What's the Deal With Ahmed al-Sharaa?

I know you’re not supposed to have a favorite militant Islamist. You’re supposed to roundly and soundly condemn all of them as enemies of peaceful coexistence etc. And I do, I truly do condemn them all: Zarqawi, al-Baghdadi, bin Laden, all of them! But if you put an AK-47 to my head and made me pick one, well, I just can’t help but have a soft spot for His Excellency Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa.

Wait, don’t take that screenshot yet, let me explain!

The Paper

When I was a little baby high school junior in AP Lang, our capstone project was a very involved research paper that had to cite a bunch sources to deliver an analysis on a topic of our choosing. The intent was to baptize us by fire into the world of real life academic writing, but I think I missed the day where we reviewed some actual academic publications to get a sense for how these things were supposed to read. Having basically only written persuasive essays up to that point, I mistakenly thought it was appropriate and necessary to interweave this dry survey with lots of argumentation. What was my topic, you may ask? Oh you know, something uncontroversial and low temperature: THE STATE OF ISRAEL.

I started my research with the genesis of Zionism via Herzl in the 19th century, proceeded through the Ottoman withdrawal, Mandatory Palestine, the Nakba, 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Suez Crisis, Six Day War, Yom Kippur War, First and Second Intifadas, Camp David, yada yada yada (a Yiddish turn of phrase, how relevant) and then finally I arrived at the Arab Spring and Syrian Civil War. My original interest in this subject had germinated from watching a dumb Netflix show called something like Greatest Tank Battles in History that visualized (using a video game, like Arma 3 or something?) the disposition and maneuvers during the big battle in the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War. I learned from that show that Israel permanently occupied the region and still does to this day. And that got me thinkin’…

When I got to the present day in my research paper, I really wanted to answer some questions that had lodged themselves in my noodle while I was hearing news of the civil war and the refugee crisis and everything. Two questions in particular:

1. Why didn’t Israel’s soft border with Syria lead them to getting inundated with refugees like Turkey and Jordan?
2. Since the CIA seemed to be doing another Operation Cyclone with the Syrian rebels, giving them training and weapons, were they leveraging the soft border with an ally to move personnel and materiel?

I don’t know why 16 year old me was so monomaniacally focused on the Golan Heights in particular, but when I looked at a map of Syria I was like “well they can’t come in from the Iraq side because of ISIS, and they can’t come in from the Lebanese side because of Hezbollah, and I don’t think of Jordan or Turkey as being buddies with the US, so they’re probably coming in from Israel”.

I was, uh, completely off base with that. One might think all the money we give to Israel would buy us some bases or at least staging areas like it does in Qatar or Bahrain, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. More importantly, the Golan Heights is the opposite of a soft border, it’s a maze of checkpoints and barbed wire and pillboxes. It was everyone else who—despite their boldly inked lines on the map—had soft borders, and it was indeed via Jordan and Turkey that the US trafficked the weapons and agents into Syria. This also tidily explained where all the refugees ended up: Jordan and Turkey, not Israel.

Left in the shambles of my preconceived notions, I grasped for any interesting narrative at all to salvage my Syrian Civil War section that I had intended to close out the paper. I started learning the names of the factions and the events of the war. The first scandalous takeaway was that NATO and Russia were bombing each other’s proxies and both excusing it as “operations against ISIS”. But I discovered something far more wild: Jabhat al-Nusra.

They were an annoying red blob on the territorial control map that completely muddled my naïve understanding of the war. You had the good guys: the FSA, the Kurds. You had the bad guys: ISIS, Assad. But then you had this group that walked and talked like ISIS, but were part of the FSA, but also sometimes didn’t get along with them? The US had designated them a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) in late 2012. That makes it a federal crime to financially support them. But arms trafficking without a paper trail is messy business. al-Nusra very visibly had ended up with American weapons. ISIS had American weapons!!

