One summer morning in 2021 a debonair-looking man approached the crossing point into rebel-held Syria. As he left Turkey behind, Khaled al-Ahmed felt his chest tighten. He was a member of the Alawite sect, a minority group from which the Assad dynasty, which had ruled Syria for 50 years, was drawn. Until 2018 he had been a close adviser to Bashar al-Assad, the country’s president. Now he was about to enter territory controlled by Sunni Islamist rebels, many of whom would have been happy to see people like him executed.
Guards waved him across into a no-man’s-land, where men in balaclavas were waiting in black SUVs to escort him to his destination. There was a cursory check of credentials. Then they sped past teeming refugee camps to a multi-storey concrete house on the outskirts of Idlib, a city which served as the headquarters for Syria’s most powerful Islamist militia. The group’s leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa – Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, as he called himself then – was expecting him.
Little was known about al-Sharaa in those days, but he did have a reputation for power games. He frequently kept visitors waiting – people assumed it was to underscore his own importance. But when the Alawite man entered his command centre, al-Sharaa walked straight up to him and kissed him three times on the cheeks – for al-Ahmed was an old childhood friend.
As adults they had taken very different paths. Al-Ahmed rose to a prominent position in the presidential palace overlooking Damascus; al-Sharaa plotted suicide-bomb operations against the regime occupying it. By the time of their meeting in 2021, Syria’s civil war had dragged on for ten years and claimed around half a million lives. Both sides had committed atrocities – though the regime’s share was far greater – and were bitter and hardened in their beliefs. Many of al-Sharaa’s comrades were steeped in the intolerant dogma of al-Qaeda, which sees all versions of Islam bar its own as heretical.
Al-Sharaa clasped his old schoolfriend tightly, calling him “akhi” and “habibi” – my brother, my mate. “He welcomed me as a friend, not an Alawite,” said al-Ahmed. “It was a reunion.”
Al-Ahmed had asked Turkish intermediaries to put him in touch with the rebel commander because he believed the regime was on its last legs. Bankrupted by civil war, Assad had little revenue left except what he could generate from the illicit sale of captagon, an amphetamine, and was running out of businessmen to shake down. The childhood connection offered al-Ahmed a chance to have some influence on what came next. He didn’t want to wait until Islamist fighters were at the gates of Alawite towns before putting out feelers.
“His compass is power. He’s managed to survive because he had no ideology”
The two men spent the entire day in al-Sharaa’s headquarters in Idlib, eating shawarma, reminiscing about their childhood and talking about post-Assad scenarios. Al-Sharaa was confident of victory: he showed al-Ahmed architectural plans he had commissioned for the rebuilding of Damascus. When he left, al-Ahmed promised to keep talking to people to map out a possible future for Syria. His initial idea was some kind of federalism, with al-Sharaa in Idlib and a new order in Damascus.
Three years on from that meeting, the erstwhile jihadist is the one sitting in the People’s Palace above Damascus. Assad fell in December 2024; shortly afterwards al-Sharaa declared himself interim president. No one is quite sure what to make of him. His secret friendship with a former regime insider, which has not previously been reported, is a perfect example of the contradictions that make al-Sharaa either refreshingly pragmatic or profoundly untrustworthy, depending on whom you talk to.
Al-Sharaa has a talent for persuading interlocutors of all stripes that he is on their side. Jihadists and liberals alike have left meetings with him convinced he is one of their own. (“Capitalist to the core,” said an oilman who saw him recently in Damascus.)
Scouring his past for clues about who he really is only throws up more questions. Throughout his career he has changed name and identity as often as he has changed allegiance, pulling the wool over the eyes of intelligence agencies and jihadist leaders alike. He was born Ahmed al-Sharaa, but has also been called Osama al-Absi al-Wahdi and Adnan Ali al-Haj, as well as his best-known moniker, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani. Until 2013 only two other jihadists knew his real name.
Hajar al-Aswad, a Damascus suburb destroyed by the regime (middle)
The one constant has been his flexibility – a quality that helped him emerge as the last man standing after a decade of internecine fighting among Syria’s Islamist rebel factions. “I don’t think he has a particular ideology – his compass is power,” said Aaron Zelin, an expert in jihadism. “He’s managed to survive because he had no ideology.”
But Syrians are growing impatient for al-Sharaa to commit himself to something. A vast, war-ravaged country is teeming with anxious factions of different religious backgrounds, many of them armed. His only formal mandate at the moment is a performative and partial show of allegiance from other rebel groups. To establish authority he is going to have to cut deals, which will inevitably mean some people feel let down.
Foreign dignitaries are pressing him to hold elections as soon as possible and guarantee representation for Alawites, Christians and other minorities. His jihadist allies see democracy as sinful and have no desire to share power. How al-Sharaa navigates these competing claims will shape the future of the Middle East. For many Syrians the fear is not just that he might side with the jihadists, but that more violence and chaos will erupt if he mismanages the political process. He has survived until now by being a chameleon, shifting from one identity to another: denim-wearing youth, turbaned jihadist, nationalist rebel in military fatigues. If al-Sharaa doesn’t show himself capable of real leadership then his most recent incarnation, that of a besuited statesman, could be his last.
Unlike most Syrian rebels, al-Sharaa spent his formative years in the belly of the regime. His father, Hussein, came from a prominent tribal family in the Golan, a rural province in the south of the country. In 1967 Israel captured the Golan and drove out its local population. The al-Sharaas lost their olive groves and were among the thousands forced to move to sprawling shanty towns on the southern outskirts of Damascus.
