Weighing the Hope and Uncertainty over Ahmad al-Shara
Ahmad al-Shara was welcomed at the White House on 10 November for a two-hour meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, the first Syrian ruler so welcomed since the State’s independence in 1946. Al-Shara is a former emir of the Islamic State and leader of an Al-Qaeda iqlim (region), a man who served six years in an American prison in Iraq.1 It is, by any standard, a remarkable turn of events.
Before Al-Shara arrived in Washington the sense of the surreal was heightened by the surfacing of a video from May where he is playing basketball with Brigadier General Kevin Lambert, head of the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State (IS), and Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), the combatant command once charged with finding and killing Al-Shara.2
After the White House meeting, Trump said: “We want to see Syria become a country that’s very successful, and I think this leader can do it, I really do.” Trump acknowledged that “people said he’s had a rough past”, but then, “We’ve all had rough pasts. … I think, frankly, if you didn’t have a rough past, you wouldn’t have a chance”, adding: “He’s a tough guy. I like him. I get along with him”. This echoes Trump’s sentiments after his prior meetings with Al-Shara.3
While Trump announced the lifting of all sanctions on Syria after his first meeting with Al-Shara in May, it takes time to unwind a sanctions regime and the most onerous “Caesar sanctions” are Congressional. One of the major announced outcomes of Al-Shara’s visit was Trump issuing a six-month waiver on the Caesar sanctions, but he issued such a waiver in June and neither firms nor especially banks felt secure enough to enter Syria. Not much will change until Congress repeals the Caesar Act. The other main outcome of Al-Shara going to Washington is that Syria has become the ninetieth member of the anti-IS coalition. That, too, is hedged with some ambivalence.
Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the jihadist organisation Al-Shara leads,4 was proficient in countering IS when it ruled the Idlib enclave in the north and since HTS’s takeover of the whole of Syria in December it has shown some of the same skill. As such, the HTS government does not feel a particular need for substantive American help on this point, and it is wary of being seen to cooperate too closely for political reasons, namely the anti-Americanism of its own Islamist constituencies and the broader popular concerns about sovereignty. On the other hand, there are political benefits for Al-Shara in terms of international legitimacy and consequent economic and other assistance if his government is recognised as part of the anti-IS coalition—and it already effectively is.5 A couple of weeks ago, HTS negotiators proposed a way to finesse this: they asked the U.S. to cease anti-IS military activities on Syrian territory and instead limit their role to sharing intelligence with HTS.6
Al-Shara made time in his American tour to meet Yosef Hamra, the chief rabbi of the Syrian Jewish community in New York.7 It is obviously highly symbolic for Al-Shara to engage with Jews, given his background, and the rabbi offering Al-Shara an “Abrahamic blessing” and saying that “Hashem watches over him” only adds to that.
On the media rounds, Al-Shara gave an interview to The Washington Post, where he said, inter alia, “We are engaged in direct negotiations with Israel” and spelled out that one reason he is trying to keep Russia onside is because “we need their vote [on the U.N. Security Council] to be on our side in some issues”. Al-Shara also spoke to Fox News, an important portal to Trump’s MAGA base, which has shown rare signs of dissenting from the Leader over Syria. Al-Shara deflected rather well on the questions about his past, left the door open to normalisation with Israel, and stressed IS as a common enemy.
There could be no doubt after Al-Shara prevailed in Syria’s war about his immense political skill. In one of the hardest political arenas of all, Al-Shara navigated the global jihadist groups, all the contending outside powers, and secured hegemony over the insurgency. It was Al-Shara, too, who recognised and exploited the opportunity in what turned out to be the final insurgent offensive that deposed Bashar al-Asad, the widespread belief it was orchestrated by Turkey notwithstanding.8
What was perhaps not so obvious was that Al-Shara in power would be so capable of public relations in a Western context, yet he has aced that test as well, from social media mass-communications to targeted messaging for interlocuters in Washington. In parts of the “mainstream media”, Al-Shara has achieved the highest accolade of getting good press for getting good press. This has led to an optimistic tone in the coverage, reflecting the signals of U.S. and other Western policy-makers, that is at best premature and potentially grossly misguided.
