Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki

Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki (Nur al-Din al-Zanki, Noureddine al Zengi Brigades) was an Aleppo-based Syrian opposition group that was formed in late 2011 by religious leader Sheikh Tawfiq Shahabuddin. The group was briefly a member of Liwa al-Tawhid, the Islamic Front in Aleppo, and an anti-Islamic State umbrella group known as the Mujahedeen Army in 2014. Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki later operated as an independent group and received funding from Saudi Arabia and the United States. Within Aleppo, Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki worked closely with former Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (Fatah al-Sham), formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra, despite an outbreak of violence between the two groups in 2015. In 2016, the group was accused of a series of war crimes including abducting and torturing journalists and decapitating an adolescent boy. After a series of skirmishes between Fatah al-Sham and other Sunni opposition groups, Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki merged with Fatah al-Sham on January 28, 2017 to form Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham. At the time of the merger, Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki had 7,000 fighters.