A neighbour remembered al-Sharaa as a soft-spoken and painfully shy teenager. “You’d get into the lift and ask how his parents were. And he’d stare at his shoes”
Reeling from humiliation at the hands of Israel and its Western backers, Hussein al-Sharaa became increasingly curious about Arab nationalism, an anti-colonial movement. Members of a pan-Arab political party had just seized power in Syria, and would do so a few years later in Iraq. It had the same name in both countries: the Baath.
Though officially brothers in Baathism, the Iraqi and Syrian regimes were actually very different and frequently at odds. Iraq was a majority-Shia country ruled by Sunnis; Syria a majority-Sunni country ruled by Alawites, who adhere to an offshoot of Shiism. Hussein al-Sharaa identified more with the Iraqi version of Baathism. He “loved Saddam Hussein”, a family acquaintance recalled, seeing him as a defender of the Sunni cause against foreign invasions. Supporting the wrong kind of Arab nationalism was dangerous in Hafez al-Assad’s Syria. After being briefly arrested for his political activities Hussein fled, first to Jordan and then Baghdad, where he studied economics. Eventually he relocated to Saudi Arabia, and landed a job in its oil ministry. Ahmed was born in Riyadh in 1982 and lived there until he was six.
In 1988 Hussein al-Sharaa sent his family back to Damascus, and worked on rehabilitating his own relations with the regime from afar. He was by then a distinguished economist, and could offer valuable know-how about how to run a modern oil ministry. He was eventually given a job as an adviser to Syria’s then prime minister. The family of five moved to Mezze East Villas, a swanky residential estate in central Damascus where the regime housed its apparatchiks, colonels and spooks.
After years of diplomatic isolation and the straitjacket of Hafez al-Assad’s command economy, Damascus in the 1990s was pretty drab, even for the elite. But al-Sharaa went to a good school, where Sunnis, Alawites and Christians all played football and computer games together. They also chased girls, driving them up to the heights of Mount Qasioun to canoodle while Damascus twinkled below.
Al-Sharaa (above) has been the de facto leader of Syria since dictator Bashar al-Assad fled the presidential palace (top) in December 2024
Al-Sharaa himself didn’t quite fit into this cosmopolitan environment. His parents had never lost their rural gutturals. And the family still bore the ignominy of being nazih – displaced (the Arabic word contains the connotation that such people were somehow to blame for losing their homes). “He felt bad about being from the Golan,” recalled one classmate. The loss seems to have haunted him into adulthood – Jolani, his most famous nom de guerre, literally means “from the Golan”.
A neighbour remembered al-Sharaa as a soft-spoken and painfully shy teenager. “You’d get into the lift and ask how his parents were. And he’d stare at his shoes.” One thuggish character in his neighbourhood took pleasure in taunting al-Sharaa. (The bully went on to become a senior figure in Assad’s regime, and was forced to flee to Beirut when al-Sharaa seized control of Damascus. “Perhaps I’m to blame,” he mused when we met over a bottle of Lebanese rosé this January. “He was afraid of me.”)
One close friend he did have was Khaled al-Ahmed, the Alawite who came to see him in 2021. The two boys both felt stultified by their immediate environment, and would occasionally drive to Lebanon to get away from it all, al-Ahmed at the wheel of his white Mercedes.
Al-Sharaa’s wariness of the offspring of apparatchiks may have been compounded by the fact that his father was falling out with the regime again. In 1999 Hussein al-Sharaa left his government job and opened a small firm of estate agents, as well as a mini-supermarket.
The following summer Hafez al-Assad died and was succeeded by his son, Bashar, a gangly, awkward eye doctor. There followed a brief period, called the Damascus Spring, when intellectuals felt free enough to gather in cafés and talk about reform. Hussein al-Sharaa was a prominent participant in these salons and one of the signatories of a famous document calling for elections.
One of the local Islamists who welcomed al-Sharaa to Syria recalls him flashing wads of money. When asked what it was for, he replied: “mufachchach” – suicide-bombing
Any hope was quickly snuffed out, however. The Baathist elite talked about socialism and pan-Arab unity, but in practice ran a clannish kleptocracy in which those who dared publicly disagree with the system faced the mukhabarat – the Stasi-trained state security services. Bashar introduced some economic reforms but kept the fundamentals of the system in place. As the elite developed a taste for consumer goods, the cronyism got worse. Some afternoons al-Sharaa helped his father at his estate agency, finding flats for regime officials, who turned up in their flash cars. He hated it.
He found respite in the local mosque. Thanks to his time in Saudi Arabia he had already received some religious education, and now plunged more deeply into it. According to one fellow-worshipper he became so pious he once reprimanded the local imam for not donning his white cap before prayers.
His religious awakening was quickly followed by a political one. In 1982, the year al-Sharaa was born, there had been a huge uprising against Hafez al-Assad, led by Sunni Islamists affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. The crackdown was savage. Thousands were killed by the regime’s warplanes and mortar fire in the city of Hama. For decades afterwards anyone remotely suspected of dissent was arrested and often tortured (many Syrians who were politically active at that time are missing teeth, which were shattered by the mukhabarat’s electrodes). Sunni piety was seen as the mark of a troublemaker. “Do you pray?” interrogators would ask before even establishing a suspect’s name.
By the turn of the 21st century there was a deep, if mostly suppressed, feeling of resentment among many Syrian Sunnis. A Sunni Islamist revival was meanwhile sweeping the Arab world, as the Arab nationalism which had inspired Hussein’s generation looked increasingly hollow. When a Palestinian uprising against Israel broke out in 2000, the secular groups played second fiddle to Islamist militants, such as Hamas.
The Assad regime was well aware that Syria’s Sunni mosques could become breeding grounds for dissent, and sought to keep a firm grip on them. Regime spies vetted the imams and penetrated the religious scene so thoroughly that Koranic study circles were known as “Assad centres”.
