HTS flag

Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), also referred to as Tahrir al-Sham, is a Sunni Islamist political and paramilitary organisation involved in the Syrian civil war. It was formed on 28 January 2017 as a merger between several armed factions: Jaysh al-Ahrar (an Ahrar al-Sham faction), Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS), Ansar al-Din Front, Jaysh al-Sunna, Liwa al-Haqq, and the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement.^[3][64] The unification process was held under the initiative of Abu Jaber Shaykh, an Islamist militant commander who had been the second emir of Ahrar al-Sham. HTS, along with other Syrian opposition groups, launched an offensive and toppled the Assad regime on 8 December 2024, and now controls most of the country.