Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is working to increase its affect on civil society in Syria’s northwestern province of Idlib, looking for to do away with the jihadist character of its administrative and govt establishments.
As a part of these efforts, HTS is highlighting girls’s function in society by its Women’s Preaching Office, which regulates the work of feminine preachers and oversees their actions at mosques and within the streets in Idlib and its environs.
The Ladies’s Preaching Workplace has just lately elevated its actions. Through this support, HTS is looking for to boost a brand new era of feminine preachers that may get its ideological message to each individual within the areas below its management. This exhibits that HTS is conscious of the function girls can play in increasing the group’s fashionable base and influencing society.
“The workplace organizes cultural occasions and campaigns that concentrate on feminine youth and encourage them to grow to be preachers,” Umm Hafs, an official on the Ladies’s Preaching Workplace, instructed Al-Monitor. “It additionally provides virtually day by day spiritual programs and preaching coaching for ladies. These actions cowl a lot of the [displaced] camps.”
The workplace offered 352 lectures in a single month, given by 120 feminine preachers in 74 mosques, whereas the variety of girls’s preaching boards reached 16. She added, “We even have an affiliated intermediate institute devoted for ladies solely, which is among the largest Sharia institutes in Idlib. This institute provides free schooling for 2 years.”
Nevertheless, a girl from Idlib who refused to disclose her id or job instructed Al-Monitor, “HTS exploits the ignorance and ignorance of some Syrian girls to ingrain its concepts in society. HTS’ work with feminine organizations brings again to thoughts Al-Qubaysiat organization,” which the Syrian regime used to show girls in regards to the Quran in previous years.
She added, “HTS is working by these feminine organizations to unfold its ideologies in society in a much less radical method, given the affect girls can have on males and society.”
Abbas Sharifa, a researcher in jihadist teams on the Jusoor Heart for Research, instructed Al-Monitor, “HTS now considers itself a part of the local people, and it desires to maneuver from the stage of managing the neighborhood to controlling it.”
It desires to make use of the Ladies’s Preaching Workplace to speak its concepts and affect households, Sharifa added, “however the work of the workplace is proscribed to the tutorial course of and giving lectures and classes in mosques. Up to now, it has not been impactful on society.”
“Over the previous years, HTS has dedicated many violations towards girls within the areas below its management,” Fadel Abdul Ghany, director of the Syrian Community for Human Rights, instructed Al-Monitor. However HTS chief Abu Mohammed al-Golani has been just lately seeking openness, with the purpose to get HTS into the political course of, getting into the Syrian parliament and gaining Western recognition. “Some feminine preachers within the workplace not even put on the niqab, because it doesn’t go along with fashionable Syrian society,” Abdul Ghany stated. “Nevertheless, this doesn’t imply that HTS has grow to be an advocate of ladies’s freedom, as violations towards them persist.”
Abdul Ghany added, “HTS should grant girls all their rights, akin to freedom of labor, motion and clothes, which fall below private freedoms. The Ladies’s Patrols Workplace affiliated with HTS’ Al-Falah security apparatus has the authority to arrest these violating the Sharia. It additionally bans mixing of women and men in public locations, males promoting girls’s clothes, and clothes shops which have mannequins displaying garments. … So it appears HTS is simply doing a media marketing campaign.”