Assad wanted to inspire admiration as well as fear in Syria’s Sunnis. In 2001, hoping to burnish his credentials as an Arab hero, he invited Khaled Meshal, Hamas’s political leader, to take refuge in Damascus. Meshal settled not far from al-Sharaa’s home. During Friday prayers at his local mosque the Hamas leader was allowed to stand directly behind the imam, while his henchmen occupied the front row.
The new Syrian flag hangs over a gate to the old city of Damascus (top). Posters in Marjeh Square bear the faces of those who disappeared under the Assad regime (above)
Meshal delivered impassioned lectures about the uprising in various mosques and classrooms in Damascus, some of which were attended by al-Sharaa. The atmosphere in al-Sharaa’s mosque grew even more heated after 9/11. According to his fellow worshippers, al-Sharaa was captivated by the idea that an Islamist had humbled a superpower. Osama bin Laden adhered to a particularly austere form of Sunni Islam known as Salafism. Al-Sharaa copied the Salafist look of his new hero, sporting a beard (wispy, at first), a white cap and white tunic cut above the ankles.
This interest in Salafi jihadism might have been a short-lived flirtation had America not decided to invade Iraq in 2003. In mosques like al-Sharaa’s, the call went out to the faithful to go and resist the occupiers.
Assad saw an opportunity to direct the passions of his own Sunni malcontents outside Syria’s borders, while also checking America’s sudden interest in remaking the Middle East. Assef Shawkat, his intelligence chief (and brother-in-law) oversaw a scheme to ferry jihadists into Iraq on buses.
At the time al-Sharaa was doing a media-studies course at a second-rate university, according to an old acquaintance, much to his erudite father’s chagrin. One day he disappeared. His parents toured the local mukhabarat offices, the prison and the mosque seeking information. No one told them anything. Much later they learnt that he had boarded one of Shawkat’s buses.
Saddam Hussein welcomed the new arrivals who had come to help him battle the “crusaders”, and marched them through the streets dressed in white funeral shrouds and suicide-vests. But when America attacked, his regime fell with little resistance. Al-Sharaa seems to have panicked and returned to Syria not long after he arrived in Iraq.
It would be wrong to see him as a hardened jihadist at this point. Volunteering in a foreign struggle had historically been a rite of passage for Islamist youth, a bit like a gap year. Other congregants from the mosque appear to have travelled with him.
“We got into bed with the devil and called him a saviour,” said one NGO staffer
But Hussein al-Sharaa, still a staunch secularist, was appalled by his son’s antics and chucked him out of the family home. Al-Sharaa went to live with his mother’s relatives on the outskirts of southern Damascus, a more down-at-heel neighbourhood filled with families who had been displaced by Israeli invasions.
More extreme forms of Islamism were starting to gain appeal in places like these, and when young men returned from Iraq after fighting for jihadist groups it accelerated the process. It didn’t take Assad long to start regretting his unorthodox travel scheme.
In November 2003, the mukhabarat picked up al-Sharaa and his Salafist friends. Nearly all of them were sent to Saidnaya prison, the regime’s main torture chamber. But al-Sharaa somehow managed to avoid this fate. “He said he didn’t know anything about politics or jihadism,” said Hossam Jazmati, a Syrian writer who edited Hussein al-Sharaa’s books. He was released without charge – the first of many lucky escapes from the clutches of various intelligence agencies.
Al-Sharaa’s friends say he was at risk of being re-arrested in Syria, and so went back to Iraq. Resistance to the American occupation was still in its infancy, but Mosul was already home to several groups. Al-Sharaa joined one of the less extreme ones. He developed a reputation as an effective bombmaker, fashioning copper-lined charges that could pierce tank armour. He also perfected his Iraqi accent, which other Arabs find notoriously difficult. He is said to have changed names each time he entered a new province. Abu Muhammad al-Jolani was the one that stuck.
Shortly after al-Sharaa’s return, Mosul’s resistance groups decided to affiliate themselves with the most powerful militant force around: al-Qaeda. The leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Palestinian-Jordanian who thought the way to oust the Americans was to foment civil war and render Iraq ungovernable. Aid workers were beheaded. Bombs exploded in Shia shrines and marketplaces across central and southern Iraq, killing hundreds.
A fellow Syrian in al-Sharaa’s resistance group told me that the young bombmaker was never comfortable with al-Zarqawi’s excesses. According to this source, al-Sharaa actually threatened to kill anyone who harmed the Yazidis, an ancient Iraqi sect denounced as devil-worshippers by the jihadists.
A girl in the courtyard of the Umayyad mosque poses with an AK-47 belonging to a member of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, al-Sharaa’s militia (top). Souvenirs printed with the new Syrian flag are sold in central Damascus (above)
Even allowing for his allies’ spin, al-Sharaa doesn’t seem to have been temperamentally motivated by the same sectarian hatred as al-Zarqawi. But he does not seem to have vocally opposed it either: by the end of 2004 he had become al-Zarqawi’s deputy, according to Iraqi intelligence.
In 2006 al-Sharaa was picked up by American forces while planting explosives on a road outside Mosul. In another stunning feat of persuasion, he convinced them (and his Iraqi jailers) that he was a local, speaking in fluent dialect. This made a big difference to how he was treated – he was spared the camps for foreign fighters, where suspected jihadis were shackled in isolation.
Al-Sharaa was treated as part of the local resistance, and held alongside Iraqis. The Americans moved him from jail to jail for several years. He picked up contacts and English vocabulary along the way. For a while he was in Abu Ghraib, the notorious prison outside Baghdad where inmates were photographed stacked naked in blindfolds. At another point he was in Bucca, an American-run camp which held several men who would go on to become major players in the jihadist scene, including Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the future head of Islamic State (IS).
