An Islamic Rebel Leader Rises, Challenging Syria’s Dictator
An Islamic militant group has made rapid advances across northwest Syria, seizing territory from the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in a dramatic evolution of a thirteen-year-old conflict that had appeared to be frozen.
The swift gains by the fighting group Hayat Tahrir ash-Sham, also known as HTS, began with attacks last Wednesday against government forces in northwestern Syria. By Saturday, the militants had gained control of Aleppo — Syria’s second largest city — and had pushed south to Hama, a major city on the highway south to Damascus.
“HTS is putting a huge military effort into these advances,” says Wassim Nasr, a senior researcher who specializes in jihadist groups in the Middle East and North Africa at the Soufan Center, a global risk and security consultancy. “They are using their best equipped units and advanced drone capabilities to retake ghost villages lost by the rebels years ago, after the push by Shia militias affiliated with Iran.”
Millions have been displaced in years of fighting across Syria, with many fleeing to Turkey or to relatively stable rebel-controlled areas. Many abandoned their hometowns, which were occupied by government militias and Iranian proxies, like Hezbollah. But with Israel having eviscerated Hezbollah’s leadership beginning in September, only a shell remained to hold off the rebels.
“Kids who grew up as displaced refugees are now returning home as fighters,” Nasr tells Rolling Stone.
For the first time in years, the survival of the Assad regime has been called into doubt. Without immediate intervention from its foreign backers, the Syrian government could fall to a coalition of anti-regime rebels, led by a hardline Sunni militant.
That militant’s name is Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, and he is called a terrorist by the United States and others. But experts, including those who have met him, paint a more complex portrait: that of a ruthlessly pragmatic, astute politician who has renounced “global jihad” — but who has every intention of uniting Syria under his interpretation of sharia law.
Whatever one calls al-Jolani, his strategic acumen is apparent. He began last week’s offensive after years of preparation, choosing to strike as Syrian government forces are at their weakest point in years of fighting, while Damascus’ key allies — Moscow and Tehran — have been sapped of military resources by the war in Ukraine and a confrontation with Israel.
“We are in an absolutely pivotal moment. This is a global turning point,” says Jennifer Cafarella, the director of research initiatives at the Institute for the Study of War, and an expert in the Syrian conflict. “Assad’s power is once more crumbling. Something will fill that void, and at the moment it looks like HTS.”
As HTS advanced, government forces in some areas fled in panic, although the rebels appear to have encountered resistance in Hama. Clashes were soon reported in other areas of Syria, in the southern city of Deraa and even within Damascus itself, although it was unclear who was fighting, or why. This reporter was able to contact a friend in Damascus on Saturday evening, who could only confirm there was fighting in the city.
“The situation is very bad here. I can hear the bullets around us,” the contact said. “It’s getting very difficult and we are preparing ourselves for the worst.”
The worst, in the context of Syria, is difficult to overstate. The civil war has killed an estimated 618,000 people since it began in March 2011 after a violent crackdown on anti-government protests, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a research group based in the U.K. The war is now a tangled web of sectarian conflict that has drawn in international Islamic extremists, Kurdish nationalists, and military forces from the United States, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Israel, and others. The slaughter has involved widespread deliberate bombings of civilians, aid workers, and medical facilities by Russian and Syrian aircraft, and the use of chemical weapons against population centers by government forces.
In 2014, the conflict became the crucible that helped form the Islamic State, an apocalyptic Salafi jihadist movement known for oppressive religious rule, brutal executions of prisoners, and genocide against the Yazidi and other religious minorities.
Some commentators have been quick to compare HTS’ lightning offensive to the Islamic State’s sweep across Syria and Iraq in 2014. But experts say the group is not the Islamic State 2.0.
“I wouldn’t call them ‘good jihadis,’” says Pieter Van Ostaeyen, an independent researcher who is an expert in Islamic militant groups in Syria. “I would say they are ‘not as bad’ as others.”
HTS has been designated a terror group by the United States since 2018, as it has its origins in the same jihadist group once aligned with Al Qaeda that became the Islamic State.
Its current leader, al-Jolani, is a Syrian who fought U.S. occupation in Iraq, first under the auspices of Al Qaeda and later under an affiliate called the Islamic State of Iraq, or ISI. When the civil war in Syria erupted in 2011, al-Jolani was sent by ISI’s then-leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to establish an Al Qaeda presence in the country — a group which eventually became Jabhat an-Nusra, or Nusra Front.
