Abu Muhammed al-Jolani and His Agenda for Syria - A Backgrounder

With the ultimate fate of Syria now in the hands of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham or HTS, a brief look at the group's history and leadership is in order.

  

Abu Muhammed al-Jolani was born in 1982 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia as Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa where his father was a petroleum engineer.  The family returned to Syria in 1989, settling near Damascus.  Little is known of his life between 1989 and his reappearance in 2003.  As a result of the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003, he joined the al Qaeda insurgency against U.S. forces.  He was arrested by U.S. forces in Iraq in 2006 and held in custody for five years.  In 2012, al-Jolani founded Jabhat al-Nusra, an affiliate of al Qaeda in Syria, coordinating with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of al-Qaeda's Islamic State in Iraq which later became known as ISIL or ISIS.  Al-Jolani left Jabhat al-Nusra in 2016 over a disagreement regarding the goals of the group.  Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) or the Organization for the Liberation of the Levant was formed in 2017 from the merger of five anti-Assad Islamic militia groups and opposition under the leadership of al-Jolani. Initially, the West viewed al-Jolani's 2016 break with al-Qaeda when he formed HTS as cosmetic, however the merger that created HTS was strongly condemned by al Qaeda.  Al-Jolani's group controlled roughly half of the Idlib governorate and part of the Aleppo governorate and has an estimated 10,000 fighters with its focus on creating an Islamic Republic in Syria that would be guided by a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law.  HTS ran the governorate of Idlib through the Syrian Salvation Government which it founded in 2017 to provide the region with a judiciary, civil services, health care, education and infrastructure.    

 

On May 16, 2013, the United States listed al-Jolani as a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist" under executive order 13224,  Here is his page on the Department of State website:

Note that there is up to a $10 million reward for information on al-Jolani.

  

Given that al-Jolani is now the de facto leader of Syria, and that he is an avowed fundamentalist Muslim, it will be interesting to see if Western nations change their official opinion about declaring Syria's new leader and HTS as a terrorist/terroist group as shown in these two examples:

 

1.) The United Kingdom which proscribed HTS as an alternative name for al-Qaeda as shown here:

 

2.) Washington which has placed al-Jolani to their list of terrorists particularly the United Kingdom as I noted above.

  

Will the West now leave al-Jolani and HTS to convert Syria into a nation that lives under a strict form of Sharia law?   If I were a non-Sunni Syrian, I would be very concerned about my future under a government that was run by a fundamentalist Islamic group.

 

References:

 

1.) Wilson Center -

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/hts-evolution-jihadist-group

  

2. National Counterterrorism Center - 

https://www.dni.gov/nctc/ftos/hts_fto.html

  

3.) Washington Institute - 

https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/pdf/view/17425/en