The Devil We Are Getting To Know
The new Syrian strongman has everything going his way
Syria does not need a Thomas Jefferson. Indeed, Syria does not need a western-style democracy at all. Syrians will prefer a strong man, emphasis man. They will want this man of the people to establish a Syrian republic that is safe for all the Syrian people. Not heaven on earth: just a peaceful Syria.
So far, so good. The victorious leader of HTS (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Organization for Liberating Syria) has projected civil and sectarian calm, leaving the Christians of Aleppo and the Alawites of Tartus and Latakia untouched. Abu Mohammed al-Jolani (spelled Golani sometimes) has not made any Taliban-style pronouncements about women or culture, nor declared a caliphate. Islam is the supermajority religion of Syrians, so he will align himself with Islamic culture. Thus the beard, which is neatly trimmed in every interview, a nod to Islamic norms that still provides a visual contrast with the Taliban or al-Qaeda grooming aesthetic.
Whatever his intentions, al-Jolani looks the part of the ‘moderate’ Sunni Muslim warlord, as though he came from central casting. He is now going by his birth name, Ahmad al-Sharaa, rather than his nom de guerre. Syrians will understand the contrast with Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, who preferred to use his nickname, earned during his years as a street hood, to brand his own dictatorship.
The whole world wants the long Syrian civil war to be over. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had multiple reasons to support the HTS offensive that has brought an end to the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the most urgent being three million war refugees in Turkey, including Kurds he would see return to Syria rather than stay in Turkey making trouble. Just hours after Assad left Damascus in a cloud of confusion, European nations exhausted by terrorism and the social turmoil of refugee streams started suspending refugee applications from Syrians. A constant backflow of internal refugees followed close behind the HTS advances, with jubilant people honking and shouting, as Syrians returned to their homes, seemingly free of fear at last.
Assad was hated by almost everyone in Syria, so he used fear to rule. Now that Assad is gone, al-Jolani — al-Sharaa — has begun his own rule of Syria with the love and respect of Syrians. The rest of the world wonders how he will do as a statesman — and worries he may still be the terrorist who broke with al-Qaeda. “Don’t judge by words, but by actions,” al-Sharaa told CNN when he was still al-Jolani, just five days ago. On this point, at least, the whole outside world agrees.
Al-Sharaa told CNN last week that a “unification of opinions” had taken place in Idlib, the humanitarian zone where HTS has established its reputation for governance and “unified” in its training camps. The result is a disciplined force with a united society behind it. Rather than a theocracy, “the revolution has transitioned from chaos and randomness to a state of order, both in civil and institutional matters, and in military operations alike.” Instead of a terrorist haven, “the most important thing is to build institutions” in Syria. He would seemingly be Syria’s final strongman.
There are approximately 1.5 million Syrians in internal refugee camps, according to al-Sharaa, and “I believe we can soon reach a point where there are no camps” at all. Fine, but what about terrorist training camps? Isn’t al-Jolani the fighting name of a listed terrorist leading a listed terrorist organization? Al-Sharaa narrates his own past as a journey away from youthful extremism as his “intentions evolved.” His association with al-Qaeda in Iraq began with the best of intentions, for “I went to defend the Iraqi people. When I returned to Syria, I didn’t want to bring what happened in Iraq to Syria. That’s why there were disagreements between us and ISIS,” he says.
“A person in their twenties will have a different personality than someone in their thirties or forties, and certainly someone in their fifties. This is human nature.” According to his own story, al-Sharaa has grown up, set aside childish pursuits, and wants to normalize Syria, not simply as a place where Syrians can live in peace, but as a place where no one is preparing for holy war at all.
Israel, the neighboring state which has had the most wars with Syria since 1946, wants the new Syria to have none of the Soviet or Russian weapons that made the old Syria dangerous to Israel. Since the weekend, the IDF has carried out more than 500 strikes on missile stocks, launching positions, drone storage, aircraft, air defense batteries, tanks, chemical weapon and other arms production centers, naval vessels, and security service buildings. Israeli troops expanded from the Golan Heights into the 1974 buffer zone, occupying Mount Hermon, the highest mountain in Syria and a radar shadow that has always limited Israeli strategic warning time ahead of Syrian atttacks. Notably, these “limited and temporary” measures have drawn rhetorical fire from the Arab League, but not al-Sharaa, for the Israelis are doing him a favor.
Israel was capable of doing this in 2012. Benjamin Netanyahu could have done this to Bashar at any time since then, but waited until after Bashar left Damascus. Until the Arab Spring, the Syrian armed forces that existed under the Assad regime were always primarily organized and prepared for state-on-state warfare with Israel. By destroying the Assad arsenals, the IDF not only removes a huge conventional arms threat, they also save al-Sharaa and HTS the work of guarding, maintaining, or decommissioning those weapons.
Fighter jets and boats destroyed by blasts and gutted by fire are fit for scrap rather than easy pickings for graft and corruption. Ammunition depots destroyed by missiles are a better outcome for al-Sharaa than rival Salafists, such as the Islamic State, capturing and exploiting ammunition depots. It is actually much easier to cooperate with international organizations to secure and dismantle possible chemical weapons sites, as he has agreed to do, when most of them have already been blown to smithereens.
