🏴🇮🇶 On Kurdish Jihadis within HTS ranks: Estimates indicate that the number of Kurdish militants within Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Syria may exceed 3,000, originating from Kurdish populations across the region.
Reports suggest that the largest contingent is likely from Turkey, with a particularly notable concentration from the city of Bingöl, where over 600 individuals reportedly joined Jabhat al-Nusra (the predecessor of HTS) during its early formation.
Other fighters primarily consist of Kurdish militants from Iran and Iraq, while only a smaller fraction are believed to be Syrian Kurds.
One prominent Kurdish militant group active in Idlib province, HTS’s main stronghold during the Syrian conflict, was Ansar al-Islam—an Iraq-based Kurdish Salafi-jihadist organization.
Pictured: Ansar al-Islam fighters during a training session in Idlib in 2019.
🏴🇮🇶 On Kurdish Jihadis within HTS ranks: Estimates indicate that the number of Kurdish militants within Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Syria may exceed 3,000, originating from Kurdish populations across the region.
Reports suggest that the largest contingent is likely from Turkey, with a particularly notable concentration from the city of Bingöl, where over 600 individuals reportedly joined Jabhat al-Nusra (the predecessor of HTS) during its early formation.
Other fighters primarily consist of Kurdish militants from Iran and Iraq, while only a smaller fraction are believed to be Syrian Kurds.
One prominent Kurdish militant group active in Idlib province, HTS’s main stronghold during the Syrian conflict, was Ansar al-Islam—an Iraq-based Kurdish Salafi-jihadist organization.
Pictured: Ansar al-Islam fighters during a training session in Idlib in 2019.
Official government accounts have also spread fake fact checks. An official Twitter account for the Russia diplomatic mission in Geneva shared a fake debunking video claiming without evidence that "Western and Ukrainian media are creating thousands of fake news on Russia every day." The video, which has amassed almost 30,000 views, offered a "how-to" spot misinformation. Again, in contrast to Facebook, Google and Twitter, Telegram's founder Pavel Durov runs his company in relative secrecy from Dubai. Channels are not fully encrypted, end-to-end. All communications on a Telegram channel can be seen by anyone on the channel and are also visible to Telegram. Telegram may be asked by a government to hand over the communications from a channel. Telegram has a history of standing up to Russian government requests for data, but how comfortable you are relying on that history to predict future behavior is up to you. Because Telegram has this data, it may also be stolen by hackers or leaked by an internal employee. Oleksandra Matviichuk, a Kyiv-based lawyer and head of the Center for Civil Liberties, called Durov’s position "very weak," and urged concrete improvements. But Kliuchnikov, the Ukranian now in France, said he will use Signal or WhatsApp for sensitive conversations, but questions around privacy on Telegram do not give him pause when it comes to sharing information about the war.
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