Al-Jolani, HTS and the future of Syria
First published at Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.
Rebel leader, Syria’s new strongman, leader of the Islamists, ex-terrorist, or jihadist? These are just some of the labels that Ahmed al-Shara aka al-Jolani has had pinned on him over the past few days and weeks when, totally unexpectedly, he and his rebel group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS, or the Committee for the Liberation of Syria) managed to topple the Assad regime. From their stronghold in the Idlib province of northwest Syria, the fighters rapidly advanced, taking Damascus in a matter of days. So swift was the offensive that Bashar al-Assad and his closest allies had no choice but to hastily flee the country after 50 years of authoritarian rule. The rest is history — and marks an uncertain new beginning.
By early December, the general public were all familiar with the name Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, nom de guerre of the founder and leader of HTS. When al-Jolani reached Damascus, however, he dropped the name associated with his jihadist past and went back to using his birth name: Ahmed al-Shara. This was a symbolic move intended to signify that the struggle is over, that what matters now is civil and political concerns and, more importantly, the reconstruction of Syria — something that al-Shara and HTS fully intend to be a key part of. Indeed, after the group’s unexpected victory, this is hardly open to question.
When it comes to the organization’s ideological goals and indeed al-Shara’s own personal agenda, however, people remain sceptical, both within Syria and beyond its borders. After all, al-Shara, like most of his fellow fighters, is an avowed Islamist. The fact that he is now presenting a more moderate image has not done much to alleviate the concerns of many minorities, liberals, and women. So what role does the man with the new, neatly manicured beard — the hallmark of Salafism — and a penchant for religious language actually play? How reliable are his assertions of not wanting to represent the interests of political Islam but of all the people of Syria?
HTS and the Syrian opposition
For the majority of Syrians, the day Assad was toppled was one of unbridled joy. All of a sudden, the gates of the torture prisons, through which more than 100,000 opposition members had disappeared, were thrust open. The fear of the authoritarian regime evaporated and so many Syrians spoke of how overnight they had gone from being refugees to regular citizens again.
However, al-Shara and his HTS cannot take all the credit for overthrowing Assad. While HTS was certainly the largest and most effective group during the advance on Damascus, there were also armed insurgents from the south who had spent years working to end the Assad regime. Assad’s removal is therefore the result of a broad alliance and widespread rejection of the regime, most recently even by those who had previously supported it. What this meant was that, after years of violence, power was “handed over” with minimal bloodshed.
During the 2011 uprising, brutally crushed by the Assad regime with the help of Russia and Iran, the province of Idlib became one of the last sanctuaries for the opposition. Following multiple unsuccessful insurgencies in other regions, rebels retreated to Idlib, doubling the population to over 4 million people. It was here that the various Islamist insurgent factions gathered, and where relations between them were marked by infighting.
This led Russian and Syrian armed forces to launch massive attacks on the province, home not only to fighters but also civilians. For the local population, the supply situation was devastating. Following an initial agreement between Russia and Turkey, a demilitarized zone was created in 2018, but fighting continued until 2020 when a permanent ceasefire was finally brokered. Since then, al-Shara’s HTS has been gradually gaining ground.
Syrian political scientist Haid Haid, an expert for the British think tank Chatham House, puts the success of HTS down to its pragmatic agenda and strategy of “patience, coercion, and persuasion”. This strategy allowed the group to be flexible, always adapting to wherever it was operating.
Even at this early stage, al-Shara was already striving to portray a more moderate image, committing to pursuing an exclusively Syrian agenda, toppling Assad, and stimulating political renewal. The 2021 documentary The Jihadist, which features an interview with al-Shara by a journalist from US broadcaster PBS, vividly demonstrates just how much he wanted to convey this new image to the outside world, even then.
At the same time, with HTS, he invested a lot of energy into building an effectively functioning administration. Using this structure, beginning in 2017, the Syrian Salvation Government officially governed in Idlib, with one prime minster and 11 ministers. This soon saw the supply situation in the province improve dramatically.
At the same time, HTS took a hard line against Islamist and jihadist groups who saw Syria as the centre of their struggle for a “global jihad”. The “Islamic State” (IS) accused HTS of killing its leader Abu Hussein al-Husseini al-Qurashi in July 2023. Given al-Shara’s path, however, this trajectory, which was largely shaped by the man himself, was anything but a foregone conclusion.
A terrorist past
Al-Shara was born to Syrian parents in the city of Riyadh in 1982. He spent his early childhood in Saudi Arabia, later moving with his family to Damascus. As a young man, he was radicalized by the bloody second Intifada, when the Israeli government responded to Palestinian suicide bombings with brutal force. The events of 9/11 also had a major impact on him.
In 2003, under his nom de guerre al-Jolani, he joined al-Qaida, which was responsible for terrorist attacks against the US occupation of Iraq. It was there that he spent time in the notorious prisons of Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib, which at that time became breeding grounds for the even more radical “Daesh” (ISIS, later IS). It was also there that he met the founder of the IS and later self-declared Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
When he was released from prison in 2011, the Syrian uprising against Assad had just begun and al-Shara became leader of the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaida the “al-Nusra Front”, which joined the fight against Bashar al-Assad’s army from the very start. In 2013, the US put al-Shara on their terrorist list and later even announced a 10-million-dollar reward for any information leading to his capture. In January 2017, he founded HTS, a new alliance with various Islamist militias. This group explicitly rejected the jihadist al-Qaida with its goal of a global jihad against the West.
