Jihadist at a Crossroads
Syria’s new leader will have to balance his Islamist beliefs with the more pressing tasks of state-building and economic development.
The fall of Syria’s Ba’athist regime has been a strategic setback for authoritarian Russia, theocratic Iran, and (most obviously) the Assad dictatorship itself. But the big winner in Syria was not liberal democracy, it was jihadism. Just twelve days after the attack on Aleppo on 27 November, Syria’s mujahideen were already in the capital. Before his triumphant arrival in Damascus, most of the world regarded Abu Mohammed al-Jolani and his Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) organisation as terrorists. Nevertheless, Turkish-backed factions joined the HTS offensive that conquered Aleppo, while other factions in the east and south also lent their assistance.
Assad’s army fell apart in days. The swiftness of the Syrian disintegration was even more striking than the chaotic final days in Kabul described by David Kilcullen and Greg Mills in their book The Ledger: Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan. The Afghan regime was corrupt and ineffective from top to bottom, largely due to the misguided priorities of external supporters (the US, NATO) and rivers of aid money syphoned off by various “conflict entrepreneurs.” Evidently, the Syrian regime was even worse.
A classic case of “overnight success, decades in the making,” until late November, Jolani was an obscure jihadist in northern Syria. He fought for al-Qaeda in Iraq and was detained at Camp Bucca, a US prison, where he earned credibility among imprisoned jihadists with a fifty-page document on strategy. Upon his release, he was entrusted with setting up an al-Qaeda front in Syria, where he rubbed shoulders with ISIS. Over a decade ago, the US put a $10 million USD bounty on his head and tried to kill him with an air strike. So did Russia in late November 2024. But days later, he was in Damascus, delivering a speech in the magnificent Umayyad mosque thanking Allah for his victory.
In his rare interviews, Jolani cuts an intelligent and articulate figure. Having survived air strikes from great powers and vicious faction fights with ISIS and al-Qaeda, he obviously has military and political skills, and like most religious fanatics, he is clear in his moral thinking. Nevertheless, he thinks differently from ISIS and al-Qaeda on certain points of doctrine. He is on record disavowing “martyrdom operations” (suicide terrorist attacks) that kill innocents, although he continues to defend their use to assault military targets.
Jolani is also well-read. Besides the usual familiarity with the Qur’an and the Hadith (the sayings of the prophet Muhammad), he seems to have studied Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, who shared the Nobel Prize for Economics for “the study of institutions and how they affect prosperity” with Simon Johnson in 2024. This alone makes him far more interesting than the average jihadist. His interest in institutions is partly attributable to his ancestry (his father was an economist), but it is also informed by his experience in Iraq. Jolani witnessed the damage that the US purge of Ba’ath party technocrats did to Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein and has stressed that those running Syrian institutions should stay at their posts.
Jolani has also been on the receiving end of US firepower, and he saw the infamy that attacks on civilians brought upon ISIS and al-Qaeda. ISIS’s enthusiastic execution of apostates and adulterers and its terrorism resulted in the might of the Pentagon’s air power crushing the terror group’s caliphate. So, Jolani has opted for an ostensibly nationalist approach. His stated goal was to bring down the regime of the dictator, who tortured and imprisoned people on spurious charges and who shelled innocents with Russian and Iranian support. But now that he has achieved this, his next mission will be to establish an Islamic government.
Jolani’s Salvation Government in Idlib has done a better job of keeping the peace and delivering services than the ISIS caliphate or the crushed insurgency of al-Qaeda in Iraq. He arrived at an accommodation with Turkey, which allowed power to be connected and building supplies to cross the border. He set up a functioning government and expanded HTS by absorbing rival factions. He won over, expelled, or killed ISIS and al-Qaeda loyalists. He met with Christian and Druze leaders and provided assurances that they would not be harmed. He even permitted churches to operate.
Strategically, this is a sound move, and legal precedents for this arrangement can be found in the history of the Ottoman Empire. But Jolani’s ecumenicism is also a pragmatic attempt to prevent a diverse country from breaking into its constituent parts. About three-quarters of Syrians are Sunni Muslim, while the remaining quarter are a combination of Alawite, Shi’ite, and Druze Muslims and Christians. Either a degree of tolerance will allow the country’s disparate sects and factions to co-exist or conformity will need to be imposed by massive repression, risking a new civil war.