Pictured: The BGM-71 TOW, manufactured exclusively by the Raytheon Corporation. One might wonder how an American anti-tank missile made it into jihadist hands when the Syrian military doesn’t use it.

Dig a little bit into al-Nusra, and you’ll see behind that unassuming name is a sordid history. It makes sense why they were designated an FTO: ISIS and al-Nusra had both rolled up into the rapidly dissolving Syria bearing the banner of the international jihad hoisted by bin Laden and his successor Ayman al-Zawahari. Al Qaeda found ISIS to be a little too much, if you can believe it, and embraced al-Nusra as their official representatives in the war, even though it had in fact been ISIS that gave al-Nusra their initial funding and blessing to bring the jihad to Syria. Al Qaeda’s endorsement of al-Nusra was the final phrase of an acrimonious breakup with ISIS, who had fully planned to absorb al-Nusra as a sub-faction. The two militias got a little less chummy and finally started shooting at each other.

You would think the US would try to run as far away as possible from these guys, given their pedigree. But just listen to what the FSA was telling the US State Department about al-Nusra:

Utilizing “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” doctrine, America held their nose and didn’t sweat how porous the divisions between the sub-factions of the FSA could be. So jihadists shot at Russians and ISIS and Kurds and Assad regime forces and Turks and maybe other FSA factions utilizing American weaponry and American training. It was 1985 in Afghanistan all over again.

I really thought I had a slam dunk here. I felt like an investigative journalist breaking a big story. What I had actually done was read some Wikipedia and Al Jazeera and stitch together a sort of clear narrative that was hard to find explicitly laid end to end elsewhere. I was sort of confused why it wasn’t being picked up by the media as a major scandal, and I still am. It doesn’t seem like there’s been a general reckoning about our role in the war in the way there was for Operation Cyclone or Iran-Contra. Maybe we likewise need to wait a decade and a half for it to blow up in our faces.

I don’t remember the grade I got on the paper, but I do remember the main piece of negative feedback I got from my teacher went something along the lines of: “You seem to sort of lose the plot at the end. The paper is nominally about Israel but the final section is all about American guns and Syrian militants and I’m wondering what happened to Israel.” He had a point. But I’m gonna do it again.

I watched with horror as the siege of Aleppo came to a gruesome close, seemingly killing all of the FSA’s momentum and dooming the once ascendent al-Nusra to spend the rest of their existence administering their little nesting doll of a nation at Idlib while the regime and Russia took potshots at them. I watched with awe as the shockingly progressive Kurds kicked ISIS out of the north and established their own secular microstate. I watched with sadness as Turkey backstabbed them at every opportunity and made the already confusing war even more fractious and multi-polar.

A year later I was on a two year mission and I missed the chemical attack in Douma, the subsequent explosive American reprisal, and the American withdrawal followed by the next-day Turkish invasion. By the time I was back home, the situation had fairly stabilized just in time for the 2020s and the pandemic, and like most of the American public, I had lost interest.

But Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, leader of al-Nusra—now known as HTS, having fully severed ties with the declining Al Qaeda and ISIS—hadn’t lost interest. He was scheming.

Daughters of the Revolution, Sons of the Insurgency

I have a hard time understanding what the Bush administration thought would happen when they invaded Iraq. I guess they suffered a brief bout of acute Paradox syndrome and thought they could seize an opportunity of high political will to knock out an annoying enemy and turn Iraq into a client state. You know, color the map a different color. And yeah, that did eventually happen. But they forgot about all the regular people that live there.

If you are an American that has a hard time understanding the Iraqi insurgency, I have a thought experiment for you: imagine you live in a world where China is completely ascendant, dominating the global stage. They have the largest GDP, the greatest military, and the fealty of many of the world’s most powerful nations. China’s got all a girl could want. But for some reason, they’ve built a bunch of military bases in Cuba, and in Mexico, and Samoa and Tonga, and all of Central America. You’re completely hemmed in.

