al-Qatala (Arabic: "The Killers") is a Sunni Islamist jihadist group which was founded in 2013 as a splinter group of the Free Syrian Army in Syria amid the Syrian Civil War. al-Qatala was founded by Omar Sulaman, an al-Qaeda commander who left the FSA due to his belief that the FSA was ineffective in overthrowing the Ba'athist regime; however, al-Qaeda also rejected him do to his insufficient commitment to their quest of implementing extreme sharia law worldwide. According to Sulaman, al-Qatala's war was not (primarily) for their faith, but rather for the removal of all foreign power from Syrian soil, differentiating al-Qatala from the more religiously motivated al-Qaeda and ISIL. Instead, al-Qatala's fighters, while motivated partly by jihadism, fought with the goal of fomenting a war between NATO and Russia to destroy the global economy and thus destroy the power of the nations (specifically America and Russia) that could diminish Syria's sovereignty. While Sulaman was criticized by al-Qaeda and ISIL for his insufficient commitment to implementing sharia, his ranks attracted thousands of fighters, absorbed several former al-Qaeda and ISIL cells across the world, and even formed lucrative alliances with the Russian Ultranationalist Party and Iran's Quds Force, even though Iran and Russia were hostile toward the other Syrian rebel factions.
History[]
As the Islamic State and al-Qaeda declined in the late 2010s, al-Qatala took over an increasing number of former al-Qaeda and ISIL cells in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, and Sulaman planned to create a major war between the world superpowers in order to destroy the world economy and thus allow al-Qatala to establish an Islamic state in the Middle East. In October 2019, al-Qatala was responsible for a mass-casualty terrorist attack in Piccadilly Circus, London, leading to Britain and the United States dispatching the SAS' Bravo Team and CIA asset Alex Keller to hunt down Sulaman.
Sulaman was killed in a raid on the Anti-Lebanon Mountains in Syria, but al-Qatala lived on and sent fighters to infiltrate the Caucasian brigades fighting the Russian Army in the Donbass War. Many of these brigades included former ISIL and Caucasus Emirate fighters, and many of them were amenable to providing al-Qatala with material support and their own experienced fighters.
In March 2020, a massive force of al-Qatala, led by Khaled al-Asad and funded by Zakhaev Arms, invaded the city of Verdansk, Georgia. The invasion completely decimated the DNP garrison stationed there, as well as caused heinous atrocities to the city's population. To combat the insurgents, a joint task force of NATO and Russian forces called the Armistice was formed. The Armistice was disbanded after a massive infight occurred when AQ deployed chlorine gas as they evacuated Verdansk, returning to Syria.
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