In this respect, Jolani has adapted the Taliban’s strategy for Syria. The Taliban executes apostates and adulterers, but they do not proclaim entire groups of Muslims to be apostates. More importantly, according to Kilcullen and Mills in The Ledger, Afghans do not need to bribe Taliban judges, nor would they try. The Taliban’s justice is backward and often ruthlessly barbaric, but it is not arbitrary:
The infamous Taliban sharia courts in fact spent most of their time doing civil rather than criminal law—births, deaths, divorces, inheritances, land disputes, water and grazing rights. They provided a low cost dispute resolution service in rural areas, and those that benefited from their judgements held valuable assets on the Taliban’s authority so that, irrespective of ideology, they had an incentive to support that authority. Even those who did not benefit from particular Taliban actions (or who felt targeted by them) often preferred the predictability and relative incorruptibility of Taliban cadres to the absentee officials and abusive power brokers they otherwise encountered.
Evidently, many Afghans found Taliban rule preferable to the routine of bribery and corruption funded by NGOs that Kilcullen and Mills describe in vivid detail. Acemoglu and Robinson identify such “extractive” practices by elites as the root cause of poverty in Why Nations Fail.
Nor do the Taliban seek to export their austere version of Islam outside their own borders. Their problems with the United States began after they refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, so the Taliban now know that harbouring transnational jihadists is not in their interests. While Afghan mujahideen have seen off the Soviets and NATO, they have always been plagued by factional splits. The Taliban are still fighting ISIS in Afghanistan today.
So, for the time being at least, Jolani’s strategy is to keep his revolution within Syria, disclaim attacks on the West, avoid apostasy charges against other Muslims (such as Alawites, Shi’ites, and Druze), and tolerate People of the Book (Christians and Jews). And while he is certainly an Islamist by conviction, he is far less rigid than the Taliban on the role of women—indeed, he has just promoted a suitably qualified woman to run the Syrian central bank.
Despite knocking down the regime of Bashar al-Assad in twelve days, Jolani’s military is weak and the Syrian economy is in bad shape. His army consists of mujahideen bearing small arms and technicals. He has no air force and no navy. He is vulnerable to invasion from the north by the Turks and from the south by the Israelis. He is unable to keep enemy warplanes out of Syrian airspace, as the Israelis have demonstrated by destroying Syrian navy ships and chemical weapons stockpiles from the air.
Benny Morris
Jolani does have some impressive low-budget, low-altitude drone-making capabilities at his disposal. He has learned the military lessons of the Azeri–Armenian War of 2020, which produced an Azerbaijan victory in 44 days. His homegrown small-drone capabilities decapitated three Syrian brigadiers, destroyed many tanks, and helped his lightly armed, highly mobile mujahideen roll into Damascus. There are rumours that Ukrainian advisers helped but Turkey also has many small drone firms—notably Bayraktar—and ISIS were making improvised airborne explosive devices as far back as 2017. No doubt the swift collapse of the Assad regime was also assisted by skilful negotiations with Syrian intelligence and a general feeling on the part of those serving the regime that Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah were no longer able to prop it up.
What Jolani offers now is a combination of economic literacy and Islamic legitimacy in a country that is ninety percent Muslim. Unlike the Taliban, who have little resembling an economic policy, Jolani seems to have taken the lessons of Why Nations Fail on board. It will be interesting to see how he combines these economic developments with Islamic principles and doctrine. It may be that a strict religious code will put a brake on innovation and capitalism’s ability to deliver technology, prosperity, and power. However, such a possibility is likely to be rejected by the jihadist mind.
But he also wants to show the West that the six million Syrian refugees overseas can safely return. Austria offered its Syrian refugees a thousand euros to go home just days after the liberation of Damascus. Perhaps this promise is the basis of the tacit understanding he has with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Make Syria stable; keep its minorities happy; encourage the refugees to go home; get Syria off the travel-advisory lists; restart tourism; get normal business flourishing. The Turks have 3.5 million Syrian refugees. The EU has a million. Reportedly, over 100,000 Syrian refugees have already returned.
If Jolani can deliver unity, stability, prosperity, and tolerance, many of these refugees may well come home. He seems to have little interest in the anti-colonial, Soviet-sponsored “Arab socialism” of dictators like Gamel Abdel Nasser, Hafez al-Assad, and Saddam Hussein, whose regimes quickly degenerated into extractive tyranny by greedy psychopaths. He seems to want to establish a kind of Islamic economy that is market-driven and based on solid governance principles such as the rule of law, security of property, enforcement of contracts, mass education, and equality of opportunity. None of this is contrary to the Islamic texts even though many Islamic rulers have historically failed to deliver these economic goods. In recent times, though, some have raised their game, educating their citizens and investing heavily in science and technology.
