The 'Albanian Tactical' Guide to Military Training

Most observers of the Syrian civil war are by now familiar with the outfit called ‘Malhama Tactical,’ which emerged in 2016 as a specialist military training and advisory outfit among the insurgents in northwest Syria. While ‘Malhama Tactical’ has claimed to have worked with a variety of factions, its closest working relationship has been with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (the dominant faction in the area), as the group’s then leader Ali (al-)Shishani affirmed to me in an interview in February 2020. One of Malhama Tactical’s better-known foreign backers was the Indonesian Abu Ahmed Foundation, which also supported Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and has since been shut down.

Shishani subsequently resigned as leader of Malhama Tactical in October 2021, and in 2022 there has been little public information on what activities if any the group has undertaken, or whether it is still active. The most recent Telegram channel set up in the name of the group only features old archival material. Per my own contact with the group’s Facebook page, it is my understanding that Malhama Tactical is currently ‘suspended’ and it has been ‘suspended’ since the aftermath of Shishani’s resignation, though this is not necessarily the same as saying that the group has been definitively dissolved or that all its members have quit the field. If Malhama Tactical’s members of the group are going to return to arrange any new training activity, then it is my understanding that those activities are not going to be advertised, at least in the near future.