Beirut: Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the militant leader whose insurgency contributed to the downfall of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, has come a long way.
The 42-year-old, whose real name is Ahmad al-Sharaa and who is labelled a terrorist by the United States, has not been seen publicly since Damascus fell early on Sunday. However, he and his insurgent group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)—which includes many jihadi fighters—are poised to play a significant role in Assad’s collapse.
After the rebels captured Damascus, Assad fled into hiding making Syria’s future governance uncertain. The capture of Damascus marked the end of the Assad family’s 50-year reign and Bashar al-Assad’s 24-year presidency.
Jolani is the leader of the Islamist alliance that spearheaded an offensive that rebels say brought down President Assad and ended five decades of Baath Party rule in Syria.
Syria, home to numerous ethnic and religious groups, has been struggling with a decade-long civil war, which ended a new phase after the rebels launched a surprise offensive in late November.
The country remains divided among various armed factions, while foreign powers, including Russia, Iran, the United States, Turkey, and Israel, have all become deeply involved.
‘Don’t Judge by Words, But by Actions’
For years, al-Jolani worked to consolidate power, while bottled up in the province of Idlib in Syria’s northwest corner as Assad’s Iranian- and Russian-backed rule over much of the country appeared solid.
He maneuvered among extremist organisations while eliminating competitors and former allies. He sought to polish the image of his de-facto “salvation government” that has been running Idlib to win over international governments and reassure Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities. And he built ties with various tribes and other groups.
Along the way, al-Jolani shed his garb as a hard-line Islamist guerrilla and put on suits for press interviews, talking of building state institutions and decentralizing power to reflect Syria’s diversity.
“Syria deserves a governing system that is institutional, no one where a single ruler makes arbitrary decisions,” he said in an interview with CNN last week, offering the possibility HTS would eventually be dissolved after Assad falls.
“Don’t judge by words, but by actions,” he said.
Al-Jolani’s beginnings in Iraq Al-Jolani’s ties to al-Qaida stretch back to 2003, when he joined extremists battling US troops in Iraq. The Syrian native was detained by the US military but remained in Iraq. During that time, al-Qaida usurped like-minded groups and formed the extremist Islamic State of Iraq, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
In 2011, a popular uprising against Syria’s Assad triggered a brutal government crackdown and led to all-out war. Al-Jolani’s prominence grew when al-Baghdadi sent him to Syria to establish a branch of al-Qaida called the Nusra Front. The United States labeled the new group as a terrorist organisation. That designation still remains in place and the US government has put a $10 million bounty on him.
The Nusra Front and the Syrian conflict As Syria’s civil war intensified in 2013, so did al-Jolani’s ambitions. He defied al-Baghdadi’s calls to dissolve the Nusra Front and merge it with al-Qaida’s operation in Iraq, to form the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.
Al-Jolani nonetheless pledged his allegiance to al-Qaida, which later disassociated itself from ISIS. The Nusra Front battled ISIS and eliminated much of its competition among the Syrian armed opposition to Assad.
In his first interview in 2014, al-Jolani kept his face covered, telling a reporter for Qatari network Al-Jazeera that he rejected political talks in Geneva to end the conflict. He said his goal was to see Syria ruled under Islamic law and made clear that there was no room for the country’s Alawite, Shiite, Druze and Christian minorities.
Consolidating power and rebranding In 2016, al-Jolani revealed his face to the public for the first time in a video message that announced his group was renaming itself Jabhat Fateh al-Sham -– the Syria Conquest Front — and cutting its ties to al-Qaida.
“This new organisation has no affiliation to any external entity,” he said in the video, filmed wearing military garb and a turban.
The move paved the way for al-Jolani to assert full control over fracturing militant groups. A year later, his alliance rebranded again as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham -– meaning Organisation for Liberating Syria — as the groups merged, consolidating al-Jolani’s power in northwest Syria’s Idlib province.
HTS later clashed with independent Islamist militants who opposed the merger, further emboldening al-Jolani and his group as the leading power in northwestern Syria, able to rule with an iron fist.
With his power consolidated, al-Jolani set in motion a transformation that few could have imagined. Replacing his military garb with shirt and trousers, he began calling for religious tolerance and pluralism.
He appealed to the Druze community in Idlib, which the Nusra Front had previously targeted, and visited the families of Kurds who were killed by Turkish-backed militias.
In 2021, al-Jolani had his first interview with an American journalist on PBS. Wearing a blazer, with his short hair gelled back, the now more soft-spoken HTS leader said that his group posed no threat to the West and that sanctions imposed against it were unjust.
“Yes, we have criticised Western policies,” he said. “But to wage a war against the United States or Europe from Syria, that’s not true. We didn’t say we wanted to fight.”
(Inputs from AP)
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