At the start of 2011 America was looking to wind down its presence in Iraq, and released a large number of fighters from its prisons there, al-Sharaa included. The ex-convicts set about turning al-Qaeda into a new group, Islamic State in Iraq, the precursor to IS. What no one knew was that the country next door was about to explode.
In February 2011 a group of schoolchildren in southern Syria wrote some graffiti on a wall that would change the course of history. Pro-democracy protesters had just toppled the authoritarian rulers of Egypt and Tunisia. Many believed it couldn’t happen in Syria, because its regime was so much more brutal. But the children of Daraa taunted their ophthalmologist dictator. “It’s your turn next, doctor,” they wrote. When the security services arrested and tortured the children, a popular uprising erupted.
His committee for the spoils of war became the general directorate for housing affairs
Al-Sharaa feared he was missing out. At first the revolt was led by writers, politicians and activists, many of them secular. Al-Sharaa was determined to be the first jihadist to seize the agenda. He drafted a 30-page proposal for an Islamic State in Iraq franchise in Syria, called Jabhat al-Nusra (Victory Front) and sent it to al-Baghdadi through intermediaries. When the pair finally met, al-Sharaa convinced al-Baghdadi that his priority should be al-Sham, the name given to Syria by the first caliphs in the seventh century.
Al-Baghdadi was sold. That summer al-Sharaa set out with a small group of six men, all carrying fake IDs and wearing suicide-belts in case they were caught. The Islamic State leader had given al-Sharaa’s scouting party $50,000 to cover expenses for six months, which was about half his annual budget. They drove up the Euphrates to al-Shuheel, a village in eastern Syria that was becoming a haven for Islamists and tribesmen fleeing Assad’s tanks.
Some members of the Syrian opposition had started to pick up weapons by then, but there was no organised military resistance. In al-Shuheel, the families of protesters who had been gunned down in the streets wanted revenge; al-Sharaa’s outfit seemed to offer it. One of the local Islamists who welcomed the group recalls al-Sharaa flashing wads of money. When asked what it was for, al-Sharaa replied: “mufachchach” – suicide-bombing. Next he bought dynamite, which was sold on the local market for quarrying stone.
Over the following months, al-Sharaa travelled around Syria’s cities teaching rebels how to assemble bombs. The first operation occurred on December 23rd 2011. Two women drove their cars into government buildings in the capital. A few weeks later two more suicide-bombers struck the capital and Aleppo, Syria’s second city. Scores were killed. On January 23rd 2012, someone from Jabhat al-Nusra posted a video on a jihadi forum announcing the group’s existence, identifying its leader (using al-Sharaa’s moniker at the time, al-Jolani) and claiming responsibility for the attacks. The video purported to show one of the suicide-bombers behind them delivering his pre-operation message. “Jihad is now in your country,” he warned.
Syrian refugees reunite with their loved ones after years in exile (top and above). A young girl steps on a likeness of Hafez al-Assad, former president of Syria and Bashar al-Assad’s father (middle)
Over the following six months, an average of one suicide-bomb a week exploded in Syria’s cities. Jabhat al-Nusra claimed more than half of them. Most targeted the regime’s security infrastructure. “There’s no direct evidence that [al-Sharaa’s] group sent car bombs to civilian areas,” said Haid al-Haid, a Syria expert at Chatham House, a think-tank. But hundreds of civilians were killed as collateral damage in attacks on buildings frequented by security personnel, which included a restaurant.
Hizbullah, the first Islamist group to deploy suicide-bombers, used to spend years grooming martyrs, dangling the promise of a better afterlife. Hamas is said to have taken months. Al-Sharaa is said to have prided himself on converting novices to killers in a matter of weeks. Our substitute for warplanes, he explained.
He certainly inflicted more damage on the regime than conventional armed groups. Assad maintained control of his cities, but Jabhat al-Nusra spread through the countryside. (The regime’s unexpected amnesty for hundreds of jihadists shortly after the uprising broke out provided a pool of willing recruits.)
At first, many Syrians were suspicious of the jihadists in their midst, and blamed them for hijacking what had begun as a peaceful protest movement. But as the regime’s savagery increased, with barrel bombs dropped and chemical weapons unleashed, the militants’ popularity grew. The Friday after America formally designated the leader of al-Nusra a terrorist in December 2012, worshippers chanted the name al-Jolani in mosques.
Large tracts of land began slipping out of the regime’s hands. No one knew the real identity of the leader associated with the bloody rebel operations. Some believed al-Jolani was a fiction invented by the regime, in order to discredit the revolution. Al-Sharaa’s own family, who were still living in the apparatchik complex, had no idea he was the leader of al-Nusra. Until the end of 2013 they assumed he was dead, but then in December he gave an interview to Al Jazeera, a Qatari network. Al-Sharaa had his back to the camera, and continued to use his nom de guerre, but those who knew him immediately recognised the gentle voice.
According to his childhood friend, al-Sharaa had been prepared to fight for a year. “He didn’t expect such a rapid collapse”
The interview was al-Sharaa’s first step into the limelight. Al-Nusra had kidnapped aid workers and foreign journalists, but Al Jazeera’s interviewer threw him softballs and addressed him as al-Fatih, the conqueror. Al-Nusra began to thrive, its revenues boosted by the loot of conquered territories, especially the oilfields in eastern Syria.
