US President Donald Trump has called Ahmed Al-Sharaa, the former leader of an Al-Qaeda offshoot and a designated terrorist, a “young, attractive, tough guy” with a “very strong” past.
After meeting Al-Sharaa in Saudi Arabia last month at the request of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, Trump suggested that Al-Sharaa, for whose capture the US offered a $10 million reward in 2013, has a “real shot at doing a good job” in Syria.
Trump’s embrace of Al-Sharaa, who is still the leader of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), formally the Al-Nusra Front, capped months of efforts by regional and international actors to dismantle years of treating Syria like a pariah state and reintegrating it into the rest of the world.
The most consequential move for rehabilitation came on 23 May when the US Treasury Department announced sweeping sanctions relief for an array of Syrian individuals and entities in order to implement Trump’s pledge in Saudi Arabia.
The measure is significant because with the easing of sanctions by the European Union and Britain, Syria can now establish normal trade relations with the West and receive investments and aid from wealthy Arab nations in the Gulf.
In less than six months, we have seen Syria under Al-Sharaa going from being a pariah nation to a country that is receiving considerable international support and being well on the road to rehabilitation and reintegration.
Yet, the strangest part of this story of Syria’s rehabilitation is the claim that Al-Sharaa, a former radical rebel leader, has turned into a moderate politician and now deserves to facilitate his regime’s reintegration into the international community.
Such episodes are often surrounded by mystery and controversy, and in the light of former alliances between Western governments and radical Islamist groups they can also spark conspiracy theories.
The controversy came to light last month with former US ambassador to Syria Robert Ford offering an explanation of how Al-Sharaa, who was known while in charge of the HTS as “Abu Mohammad Al-Jolani,” has been transformed from a terrorist leader into a politician.
Speaking to the Baltimore Council on Foreign Affairs on 12 May, Ford disclosed that efforts to rehabilitate Al-Sharaa had started long before his militia’s takeover of Syria in December 2024.
Ford told the audience who had met to probe how Syria can turn into a “real democracy” about his own behind-the-scenes efforts to help in “bringing Al-Sharaa out of terrorism and into politics” and eventually help his ascent to power.
Ford disclosed that he met with Al-Sharaa twice in 2023 while the ex-Syrian militant leader was in HTS-held territories in northern Syria. A third meeting was held after he took power in Damascus in January 2024, following the fall of the former Al-Assad regime.
Ford said his mission was sponsored by a British non-governmental organisation that had contributed to preparing Al-Sharaa to enter politics after years of involvement in groups listed as terrorist.
Ford did not name the British organisation, but media reports revealed later it was the London-based Inter Mediate group, which describes itself as a registered charity for negotiation and mediation.
The group was established by Jonathan Powell, former UK prime minister Tony Blair’s former chief of staff and current National Security Adviser to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
The group’s present director is Claire Hajaj, who according to the institution’s website is of Palestinian and Jewish heritage. She is described as focusing on the resolution of difficult, complex, and dangerous conflicts.
Hajaj, who has worked in international aid and conflict resolution for the United Nations in the Middle East, is widely believed to have played a key role in the Inter Mediate team that provided political consultancy services to Al-Jolani in Idlib and put him in a suit and tie.
It is no secret that Turkey, which had deep interests in Syria following the anti-Al-Assad uprising in 2011, allied itself with the country’s largely Sunni opposition and bolstered it by providing weapons, money, and logistical support.
Turkey has played a pivotal role in the Syrian conflict, significantly shaping the trajectory of opposition groups, particularly HTS. Without Turkey’s involvement, HTS would have likely struggled to maintain its control of Idlib, let alone challenge the Al-Assad regime.
Hussein Al-Sharaa, Ahmed’s father, reveals in a book he has written that the HTS rebel group advance on Damascus from their powerbase in the north-western province of Idlb in December 2024 was not sudden and spontaneous as was then widely reported.
In excerpts from the book titled Eleven Days that Shook the World and published on the Al-Arabi Al-Jadeed website on 28 May, Al-Sharaa’s father wrote that several deadlines for the “Deterrence of Aggression” Operation, the codename for the HTS-led offensive, had been set since August 2023.
