Posts Tagged ‘Ahmad al-Sharaa’
The Power Shifts Changing the Middle East
I was pleased to be invited again to speak with Faisal al-Yafai on The Lede podcast, connected to the excellent New Lines Magazine. We spoke about Ahmad al-Sharaa’s visits to both Moscow and Washington DC, the role of ideology in today’s Middle East, and even Scottish independence! Raya Jalabi of the Financial Times tals first about the Iraqi militias and the regional changes since & October 2023.
Ahmad al-Sharaa in the White House
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.
Read the rest of this entry »Constructive Criticism
Here I am on the Eon podcast with some post-Suwayda constructive criticism for the Syrian transitional authorities.
The End of Eternity
A slightly edited version of this text was published at the Guardian.
The liberation of Syria was long hoped for, but unexpected. Over the last weeks, Syrians have experienced the full range of human emotions, with the exception of boredom.
On the first two Assad-free Fridays, millions of celebrants swelled the streets to chant and sing and speak formerly forbidden truths. There was a huge presence of women, who had been less visible in the years of war. Relatives are meeting again and assuaging their pain as hundreds of thousands return from the camps of exile. At the same time, millions are having to accept at last that their loved ones have been tortured to death. It now appears that most of the 130,000 lost in Assad’s prisons (a bare minimum figure) are dead. Dozens of mass graves have already been discovered.
Working hard to crawl out from under the corpse of one of the worst torture states in history, Syrians are now looking to the future.
A key factor in the final fall of the regime was the remarkable discipline and social intelligence shown by the HTS-led rebel coalition. When it became clear that neither Christians nor unveiled women were being harassed in liberated Aleppo, that there was no looting, and that Shia towns which had hosted murderous foreign militias were not subjected to revenge attacks, then tens of thousands of Assad soldiers felt safe enough to defect or desert.
But some still harbour deep suspicions of HTS leader Ahmad al-Sharaa, previously known as Abu Muhammad al-Jolani. He also has enormous charisma, which might ease the path to a new dictatorship. So far, however, the signs are more hopeful than that. Al-Sharaa is popular precisely for his non-dictatorial qualities.
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Qunfuz 