In Mosul, al-Baghdadi received reports that al-Sharaa was acting as if he were a leader in his own right, not a subordinate. He summoned his underling for an audience. Al-Sharaa went to Mosul, delivering a tribute of $2m, and reassured his boss with expressions of fealty before returning to Syria. But al-Baghdadi felt he was entitled to more. In 2013 he sent his forces into Syria to seize the oilfields from al-Nusra, and issued an audio message announcing that al-Sharaa’s group had been dissolved and merged into his new entity, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (which came to be known simply as “Islamic State” or IS). Al-Sharaa quickly retaliated. He denounced al-Baghdadi’s group and declared he was switching allegiance directly to al-Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri – to whom this came as news. The two most powerful warlords in the Arab jihadist world were now at each other’s throats; only one of them would survive.
At first, it wasn’t much of a contest. IS fighters chucked al-Nusra out of the territories it controlled in southern and eastern Syria, leaving them only with Idlib. Then, in June 2014, al-Baghdadi captured Mosul, the second-biggest city in Iraq. He proclaimed himself ruler of a “caliphate” of 8m people spanning Iraq and Syria. Raqqa, on the north bank of the Syrian Euphrates, was its capital. Most of the jihadists in Syria flocked to him. According to one rebel leader, al-Shaara was left to fight the IS advance in the east with just a handful of troops. His group eventually escaped in a single Toyota pick-up truck.
He still had Idlib, however, and it was here that he undertook his extraordinary journey from suicide-bomb instructor to statesman-in-waiting. His first priority was to stem the haemorrhaging of his support among jihadist fighters. In May 2015 he gave another interview to Al Jazeera in which he reaffirmed his loyalty to al-Qaeda. He also tried to carve out a distinct identity for his project, to differentiate it from al-Baghdadi’s. Islamism and sharia (Islamic law) were still at the fore, but with a focus on Syria, rather than the global fight against the West. Most foreign fighters stayed with al-Baghdadi, but al-Sharaa managed to hang on to 800 Jordanians and around 1,500 Uzbeks and Uyghurs.
The Syrian pound has lost 99% of its value since 2011, so currency exchanges offer plastic bags full of notes (above). “I am the dog”, reads graffiti scrawled across a mosaic of Bashar al-Assad on the road to Damascus (middle)
Diminished as they were, his forces gained a reputation for discipline. Unlike other rebels, they were well paid and seldom demanded bribes. According to a UN official who negotiated humanitarian access with them, al-Sharaa’s commanders were also known for being true to their word. “Unlike the others, we trusted their ‘yes’,” said the official.
His territory represented a haven, of sorts, for other Syrians. With most of the rest of the country carved up by the murderous regimes of Assad and al-Baghdadi, Idlib was one place that rebel fighters not affiliated with IS could feel relatively safe. In return for offering them shelter, al-Sharaa secured a share – estimated by one local observer to be 20% – of the money and arms they received from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey.
These fighters needed somewhere to stay, so the 3,000 Christians who had previously lived in Idlib’s city centre were expelled from their homes by al-Nusra’s committee for the spoils of war. Other symbols of Christianity in the city were extinguished. Christmas was banned. The city’s churches were closed and the copper crucifixes adorning their doors removed. A 1,500-year-old mosaic depicting a biblical scene was ripped from the wall of a church. Al-Sharaa’s representatives would later blame rogue officials for these desecrations, though they seem to have had fewer qualms about taking responsibility for the expulsion of the city’s small Alawite population. According to a UN official, al-Sharaa’s henchmen routinely singled out Alawite truckdrivers attempting to enter Idlib at checkpoints, cut off their fingers and toes, and told them to go back the way they came.
Al-Sharaa gave a great deal of latitude to the fanatics who didn’t defect to IS. One lieutenant, Shadi al-Waisi – his future justice minister – conducted a sharia execution in public, forcing a woman accused of prostitution to kneel at a roadside before being shot. Al-Sharaa gave a Tunisian fighter control of several villages inhabited by the Druze, another minority sect. The fighter went on a shooting spree, killing 20.
Shopkeepers and taxi drivers took down Assad’s portrait. Some looked for a picture of al-Sharaa with which to replace it, but none was available
By 2016 the diverse forces that had scrambled to beat back IS were prevailing. Russia had entered the Syrian war at the end of the previous year, and Raqqa was being bombarded by its planes. Once IS was finished, Idlib seemed like it would be next, possibly with American planes, too (Brett McGurk, an American envoy, would later describe the province ominously as “the largest al-Qaeda safe haven since 9/11”). The al-Qaeda affiliation that al-Sharaa had embraced when he needed to retain jihadi support started to look like a millstone.
So he pulled off his next transformation. In July 2016 he sent a video to Al Jazeera in which he spoke directly into the camera, revealing his face for the first time, and announced that Jabhat al-Nusra was no longer part of al-Qaeda. A few months later he declared that his organisation was to be given a blander name, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant.
In July 2017 he turned his weapons on the last significant rebel group in Idlib that wasn’t his, and kicked them out of their bases on the Turkish border. Zealots were appalled by his disloyalty to al-Qaeda but from then on, give or take some flare-ups, he would be the supreme leader of the rebellion in north-western Syria. At the end of 2017 he sought to cement his rule, announcing the formation of a kind of administration-in-waiting, which he called a “Salvation government”.
Despite its grand name, al-Sharaa’s administration tended to prioritise the accumulation of power – an armed security force, taxation, customs controls – over the provision of public services. Some foreign NGOs providing aid in Idlib said that they couldn’t work under the “toxic” controls he imposed, but al-Sharaa succeeded in farming out welfare to others. He left the tribes to administer justice in cases in which he had no direct interest.
Now that he controlled the border with Turkey, the rest of the world needed to talk to him. Idlib held nearly 2m refugees from other parts of Syria and the West was keen to get aid to them, not least to stop more of them crossing the border and heading for Europe. This could only happen with al-Sharaa’s co-operation. Officially, he was an enemy of America with a $10m bounty on his head. “Stop this terrorist”, read posters distributed by the State Department. In practice he had a productive relationship with Western and other foreign powers.