But the ambitions of al-Baghdadi, an Iraqi with a taste for rape, murder, and Islamic extremism, extended beyond the vision held by Al Qaeda’s leadership. He sought to establish a fundamentalist Sunni caliphate across Iraq and Syria, exterminating or enslaving religious minorities and declaring a global jihad against infidels. Having been forced to flee Iraq as U.S. forces worked to methodically eliminate Al Qaeda operatives, al-Baghdadi set up shop in Raqqa, Syria. There, he sought to corral the Islamic resistance in Iraq and Syria together.
Al-Jolani took issue with al-Baghdadi’s efforts to co-opt the Nusra Front, saying ISI should confine its activities to Iraq.
“Nusra Front will not change its flag, though we will continue to be proud of the flag of the Islamic State of Iraq, of those who carry it and those who sacrifice themselves and shed their blood for it,” al-Jolani said in a recording released in April 2013.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s global leader after the death of Osama bin Laden, attempted to quell the dispute, but was ignored by al-Baghdadi. The result was a rift, with the bulk of Nusra Front’s fighters flocking to the black banner of ISI.
Al-Jolani, along with other anti-regime Islamist fighters in Syria who refused to join al-Baghdadi, relocated to the northwest.
Al-Baghdadi’s forces descended on the cradle of civilization spanning Syria and Iraq, capturing key cities along the Euphrates and Tigris river corridors, as Iraqi security forces evaporated before it and the Syrian military was brought to the brink of collapse. In June 2014, al-Baghdadi declared the establishment of the Islamic State from a mosque in Mosul, naming himself caliph of all Muslims. At its peak in 2015, the caliphate controlled almost half of Syria and one-third of Iraq.
The Islamic State also had a dedicated unit assigned to extraterritorial operations, which sponsored terror attacks around the globe, killing hundreds in shootings, bombings, and massacres worldwide. That prompted the United States — which had already been intervening in Syria overtly and covertly for years, especially after Assad’s forces used sarin nerve gas to kill 1,729 civilians in Ghouta in 2013 — to assemble an international military coalition under the ponderous acronym CJTF-OIR, or Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve, to battle the Islamic State.
The Syrian government’s allies in Moscow and Tehran also decided it was time to act.
“Initially their goal was to support Assad, to make sure the government had enough territory for a settlement, for leverage in peace talks. The threat of terrorism, of fighters from Chechnya joining the Islamic State, was also a major concern for Moscow,” says Dr. Nicole Grajewski, an expert in Russo-Iranian relations and a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Russia also saw this as an opportunity to contest U.S.-led interventionism.”
By September 2015, Moscow had sent a naval flotilla, thousands of soldiers and advisers, and dozens of bombers, attack aircraft, and helicopters to Hmeimim Air Base in Latakia, on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. At its height, the Russian mission involved perhaps 6,000 military personnel. Iran ordered tens of thousands of Hezbollah and Shia militia fighters into the fray alongside them, hoping to maintain Syrian cooperation and a land bridge to its proxies in Lebanon.
The combination of Iranian muscle coupled with Russian air power and command-and-control proved essential in allowing the regime to capture the rebel stronghold of Aleppo in 2017, after a brutal bombing campaign and ground offensive that claimed tens of thousands of civilian lives and forced surviving anti-regime fighters to flee.
That same year saw the defeat of the Islamic State. Iraqi and U.S. forces liberated Mosul, the last significant city held by the Islamic State in Iraq, while Russian air power, Shia militias, and government forces rolled back their gains across Syria and Kurdish-led fighters captured Raqqa, the caliphate’s capital. The caliph became the focus of an international manhunt.
The failure of the Islamic State and the devastation it brought were a lesson for al-Jolani, who viewed fighting infidels abroad as detrimental to efforts to oust the Assad regime and establish Islamic rule in Syria.
One of the last bastions of territory held by non Kurdish-led rebels was Idlib province, a key territory in northwestern Syria which has two border crossings into Turkey, and in 2017 al-Jolani and others forged HTS there out of an array of smaller fighting groups of varying ideologies. They quickly began consolidating control over Idlib province.
HTS created the Syrian Salvation Council, a civil government that dismantled or subsumed rival rebel councils and administrations. Soon, HTS governed nearly 4.5 million inhabitants — a number that includes an estimated 1.5 million displaced persons. In addition to setting up a government, HTS also went to work organizing effective military units, investing heavily in training centers, special operations units, and drone warfare.
“It’s not the clarity of his vision that has drawn him support from the Syrians who are ideologically aligned. It’s his organizational capacity,” notes Cafarella.