Imagine how much easier the occupation of Iraq would have been for American forces if the armed forces of Saddam Hussein had been demolished this thoroughly. The IDF is making it much easier for al-Sharaa to pacify Syria.
Al-Sharaa does not need the Russian aircraft and equipment parked all over Khmeimim airbase in Latakia for himself, either. Those are instead hostages now in his negotiations with Vladimir Putin. Nor does he need to replace most of what is being destroyed or withdrawn from Syria.
In the long run, HTS will do much better with a small, cheap, disciplined motor infantry force equipped with light aircraft, small drones, and trained in the tactics Ukrainians have shown them. If al-Sharaa is serious about building new institutions, including military ones, then he will build forces for policing Syria, that do not present a realistic threat to Israel or any other neighbor.
His strategic patience with Israeli occupation of the buffer zone is an encouraging sign that he intends to live peaceably alongside Israel, which would indeed be a sea change in Middle Eastern affairs. Nor has al-Sharaa complained while the United States carried out an intense, simultaneous bombardment campaign on ISIS in Syrian territory. The Islamic State is after all his nemesis. Rather than attempt to imitate them, or outdo them in jihad, al-Sharaa has chosen to differentiate his organization by moderating its rule.
When HTS set up their “salvation government” in Idlib in 2017, they initially “attempted to enforce a strict interpretation of Islamic law.”
Religious police were tasked with making sure that women were covered, with only their faces and hands showing. Its members would force shops to close on Fridays so that people could attend the weekly prayers. Playing music was banned, as was smoking water pipes in public.
As part of his “rebranding” in 2023, however, al-Sharaa “cracked down on extremist factions and dissolved the notorious religious police. For the first time in more than a decade, a Mass was performed recently at a long-shuttered church in Idlib province.”
Al-Golani told a recent gathering of religious and local officials that Islamic law should not be imposed by force. “We don’t want the society to become hypocritical so that they pray when they see us and don’t once we leave,” al-Golani said, pointing to Saudi Arabia, which has relaxed its social controls in recent years after decades of strict Islamic rule.
He also says he wants a reset of relations with the West, the removal of his pariah status, and foreign investment in his shattered economy. Al-Sharaa would form a government of technocrats, not zealots, he says. One hopes that his new education system will discourage extremism, anti-Semitism, and war. In the short run, his enthusiasm for destroying rival organizations with more radical Islamist agendas is welcome in Washington, to say nothing of European capitals.
If anyone is ready to play spoiler in Syrian peace, it is Erdoğan. While Turkish-backed rebels agreed to a ceasefire with the US-backed, mainly-Kurdish SDF in Manbij Wednesday, HTS forces framed the withdrawal of SDF forces from Deir Ezzor as a military victory. The SDF entered Deir Ezzor under American close air support just last week as part of the final campaign to crush the regime, and never secured the nearby border crossing with Iraq, so the more likely scenario is that the SDF withdrew from Deir Ezzor because they never intended to stay there, or had American support to do so. Trump has vowed to remove American support from Syria after Inauguration Day. Caught between Erdoğan and al-Sharaa, the Kurds are once again being forced to set aside the dream of Kurdistan for the sake of regional peace.
Centripetal forces still exist, but the fall of the Assad regime has become a uniting moment. By now, the reader has likely seen the horrific images from Sednaya prison, where tens of thousands of Syrians have apparently been held or executed. Scenes of blinking, dazed Syrians emerging from regime jails speak to systematic inhumanity. Syrian rescuers digging and breaking their way into the “red zone” below ground are a shared national drama because everyone has lost someone to Assad’s prisons.
The end of fear has brought disclosure. ‘Sami,’ one of two men who smuggled photographs of “as many as 70 [dead] prisoners a day” out of Sednaya prison, has revealed himself to the Arabic language newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat. Asked why he decided to reveal his name, Sami replied that “Syrians know the answer to this question. I think the answer is obvious to most Syrians who were inside Syria and those who were outside it.” He wants accountability and transparency:
Sami stressed that “crimes against humanity and genocide are not subject to a statute of limitations and cannot be tolerated under any circumstances. The Syria we dream of is a free Syria based on justice and equality. Transitional justice that precedes comprehensive national reconciliation is the only way to build the Syria of the future. We are all hopeful that Syria will be fine now. The Syria that our team left 11 years ago with thousands of tortured faces and disfigured bodies. Hundreds of sockets that were separated from eyes that dreamed of being among us today.”
While this is all promising, Kyle Orton argues that it would be a great mistake to simply de-list Ahmad Hussein al-Sharaa, aka Abu Mohammed al-Jolani/Golani, or HTS from terrorist sanctions just because they have won. While this might make some things easier for western policy makers, it would incentivize other jihadi leaders or movements towards conquest rather than moderation and responsible governance. The Middle East region needs a new model of leadership behavior, something that is neither a Sunni caliphate like ISIS nor an iron-fisted dictatorship like the Assads.
Syria’s regime were the devils we all knew and tolerated because the alternatives seemed worse. We are still getting to know the new devils in charge of Syria. Rather than rehabilitate al-Sharaa, the world should let him continue to rehabilitate himself. The world does not have to love his organization, just give them permission to change for the better. They have already shown they can evolve. Let us hope they are all serious about keeping the peace of Syria.