To be critical of this is not to dismiss all of Al-Shara’s messaging and the sympathetic coverage as propaganda. There are reasons for optimism with Al-Shara. The issue is that there are significant countervailing factors—many unknowns and some actively negative signs—and even the favourable aspects have to be qualified. To give three examples:
First, there is no alternative to Al-Shara if the policy is to unify and stabilise Syria.9 Inevitable as partnering with Al-Shara might be, it hardly guarantees success—the ideological-political outlook of HTS and the leaderships of the other sects might mean this is impossible regardless of what is done—and if it does “work”, i.e., consolidate Al-Shara’s regime, it is distasteful insofar as it is rewarding brutality. Al-Shara expended a tremendous amount of effort to destroy all the other anti-Asad options. But we are where we are.10
Second, Al-Shara offers the chance to strategically rebalance the region by locking the Islamic Revolution headquartered in Iran out of Syria and bringing the country into the Western-allied status quo camp. A question-mark over this is what has happened to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) apparatus in Syria. Some IRGC officials fled as Asad’s end drew near; more presumably fled after Asad was gone. Al-Shara says his forces “expelled” the IRGC/Hizballah. Maybe. But the IRGC effectively colonised Syria thirteen years ago and was woven into the societal fabric in ways that make it doubtful it evaporated overnight. Then there is Asad’s other patron, Russia, which will retain its position in Syria under Al-Shara’s current policy. In every other geopolitical theatre, Russia’s presence is twinned with the IRGC. Perhaps Syria will be the exception; it has not been so far.
Third, Al-Shara clearly has evolved ideologically away from transnational jihadism towards a Syria-centric Islamism.11 How far and what exactly it means can be debated, but to believe everything Al-Shara has done in engaging with the West is some sort of deception operation is silly.12 We might call Al-Shara a “political jihadist”, and the difference between that and being a Salafi-jihadist matters. This does not make Al-Shara or his regime unproblematic from a Western perspective. Liberals and democrats will be disappointed with Syrian domestic arrangements that are likely to include an education system geared more towards Islamic indoctrination than critical thinking; a status for women and non-Muslim minorities some way short of full equality; and a political system that is autocratic in structure and authoritarian in some measure. And there is a jihadist problem that the HTS government has yet to resolve.
When Trump lifted the sanctions, he highlighted “foreign terrorists” in Syria as an ongoing impediment in relations. This was a reference to the few thousand foreign fighters, organised into single-nationality (or single-language) groups, which were subordinate to HTS and participated in the takeover in December. Many of these elements do retain transnational designs and links to Al-Qaeda, and it is therefore worrying that Al-Shara has brought them into the State, reflagging the jihadist units as contingents of the new National Army and making their leaders into his military commanders.13 Al-Shara justifies this as the least turbulent method of quarantining potential spoilers, and he may be sincere.14 However, it contributes to a variable that should cause concern even if the most benign interpretations of Al-Shara’s personal ideology and objectives are accepted.
The foreign military officers are merely the most visible of the more unreconstructed Salafi-jihadists in important positions around Al-Shara, people who are, at a minimum, less inclined to exert themselves to rein-in the lower cadres of HTS—the guys with guns, now rebranded State security forces, manning checkpoints across the country—who have been indoctrinated for years in HTS-ruled territory with a viciously sectarian religious supremacism. For some HTS soldiers, this is the only education they have had. The effect of this has been seen already. When there have been communal sparks, in March with the Alawis and in July with the Druze, it devolved quickly into sectarian pogroms, with HTS operatives in the thick of things, motivated by undisguised religious hatred, and senior officials in Al-Shara’s government were implicated, even as Al-Shara himself publicly said all the right things.
Until late 2024, no Syria-watcher would have been surprised at HTS behaving atrociously. The image conjured when HTS was mentioned was of its grim extremism, repression, and murder in Idlib.15 This was not just the suicide bombings and forced conversion of the Druze in Idlib in the early stages, before the ostensible break with Al-Qaeda in 2016, but the dress codes, arbitrary arrests and torture, and assassination of peaceful anti-jihadist revolutionaries long afterwards, most notably Raed Fares.
