Who is the leader of Syria’s rebels and what does he want?
Analysis by Peter Bergen, CNN
(CNN) — The US State Department is advertising an up to $10 million reward for information leading to the capture of Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, who the agency first designated as a terrorist more than a decade ago, saying his group had “carried out multiple terrorist attacks throughout Syria.” Yet, Jolani is also the leader of the rebel forces that just toppled the tyrannical regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in a fast-moving offensive that surprised the world.
As a result, Jolani is now the de facto leader of more than 23 million Syrians and the several million Syrian refugees who are outside of their country, many of whom will surely want to return home now that Assad is gone.
So, who is Jolani, and what does he want? As a Syrian “foreign fighter” in his early 20s, Jolani crossed into Iraq to fight the Americans when they invaded the country in the spring of 2003. That eventually landed him in the notorious US-run Iraqi prison, Camp Bucca, which became a key recruiting ground for terrorist groups, including what would become ISIS.
Freed from Camp Bucca, Jolani crossed back into Syria and started fighting against the Baathist Assad regime, doing so with the backing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who would later become the founder of ISIS.
In Syria, Jolani founded a militant group known as Jabhat al-Nusra (“the Victory Front” in English), which pledged allegiance to al Qaeda, but in 2016, Jolani broke away from the terror group, according to the US Center for Naval Analyses.
Since then – unlike al Qaeda, which promoted a quixotic global holy war – Jolani’s group, now known by the initials HTS (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham), has undertaken the more prosaic job of trying to govern millions of people in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib, providing basic services, according to the terrorism scholar Aaron Zalin who has written a book about HTS.
Same old jihadist wine in a new ‘inclusive’ bottle?
Jolani rarely gives interviews to Western news organizations, but on Thursday, he spoke with CNN’s Jomana Karadsheh. In that interview, Jolani was at pains to distance himself from Sunni terrorist groups like ISIS and al Qaeda, saying, “People who fear Islamic governance either have seen incorrect implementations of it or do not understand it properly,” and he tried to reassure Syria’s minority Alawites and Christians by saying, “These sects have coexisted in this region for hundreds of years, and no one has the right to eliminate them.”
Jolani, now 42, also told CNN that he has matured since he was fighting the Americans in Iraq two decades ago: “A person in their twenties will have a different personality than someone in their thirties or forties, and certainly someone in their fifties.” It’s hard to assess the veracity of Jolani’s recent mollifying statements and what they might mean over the longer term, although his men have not carried out ISIS-style sectarian massacres when they have seized Syrian cities.
From a US perspective, a positive indicator would also be if Jolani helps to find Austin Tice, an American journalist who disappeared in Syria a dozen years ago and who President Joe Biden said on Sunday he believed was still alive.
So, is Jolani simply the same old jihadist wine repackaged in a new “inclusive” bottle? Or is he more in the mold of an Islamist leader like Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, while no liberal democrat, won’t unleash sectarian cleansing on his population?
It’s worth recalling that the Taliban positioned themselves as a kinder, gentler Taliban 2.0 before they seized all of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, and they are now ruling with an iron misogynic fist just as they did the last time they were in power before the 9/11 attacks. And when ISIS seized much of Iraq a decade ago, the terrorist army ruthlessly suppressed pretty much every ethnic and religious group other than the Sunnis. So, Jolani’s treatment of the Alawites and Christians that he now rules over will be an important indicator of his true colors.
For its part, the Biden administration is taking no chances over whether Jolani has the capability to manage the threat from ISIS. US Central Command announced on Sunday that it had carried out more than 75 strikes at suspected ISIS camps and operatives in central Syria.
On Saturday, President-elect Donald Trump posted about Syria in all caps: “THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” But the US is already involved in Syria with nearly 1,000 US troops deployed there on an anti-ISIS mission. American forces have been in Syria a decade now, and during his first term, Trump went back and forth about withdrawing all of them. What to do about those US forces in Syria is a decision that Trump will likely face as he assumes office.
Lessons from history
In 2003, the Americans toppled another Baathist dictator, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and then fired as many as 30,000 members of the Baath party who were running the country. They also disbanded about half a million members of the Iraqi armed forces. This simultaneously collapsed the government of Iraq while also creating a large cadre of angry, armed, trained men, some of whom joined the insurgency fighting US forces. Jolani was fighting against the Americans in Iraq then, so he is presumably aware of this instructive history.
In Libya in 2011, a US-led NATO bombing campaign contributed to the fall of another brutal secular dictator, Moammar Gadhafi. Thirteen years later, Libya is still embroiled in a civil war with countries like the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Russia, Turkey and the US all backing or attacking various factions in the war.
Perhaps Jolani may be able to pull off the neat trick of bringing order to Syria while keeping many of Assad’s bureaucrats in place, so the country continues to be governed while simultaneously pursuing a “big tent” strategy of protecting all of Syria’s religious minorities.
Jolani won the war against one of the 21st century’s nastiest dictators. Now the hard part begins.
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