Al-Qaeda’s Man in Syria—A Post-Mortem Profile of Hurras al-Din Leader Abu al-Qassam al-Urduni

Al-Qaeda’s Man in Syria—A Post-Mortem Profile of Hurras al-Din Leader Abu al-Qassam al-Urduni

On June 14, two senior al-Qaeda leaders were reportedly killed in a suspected U.S. drone strike in Syria’s Idlib province while traveling in their car (Alaraby.com, June 15). According to video circulated on social media, the vehicle was struck with a R9X, a version of the Hellfire missile that has been used by the U.S. military for previous targeted killings in Syria. [1] The two jihadists were later identified as Abu al-Qassam al-Urduni and Bilal al-Sanaani, senior leaders of the Syrian-based al-Qaeda affiliate Hurras al-Din. What follows is a post-mortem profile of Abu al-Qassam, a long-standing al-Qaeda veteran whose death is likely to deprive al-Qaeda of a strategic link between its general leadership and Syria.

Al-Zarqawi’s Comrade in Jordan and Afghanistan

Khaled Mustafa Khalifa al-Arouri, also known as Abu Ashraf or Abu al-Qassam al-Urdini, was born in 1967 in Zarqa, northern Jordan, to parents of Palestinian origin from Ramallah (Akhbaralaan, June 17). It was in this small town north of Jordan’s capital Amman where, at the beginning of the 1990s, he met Abu Musab al-Zarqawi at a local mosque. Al-Zarqawi would later become the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor of Islamic State. In Jordan, Abu al-Qassam and al-Zarqawi gradually developed a close friendship. The two became nearly inseparable from 1993 onwards due to shared experiences and a mutual commitment to militancy.

Little is known about al-Urdini’s early years. One account suggests that he joined the Muslim Brotherhood when he was teenager, eventually becoming a member of the hardline Falcon Movement, in which he developed a certain admiration for Hamas and the al-Qassam Brigades (from which his nickname probably originated from) (24.ae, September 15, 2019). Al-Qassam was likely already gravitating around militant jihadist circles in Zarqa in those years. In March 1994, he was arrested due to his involvement in the so-called ‘Bay’at al-Imam’ case. Bay’at al-Imam is the group that al-Zarqawi tried to establish in Jordan upon his return from Afghanistan, where he first gained battle experience. He was sentenced to a prison term with al-Zarqawi in the Swaqa prison, in southern Jordan, until 1999, an experience that further grew their friendship. In 1999, the two young Jordanians were released after a royal pardon and quickly left for Afghanistan via Pakistan (Alwatanvoice, May 26, 2005).

Once in Afghanistan, Abu al-Qassam likely became a confidant or deputy to al-Zarqawi. The latter was quickly approached by senior al-Qaeda figures who offered specialized training, funding, and logistics for al-Zarqawi’s militant group in Herat, with a view to coordinating the efforts of the disparate groups of Arab mujahideen flooding Afghanistan at that time (Alarabiya.net, January 17, 2017). Al-Zarqawi eventually accepted the proposal to run the Herat training camp, but only after consultations with Abu al-Qassam and following a meeting in which he requested al-Qassam’s presence, a demand that reflected his place in al-Zarqawi’s inner circle of close associates. It was during this period that Abu al-Qassam married al-Zarqawi’s sister and assisted him in establishing the first nucleus of Arab jihadists in Herat, which would later become the backbone of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Before beginning to run the training camp, it is reported that al-Zarqawi and al-Qassam underwent 45 days of specialized training in another al-Qaeda camp in Waziristan, Pakistan (Alarabiya.net, January 17, 2017).

The Iranian Sanctuary

Abu al-Qassam remained at the Herat camp until November 2001. The 9/11 attacks on the United States carried out by al-Qaeda and the consequent U.S. military intervention in the country forced al-Zarqawi’s group to flee Afghanistan for Iran. But while al-Zarqawi managed to travel from Iran to Iraqi Kurdistan in 2002, Abu al-Qassam remained in Iran, where at some point he was taken into custody by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards along with other al-Qaeda members and placed under house arrest (Aawsat, June 15). During his time in Iran, however, al-Qassam continued to enjoy some freedom to maneuver and continued to support al-Zarqawi efforts in Iraq, likely with the backing of other al-Qaeda operatives who exploited the favorable Iranian environment. According to Jean-Charles Brisard’s book, Zarqawi: The New Face of Al-Qaeda, he served as al-Zarqawi’s key liaison with Ansar al-Islam (an al-Qaeda affiliated group in Kurdistan at that time) and was Zarqawi’s “man for special missions in Iraq and abroad,” a role that once again confirms his ascendant status within the global al-Qaeda network. [2] According to Biscard, Moroccan authorities also claimed that he had links to the May 2003 suicide bombings in Casablanca, as he sent $70,000 to a local jihadist who used the money to finance the attack. Abu al-Qassam spent some 13 years in prison before being released by Iranian authorities in March 2015. He would never again meet al-Zarqawi, who was killed in an airstrike in Iraq in 2006 (al-Jazeera, June 8, 2006).

