The US has continued carrying out airstrikes against Syria’s Idlib Governorate’s Harem District, near the Tel al-Karama refugee camp this weekend, targeting and killing Wasim Tahsin Bayraqdar, who they described as a “senior leadership facilitator” for the al-Qaeda-linked Hurras al-Din.
It is the third US drone strike against Idlib since President Trump took office last month, and all three reportedly targeted and killed Hurras al-Din leaders. This is particularly noteworthy since Hurras al-Din announced it was dissolving in late January, before any of these attacks.
This latest attack is perhaps an even bigger deal because Bayraqdar is the brother of Samer Bayraqdar, who is the Syrian government’s current Religious Endowments Minister. The ministry ensures that endowments are used properly for the maintaining of mosques and to help pay for religious education.
The US claimed the Bayraqdar that they killed was an active member of Hurras al-Din, despite the obvious handicap of that group apparently having dissolved weeks ago. Syrian researchers are also reporting that the man actually left Hurras al-Din five years ago after becoming disillusioned with the group.
The statement from researcher Mohammed Munir al-Faqir, who claimed to have met Bayraqdar in 2022, after he had already left Hurras al-Din and became a businessman, declaring that the US had killed “an isolated civilian citizen” and urging they retract their previous targets and reevaluate them.
That’s unlikely to happen, as the US, at least, seems satisfy with the narrative that Bayraqdar was an active “finance and logistics officer” at Hurras al-Din, and indeed has never appeared to even acknowledge the very public dissolution of the organization.
Hurras al-Din was effective al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria. They were distinct from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is broadly the current government. HTS had similar ideology to Hurras al-Din and going back through a series of rebrandings and renamings got its own start as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the original al-Qaeda affiliate in neighboring Iraq.
Therefore it is not necessarily implausible that a minister from an al-Qaeda-linked government might well have a brother affiliated with a separate al-Qaeda-linked organization. At the same time there is a paucity of evidence that this was actually the case, just a claim from CENTCOM that they hold that to be true.
There’s also no sign the US is slowing down on striking Syria, as on Sunday another strike was reported in Idlib, which killed another person. Details are still emerging on this newest strike though it seems probable that whomever this was, it will be presented as something to do with Hurras al-Din.
