Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) was a Sunni Islamist political and paramilitary group involved in the Syrian civil war. It was formed on 28 January 2017 as a merger of several armed groups: Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (JFS), Ansar al-Din Front, Jaysh al-Sunna, Liwa al-Haqq and the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement. The unification process was held under the initiative of Abu Jaber Sheikh, an Islamist militant commander who had been the second emir of Ahrar al-Sham. HTS, along with other Syrian opposition groups, launched an offensive that led to the fall of the Assad regime on 8 December 2024, more than 13 years after the Syrian revolution.