Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the Islamist leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, at the head of the coalition of Islamist rebels who ousted Bashar al-Assad from power in less than two weeks, has long been in contact with al-Qaeda. Since then, he has severed his ties with the terrorist group and shows a more moderate face by promising a smooth transition to Syria. A surprising change which questions his real motivations.
Tall, well-built, with a well-trimmed beard… Abu Mohammed al-Jolani shows a very different face from the one he had when he was the leader of a branch of al-Qaeda. The leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) is doing everything to show himself from now on in a much more moderate light. He abandoned his traditional outfit for a suit or military fatigues, and since the offensive which led to the fall of Bashar al-Assadhe asks that we call him by his civilian surname, Ahmed Hussein al-Charaa, and no longer by his nom de guerre.
In twelve days, the leader of the HTS at the head of the rebel coalition successfully completed his lightning offensive against the Assad regime and he now wishes to forget his past as a jihadist affiliated with al-Qaeda to pose as a credible political alternative in Syria. In front of the CNN camera on December 6, Abu Mohamed al-Jolani affirmed that “ the goal of the revolution is to overthrow this regime. We have the right to use whatever means necessary to achieve it. »
Reassure minorities
As soon as Aleppo was taken on November 27, he wanted to reassure the population by affirming that different faiths and all minorities would be respected. “ No one has the right to delete any group. The different communities have coexisted in this region for hundreds of years and no one has the right to eliminate them. There must be a legal framework that protects and ensures the rights of everyone. Not a system that serves a single community, like what the Assad regime did “, he then declared.
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Aged 40, the Islamist leader was born in Daraa in southern Syria. He spent the first years of his life in Saudi Arabia where his father was an oil engineer before returning to Syria. Ahmed al-Charaa, the name by which he now wishes to be called, grew up in Mazzé, a wealthy district of Damascus, in a wealthy family. And he began studying medicine.
According to the Middle East Eye websiteit was after the September 11 attacks that “ The first signs of jihadism began to appear in Jolani’s life, and he began attending sermons and secret roundtables in the marginalized suburbs of Damascus. “. In an interview given to PBS Frontline, in 2021, he believes he began to radicalize during the second Intifada in 2000. “ I was 17 or 18 years old at the time and I began to think about how I could fulfill my duties, defending a people oppressed by occupiers and invaders “, he explained.
A veteran of Islamic jihad
Following the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, he went to fight in this country neighboring Syria, where he joined Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq group before being imprisoned for five years. After the start of the revolt against Bashar al-Assad in 2011, he returned to his native country to found the al-Nusra Front, which would become HTS.
In 2013, he refused to be knighted by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, future leader of the Islamic State, and preferred the emir of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri. It was finally in 2016 that the al-Nusra Front severed its ties with the terrorist organization, a decision which according to al-Jolani aimed to “ silence the pretexts put forward by the international community » to target the group, classified “ terrorist » by Washington. In 2017, it was renamed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).
Al-Jolani, whose head was nevertheless put at a price of 10 million dollars by the United States, has since claimed to have evolved and want to build a new Syria, which would allow all Syrian refugees to return home. If this distance from al-Qaeda ideology seems very real for the moment, is it really sincere? “ Abu Mohamed al-Jolani completely denies global jihad. He believes, like others within this group, that it was a mistake and that many men died because of it and that it was a project which could not in any case succeed and which was senseless. », Explains Wassim Nasr, journalist at France 24 and Middle East specialist who met the Islamist leader in 2023 in Idlib.
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“ Al-Jolani draws strength from his experience in the North »
Since the capture of Aleppo, the HTS has multiplied press releases to reassure the Druze, Christian and Alawite communities. In areas the group controlled before the fall of Bashar al-Assadpublic services were created, a mobile telephone network was even set up in Idleb then extended to Aleppo. “ They are Islamists, but they are, for example, less rigorous than the Taliban. Women go to school, women go to university, people smoke in the street, we hear music in shops… So, it’s rigorous and conservative, but it’s not all the jihad of al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. It’s not at all the extreme conservatism of the Taliban, it’s something else », analyzes Wassim Nasr.
Following the flight of Bashar al-Assad, the leader of HTS remains relatively in the background politically. He asked his fighters not to approach the institutions which remain, he said, under the control of the Prime Minister who, for his part, said he was ready to cooperate with everything “ new leadership » chosen by the people. “ The success of a transition lies precisely in its inclusive approach. Al-Joulani draws strength from his experience in the North, as he instead appointed a civilian government composed of technocrats and administrators to manage daily life in the HTS-controlled territories. This is a positive element and he could reproduce this pattern by letting certain ministers, or even the current head of government, manage affairs for this transition phase. », Estimates Hasni Abidi, director of the Center for Studies and Research on the Arab and Mediterranean World and lecturer at the University of Geneva.
A political calculation?
The fact remains that under the cover of a certain tolerance, al-Jolani has governed the Idlib region with an iron fist since 2017. For many observers, this desire to appear as a moderate Islamist remains first of all a political calculation for those who dream of a statesman’s destiny. “ It has been al-Jolani’s strategy for several years to be extremely tolerant, extremely moderate, particularly towards the media. But don’t be fooled », warns Fabrice Balanche, lecturer at the University of Lyon 2 and author of several works on the Middle East.
“ This is someone who, when he was 20 years old, went to fight in Iraq alongside al-Qaeda. He was in Abu Ghraib prison. He knew the greatest cadres of al-Qaeda. He divorced from al-Qaeda in 2016 for tactical reasons, but he obviously retained his ideology. He imposed Islamic totalitarianism on Idlib, physically eliminating thousands of opponents, whether secularists or moderate Islamists like the al-Sham group. So, we should not have many illusions about what could happen in the months following his possible takeover. », concludes the academic.