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The Syrian civil war, which began in 2011 and had been in a stalemate in 2020, has seen major developments in recent days. The government of President Bashar al-Assad, who ruled the Middle Eastern country since 2000, has reeled under sudden intense attacks from the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). On Sunday (December 8), its members reached the capital Damascus and celebrated the fall of the regime led by Assad, who was reported to have fled the country.
HTS leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani recently told The New York Times in an interview, “Our goal is to liberate Syria from this oppressive regime.” What is known about Jolani and his group? We explain.
Syrian rebel forces, who oppose the Assad regime, concluded a three-day attack towards the city of Aleppo on November 29. The move came as a surprise since the conflict had laid dormant after a ceasefire was negotiated in 2020.
The government of Syria and its ally Russia’s united forces failed to regain control of rebel-occupied territory, despite the use of jets and bombings in the region. The rebel attack was also the first time since 2016 that opposition forces seized territory in the city of Aleppo.
To recall, the Syrian civil war began around the “Arab Spring” of 2010, dubbed so as many countries in the Middle East and North Africa saw uprisings against authoritarian governments that had been in power for decades. Foreign governments, such as the United States and Russia, also engaged with the conflict based on their respective strategic interests.
The HTS, which Abu Mohammad al-Jolani leads, was founded in 2011 as Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria. In 2016, it broke away to form the Jabhat Fateh al-Shaam (JFS), standing for the liberation of Shaam or the Levant (the sub-region of the Middle East lying near the Mediterranean Sea, including Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine).
Bashir Ali Abbas, a Research Associate at the Council for Strategic and Defense Research, New Delhi, wrote in The Indian Express, “By 2017, after merging with a number of other groups, the JFS became the HTS, which had a localized operational focus.”
Jolani, 42, is seen as being instrumental in HTS meeting its objectives in recent days. According to a recent profile in Financial Times, “Jolani capitalised on the recent outreach he’d conducted with tribes, former opponents and minority groups, brokering surrenders and ordering the protection of minorities.”
He was born in Saudi Arabia and later moved to Damascus. Before coming to Syria, Jolani’s grandfather lived in Golan Heights, a region lying between Israel and Syria and part of Syria until the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Since then, Israel has controlled around 70% of this area.
At an early age, Jolani began engaging with the geopolitics of the region. Around the Second Intifada in 2000, or the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation, he said, “I was 17 or 18 years old at the time, and I started thinking about how I could fulfil my duties, defending a people who are oppressed by occupiers and invaders.”
As the United States sent its forces to Iraq in 2003, Jolani also left to go to Baghdad to join the insurgency and subsequently climbed up its ranks. In 2013, the U.S. Department of State designated him as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist.
In a rare interview with American media, Jolani spoke to the American news outlet PBS in 2021. He discussed the conflict in Syria at length, saying, “The conflict in Syria has aggravated. It is no longer a conflict within the same people. It has become to certain countries — because of the policies driven by their different interests — it has become more like a mailbox to them, unfortunately. Russia doesn’t care much about the regime, but it uses the regime as a pretext to reach the beaches of the Mediterranean, with all its natural gas and warm waters… They also try to return to the international scene, after their loss from the Soviet Union in the early ’90s of the past decade.”
Jolani said Iran, which has also supported the Assad regime, has “huge interests in the region, interests that go long back in history, ancient history, the interests of the old Persian state, the Persian empire that used to exist in this region… They are now trying to restore their former glory… The Mediterranean, of course, is of great importance, and any country with ambitions would want to have access to it… and at the same time, they use the Shiite doctrine to reach their goals and the interests they have been seeking throughout history.”
He said the solution to the conflict was “to address the causes rather than the symptoms. The cause of this issue, this huge catastrophe, is this regime.” Jolani also said the Syrian revolution has global significance. “First of all, it’s an unfairly treated revolution that arose against a tyrant (referring to Assad), who is a criminal and an oppressor, who kills his people.” He added, “First and foremost, this region does not represent a threat to the security of Europe and America. This region is not a stage for executing external operations. That’s to start with. The other point is that there are some wrong policies adopted by the international community against the Syrian revolution. For example, till now there’s still international recognition of Bashar al-Assad, although he carried out tens of chemical attacks against his people…”
Going forward, according to a report in The NYT, “There are also questions about whether Mr. al-Jolani’s form of rule — where some conservative Muslim strictures have been imposed on the population — would be widely accepted across Syria. He and his group espouse government guided by a conservative and at times hard-line Sunni Islamist ideology.” Although, it noted, “he has formed an alliance with a variety of other rebel factions, some backed by Turkey, that hold more moderate views.”
