Ahrar Al Sham appoints new Shariah officer

Writing to Zaman English by Dani Murad

(Zaman al-Wasl)- After the devastating explosion in North-eastern Syria last week, which killed a dozen of the most important senior figures in the armed opposition, a Syrian rebel group Ahrar al Sham Movement has named a new Shariah Officer on Tuesday.

The new ‘Mufti’ or the man who handles all Islamic affairs of the movement, Abu Mohamed al-Sadeq has come from the same environment where most of Ahrar Al Sham leaders have known each other, the infamous “Sednaya military prison”, where the regime has been detaining thousands of its opponents from different parties, most importantly “The Islamic Movement”.

The eye-catching thing in the matter is that al-Sadeq had almost spent the same period of detention as the general leader of the movement, "Abu Abdullah al-Hamwi," which is between 2005 and 2011, when the regime released the most prominent figures in the Islamic opposition under the so-called the decree of “General Amnesty".

Al Sadeq graduated from the institute of Engineering in Aleppo University, but his ambition drove him away from Engineering, and he joined the faculty of Sharia to graduate in 1995, and while perusing his master studies, he was arrested by the regime for the first time.

After being released, he worked in the field of Sharia education, in general and Sharia high schools in Aleppo’s countryside, but in 2005 al-Sadeq was arrested again by the regime forces and was put in Sednaya prison.

And under the “General Amnesty” decree, al-Sadeq was released again with many of the symbols of Islamic opposition, including his fellow prisoners and friends, who share his cause and later formed the movement of Ahrar Al Sham , and on the top of that list : "Abu Abdullah al-Hamwi," "Abu Yazan al-Shami," "Abu Abdul-Malik" , and dozens of other leaders who lost their lives in a very ambiguous operation in the town of "Ram Hamdan."

Since the beginning of the Syrian revolution, Al-Sadeq has worked on “the Sharia files”, where he supervised the graduation of many religious courses Aleppo and Idlib, and also participated in the establishment of Sharia courts and legal bodies in the liberated areas. Later, he became the president of the “Sharia Committee” in Aleppo, in addition to being head of the Sharia Council of Aleppo and its countryside.