You kinda wish they would just leave North America alone. Unfortunately, they are very interested in you. Your country has abundant natural resources, a large population, and the ear of some of China’s foes. They simply can’t let you fall into the wrong hands.

Suddenly the news hits: in response to a terrorist attack perpetrated by Haitians angry about China’s encroachment in the Caribbean, they have decided to respond to “Christian extremism” with a heavy hand and invade Canada. Wait, Canada? Maybe Mark Carney and Xi Jinping don’t exactly see eye to eye. And yeah, Canada speaks French and English, just like Haiti. But they didn’t do anything! China responds to protests by producing evidence of friendly relations between various radical Haitians and the Canadian state.

Ok, maybe that’s problematic. But is it really Canada’s job to police anti-Chinese sentiment in Haiti? Doesn’t that kinda sound… ridiculous? Like you would have to believe you’re literally the protagonist of the entire Earth to assert that it’s the job of nations who are explicitly not your allies to clamp down on their own allies for your benefit or else be subject to invasion and complete spoliation.

And that stuff about Christian extremism… there’s a lot of Christians in America too. What if you’re next?? Canada is basically the US pt. 2. You speak the same language, look the same, share a lot of the same history.

Is it really ridiculous or evil at this point for you to pick up your AR-15 and drive over the border to try to fight back the invasion before it spreads? Doesn’t it feel like it’s just a matter of time until you’re all occupied by China and answering to their whims?

Mutatis mutandis this is how the 2003 invasion of Iraq managed to spark a broad cross-national insurgency. Pulled into a seemingly senseless war of conquest only a decade after actually being bombed back to the stone age, hundreds of thousands of ordinary dudes got fed up and decided to start shooting back. Fast forward a decade: Hussein is dead, Gaddafi is dead, Zarqawi is dead, bin Laden is dead, a million Iraqis are dead, and the Arab jihadists are doing better than ever. Not only is Al Qaeda still at it, you’ve got new kids on the block like ISIS ready to take the spotlight, and many more terrible terrorist attacks in the West to look forward to. The Arab world is dissolving in real time, with Libya and Egypt and Syria collapsing like dominoes. It’s a good time to be a guy with a gun.

The guy with the gun

Ahmed al-Sharaa was born in Riyadh but relocated to Damascus during his childhood. Guess where his family was originally from? That’s right, the Golan Heights baby. There’s this incredible interview he did with PBS Frontline that I will be quoting from very heavily. We will see his journey to the present day through his own eyes. Anyway, he’s in some specific neighborhood in Damascus he describes as:

But he is pretty outraged by how his Arab brothers are being treated in Palestine.

The way he puts it, almost in parallel, he has a spiritual rebirth. These two streams: his faith journey and his political awakening, are going to merge as he dives into the world of militant Islamism:

After claiming that every Arab felt some sense of justice seeing the planes hit the towers and receiving pushback from the reporter that Americans see it as a cowardly act of terrorism that targeted innocent civilians, he responds with what seems to be remarkable clarity and maturity:

By this time you might be getting the picture. This guy is smart, he’s from a secular background. He seems capable of adopting a third person perspective, exercising empathy, and trying to keep his messaging clear while still appearing frank and honest. He reminds me a bit of Zelenskyy, and the comparisons won’t stop here. But this is 2020s al-Sharaa we’re talking about. 2000s al-Sharaa is a little less camera-ready.

