Qunfuz

This article was first published at Time magazine.

On November 10, President Donald Trump met Syria’s transitional president Ahmad al-Sharaa at the White House. The meeting was remarkable in many ways. It was the first time that a Syrian president had ever been hosted in the White House. Trump and al-Sharaa had briefly met before, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on May 14. That date was almost as remarkable as the meeting itself, because it was the twentieth anniversary to the day of Ahmad al-Sharaa’s arrest by American troops for membership of al-Qaeda in Iraq. When al-Sharaa later started fighting in Syria, the US not only declared him a terrorist, it put a $10 million bounty on his head.

The White House welcome looks like a new dawn for Syrian-American relations, given that the US has sanctioned Syria as a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ since 1979 – and that further sanctions were added by the Reagan, George W. Bush and Obama administrations.

And it’s certainly quite a turnaround for a former jihadist – though perhaps not as much as it first seems. Al-Sharaa was in prison for most of the Iraqi civil war, so he didn’t participate in attacks on Shia civilians. Released just as the Syrian Revolution was beginning in March 2011, he returned to Syria to establish a militia called Jabhat al-Nusra, which later transformed into Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). These organizations focused on fighting Assad and the Iranian militias that supported him. They never attacked the West, and they steered clear of the mass civilian casualty operations favoured by Iraqi jihadists.

Al-Sharaa broke definitively with ISIS in 2013, and has fought it continuously since 2014. In power, he aims for good relations with the world rather than apocalyptic war. And where ISIS fielded a morality police to impose a dress code, in al-Sharaa’s Damascus, women wear what they like.

The US had conducted multiple anti-ISIS operations in HTS-ruled Idlib, including the one that killed ISIS ‘caliph’ Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019. Though there was no direct coordination, HTS fighters did not attack the US special forces. Indirect understandings intensified into direct cooperation when al-Sharaa assumed power on December 8 last year, leading to at least eight joint operations. Now, after the meeting in the White House, Syria has announced its formal integration into the Global Coalition against ISIS. This will lead to still more joint action. Even more significantly, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – the Kurdish-led militia that controls large parts of northeastern Syria – can no longer claim to be the Coalition’s boots on the ground. This is a step towards Syria’s reunification under central authority.