Here is what we know about the group and its relation to IS:
– When did they appear? –
Saraya Ansar al-Sunna first rose to prominence in June, after claiming responsibility for a suicide bombing in a Damascus church that killed 25 people.
In a statement on Telegram, the group said at the time that the operation came “after provocation” by Damascus Christians “against the people of the faith”, denying the authorities’ accusation that IS was behind the attack.
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On Friday, the group said its members were behind the bombing of a mosque in an Alawite area of Homs, central Syria, which killed eight people.
Saraya Ansar al-Sunna, led by Abu Aisha al-Shami, vowed that attacks “will continue to increase, and will target all infidels and apostates”.
These attacks amplified fears among Syria’s minority communities, with authorities saying the goal of the attacks was to destabilise the country.
Aaron Zelin, a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told AFP the bombing at the mosque was the “largest” carried out by the group since the church attack.
Zelin said “they use these types of attacks to recruit more” members, adding that “we will see if this was a one-off again like June or if they can maintain any actual campaign like… IS”.
– What are its roots and stances? –
The group’s channel on Telegram dates back to June 8.
It declared itself as an independent entity at the start of the year, after Sharaa took off his military uniform and began to abandon his jihadist past.
Aside from the mosque and church bombings, Saraya Ansar al-Sunna has claimed responsibility for killing individuals it said were linked to ousted Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, and for setting fire to forests in Syria’s coast, the country’s Alawite heartland, during the summer.
Analysts say the group includes former commanders and members of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group formerly led by Sharaa that spearheaded the lightning offensive that overthrew Assad in December 2024.
Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a Syria-based researcher and historian, said the breakoff came “because HTS was not going to implement an Islamic state”.
He added that Saraya Ansar al-Sunna “might also have members who were part of other factions”.
Nowadays, the majority of Saraya Ansar al-Sunna’s posts on Telegram show opposition to Sharaa, describing his government as an “apostate”.
The group sometimes calls him a “traitor” who “submitted to Israel” and criticised him for “throwing himself into the arms of the Crusader coalition”, referring to the US-led coalition against IS, which Syria recently joined.
It decried what it called Damascus’ use of secular laws instead of the Islamic sharia, accusing it of “apostasy” and abandoning “jihad”.
– Links to IS? –
In several publications, the group expressed its sympathy for IS and condemned operations by the US-led international coalition and the Syrian authorities targeting its members.
After an attack in central Syria’s Palmyra region this month that killed three Americans, carried out by a member of the Syrian security forces and attributed by Washington to IS, Saraya Ansar al-Sunna said in a publication that it stood with IS to confront the “apostate” Syrian government, which pledged to hold those involved in the attack accountable.
“I see it as an IS front group. There likely is already linkage. It’s part of IS’s information operations to obfuscate and confuse its strength and reality,” Zelin said, adding that it may hope to recruit members under a name that “seems more innocuous” than IS.
Tamimi said it was “notable that IS has not claimed the biggest attacks claimed by Saraya Ansar al-Sunna”.
In a statement published Saturday, Saraya Ansar al-Sunna’s leadership said they are “an administratively independent group, but we share their (IS’s) ideology and methodology”.
“If there had been a pledge of allegiance, we would have announced it publicly, and that would only have increased our pride,” the statement added, praising the group “which stood firm against the coalition of 89 countries… without compromising”.