He leaves home for Iraq to join the resistance against the American invasion. He’s serving under the notorious Zarqawi. When pressed on the atrocities committed by Zarqawi’s organization, he denies having ever met the man, emphasizes that he spent most of the war—5 years—in Western prisons, and claims to always have questioned the terror attacks. It’s all very canny and neat, almost too much so. It’s hard to believe that he wasn’t at least a little bit bought in to the bloodlust and zealotry that suffused Zarqawi’s operation. From his own telling, he’s basically a wholesome nerd that is trying to form a gentler jihad:

Once he is released from prison, he presents himself to al-Baghdadi—Zarqawi is dead, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi is dead, so the new boss on the block is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—with what sounds like a much better research paper than mine:

He was not impressed by al-Baghdadi:

Nevertheless, despite his claimed misgivings about the man and the methods of Al Qaeda, he has to make nice to get what he needs to found al-Nusra and liberate Syria:

He claims he got 6 men, 60k/month for 6 months, and 50 rifles. Humble beginnings, for what was going to grow to be the dominant faction within the FSA. When pressed on his problematic continued association with al-Qaeda throughout his time in Syria, he stays doggedly on message:

He pushes back strongly on the idea that advocating for Sharia law is antithetical to tolerance or coexistance:

Every time the interviewer tries to point out his clear allyship and leadership of murderous intolerant criminals, he flips the script:

Bit of a weaksauce response to “why do your guys seem to have genocidal intent when it comes to the Alawites”, but it’s still loads better than what I imagine Zawahiri or al-Baghdadi would respond with: “Because they deserve it!”

The interview ends with a bunch more back and forth: the journalist asks him why he’s chosen to be the message bearer for the Syrian Revolution with all of his baggage, he deflects and says the Assad regime is the source of all evil. The interviewer asks him about torture of Westerners and journalists by al-Nusra, he denies, deflects, and minimizes. When the interviewer tries to get him to guarantee rights for women and minorities, he’s kind of slippery, pointing to the fact that Idlib has enrolled many women in schools, which I guess at least makes him better than the Taliban, and says Sharia demands coexistence with other religions, pulling out the whole “Christians have been here for 1,400 years” bit again, but stopping short of any literal guarantees.

Okay, that was long. But hopefully revealing. It’s clear that al-Sharaa is not exactly a reliable narrator. He does a lot of politician deflection every time al-Nusra’s many crimes during the war get brought up, but he also expresses some regret for the worst atrocities and claims a desire to move forward and become better. But only once Assad is gone. That is his pointed, repeated message. Once again, big Zelenskyy vibes.

This interview was part of a bigger documentary PBS did on him called The Jihadist (it’s free!) about him making nice with the West. I think it does a good job of looking at both his sympathetic side as well as the pretty heinous things his organizations have done. Like I said, I am no friend of any Salafist. Nevertheless, I find al-Sharaa’s communication style quite refreshing compared to the sort of dreck the other militants like to say about infidels and God’s will and death to America. Maybe it’s just because he wants daddy America to turn on the guns and money faucet again like the good old days so he’s being a good little tolerant boy. Or maybe he’s a little more complex than your run of the mill emir.

The Road to Damascus

While Saul the Pharisee was traveling to Damascus, he was visited by a vision of the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ, temporarily blinding him. That moment set him on a forever different course, sending him all over the ancient world as Paul the Apostle, one of the founding fathers of the Christian Church. We have come to use “Road to Damascus” as an idiom to describe a pivotal event in someone’s life, a moment when their trajectory is forever changed by some exterior force. I want to understand what al-Sharaa’s Road to Damascus moment was before he got on the literal road to Damascus, because it really seems like he changed his tune in the 2020s.

If you fall down the wikipedia rabbit hole of researching FTOs as I do several times a year, you’ll quickly come to grips with the fact that being a high profile enemy of America and Israel does not lead to a long and happy life. As the last 6 leaders of ISIS/Al-Qaeda in Iraq, or the last 2 leaders of the global Al-Qaeda organization, or Solemani or Nasrallah or Sinwar or Mansour or Gaddafi or Hussein can attest: making an enemy of the West and Israel is a good way to get the word “was” to appear in your wikipedia lede. On top of this mountain of corpses stands al-Sharaa, thriving. His body: tea. His face card: never declines. He was one of Zarqawi’s top dogs if you believe Iraqi intelligence, he rotted in Bucca for five years, he killed a mind-boggling amount of people in the mean streets of Idlib, and now he’s chillin in NYC with the Trumpster.

