Syrian rebel leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani spoke with Sky News on Wednesday, his first Western media interview since his forces overthrew dictator Bashar Assad on Sunday.
Jolani continued to insist his forces have abandoned terrorism and wish only to build a more free and inclusive Syria – a pledge met by skepticism from those aware of his past as an al-Qaeda commander.
Jolani began the interview by saying he now wishes to be known by his birth name, Ahmed al-Sharaa, because he has ostensibly renounced his terrorist past. He changed his name about 20 years ago when he abandoned his study of medicine, walked away from his well-heeled family in Damascus, and embraced jihadi ideology. His terrorist alias, “al-Jolani,” is a reference to the Golan Heights, which have been held by Israel since Syria lost them in the 1967 Six-Day War.
Jolani became involved with al-Qaeda when he journeyed to Iraq to commit terrorist attacks against American soldiers. When he returned to Syria after a few years’ imprisonment in Iraq, he joined the Syrian civil war as head of al-Qaeda’s franchise, Jabhat al-Nusra or the “Nusra Front.”
The Nusra Front drifted away from al-Qaeda and rebranded itself as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a transformation intended to emphasize that the group was devoted to overthrowing the Assad regime rather than participating in global terrorism.
The decisive moment in that transformation reportedly arrived when Jolani’s boss in al-Qaeda, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, created the Islamic State and unilaterally declared the Nusra Front would be part of it. Jolani and those loyal to him resisted, seeking to create a reputation for themselves as more focused and pragmatic than the wild-eyed savages of ISIS.
In Jolani’s telling, he severed ties with al-Qaeda in 2016 in a bid to become more respectable to both Syrian civilians and the outside world. It did not really work, as most of the Western world, including the United States, still regards HTS as a terrorist organization. Jolani himself was designated as a terrorist by the United States in 2013, and the Trump administration put a $10 million bounty on his head in 2018.
In 2017, HTS established a civilian arm called the “Syrian Salvation Government” (SG), styled as a revolutionary government-in-waiting, with its own officials and ministries. Even this play for respectability was half-hearted at best, as the ersatz government is nakedly Islamist in character, with a ruling religious council and strict sharia law.
HTS has praised the Afghan Taliban as its model for Islamist government, which is not a great strategy for winning over Western skeptics. Syrian critics of HTS said its rule over occupied territories over the past year was little different from Assad’s, complete with authoritarian edicts and brutal crackdowns on dissent. HTS has dungeons filled with dissidents, just like the dictator it overthrew.
Jolani now presents himself as the leader of a new “moderate jihad” movement, committed to Islamist rule but ostensibly willing to respect the rights of Syria’s many religious minorities. He said his focus is now on repairing damage from the Syrian civil war and organizing an effective government in Damascus.
“The country will be rebuilt,” he told Sky News on Wednesday.
Jolani said it was “unnecessary” for Western leaders to fear his group.
“The fear was from the presence of the regime. The country is moving towards development and reconstruction. It’s going towards stability,” he said.
“The source of our fears was from the Iranian militias, Hezbollah and the regime which committed the massacres we are seeing today, so their removal is the solution for Syria. The current situation won’t allow for a return to panic,” he said.
“People are exhausted from war, so the country isn’t ready for another one, and it’s not going to get into another one,” he promised.
In a public appearance at the Damascus mosque he attended in his youth, Jolani blamed Syria’s problems on the “corruption and greed” of the Assad dynasty, which only remained in power with assistance from “colonizers” like Russia and Iran. Jolani painted the overthrow of Assad as a victory for Syrian independence over outside forces.
Analyst Hussain Abdul-Hussain of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy told the UK Guardian on Tuesday that Jolani has been “saying all the right things,” and Syrians can only hope he “is the guy he says he is.”
“But the country is a shambles. There is no economy, no money. There is crime, poverty, millions of refugees who want to come back. Now everyone is happy, but sooner or later, things are going to get real and my fear is that he turns back to his Islam,” he said.
“The challenges are going to be massive, and he does have an authoritarian streak,” said Shiraz Maher, an expert on Islamist extremism at King’s College London.
Maher felt some of the rebranding done by Jolani and HTS might have been a serious effort to develop a more “pragmatic ideology,” but HTS probably wasn’t kidding when it pointed to the Taliban as its model for an Islamist state.
“Is he creating a secular state? I don’t think so. My guess is that it is going to be Taliban-lite in terms of what he is going to implement,” Maher predicted.