For the minorities in Syria, this view still runs strong. Alawis think what happened in March is “just the beginning” of an Islamist effort to expel them entirely from the country, the Druze are waiting for the next attempt to subjugate them, and a showdown is looming that is most immediately a political contest between the central HTS government and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has carved out an enclave in the east, but has an intrinsic sectarian dimension, since the PKK sees itself and is seen as the leader of the Kurdish minority.16
After HTS took power, narratives framing it as the responsible actor and its opponents as reckless and overwrought have gained ground, both among Syrians, especially among the Sunni Arab majority, and among foreign journalists and analysts, who for various reasons and to various degrees have come to see the Syrian landscape from HTS’s perspective. And it is not an implausible perspective.
The HTS view would be, roughly: everyone was expecting “revenge” attacks on Alawis, seen as “Asad’s people”, to happen immediately after the regime came down and they did not largely because Al-Shara’s government worked to keep a lid on things. HTS succeeded for three months, and when the explosion came it was precipitated by Asadist remnants, not HTS. There has been no repeat against the Alawis, while the Druze issue is a complex sui generis situation involving competition with the local Bedouin Arabs over the black market and Israel. There is truth in all of this and in this light one can argue there is no standing danger to “the minorities”, just a couple of exceptional and contingent events that have to be allowed for in any political transition this difficult.
It is pointless to try to adjudicate which “side” is correct, and not solely because no faction will be moved from their view by being told they are mistaken. The fact is we do not know. In circumstances this opaque, any policy is a bet. Part of the rationale of those of us who favoured a cautious policy, of offering HTS political engagement and lifting of sanctions only in exchange for concrete steps of reassurance, such as expelling the foreign jihadists, was to gather data—to test HTS’s intentions—while guarding against its excesses, even as it was well-understood this course might lead to a self-fulfilling disaster by pushing HTS away and suffocating the possibility of Syrian recovery.
The advocates of the course now set, of rapid sanctions-relief and political engagement amounting to support for Al-Shara within Syria’s domestic politics, could see the dangers of the alternative road, but seem unconcerned or actually oblivious to the scale of the risks they are taking on in adopting a policy that puts all the chips on the unknown, and where the definition of success is primarily negative—avoiding despotism or civil war, though the policy could easily lead to either or both. Fortune is said to favour the bold. For everyone’s sake, we must hope it is true in this case.
NOTES
Al-Shara was known by his kunya, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, until quite recently, though his real name has been public since the summer of 2016.
Though the U.S. had rescinded the $10 million bounty on Al-Shara soon after he put Bashar al-Asad to flight in December, Al-Shara was only formally removed from the Specially Designated Global Terrorist sanctions list three days before he arrived at the White House.
Trump first met Al-Shara in Saudi Arabia in May. “Tough guy. Strong past. Very strong past”, Trump told the press after the meeting. Trump’s verdict that Al-Shara was an “attractive guy” was omitted at the White House this week. In a subsequent interview in May, where Trump reiterated that Al-Shara was “handsome”, the President added: “I said [to Al-Shara], ‘You know, you have quite a past; got a tough past’. But, when you think about it, are you going to put a choirboy in that position? I don’t think so. … They say it’s a nasty neighbourhood, it’s a rough neighbourhood, and I thought he was terrific.” Trump met Al-Shara again on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September.
The strangest fact here is that Trump is not alone among Westerners in finding Al-Shara’s personal history more of a reason to support him. There’s material there that allows a spectrum spanning General David Petraeus to the post-colonialists to construct an image of Al-Shara that vindicates their worldviews.
All armed groups outside the national army were pronounced dissolved in January and technically, therefore, HTS no longer exists—a point supporters of Al-Shara’s government are rather insistent on, as I found in Syria earlier this year. Nonetheless, the integration of Party and State, so to speak, is a work in progress, and official titles for now count for less than the “power vertical” arranged around the HTS structure.
As just one small example, in mid-September, CENTCOM put out a statement after Admiral Cooper and U.S. Ambassador and Special Envoy for Syria Thomas Barrack met with Al-Shara thanking the Syrian ruler “for his support to counter ISIS in Syria”.
Reuters reported last week that the U.S. “is preparing to establish a military presence at an airbase in Damascus … The U.S. plans … would be a sign of Syria’s strategic realignment … The base sits at the gateway to parts of southern Syria that are expected to make up a demilitarised zone as part of a non-aggression pact between Israel and Syria.” Al-Shara’s foreign ministry said this was “false”, without further elaboration. It is difficult to know what to make of this.