Does this guy know I don’t speak English?

So what happened? I think there are two stories I can tell myself to explain this enigma of a man, and they both scare me.

Both of them start with al-Sharaa truly committed to the jihad. Ripped from his secular upbringing by some anonymous cleric, he joined the insurgency to kill Americans and defend the Muslim world. But he never quite fit in with the wild-eyed zealots of Salafism, not with his cosmopolitan upbringing. During the time he spent in Bucca, he started developing his own flavor of “moderate extremism”, a brand of militancy that treasured palatability over purity, that made appeals to conscience over duty. Somehow he won enough influence and social capital to take point on the Islamic State’s entrance into Syria.

Here’s where our narratives diverge. One casts al-Sharaa as a cynical zealot. He rebrands to al-Nusra, from al-Nusra to Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, ever on the run from his previous baggage. But it’s the same old beast lurking in there: murdering Alawites for heresy, brutally playing for ultimate power in Syria, a contest he eventually wins. He has learned not to fight the West, so he cooperates. He gets their guns and their training. He gets their recognition on the international stage. Every move is calculated and theatrical: he said “diversity is a strength” after recapturing Aleppo, a phrase deviously aimed to melt a western liberal’s heart. His reversal on many of his previous radical positions is temporary salve to convince the West he can be trusted, to get sanctions lifted. All the while, his people seem insufficiently restrained in their persecution of the Alawites and the Druze (What, you thought we’d finish this marathon without mentioning the Druze? No chance). Once he has consolidated enough power, you’ll get to see what a real legitimized Islamic State will look like. Same old al-Baghdadi in a suit and tie. You know… besides the one already playing out in Afghanistan…

Our other narrative casts al-Sharaa as a cynical liberal. He really did have a honeymoon phase with radical Islam, but his motivations in heading for Iraq were always more political than religious, more Arab than Muslim. You just have to play the only game in town. The guys on top will only give you resources if you’re a good little jihadist, and the guys down below will only die for you if you’re a good little jihadist, so that’s what you must be. But even as early as Bucca his cracks start to show, his desire to distance himself from the yucky clerics with their legal arguments and heretic executions. So he played the long game, never reigning in his men too tightly lest they catch on that he’s not really on the same page as them, letting atrocities happen under his watch as an acceptable price to pay. And the moment he has consolidated enough power and eliminated enough rivals, away goes the turban and the camo, on comes the black suit. No more persecution, now diversity is our strength. There is no sharp turn revealing the true al-Sharaa coming in the future, because 2021 was the sharp turn. He really is an intersectional baddie with glowing skin. Any further repression and inhumanity are simply his once-criminal underlings doing what they’ve always done, and he has his work cut out for him trying to restore rule of law and reign in sectarian violence.

You may have been able to tell, but deep down I want to believe that the second story is true. I want him to be an unexpected champion for political equality and religious tolerance, forged in grueling conditions of Camp Bucca. I first learned about him all the way back when I was 16, trying to tie together how American guns ended up in Islamist hands. Now I’m ten years older and he’s the President of Syria! I can’t help but sort of cheer for him! It feels like we’ve grown up together. I’m a very different person than I was a decade ago, and it maybe seems like he is too.

I guess I’ll finish the story for anyone who wasn’t paying attention to global news last year. After laying dormant and playing municipal politics in Idlib for four years, HTS neé al-Nusra suddenly came alive in 2024 and started a lightning offensive toward Aleppo. While Assad regime forces had lost discipline and momentum, Russia had been mired in Ukraine, and Quds Force and Hezbollah decapitated by Israel’s ever-expanding war on Iran and her proxies, HTS had been quietly building up materiel and allies. Once the time was right, the road to Damascus was paved in gold. Aleppo, Hama, Homs, Damascus. It was over in a week. HTS was in the presidential palace firing their guns into the air, and al-Sharaa was ready for his closeup.