No more than a few months later, however, the organization took responsibility for a terrorist attack targeting Shi’ite pilgrims in Damascus, which claimed the lives of more than 40 people. In the words of HTS, this was a “message to Iran”, which was at once the most important supporter of the Assad regime after Russia, and a Shi’ite state loathed by Sunni radicals.
In 2018, the US went on to classify HTS as a terrorist organization, and the United Nations soon followed suit. In the years that followed, various organizations, including Human Rights Watch, repeatedly accused HTS of serious human rights violations against members of the opposition, women, and religious minorities. This resulted in large-scale protests against HTS and its leader.
Seizing control of Damascus
Even now, having toppled Assad, HTS still face a lack of trust, especially from Syrian minorities. The Kurdish regional government in Syria, which came to a form of agreement with President Assad, fears that under HTS and the Syrian National Army (SNA), which is supported by Turkey, it will encounter anti-Kurdish policy or even direct confrontation. Druzes and Shi’ites worry about being seen as “infidels”, the Alawites worry about being persecuted as Assad’s allies. Thousands of Shi’ites are said to have already fledto Lebanon.
And yet, al-Shara has constantly reiterated that he will respect the minorities and the rights of all Syrians. Back at the beginning of Aleppo offensive, he issued “ recommendations to his soldiers”, in which he told them: “Aleppo has always been — and continues to be — a crossroads of civilizations and cultures … It is the heritage and present of all Syrians.” In an interview with CNN which he gave during the advance on Damascus, he reaffirmed that he was committed to a system that would protect the rights of all Syrians. He played down the role of HTS, saying its only purpose was to overthrow the regime, and once this had been achieved it would be dissolved and replaced by new state institutions. Again, he rejected the accusation of terrorism outright: “I define a terrorist as someone who intentionally kills civilians, harms innocents, or displaces people” — this is not, al-Shara stresses, something HTS is guilty of, but rather the Syrian regime.
In actual fact, the lightening offensive on Damascus did not lead to acts of revenge or violence. In his first speech in Damascus, al-Shara also struck a moderate tone, calling for the transition from armed struggle to institution building, but also going on to say: “This new triumph … marks a new chapter in the history of the region.” The venue of his speech was highly symbolic: the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, one of the most important mosques in the Arab world, built during the first long Umayyad dynasty (661–750 AD), which led Damascus into its heyday.
At al-Shara’s public appearances and his first cabinet meetings in Damascus, alongside the new national flag — a green, white, and red flag with three red stars symbolizing the independence of 1921, which has been used by the opposition since 2011 — another flag could be seen, featuring the Shahada or Islamic declaration of faith, written in black on a white background. For many, this is an unacceptable Islamist symbol resembling the flag of al-Qaida, which shows the same motif but in white on a black background.
Moderate Islamism or a new form of authoritarianism?
So far, it is gestures such as these rather than al-Shara’s actual words or first official actions that have resulted in growing scepticism among some observers. For International Crisis Group expert Heiko Wimmen, it is crucial that at this early stage an “attempt at inclusion” is already being made and other political forces are being involved. “Sending signals like this in the early stages is important for building trust”, comments Wimmen. The next important step will be to put together a new constitution.
This, however, was not top of the agenda for the first transitional cabinet, formed a few days after the fall of Assad. This cabinet is essentially equivalent to the provincial government that HTS led in Idlib. And while power may have been symbolically, and peacefully, handed over by the former prime minister, something that is certainly not an insignificant sign of legitimacy, Syria is now under the de facto rule of the Islamist militia HTS.
And Islamists tend to act on the basis of their conservative ideology. Although there are clear differences between moderate and radical interpretations, they are generally incompatible with liberal values. In this worldview, women do not enjoy the same rights and are subject to discriminatory regulations and legal disadvantages. Other religious groups, including some Islamic movements, are seen as “infidels” and discriminated against or even persecuted.
Warnings to the effect that HTS is now planning to “introduce Sharia” are absurd insofar as — like in many other countries across the region — this has long been considered the main source of law in Syria. The more important question, however, is how this will be interpreted and to what extent Islamists such as al-Shara and his fellow fighters are willing to compromise — something which can have very different outcomes, as seen following the Arab Spring of 2011. In Egypt, to the dismay of the liberals, the freely elected Islamist president Mohammed Morsi slowly but surely restricted people’s rights and freedoms. This was followed by al-Sisi’s coup and a return to dictatorship. In Tunisia, the popular Islamist Nahda Party behaved in a much more moderate manner, and yet it too was eventually pushed out by the current authoritarian president, bringing what looked to be an extraordinarily promising democratic period to an end.
In order to prevent similar events or the emergence of new fault lines in Syria, an inclusive political process must begin as soon as possible. The success of this process will also depend on financial support to rebuild economic and political structures. Instead of cynically debating the premature repatriation of Syrian refugees, as we have seen in Germany, the international community should help support the conditions for successful reconstruction and efforts to address past injustices and hold the perpetrators to account.
The international community should immediately increase diplomatic contact with those currently in power as well as other actors and should reopen their offices in Syria. The assurances given by al-Shara and HTS that they will respect the rights of all Syrians could be taken at face value. External interference should be avoided at all costs — because the Syrians have achieved this change on their own accord, and this is an achievement that must be acknowledged.
Ultimately, the only ones who can make a success of this are the very Syrians who took a brave stance against Assad. This is something Syrian intellectual Yassin Al-Haj Saleh also underlines: Millions of politically active Syrians are the best protection against the revolution being hijacked by extremists, irrespective of their conviction. This reason alone emphasizes the need to support such activism.
René Wildangel holds a doctorate in history with a focus on West Asia. He lived in Syria for a long time and worked as a Middle East consultant for Amnesty International from 2016 to 2019.