In 2019, al-Baghdadi, on the run for years after the fall of Raqqa, was located by American intelligence. He had been hiding in a safe house in Idlib, just across the border from Turkey. When the U.S. conducted a raid to capture him, he elected to kill himself and two children with a suicide vest when cornered by Delta Force operators.
That same year, HTS began a crackdown on jihadists who refused to bend the knee. The group already required fighters to forswear “global jihad” and pledge to recognize its legal and military authority. Now, it began hunting down anyone in Idlib who chose to stay loyal to Al Qaeda or the Islamic State, arresting or killing those it found.
“Al-Jolani is a pragmatist,” says Van Ostaeyen. “He’s interested in power. They have absolutely no interest in attacking the West. They want to control Syria.”
The next step was making that clear to foreign powers. HTS began cultivating ties with Turkey, while maintaining independence from the Syrian National Army, the umbrella group of rebel militias directly trained, armed, and controlled by the Turkish government. It also began to publicize its ideology and goals.
Abu Maria al-Qahtani, another Iraqi who had fought under Al Qaeda and now served as one of the ideological leaders of HTS, made the breakup explicit, issuing a controversial call for Al Qaeda to be dissolved in August 2022, saying it had fallen under the sway of Iran after the death of its leader al-Zawahiri.
Al-Qahtani was assassinated earlier this year, allegedly by Islamic State operatives.
“The split from the Islamic State and from Al Qaeda were incredibly costly internally,” Nasr says. “It’s not just marketing. It cost [Al-Qahtani] his life.”
Al-Jolani had started to purge HTS of internal dissent last year, and the group regularly arrests and imprisons even senior members for a variety of offenses. The death of al-Qahtani, a prominent voice within the group, left al-Jolani as the group’s undisputed leader.
“He’s a politician. He’s smart,” Nasr says. “While everyone was looking at Idlib thinking they were going to solve this conflict without the Syrians, he put Syrians back in the equation.”
Despite its focus on Syria, it would be a mistake to view HTS as moderate, Nasr says. “They are Islamist insurgents, and they want to install sharia law.”
“They are not secular rebels. They’re kind of a softer Taliban. When I was in Idlib I saw women driving and going to university, people smoking and playing music. … Even women and men walking together in the center of town. It may sound like nothing to us, but understand the hardliners think this is blasphemy.”
Syria was, before the revolution, a secular state comprised of multiple ethnicities and religious denominations, and any serious attempt to govern it — without resorting to outright genocide, as did the Islamic State — must contend with that reality.
“I visited Christian villages. They are restoring churches, and I saw priests holding mass,” Nasr says of a visit to Idlib under HTS rule. “Minorities have less rights, but they are not massacred.”
Since its sweeping offensive across northwest Syria commenced last Wednesday, HTS commanders have issued multiple statements designed to reassure other rebel groups and minority populations that their goal is not conquest: it is fighting the regime and Iranian proxies. They also issued a statement designed to placate Moscow, saying that Russia was not their target and that they hoped “to establish positive relations.”
“Western policy has been to treat Syria as if the civil war has been concluded,” Cafarella tells Rolling Stone. “But Assad’s rule is a house of cards.”
That “house of cards” was previously propped up with Russian air power and Hezbollah’s guns.
“We are not in 2015 any more. The Russians used to have 40 aircraft. Now they have perhaps 10. They are taking action according to their capacity,” Nasr says, adding that he is skeptical Iran can provide aid in the short term. “The Israelis hit Hezbollah so hard, and the Americans are hitting Iran’s proxies in the east. It would be quite surprising to see them able to rebuild.”
But he doesn’t think Russia is ready to abandon Assad. Neither does Grajewski, the expert on Russian policy in the Middle East.
“Given the importance of the Syrian intervention to Russia’s foreign policy messaging and propaganda, it seems unlikely they will simply stand aside and watch as Assad falls,” she says.
There is a difference however, between desire to intervene, and ability to do so.
“My question is ‘What price are the Russians willing to pay to maintain their presence?’” Cafarella asks.
Although the handful of Russian forces on the ground in northwestern Syria were pulled back to Hmeimim as the rebels advanced, their aircraft have continued striking HTS targets — and hospitals, according to international aid agencies, a practice which was common during the siege of Aleppo. Some sources even claimed al-Jolani himself was killed in an airstrike, which Nasr — who is in contact with HTS fighters — described simply as “BS.”
Other big questions now are whether HTS has the resources to continue its offensive, and if other insurgent groups will coordinate in a broader push against the government.
“There is only one thing the Syrian opposition is sure about,” Van Ostaeyen observes, “and that is it’s time to get rid of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.”
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