The old Syrian flag still adorns the checkpoint to an army base just outside Damascus (top)
He detained wanted jihadists, particularly European fighters. Rumour had it that he let Western spooks interrogate them in his jails. His forces did not attack the American commandos who flew by helicopter in October 2019 to eliminate al-Baghdadi, who, thinking no one would guess to look for him in the land of his rival, was hiding in the countryside outside Idlib. “They had orders to hold fire,” said a Syrian military commander who was nearby at the time of the assassination. Al-Sharaa has always denied co-operating with any foreign intelligence agency, though after Assad fell, the head of Turkish intelligence admitted to working with HTS.
He agreed to let Russian and Turkish troops patrol the edges of his territory as part of an agreement to freeze the lines of the conflict. Diehards in his ranks saw this as a shameful capitulation, but it helped stave off a Russian-backed offensive on Idlib by the Assad regime. So many of al-Sharaa’s jihadist rivals were eliminated by drones that some Syrians started to speculate that al-Sharaa was in fact working with American intelligence. When other rebels passed on details of his whereabouts to Western spies they were aghast by the indifference they met.
Some Western diplomats and mediators came to see al-Sharaa as a contact to be cultivated, and even moulded. He was crucial to the stability of northern Syria, and had influence over a swathe of the global jihadist movement. One of those who trooped to Idlib to meet him was Jonathan Powell, formerly Britain’s chief negotiator on Northern Ireland, who was then running a conflict-resolution NGO. According to diplomatic insiders, some of these foreign interlocutors explained the kind of steps al-Sharaa would need to take to have a chance of removing his name from various international blacklists. Not everyone in the conflict-resolution world thought it was right to try to work with someone as blood-soaked as al-Sharaa. “We got into bed with the devil and called him a saviour,” said a staffer from one NGO.
It’s not clear what role such back-channel discussions played in his policies, but Idlib did start to look less like a religious dictatorship. In 2021 al-Sharaa replaced the hisba (the morality police) with a directorate of general security, and relaxed the requirement on shops to close for midday prayers. People accused of a crime were allowed to hire a lawyer. His committee for the spoils of war became the general directorate for housing affairs.
Three times during our interview he mentioned his clothes. “You didn’t comment on my outfit,” he joked
Although minorities were still banned from government posts, al-Sharaa’s treatment of them softened. He promised to protect the Druze in Syria. (The Tunisian who killed so many of them was himself killed in a Western drone strike.) He restored a church on the periphery of his emirate; Qatar’s media outlets were on hand to broadcast the return of its Christians to prayer.
Under al-Sharaa’s watch, the province’s shabby capital mushroomed into a bustling city, with fairgrounds, arts centres and a university. Foreign aid poured in. Turkey connected the province to its grid, providing round-the-clock electricity while lights in the capital flickered on for just two hours a day. The dollar and the Turkish lira replaced the plummeting Syrian pound. Housing estates and industrial zones sprouted on hilltops; glitzy malls and showrooms for luxury SUVs sprang up on the roadsides. Farmers upgraded their irrigation systems and bought new combine harvesters. Idlib developed its own mobile-phone network using a European operator, and adopted Luxembourg’s dialling code. By some measures it was the most prosperous place in the country (admittedly, this was a low bar).
Yet there was little about al-Sharaa’s rule of Idlib, even in its more reformist phase, to give comfort to democrats. He had some institutions of government, such as a Shura council, but in practice one man “singlehandedly ran the entire thing”, said a Syrian who administered development projects under his rule. Ministers watched by men in the shadows implemented his orders. No women held political office.
Critics were detained. “Almost every day of every week, I had to listen to the screams of torture just a few metres away from me,” said Bilal Abdul Kareem, an American Islamist vlogger who was arrested in 2020 for “publishing and promoting lies”. The UN says people in Idlib were executed for apostasy and adultery as recently as 2020.
For all his brutality and hunger for power, al-Sharaa did not rule with the same narcissism and cruelty as the Assads. His cells contained dozens of political prisoners, not tens of thousands. His portrait was nowhere to be seen. For almost a year before his advance on Damascus, jihadists marched down the streets of Idlib city chanting “killer of the mujahideen!” and calling for his downfall. None of them were killed. When I visited a town near the Turkish border in December, I saw graffiti cursing al-Sharaa as a “traitor”. It had been allowed to stay there for months.
By 2024 al-Sharaa sensed the moment was ripe to expand his domain. Assad depended utterly on military backing from Russia and Iran, which were now weakened by their own wars. In April al-Sharaa summoned representatives from the various rebel militias for a meeting. Some 150 men crammed into a room with huge white padded armchairs. The regime’s strength was waning. Prepare for the offensive, he told them.
Turkey was supposed to guarantee that al-Sharaa’s forces stayed within their lines. But the Turks were getting fed up with Assad. They were trying to negotiate a resumption of diplomatic relations with Syria, and the return of some of the 3m refugees in Turkey. Assad was dragging his feet. At some point towards the end of 2024, the frustrated Turks gave al-Sharaa the green light to take Aleppo.
When the offensive began al-Sharaa turned to al-Ahmed, his old childhood friend, to ease his path. Al-Ahmed was clever, charming and articulate. A decade earlier, he had helped arrange the terms for the safe passage of rebels from towns and cities under government siege. He was seen by many in the opposition as a scoundrel, complicit in the regime’s starvation tactics. But he was ideally placed to act as a negotiating channel with Assad’s worried security establishment.
