The head of the al-Qaeda offshoot Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group now running Syria, told Saudi media on Sunday that he expects it could take the jihadists up to three years to write a new constitution and four to hold elections.
Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly known by jihadi name “Abu Mohammed al-Jolani,” spoke to the Saudi outlet Al Arabiya as part of an ongoing media blitz intended to rebrand his group from a bloodthirsty terrorist gang to a respectable group of government reformers.
Sharaa himself has abandoned his war moniker and began wearing Western-style suits in public appearances rather than military fatigues, claiming HTS will help create an “inclusive” government to replace the one it toppled. He has long been identified globally as a terrorist, however, appearing to retain his designation in the United States as a specially designated global terrorist (SDGT) even after the administration of President Joe Biden lifted the $10 million reward for his capture previously offered last week.
Syria was in a state of war from 2011 to November, when HTS launched a surprise attack on Syria’s second-largest city, Aleppo, and rapidly took control. Prior to that, the regime of deposed dictator Bashar Assad had successfully quelled the war against him after the fall of the Islamic State in 2017, leaving active only some warfronts between other actors such as the Kurdish-led Syrian Defense Forces (SDF) and Turkish-backed militias in the north. The HTS attack on Aleppo exposed Assad’s army as weak after years of stalemate, leading to rapid conquests of other major cities until its terrorists arrived in Damascus, prompting Assad to flee in early December.
As the head of HTS, Sharaa is now the de facto leader of Syria. While Sharaa has insisted that the objective of overthrowing Assad was establishing an “inclusive,” presumably democratic government, he has not shied away from indicating that Syria would now be under an Islamist government, telling CNN before Assad fled the country that “people who fear Islamic governance either have seen incorrect implementations of it or do not understand it properly.”
An impending Islamist regime has been unwelcome in Damascus, where Assad ruled with an iron fist but did not systematically oppress Christians or ethnic minorities. Civilians in the capital have staged multiple protests calling for respect for Christians, respect for women’s rights, and opposing the imposition of radical sharia governance.
Speaking to Al-Arabiya, Sharaa indicated that he would dissolve HTS, as the objective of overthrowing Assad had been achieved and that it and other anti-Assad militias would be integrated into a refurbished Syrian national military. On elections, he suggested that holding any elections to replace himself and the HTS allies appointed to run the country at the moment would take up to four years. Syria needs a new constitution, he argued, and the return of millions of Syrians who fled the civil war in the past decade.
“Any sound elections will need to carry out a comprehensive population census,” he asserted. That would require time for refugees to return home and an analysis of attempts to document the thousands who Assad imprisoned, tortured, and disappeared into mass graves in the past decade.
The Emirati outlet The National observed that Sharaa had not offered any hard timetable for elections before this interview, nor had he previously indicated how long he believed it would take HTS to begin rebuilding the country.
“Syria needs a year for the citizen to feel radical changes in services,” he claimed.
On HTS, Sharaa affirmed, “certainly, the organisation will be dissolved, and this will be announced at the National Dialogue Conference. Syria will not be a source of disturbance to anyone.” He also suggested that the complex network of other militias in the country would either be dissolved or integrated into the Syrian military, specifically identifying the SDF as a promising candidate to become integrated into the armed forces.
The SDF is largely led by the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG/YPJ), Marxist anti-Islamist militias that allied with the United States to become the most instrumental forces to the fall of the Islamic State “caliphate” headquartered in northern Raqqa. While the war against Assad has ended, fighting between the SDF and the “Syrian National Army” (SNA), a Turkish proxy militia, continues, as the SNA launched a campaign to destroy the Kurdish presence along the Turkish border following the fall of Aleppo to HTS. The Turkish government has traditionally not supported HTS, preferring the easier-to-control SNA, but Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan publicly cheered the fall of Assad to HTS throughout the month.
Erdogan has supported the SNA’s war on the Kurds, claiming the SDF is indistinguishable from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a U.S.-designated Marxist terror organization. Last week, Erdogan promised SDF forces would be “buried in Syrian lands along with their weapons” if they did not give up Kurdish lands in Syria.
Al Arabiya challenged Sharaa on the contrast between his claims to building an “inclusive” government and the prevalence of Islamist clerics and HTS fighters amassing power following the Assad regime collapse. Sharaa excused the situation by claiming that the urgency of keeping the country afloat after Assad fled to Russia necessitated him relying on HTS leaders to seize major government powers.
“The current appointments were essential for the period and not intended to exclude anyone,” he claimed.
Sharaa also expressed hope to improve HTS’s relationship with the government of America. He expressed optimism that incoming President Donald Trump would cooperate with the new Syrian government by not addressing his group as terrorists.
“We hope the incoming Trump Administration will not follow the policy of its predecessor,” he was quoted as saying.
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