IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/swpcom/272016.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Ahrar al-Sham: The "Syrian Taliban". Al-Nusra ally seeks partnership with West

Author

Listed:
  • Steinberg, Guido

Abstract

President Bashar al-Assad's refusal to step down and open the door to compromise is not the only obstacle to a resolution of the Syrian conflict. Various Islamist groups focused on outright military victory also play a major role. Since 2012 they have come to dominate the uprising. The international community agrees that there can be no negotiations with the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), nor with the al Nusra Front, which is close to al-Qaeda. The open question is how to treat Ahrar al-Sham, as the largest rebel group alongside ISIS. Its militant Salafist orientation, which makes it the al-Nusra Front's closest ally, speaks against involving it in talks. Although Ahrar has been seeking since 2015 to position itself as a partner for the United States and its allies, there is no sign that it intends to abandon its alliance with the jihadists. (SWP Comments)

Suggested Citation

  • Steinberg, Guido, 2016. "Ahrar al-Sham: The "Syrian Taliban". Al-Nusra ally seeks partnership with West," SWP Comments 27/2016, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:swpcom:272016
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/256402/1/2016C27.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:swpcom:272016. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.swp-berlin.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.