THE LONG-RULING Assad government fell in Syria at the weekend as its president Bashar al-Assad fled the country, more than 13 years after the civil war that saw hundreds of thousands of people killed and millions displaced.

Rebels began a surprise advance just eleven days before taking control yesterday of Damascus, the country’s capital.

The head of the Islamist-led rebels is named Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. Who is the man that led the offensive making headlines across the world today?

Origins

Al-Jolani is the head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). The group was formerly associated with al-Qaeda but cut ties in 2016 as part of attempts to appear more moderate in order to further its cause.

Al-Jolani was born as Ahmed al-Sharaa in 1982 in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia.  

His family had previously been displaced from the Golan Heights in Syria in 1967 during Israeli occupation. They returned to Syria seven years after al-Jolani was born and resided in the upscale Mezzeh neighbourhood of Damascus.

He moved to Baghdad in 2003, where he was an al-Qaeda operative during the United States’s war on Iraq.

He was imprisoned by US forces for five years in the late 2010s and was released around the same time as the Syrian revolution in 2011, which was a series of protests against Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Rebel leader

After being freed from imprisonment by the US, al-Jolani established al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch al-Nusra, which was one of the most powerful groups in Syria during the early years of the civil war.

The group was renamed in 2016 and claimed to have ‘no external affiliations’ – though the US labelled the rebrand as meaningless. It was dissolved in 2017 and formed part of a merger of groups to create the Hayat Tahrir Al Sham organisation.

In areas under the control of Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, it has developed forms of civilian government while quashing rival rebel groups. It has faced accusations from residents in these areas and human rights groups of abuses against dissenters that the United Nations has classed as war crimes. 

‘Pragmatic radical’

Al-Jolani has nonetheless tried to frame himself to the world as a more ‘moderate’ figure than other extremists in the region.

In 2015, he claimed that he, unlike ISIS, had no intention of launching attacks against western countries. He has also said that cutting ties with al-Qaeda was done in order to deprive the west of reasons to attack his organisation.

He has addressed residents of the city of Aleppo, where there is a significant Christian minority population, to claim they would face no harm and has also told his fighters to preserve security in areas seized from Assad’s rule. 

Aron Lund, a fellow at the Century International think tank, told AFP that he believes al-Jolani’s words are “primarily just good politics”.

“The less local and international panic you have and the more Jolani seems like a responsible actor instead of a toxic jihadi extremist, the easier his job will become. Is it totally sincere? Surely not,” he said. “But it’s the smart thing to say and do right now.”

Thomas Pierret, a specialist in political Islam, said l-Jolani is a “pragmatic radical”.

“In 2014, he was at the height of his radicalism,” Pierret said. “Since then, he has moderated his rhetoric.”

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In an interview with The New York Times last week, al-Jolani aimed to project that tone of tolerance, saying: “You can’t force your ideas on people.”  

In a separate interview with CNN, also last week, al-Jolani claimed he has gone through periods of transformation in his life, saying: “A person in their twenties will have a different personality than someone in their thirties or forties, and certainly someone in their fifties. This is human nature.”

The interviews were conducted in the days before Assad was overthrown while the rebels under al-Jolani’s command were taking control of major Syrian cities.

Al-Jolani said there would be “a state of governance, institutions and so on” after the toppling of the Assad regime.

“Syria deserves a governing system that is institutional, not one where a single ruler makes arbitrary decisions,” he said. 

He wants to see foreign forces currently in Syria – which includes from the US, Russia, Iran and Turkey – to leave the country. “I think that once this regime falls, the issue will be resolved, and there will no longer be a need for any foreign forces to remain in Syria.” 

Additional reporting by AFP