Sulaymān ibn al-Manṣūr (Arabic: سليمان بن المنصور), better known as Sulaymān ibn Abī Jaʿfar (Arabic: سليمان بن أبي جعفر), was an Abbasid prince and served as governor of Basra, al-Jazira and Syria during the reign of his nephew, Caliph Harun al-Rashid (r. 786–809).
[1] During the Fourth Fitna, the civil war which broke out in 811 over the succession dispute between al-Amin and his brother al-Ma'mun, tribes and local magnates in many regions and cities in Syria expelled representatives of the Abbasids.
[7] In Damascus, remnants of the Umayyad dynasty, which was toppled from the caliphate by the Abbasids in 750, and their sympathizers, led by Abu al-Umaytir al-Sufyani, attacked Sulayman's in his residence, the palace of al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf.
In the run up to the revolt, Sulayman had imprisoned an Abbasid loyalist, the prominent Qaysi chief Ibn Bayhas al-Kilabi, in the same palace.
[8] Upon his return to Iraq, Sulayman remained among the leading partisans of al-Amin, staying with him and his loyalist troops from the al-abna faction as they barricaded in Baghdad's City of Peace as al-Ma'mun's general, Tahir ibn al-Husayn, closed in on him.