Interestingly, Jolani has stopped using his nom de guerre and now goes by his real name, Ahmed al-Sharaa. He has also taken to wearing a suit. The nature of the future government of Syria remains uncertain, although the present goal is to establish new institutions of government within three years. Europeans will no doubt press for democratic reforms, but a menu of Islamic governance options is also available. Malaysia has an elected parliament headed by a prime minister and a rotating sultan chosen from the county’s royal families every five years to serve as head of state. Indonesia is a notionally secular republic, but majority Muslim. Egypt and Pakistan are also notionally secular republics, though Islam is written into the constitution.
Another possibility would be to set up an emirate resembling Afghanistan or the Gulf states. This option is the most likely as it is how Jolani and HTS have been running Idlib for years. In a recent interview with CNN in Damascus, he said:
People who fear Islamic governance either have seen incorrect implementations of it or do not understand it properly. We are talking about something that aligns with the traditions and nature of the region. The most important thing is to build institutions. We are not talking about rule by individuals or personal whims. It’s about institutional governance. Syria deserves a governing system that is institutional, not one where a single ruler makes arbitrary decisions.
Even so, the precise form that Syrian “Islamic governance” will take is yet to be decided. To calm fears of jihadist persecution, Jolani might broaden membership of the traditional Islamic institution of the Shura (a consultative council to advise the emir) and give Syrian minorities elective (or appointed) places at the table. But first, he says, he wants to stabilise Syria, begin reconstruction, and conduct a proper census. A cynic would say that he is simply kicking the can of democratic elections down the road, but it is worth noting that the political legitimacy of an Islamic ruler does not flow from the people but from the deity. To be legitimate, he simply has to rule in accordance with Sharia law.
In a pragmatic decision, the US recently lifted the US$10 million bounty on Jolani’s head, but the fact it was offered in the first place is an asset for Jolani not a liability in the Muslim world. And he has accrued massive political capital as the jihadist who toppled Bashar al-Assad’s despised regime. In response, the people came out and joyfully toppled statues of the Assads all over Syria. To put the matter plainly, he has scored the second major victory for mujahideen in three years. Yes, Turkish backing and the Israeli neutering of Hezbollah helped, but neither Erdoğan nor Benjamin Netanyahu is in Damascus.
The effect of Jolani’s victory on the wider jihadist movement remains to be seen. It will be interesting to see if Jolani condemns the jihadist attack in New Orleans on 1 January that claimed fourteen lives and injured dozens. Since Saudi Arabia and Turkey have already done so, I would expect Jolani to follow suit, albeit in a more muted way, as this would be consistent with his statements on the topic of suicide terror and the impermissibility of murdering innocents, even if those innocents are drunken infidels engaged in adultery. But such a statement risks angering the more fanatical elements of his core constituency.
Whatever Jolani decides on this and many other contentious issues, the path forward is fraught with danger. He might yet become a murderous and torturing dictator himself. He would hardly be the first revolutionary leader to do so and plenty of reports from human-rights groups say his rule in Idlib has been no more liberal than that of the Taliban in Afghanistan. His faction has kidnapped, tortured, and launched suicide attacks against military or regime targets. He might be murdered by a Russian, Iranian, Turkish, or Israeli drone or assassinated by ISIS or a rival Syrian faction. His coalition might fall into bitter infighting and Syria may end up being balkanised into smaller statelets ruled by sectarian warlords.
But for now, the imperatives of realpolitik and the goal of getting refugees to return home seem to be overriding the legal scruples of Western governments regarding negotiating with listed terrorists. Jolani is talking about disbanding HTS and folding it into his new government’s security apparatus. And he is busy meeting with foreign dignitaries and re-establishing diplomatic relations. He has already met with the Ukrainians, who offered wheat shipments. He has even issued a pragmatic statement about the hated Russians (who engaged in indiscriminate bombing attacks on Syrian civilians), pointing out that most of the Syrian army’s weapons are Russian and that Russian experts run Syria’s power stations.
As far as it goes, this kind of thinking is commendable, disciplined, and far-sighted. But most of the key appointees to ministries so far are still trusted HTS jihadists. The first nations to reopen their embassies in Damascus were Turkey and Qatar. The first diplomatic visit overseas by the new foreign minister will be to Saudi Arabia. In return for stability, minority guarantees, and refugee return, economic aid may begin to flow and trade sanctions are likely to be lifted. A long-dormant gas pipeline construction project from Qatar to Europe via Jordan and Turkey is likely to be restarted, freezing out Russia.
What Syria needs most of all is stable government that can secure a monopoly on violence and bring an end to sectarian fighting. But the success of Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the conquering jihadist hero, is likely to embolden more ruthless and fanatical mujahideen with altogether more destructive priorities. The future of Syria now depends upon how its new leader balances the demands of his religious ideology with the pressing needs of a country badly in need of economic development and competent governance.