I love it when they got the rifle in one hand and the peace sign in the other

And They All Lived Happily Ever After

al-Sharaa’s first year as president has been fraught, to put it lightly. The persecution of the Alawites by HTS has not let up. In July of 2025, a spat between local Druze and Bedouin militias in Suwayada led to a domino effect that resulted in Israeli jets bombing the Presidential Palace. This kerfuffle was what initially inspired me to put my thoughts down about this fella, because the dueling narratives I presented about his motivations have far-reaching implications for international peace. They determine whether the IDF bombers are power-hungry provocateurs or heroic defenders of the weak.

This is a developing story with a lot of moving parts and fog of war, so I won’t come down too strongly on what really happened. But what it seems to me is basically this: an escalating series of ethnically motivated crimes between Druze and Bedouin (started by some Bedouin miscreants I guess?) exploded into a full blown shooting war between the two groups, because everyone is packing heat in the Middle East at all times.

In response to this a Druze sheikh named al-Hijri was like “We’re getting ethnically cleansed, get em boys!” The other two sheikhs were trying to negotiate a ceasefire, meanwhile al-Hijri was basically turning into a mini-warlord and perpetuating massacres. Of course this guy is the one the US and Israel latched onto. Israel had gobbled up some nearby territory beyond the armistice lines in the Golan Heights during the fall of the Assad regime under the auspices of protecting the Druze from genocide. So someone forcefully advocating for Druze militarization against the Arab majority (historic enemies of Israel, remember they’ve fought a lot of wars with Syria in living memory) was naturally aligned with Israel’s interests.

al-Sharaa sent government forces to break up the conflict, and al-Hijri was like “See? They’re coming to kill us!” The mostly Arab government forces did in fact say some racist things and got in some shootouts with the Druze, but they obviously weren’t there to just cap Druze in the street. Like, maybe the Druze shot first sometimes? al-Hijri’s hysterics did not cease, and Israel started conducting a lot of aerial bombardments in the area. Not targeting the Bedouin aggressors, but the government forces meant to mediate the conflict.

Then they decided to drop some bombs on Damascus for good measure. Or in their words, to send a message that there would be no Druze ethnic cleansing on their watch. These were in the heady days mere weeks after Israel had gotten away with bombing Iran with the United States’ support, so I guess they were trying to see how long their leash was. And they did indeed suffer no real consequences, though the entire international community from China to the US to Turkey officially condemned it and told them to not do it again.

The IDF chilled out, government forces managed to establish some separation between the quarreling groups, and al-Hijri’s forces consolidated under one banner and expressed separatist sentiments. Now it’s a fun little frozen standoff, nothing a Syrian Civil War vet hasn’t seen a hundred times before.

The important question to ask is who we believe here. If we believe Israel and the Druze, HTS has been raring for an excuse to roll into Suwayada and start blasting. If we believe al-Sharaa, HTS has some guys within it that would love to sock it out with the Druze and don’t have any sympathy for their plight, but the cooler heads in the government are completely committed to rooting them out and guaranteeing equality before the law. Whether we believe al-Sharaa’s messaging or not comes down to whether we think he’s a cynical jihadist that secretly hates the Druze or he’s a true liberal that openly hates prejudice and disunity.

So which one is he?

I’m not sure I’m the right guy to answer the question. After all the words I’ve read and all the words I’ve written, all the years I’ve spent following his ascendancy, I think I’m just too invested to judge him fairly. But I also don’t have anybody to talk to about this, so you have to hear my thoughts. Don’t take my retelling as the factual account. Click on all the hundreds of links, read the full interview, watch the documentary. Lose yourself in the endlessly deep pool of al-Sharaa lore. Try to answer the eternal question.

What’s his deal, for real?