Al-Sharaa senior wrote that the last D-Day was quicky set after Israel’s killing of Lebanese Hizbullah leaders in Lebanon and Hamas leaders in Gaza and Iran and its devastating airstrikes on Iranian targets in Syria in autumn 2024.
Taken together, the reasons given by the author to accelerate the plan mirrored the shifting geopolitical realities in the region due to the decline of the influence of Iran and its Shia allies after the war on Gaza, which weakened the Al-Assad regime.
The engagement of Western governments and institutions with the Islamists goes back to the earlier history of the modern Middle East, when they embraced the movements either as an inevitable part of the region’s political scene or to serve their own regional agendas.
During the Cold War, the West mostly covertly but sometimes explicitly worked with the region’s Islamists to subvert Communist ideology and contest the Soviet bloc’s influence.
Most noteworthy was the alliance the United States forged from 1979 to 1989 with radical Islamist jihadists while fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
That “sponsorship” in Afghanistan contributed later to the rise of global jihad, creating dynamics that turned the international arena into a primary playground for the extremists’ vast networks of ideology and action.
In Iraq, the US occupation that began in 2003 attracted foreign fighters making it a new centre of jihad. Critics have also accused the United States of engaging in appeasement tactics with the jihadist fighters in the country.
While the United States was blamed for the failure to defeat the Iraqi insurgency, some of the accusations were more serious and centred on the US policy of dealmaking with the jihadists, especially those who had spent time in US prison camps.
Al-Sharaa was imprisoned at the notorious Camp Bucca established by the US Army in southern Iraq after spending a few years rising through the ranks of the jihadist rebellion in the country.
He was released just as the Syrian uprising began in 2011, only to cross the border with bags full of cash and on a mission to set up his own insurgency group affiliated to Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organisation.
Despite this history, the present case for Syria’s rehabilitation by regional and international actors is not new. Syria is and always has been important to these powers, which have fought over its future since the inception of the modern state after World War I.
In the few years before its downfall, many governments also offered the Al-Assad regime rehabilitation, including through a wide range of initiatives addressing Syria’s needs for recovery and reconstruction.
However, the bids, which included offers to rebuild Syria’s authoritarian political system to be more inclusive in return for normalisation, did not gain momentum, and former Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad instead relied on Russia, Iran, Hizbullah, Iraqi Shia militias, and his brutal security forces to maintain control of the country.
Today, the rehabilitation of the HTS-led regime in Syria, which incorporates terrorist militias still committing human rights abuses, presents a complex test for international and regional efforts.
While there is a genuine need to help the Syrian people end their humanitarian sufferings and rebuild their devastated nation, the path to a sustainable resolution to the conflict in the country remains uncertain.
The situation in Syria remains deeply fragile after 14 years of turmoil, and Syria stands at a crossroads despite international efforts to create stability in the country.
The empowerment of the Sunni consortium of rebel factions led by the HTS has further disrupted the status quo and deepened religious and ethnic divides, especially between the Sunnis, the Alawites, the Druze, the Kurds, and the Christians.
Because of instability and increasing fragility, the country has become an arena for international power struggles and bids for external influence that threaten to turn it into a regional geopolitical playground.
While Russia, Israel, Turkey, and the United States maintain an effective military presence in Syria, including naval and air bases, other world and regional actors are also securing footholds in the country.
With Syria’s economy in disarray and humanitarian efforts dwindling, the focus now must not only be on creating stability in order to send millions of displaced Syrians abroad back home.
A lasting peaceful order and an end to Syria’s protracted conflict can only come when the new regime starts opening up the prospect of a free and democratic future for the people of Syria.
The stark reality is that the HTS-led regime has no incentive to carve out a new future of this sort for Syria despite its leaders’ departure from their previous Afghan-style dress code to wearing suits and ties.
Last week, the EU, which has joined the international chorus for Al-Sharaa’s rehabilitation, imposed new sanctions on three militia groups in Syria and two of their leaders over human rights abuses committed against members of the country’s Alawite minority.
This shows that global trust in the new regime in Syria is low, and its rapid rehabilitation is not the answer. The biggest problem in the rush to rehabilitate Damascus is the failure to look at Syria’s harder reality and to replace the latter with wishful thinking.
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