Al-Ahmed told 1843 magazine that he conveyed a message to senior commanders in Aleppo: al-Sharaa’s troops would not pursue them if they retreated. The city quickly fell. Amid the chaos, al-Ahmed managed to negotiate the safe passage of 630 young junior cadets out of the city’s military academy.
The advance continued, and the regime’s lines buckled at astonishing speed. According to al-Ahmed, al-Sharaa had been prepared to fight for a year. “He didn’t expect such a rapid collapse.” Al-Ahmed carried on phoning around the regime’s generals, urging them not to let their soldiers become “wood for the coming fire”. The HTS leader messaged al-Ahmed every day with updates. “We’re going to make this the best country ever!” he told his schoolfriend.
He is said to be sleeping just two hours a night
Just a few days after the fall of Aleppo, al-Ahmed was able to call al-Sharaa and give him the news he’d been waiting for: “The line is open to Damascus.” Commanders in the Republican Guard, Assad’s crack force, stood down their men. Troops protecting the offices of senior officials abandoned their posts, muttering “We’re sorry.” Assad fled to Moscow. Al-Sharaa, who always had a knack for persuading people, had pulled off the sales pitch of his life.
HTS troops weren’t actually the first to reach Damascus, but they were the strongest force in the rebel coalition. It was fighters from the south who breached the capital and captured Assad’s prime minister. When HTS arrived he was handed over to them, and he quickly offered to formally cede power to al-Sharaa’s government in Idlib.
Damascus is a world apart from the war-blasted, religiously conservative landscape of Idlib. Ornate palaces and bijoux wine bars nestle in its alleyways; the Umayyad mosque, a 1,300-year-old architectural marvel, sparkles with golden mosaics. On December 8th 2024, these two Syrians looked at each other for the first time in years, amazed.
Schoolchildren from Idlib marvelled at the unveiled women. Salafi fighters gazed in wonder at the old city’s cobbled alleyways and its ancient courtyards. At night they patrolled the streets, peering into bar windows, before passing on and leaving the drinkers inside in peace (“Cheers!” roared customers in one establishment). The bloodbath which the regime had encouraged Damascenes to expect didn’t happen.
No one was missing Assad. Shopkeepers and taxi drivers took down his portrait. Some looked for a picture of al-Sharaa with which to replace it, but none was available (“They’re so used to having a tyrant they don’t seem to be able to live without one,” a Syrian banker told me). Ordinary Damascenes began affecting an Idlib accent, and cars with Idlib number plates became more valuable.
Even in those early days of celebration and hope, there was anxiety. What would the shadowy head of HTS be like as a ruler? When he got back to Damascus, al-Sharaa dropped his nom de guerre and presented himself to the world with his real name. His public pronouncements were calculated to give assurance to a liberal Western audience, even if they were short on details. He replaced his military fatigues with a suit and tie (his first tie is said to have been given to him by an Arab TV journalist, who pointed out that he would need one). Incredibly for any Arab leader, let alone a jihadist, he addressed his speeches to “Suriyeen wa Suriyat” (ladies and gentlemen).
Damascus, with its bars, arts and music scene, is very different to the religiously conservative landscape of Idlib. The National Symphony Orchestra (above) plays for the first time after the fall of Assad
The new leader spoke diplomatically about Israel, even as Syria’s old foe took the opportunity of Assad’s downfall to seize territory. He shocked Salafi diehards by bringing his wife in front of the cameras with her face unveiled. He said all the right things about all Syrians being one, be they Sunni, Christian, Alawite or Druze. Under American auspices he twice met the military leader of Syria’s Kurds.
But on thorny subjects such as democracy and Islamic law, he tended to delay and fudge. Under pressure from his many foreign visitors, whom he was trying to persuade to remove the sanctions placed on Assad’s Syria, he agreed to hold a national conference about transitional justice and co-existence. But when journalists pressed him for a timetable for elections he was vague. “Maybe four years,” he told one. When asked whether people would be allowed to consume alcohol and pork in Syria, al-Sharaa said it was “a matter for a committee of experts”.
At the start of this year, just after he had announced he would be acting as Syria’s “interim” president, my Economist colleagues and I got to meet al-Sharaa. When we entered the presidential palace, I was surprised at how forlorn it looked. I had expected its 100-metre-long red-carpeted hall to be full of advisers – running a large, multi-denominational country is a labour-intensive business. But it was eerily empty.
We were moved into a side room off the main hall, and eventually two men entered. One, short and rotund, was the new foreign minister, Assad al-Shaibani, who surveyed us with a cold glare. With him was a tall, trim and strangely diffident man – the new president of Syria. They reminded me of Laurel and Hardy.
I knew from watching his speeches that al-Sharaa had a soft voice, but I had expected it to carry a quiet authority in person. In fact it just sounded tentative. Where was the commander who had convinced young men to kill themselves and many others, I wondered? Where was the warlord who instilled terror in other militias? Where was the ideologue who had convinced al-Baghdadi to entrust him with the task of conquering Syria?
He sported a smart cotton jacket and a neatly clipped beard, as if headed for a night on the town in Beirut. Three times during the interview he mentioned his clothes. “You didn’t comment on my outfit,” he joked.
“Without the dragons he’ll be nothing. But no one is looking at how dangerous the dragons are”
In spite of the bonhomie, he didn’t seem at ease. He fidgeted between questions, and rubbed his nose. His legs shifted about. When he felt on the defensive he tucked them under his chair. My colleagues and I asked him repeatedly about democracy, and eventually he conceded that Syria would be “going in this direction”.
In a break with Arab traditions of extravagant hospitality, there were no flunkies to serve us tea, coffee or biscuits. Perhaps it was because it was Friday, a day of piety. Or perhaps because his entourage were waiting to see what kind of welcome our questions merited.
