This Wednesday, October 22, clashes took place between Syrian government forces and French jihadists entrenched in a camp in the northwest of the country, whose leader, Oumar Diaby, alias Omar Omsen, they accuse of refusing to surrender to the authorities.
It is the first time, since they took power in December 2024, that the Islamist authorities, who want to break with their jihadist past, announce a confrontation with foreign fighters.
“They use civilians as shields”
The jihadists, estimated to number in the dozens, led by Diaby, a former Franco-Senegalese criminal turned preacher, are taking refuge with their families in a camp in the Harim region, near the Turkish border. Syrian government forces accused Diaby, 50, of kidnapping a girl and refusing to surrender to authorities, and later announced they had surrounded the camp.
In a statement, the commander of the internal security forces of Idlib province (northwest), General Ghassan Bakir, accused Diaby of shooting at government forces and “using civilians as human shields.”
An AFP correspondent present at the scene indicated, however, that the shooting stopped early on Wednesday afternoon. And he was able to enter the camp where he saw French fighters and other nationalities, most of them masked.
According to Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH), an NGO based in the United Kingdom but with a wide network of sources in Syria, “foreign (non-French) jihadists are carrying out mediation” to achieve a peaceful outcome.
Shootings, reinforcements and fear of neighbors
Earlier, Oumar Diaby’s son, a jihadist who calls himself Jibril al-Mouhajer, told AFP on WhatsApp that “the clashes started after midnight (…)”.
“The security forces bombed the camp that houses women and children,” added the young man, known for having played on the soccer team of the former rebel enclave of Idlib.
A resident of the town of Harim, located on the outskirts of the camp, told AFP he had seen government forces bringing in reinforcements since Tuesday and had heard explosions since night.
“We stay at home, we don’t send the children to school,” said the man, who requested anonymity.
French jihadists who call themselves “Firqat al Ghouraba” (the group of foreigners) are a fringe group with no ties to the Islamic State group, which reigned through terror in Syria and Iraq before being defeated. Thousands of foreign jihadists, including Westerners, flocked to Syria during the civil war that broke out after former president Bashar al-Assad suppressed a popular uprising in 2011.
The conflict ended in December 2024 with the seizure of power by an Islamist coalition led by Ahmad al-Chareh, who overthrew Bashar al-Assad.
Like other extremists, these Frenchmen seem to have fallen from grace since the rise to power of Ahmad al-Chareh, an interim president who is trying to forget his jihadist past.
Oumar Diaby, a jihadist disgraced since the fall of Assad
Oumar Diaby had pledged allegiance to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which was led by Ahmad al-Chareh and controlled the rebel enclave of Idlib. But in August 2020 he was arrested by HTS and then released in February 2022 without the reasons for his arrest being communicated.
After taking power, Ahmad al-Chareh dissolved the HTS, the spearhead of the rebel offensive against Damascus, and called on all other armed groups to do the same and join the ranks of the new Syrian army.
Oumar Diaby, suspected of having convinced many French people to join Syria, is the subject of an arrest warrant from French justice and was classified in 2016 by the United States as an “international terrorist.” About “fifty” people would be part of his group, French security sources told AFP in December 2024.
At the same time, anti-terrorist prosecutor Olivier Christen told the newspaper Le Figaro that in the Idlib sector there remained “a large hundred” Frenchmen of the “1,500 who left to wage jihad in the 2000s.”
Source: BFM TV