Al-Qaeda’s Man in Syria

Abu al-Qassam was freed as part of a prisoner exchange, whereby five senior al-Qaeda members, including him, were released and allowed to relocate in Syria in exchange for an Iranian diplomat who had been held hostage in Yemen by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (Alabasirah, January 15, 2018). Among the other prisoners released were Saif al-Adl, who played a key role in helping Abu al-Qassam and al-Zarqawi establish the training camp in Herat while they were in Afghanistan (Alwatanvoice, May 26, 2005).

The first information to surface about Abu al-Qassam following his release came at the end of 2015, when a Jordanian media outlet reported his arrival to the liberated areas of northern Syria, which coincided with the visit of a delegation of the most prominent Jabhat al-Nusra (JaN) leaders from southern Syria (Jordan Zad, December 25, 2015). It is likely that the group moved to northern Syria to meet with Abu al-Qassam, who, from then on, played a key role in ensuring that al-Qaeda would remain present in Syria. Some local reporting also speculated that this group, including al-Qassam, was actually the so-called ‘Khorasan Group,’ a group of al-Qaeda veterans sent to Syria under the direction of al-Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to establish a safe haven from which to plot attacks on the West (Alarabiya.net, January 17, 2017). Information corroborating this is not available in open sources, but it is indisputable that al-Qassam was operating on behalf of al-Qaeda in Syria. That is indicated by the fact that he was part of a Shura Council (or consultative body) specifically appointed to pull JaN closer to al-Qaeda’s agenda (Alabasirah, January 15, 2018).

It is not surprising that al-Qassam gradually became more involved in the jihadist infighting that broke out in northwestern Syria in July 2016, when JaN leader Abu Muhammad al-Julani rebranded his group Jabath Fatah al-Sham (JFS) and announced its disassociation from al-Qaeda. Months later, in January 2017, JFS merged with several other jihadist entities to form Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Al-Julani’s moves became highly controversial within jihadist circles, with some al-Qaeda veterans inside Syria objecting to JaN publicly distancing itself from al-Qaeda. One of the men who objected to JaN’s rebranding was Abu al-Qassam, who in 2017 was reported to be touring camps run by HTS, urging its members to defect from al-Julani’s group and instead reaffirm their allegiance to al-Qaeda (Alabasirah, January 15, 2018). These tensions eventually escalated even further, when HTS at the end of 2017 launched a campaign of arrests targeting senior al-Qaeda members in Syria and raiding Abu al-Qassam’s home in the north of the country (Almodon, November 28, 2017). Al-Qassam’s strict loyalty to al-Qaeda’s agenda was further reiterated in February 2018, when the Jordanian was among the jihadists behind the establishment of Tandheem Hurras al-Din, which translates as ‘The Organization for the Guardians of the Religion.’ [3] The group was unofficially the re-emergent al-Qaeda branch in Syria following HTS’s disassociation from al-Qaeda and the infighting that followed al-Julani’s move.

Directed by al-Qaeda’s emir Ayman al-Zawahiri, the idea behind the formation of Hurras al-Din was to return to the model of the ‘vanguard elite’ traditionally embraced in the days of Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaeda’s intended strategy was to discourage its branches and subordinate groups from trying to control or rule territories (as the Islamic State did in Syria and Iraq); to avoid forming relations with foreign governments or other groups not ideologically committed to the idea of jihad; and to follow an explicit military strategy focused on both the near enemy (the local Arab governments) and the far enemy (the United States and its allies) in the West. Accordingly, Abu al-Qassam played a key role in shaping this path by becoming the group’s deputy emir, testament to the trust and deference he enjoyed in jihadist circles and reflective of the core al-Qaeda concepts shaping his jihadist ideology. A source quoted in local media suggested that he was actually appointed by al-Zawahiri to be one of the deputy leaders of al-Qaeda, replacing Abu Hammam al-Shami as emir of Hurras al-Din. He was also one of at least two Hurras al-Din members occupying a seat on the 12-strong al-Qaeda Shura Council, suggesting that the Syrian group is a main recipient of al-Qaeda efforts and that al-Qassam steadily managed to get to the top of the al-Qaeda global network (Alghad.com, September 15, 2019).

The Significance of al-Qassam’s Death

According to local media, al-Qassam was killed while traveling to meet HTS and other commanders to discuss the establishment of an Idlib operations room and unify jihadist efforts to fight back against a potential major government offensive against the latest jihadist bastion in northern Syria  (Khaberni.com, June 25). [4] The al-Qaeda leadership has often urged jihadists in Syria to put aside their differences and focus their efforts against the Syrian government, their common enemy, and al-Qassam’s initiative was in line with this thinking. His death will probably not have an immediate impact on the group’s short-term trajectory, given the presence of other al-Qaeda veterans within its ranks. However, it deprives Hurras al-Din and the overall jihadist environment in Syria of a key high-ranking al-Qaeda leader with years of militant experience in the most important jihadist theaters of recent decades. Most importantly, it deprives al-Qaeda of a strategic link between its general leadership and the Syria arena, reducing in the long-term the space for al-Qaeda to continue in its bid to shape the trajectory of the Syrian jihad.

Notes