The previous post in this series looked at the testimony of al-Qaeda 'loyalist' Sami al-Oraidi, who directed his criticisms at comments by Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham's Abu Abdullah al-Shami (Abd al-Rahim Atoun) on the speech by Ayman al-Zawahiri entitled 'We will fight you until there is no more fitna' and released in October 2017. Atoun has responded to the criticisms by releasing a long post on his Telegram channel in two main parts.
The first part is a version of Atoun's comments on Zawahiri's 'We will fight you until there is no fitna' speech, which did not mention Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham or its predecessors by name but implied that they had broken the allegiance pledge to him. Atoun's comments were circulated for internal consumption in Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham but were leaked to Oraidi. Thus, the material that Oraidi had obtained at the time in October 2017 was authentic.
Atoun gives a history of Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham and its predecessors with a focus on the relationship with al-Qaeda. The following key points and claims arise from this history:
There was no illegitimate breaking of the original allegiance to al-Qaeda in the transition from Jabhat al-Nusra to Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (July 2016) and subsequently Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (January 2017)
For around two years and ten months (c. November 2013-September 2016), the ability of Jabhat al-Nusra and its successors to communicate with Zawahiri was cut off. In 2015 however, Abu al-Khayr al-Masri, who was considered to be the 'first successor' to Zawahiri and on this understanding his deputy, came to Syria after being released from custody by Iran in a hostage swap.
In the transition to Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, the idea was that the connection and allegiance with al-Qaeda should be secretly maintained, similar to Jabhat al-Nusra's status before its leader Abu Muhammad al-Jowlani publicly declared a 'renewal' of the allegiance to al-Qaeda in response to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's public attempt to subsume the group within the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham in April 2013.
The transition to Jabhat Fatah al-Sham was overwhelmingly supported in the leadership of Jabhat al-Nusra, with around 60 out of 65 of the leadership agreeing to the idea. The project also had the blessing of Abu al-Khayr al-Masri. It should be noted that Oraidi's response seems to support Atoun's assertion of the level of support for the project here, in that Oraidi says many initially agreed with the Jabhat Fatah al-Sham project on the basis of a break in ties for media portrayal only.