The rabbi’s son, also a rabbi, Henry Yosef Hamra, partook in the pseudo-elections for the Syrian parliament in October 2025. Meaningless as the voting was in a practical sense, a Jew running for the Syrian parliament—something banned by “law” under the House of Asad since 1967—is an important symbolic change. Hamra Jr. ran on the slogan, “Toward a Prosperous, Tolerant, and Just Syria”, emphasising the unity and territorial integrity of the country, and calling for the lifting of the Caesar sanctions.
In April, Trump gave voice to the idea that Turkey’s ruler, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had “taken over Syria” by using HTS as a surrogate. And while the Turkish government publicly denies this, in private the Turks have themselves encouraged the idea that Asad’s downfall was their handiwork: there is a lot of regional popularity and prestige on offer to anyone who can claim to have got rid of Asad, and Turkey’s security does not suffer if the other States in the Middle East believe it is capable of removing governments that defy it. The reality, however, is rather different.
Through 2024, Erdogan was trying to repair relations with Asad. Erdogan stuck to this course despite Asad’s intransigence becoming public in late August 2024. A month later, Erdogan offered to meet Asad in person to normalise ties. Meanwhile, on the ground in northern Syria, tensions were building between HTS and the regime coalition to the west of Aleppo city, and Al-Shara proposed an offensive to rebalance the local situation. Erdogan vetoed the plan in October 2024.
Turkey could not direct HTS’s activities, but the enclaves Ankara held in Syria via its actual proxies, the “Syrian National Army” (SNA), gave the Turks a certain logistical leverage over HTS. More important was the simple fact that Turkey’s presence was the shield that prevented the Asad/Iran system and Russia launching a full-scale attack on the HTS zone, something Ankara wanted to avoid as it would send more Syrian refugees into Turkey, where three million already resided, an economic and political headache for Erdogan. This set-up induced a certain deference from HTS; they did not want to rupture relations with Turkey.
Even as Russian drone attacks escalated on the HTS areas through October and November 2024, Erdogan held firm: Al-Shara was told to maintain the status quo and Turkey’s outreach to Asad went on. It was only at the end of November 2024 that Erdogan finally gave Al-Shara the green light, with the intention of bloodying the pro-Asad coalition in western Aleppo and thereby softening up Damascus’s tyrant in normalisation talks.
It turned out, though, that the decay of the Asad regime was far worse than even the most pessimistic assessments had suggested. On impact with the insurgent offensive, the pro-Asad forces crumbled away, and Israel’s devastation of Iran’s Hizballah unit in Lebanon meant there was nobody to come to the rescue this time. Within two days, HTS had taken Aleppo city, and the insurgents, “surprised by their success”, pressed on. Nine days later, they were in Damascus and Asad had fled to Moscow.
This is true even if, as seems to be the case, Trump’s interest in Syria extends only to ensuring the HTS government is powerful enough to prevent an embarrassing, Afghanistan-style meltdown when he withdraws U.S. troops from Syria.
One feels immense sympathy for the Syrian revolutionaries, the democrats and anti-Islamists, who tried to resist Jabhat al-Nusra, as HTS used to be known. Many of them experienced the Syrian war as nearly as much of a struggle against Al-Nusra as the regime coalition (not to mention IS and the PKK). Western complaints about the current predicament ring much more hollow: there were many ways the West could have prevented the jihadists running away with the rebellion and a deliberate choice was made not to even try any of them.
To call the Syria-centric vision of Al-Shara and by extension HTS “nationalist” risks imposing a category where it does not apply. There are at least two obvious difficulties with it. On the one hand, “nationalism” in the Syrian context does not necessarily mean confined to Syria’s recognised borders. There is a strand of Syrian nationalism that has irredentist designs, specifically on Lebanon. On the other hand, operating within national borders does not necessarily equate to nationalism. In recent years, Al-Qaeda has adopted a system where its “affiliates” are much more locally-focused day-to-day and often de facto operate in one country. But Al-Qaeda does not recognise the nations or frontiers and has the ultimate aim of eradicating them.
