Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which wields military influence in Idlib, has announced the release of the Shura Council member and top-tier leader Abu Maria al-Qahtani, after a six-month detention on the background of a “treason” case.

The judicial committee tasked with investigating the case stated that al-Qahtani is innocent of the charge of “collaborating, infiltration and communication with internal and external hostile parties,” as the evidence which led to his detention turned out to be invalid, being arrested based on testimonies from detainees charged with the same accusation.

The committee mentioned in its statement yesterday, Thursday, March 7, that it did not rely solely on the detention evidence but also reviewed other evidence presented by claimants.

The statement was published by the head of the Supreme Council of Fatwa in Tahrir al-Sham, Abdul Rahim Atoun, and circulated by military correspondents close to HTS and its affiliated media.

Six months in detention

On August 17, 2023, HTS issued a statement freezing the powers and duties of Abu Maria al-Qahtani due to “his mistake in managing his communications without considering the sensitivity of his position or the necessity of permission and clarification of the intent behind this communication,” according to the statement, without clarifying the nature of these communications or the entities he was communicating with.

Abu Maria or Abu al-Hamza is Maysar bin Ali al-Jubouri al-Qahtani, nicknamed “al-Harari” after Hararah village in Iraq, to which he moved from Iraqi village al-Raseef after being born there in 1976.

He participated in founding the al-Nusra Front (currently Hayat Tahrir al-Sham) in October 2011, after eight years of working within al-Qaeda in Iraq, and became the deputy to its leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani.

Al-Qahtani is considered the second man in the faction, and he used to lead the campaign against the Islamic State organization, often presented by followers of Tahrir al-Sham as a religious scholar or sheikh, but he is a leader, an executor, and a businessman more than being a scholar.

Between 2014 and 2015, al-Qahtani played a pioneering role as an ideological theorist attacking the “extremists” of the Islamic State organization, eventually earning the title “Conqueror of the Khawarij.”

Leakages of a coup

At the beginning of this year, leakages began to emerge through the affiliated media of Tahrir al-Sham (widely spread Telegram channels in the region that transmit the narrative of HTS and are close to it) as parts of interrogation minutes with the leader Abu Maria al-Qahtani, and confessions from him regarding the charges attributed to him.

The most prominent thing conveyed by the leaks was that al-Qahtani admitted his allegiance to the operations room of the International Coalition in the city of Erbil, Iraq, where the room is headed by an Iraqi officer, an agent who visited Idlib more than once and met with him, planning a coup against the leadership of the HTS.

HTS left these leaks without denial or confirmation at the time, despite its affiliated media following everything that spread, and denying and confirming many of the news circulated with the resonance of the “treason” file.

About a month ago, Tahrir al-Sham started to release a number of its military leaders almost daily, after detaining them for varying periods, on charges of “treason,” and Enab Baladi learned from military sources within the HTS that the faction’s leadership provided amounts to the leaders who were released from its prisons, ranging from 2000 to 5000 US dollars, varying according to the duration of the imprisonment and the nature of the leader’s position.

Signs of torture appeared on most of the released, and the killing of a member of the Free Army faction in HTS prisons was enough to trigger demonstrations in Idlib.