Omar al-Ageidi, an East Nusrah media representative who writes a really lacerating takedown of al-Atwi. Al-Ageidi’s narrative centers on a craven al-Atwi who was out of his depth as a military commander and who repeatedly betrayed his comrades by undermining morale in the fight against IS.
The truth is likely somewhere in between the point and counterpoint. You hardly need al-Ageidi to mock al-Atwi’s three (!) self-aggrandizing poems to realize that al-Atwi’s account is not perfectly objective. Al-Atwi claims, for example, that Eastern Nusrah’s leadership never played an active role in military planning or command, “they only used to take pictures of themselves ‘planning.’” In May, of course, Nusrah had released photos of commanders “planning” featuring Abu Mariya and, surprise, al-Atwi. It seems reasonable to assume that al-Atwi is motivated by animus towards Eastern Nusrah’s commanders and Abu Mariya in particular, whom he portrays as a sort of desert Ahab in his obsessive campaign against IS.
And yet many of al-Atwi’s points, both in broad terms and on the particulars, seem to have some basis – at least enough to take them seriously when looking at Nusrah and the East. The oil trade in Deir al-Zour was, by all accounts, a mess of tribal influence and corruption. Jabhat al-Nusrah had indeed been identified with the al-Shuheil. And al-Atwi is probably right that, by mid-summer, the fight against IS in the East was a lost cause. IS was riding high from its successive, dramatic gains, and the East’s rebels had seen all their supply lines cut. When al-Atwi talks about the Nusrah commanders in Albukamal who pledged allegiance to IS and paved the way for IS to take the border town, he says sympathetically that they made “the appropriate decision… the lesser of two evils” – and he’s arguably correct. By that point, taking a really unyielding stand against IS probably would have been suicide.
Some of al-Atwi’s critiques of Abu Mariya also seem worth reading closely. Abu Mariya has an influence and appeal in Syria that goes beyond Nusrah. He also,