As Orwa Ajjoub pointed out, the willingness of Al-Shara to work with the U.S. against IS transgresses one of the key jihad-Salafist concepts, al-wala wal-bara (loyalty [to Muslims] and disavowal [of infidels]). Interacting with the United Nations is another major jihadi-Salafist line Al-Shara has crossed: Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are ferociously hostile to the U.N. as a symbol of the international system, whose borders, nations, and man-made laws they reject.
The Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), composed of Uyghur jihadists, is focused on detaching the Xinjiang province of China and is tied to Al-Qaeda. Indeed, TIP’s overall leadership is based with Al-Qaeda Central in Taliban Afghanistan. TIP in Syria has been integrated into the new National Army, and the local TIP leader, Abdulaziz Hudaberdi (“Zahid”), made a Brigadier General.
Abdul Jashari (Abu Qatada al-Albani), leader of the numerically smaller but more militarily impactful Xhemati Alban, is a colonel in the official Syrian Army, which undersells his impact, as he is so close to Al-Shara.
There are Jordanians, Turks, and Egyptians among Al-Shara’s senior officers
Interestingly, though Russian-speakers—Chechens, North Caucasians, and Uzbeks—comprise together probably the largest contingent of the HTS-aligned foreign jihadists, none of them have had advertised promotions in Al-Shara’s National Army. Presumably this is to avoid antagonising Moscow as Al-Shara tries to find a compact with the Russians.
He may also not be. When Al-Shara wants to, he can locate, detain, and deport foreign terrorists on Syrian territory, as he has done with the Asad-aligned Palestinians. The situation with the foreign fighters under the HTS umbrella is different, of course; there are many more of them, for one thing. But the real impediment is political, not logistical: most HTS members, including those now in senior posts in Al-Shara’s government, see the foreigners as brothers, bound to them by shared ideology and sacrifice in war. They would see it as a betrayal to expel the foreigners on instructions from the Americans and they can cause Al-Shara serious internal trouble if he makes any such attempt. More importantly, there is no particular reason to think Al-Shara does not see the foreigners in the same way as the rest of HTS. A precedent for this situation is Bosnia, where the U.S. demanded the president, Alija Izetbegović, expel the Al-Qaeda-linked foreign fighters who had fought within his military after the war. Izetbegović, other than a couple of token pretences of compliance, defied the Americans and instead naturalised the foreigners.
Those who documented the administrative capacity HTS had built in the areas of Idlib it controlled—an apparatus far more effective at delivering services and providing security to people than any other insurgent experiment in governance during Syria’s war—were at pains (PDF) to emphasise that this should not be equated with moderation in terms of ideology or repression.
An especially dangerous aspect in Deir Ezzor is that the nominal government troops on the frontline are Turkey’s SNA proxies. The SNA are, doctrinally speaking, less extreme Islamists than HTS, but they are Sunni Arabs in the main and their use by Turkey in battles with PKK has helped sharpen an ethnic dimension to their identity that has led to awful humanitarian consequences when the SNA has encountered Kurdish populations (albeit, in fairness to the SNA, their record with any civilian population is abysmal). Al-Shara is engaged in a political process that will re-integrate the PKK’s area with the rest of Syria, but he has not ruled out using force to bring “Rojava” under the central State, and the troops on which he would rely for such an operation are eager for war—to the point of being contemptuous of the negotiations wholesale and publicly suggesting they might invade the PKK zone no matter what Al-Shara decides.
The U.S. envoy Tom Barrack was on-board for HTS’s by-force-if-necessary reintegration of the PKK areas. It appears that, after the horrors in Suwayda in July, Barrack has been somewhat sidelined and CENTCOM is now in the lead facilitating HTS-PKK reconciliation, which has tempered Al-Shara’s willingness to use force. But if this is correct, there is now a risk in the other direction, that the PKK will receive—or perceive—a message that emboldens it to do something rash. CENTCOM has a long relationship with the PKK from the war against IS’s caliphate and CENTCOM, especially the operatives directly embedded on the ground with the PKK, basically “went native”, as we would once have said, repeatedly encouraging PKK maximalism at points where accommodation would have better-served the PKK’s long-term interests. (I remember meeting a SOCOM officer working for CENTCOM’s anti-IS mission at a conference in 2017 who sincerely suggested the U.S. should go to war with Turkey if the Turks intervened against the PKK in Syria.)