Mostafa Farag, also known as Abu Sulayman al-Muhajir, was a commander and cleric of the al-Nusra Front. Farah was born in Australia of Egyptian descent, and he would become a famous Islamist cleric and a representative of al-Qaeda in the media.
Biography[]
Mostafa Farag was born in Australia to a family of Sunni Muslim Egyptians, and he joined al-Qaeda at the time of the Syrian Civil War. When the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State split, he tried to mediate between them, but he later joined al-Nusra and became a high-ranking member of their sharia council. He accused the Islamic State of being a criminal group, as it broke a holy pact with Ayman al-Zawahiri, beheaded western aid workers (seen as a breach of sharia law), and declared itself a caliphate, while al-Nusra was only a small part of several Islamic groups. On 14 July 2016, he welcomed the death of Islamic State commander Abu Omar al-Shishani in Iraq, calling him an evil Kharijite criminal and accusing him of murdering hundreds of Mujahideen in Deir ez-Zor Governorate and Sheitat.