They didn’t care for them much, in the event. “Stereotypes! Orientalism! Aggressive!” the foreign minister’s chief of staff muttered when we asked about women. When Israel was raised, the aide interrupted and said the interview would have to end in five minutes.
Some interlocutors have praised al-Sharaa for his responsiveness to others’ suggestions. He certainly seemed to take direction well from his foreign minister. “I have to go now,” he apologised in English, as al-Shaibani all but pulled him up from his chair and escorted him hurriedly out of the room.
Some wonder if al-Sharaa is laying the groundwork for another ruling dynasty. Soon after taking Damascus, he appointed one brother, Maher, his health minister. A brother-in-law, Maher Marwan, became governor of Damascus. The transitional government he appointed after taking power in December was full of HTS loyalists and contained no Alawites, Kurds or Druze. His rule is “micro-managed, no delegation, no trust”, said a European diplomat.
He seems to have developed a taste for ostentation. In February his PR department released images of him riding Assad’s black horse. Watch enthusiasts noted that he’d upgraded his workman-like Seiko to a luxury Patek Philippe. Ordinary Syrians, meanwhile, were facing a cold winter with virtually no electricity. “We didn’t sacrifice a decade of death, demolition and dispersion just to turn Assad’s Syria into Sharaa’s,” grumbled one aid worker.
Families visit the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a monument to Syrian soldiers killed throughout history. It was closed to the public under the Assad regime
His challenges are immense. Largely because of the war, around 90% of Syrians are now poor and half the country’s infrastructure has been destroyed. Among the Salafi hardliners who helped al-Sharaa take down Assad, a rebellion is brewing. Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, an influential Salafi scholar based in Jordan, has fulminated against al-Sharaa’s tolerance for democracy and man-made laws. “He’s not an Islamist. Religion’s just a tool,” said a rebel commander who had been one of the first to welcome him when he crossed the Iraqi border in 2011. “He would sell the country to Satan if it gave him power.”
Not all al-Sharaa’s injunctions to lay off the Alawites have been obeyed – one jihadist murdered two men accused of belonging to a pro-regime militia by the side of the road. Hotheads waving al-Qaeda flags have marched through coastal cities taunting the Alawites and ordering them to leave.
The forces Syria’s new leader has to contain all this are simply insufficient. The 30,000 men in HTS who answer directly to him are now spread thinly across the entire country. “He’s never been so weak,” said a rival rebel leader. Nor has he shown himself particularly good at the coalition-building necessary to broaden his base and exercise power effectively (he is a “rock star rather than a leader”, a friend told me). At a recent meeting of anti-Assad militias in Damascus, al-Sharaa proposed they all share power in a military council. Of course, he would lead it and HTS would dominate. The others baulked. Some apologised, explaining that under his command they would be designated terrorists and lose their foreign funding. Some called him a sell-out.
Adding to the sense of instability is the fact that the old regime’s security forces have been dissolved. Earlier promises to recall the police to their posts have not been kept. People have been invited to reapply for their jobs, but the process is opaque and said to discourage Alawites. For the most part, al-Sharaa has turned to the security forces of his Idlib administration to make up the shortfall. Experienced officers of the old regime are now taxi drivers. In the vacuum, local communities are assembling their own vigilante forces.
It is hard to see, in any case, how the old regime’s security forces could fit into the new Islamist government. Assad’s men were trained to be fanatics of secularism, and some were given 20 days in jail if they were caught with a crucifix or Koran. “In effect they have their own sect. Do you think these guys will remain silent for long?” said a former graduate of the army academy in Homs, who gave al-Sharaa six months before he is overthrown. Others think he might be assassinated by one of his hardline allies. Little wonder Syria’s president is said to be sleeping just two hours a night.
Before Assad fell, Khaled al-Ahmed, al-Sharaa’s childhood friend, had been working with several Syrian intellectuals on a bill of rights. Called “The Road to Damascus”, it set out a vision for a post-regime scenario in which the rights of minorities were guaranteed. He sent it to al-Sharaa on Signal, hoping to get his support, at least in principle. The rebel leader never replied to the message.
Al-Ahmed was nonetheless exultant when his friend toppled the regime. He made several trips to see al-Sharaa in Damascus, discussing the terms under which figures from the old regime might lay down their arms. I was at al-Ahmed’s side when one of the most powerful men in Assad’s army called him to negotiate coming out of hiding. (The deal has yet to come off.) Perhaps, al-Ahmed hoped, Damascus would make the Islamists from Idlib more open-minded, as it has moulded so many invaders in the past.
But this intuition was no substitute for guarantees. After each trip he returned to his home in Europe, where he has been living since 2018, feeling a little less optimistic. Alawite officers seemed to be pushed to the back of the queue when reapplying for their posts. Al-Sharaa’s government and his army seemed to be more sectarian than Assad’s. (Of Assad’s six security chiefs, three had been Sunni.) Syria’s new leader “still has his al-Qaeda mentality”, al-Ahmed complained to me after his fourth trip. “He wants to turn the collective toppling of a dictator into a Sunni victory against Alawites. He wants a Sunni supremacist state.”
Still, al-Ahmed tried to offer his childhood friend the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps al-Sharaa was moving slowly so he could bring the jihadists with him, he reasoned. But he worried that al-Sharaa had been forced to give them too much power. “He invaded the country with the dragons,” he said, likening al-Sharaa to a character in “Game of Thrones”. “Without the dragons he’ll be nothing. But no one is looking at how dangerous the dragons are. You can’t rule the country with dragons.” ■
Nicolas Pelham is The Economist’s Middle East correspondent
PHOTOGRAPHS OLIVER MARSDEN