Ahmed al-Sharaa
Based on Wikipedia: Ahmed al-Sharaa
In the span of just eleven days in late 2024, a man who had spent five years in American military prisons—including the infamous Abu Ghraib—toppled a dictatorship that had ruled Syria for over half a century. Ahmed al-Sharaa, better known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Julani, went from being a terrorist on the United States' most wanted list to shaking hands with diplomats and announcing the formation of a transitional government. His story is either one of genuine transformation or the most audacious rebranding in modern political history. Perhaps both.
A Bookish Boy in Damascus
Al-Sharaa was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 1982, though his family's roots lay elsewhere. His father's people came from Daraa, in Syria's south, and from the Golan Heights—territory that Israel had seized from Syria in the 1967 war. This detail matters. The displacement of his grandfather's family would become, in al-Sharaa's telling, one of the formative wounds that shaped his worldview.
The family returned to Syria in 1989, settling in Mezzeh, an affluent neighborhood in Damascus. His father, an oil engineer, opened a real estate office. His mother taught geography. They were middle class, educated, and—according to the New York Times—discussed politics around the dinner table, though they had no connection to Islamic extremism.
Young Ahmed was, by all accounts, unremarkable. His biographer Hussam Jazmati gathered memories from classmates who recalled a studious boy who wore thick glasses and avoided attention. Words used to describe him: "bookish," "quiet," "shy," "socially introverted." He worked part-time at his father's grocery store. He frequented the local Shafi'i mosque.
At seventeen, something shifted. He became religious in a visible way, adopting the austere long tunic and knitted cap of the devout. Yet even this transformation seemed to come without drama—a quiet intensification rather than a sudden break.
One detail from this period stands out. He had a romance with an Alawite girl. Both families opposed it. This matters because Alawites—the religious minority to which the Assad family belongs—would later become targets of violence by groups al-Sharaa led. The personal and the political, in Syria, are never far apart.
The Road to Iraq
What radicalized him? Al-Sharaa has given his own answer: the Palestinian Second Intifada, which erupted in 2000. "I started thinking about how I could fulfil my duties," he told the American documentary program Frontline in 2021, "defending a people who are oppressed by occupiers and invaders."
His reaction to September 11, 2001, is revealing. In a 2024 interview, he said that "anyone who lived in the Islamic or Arab world at the time who tells you he wasn't happy about it would be lying." He acknowledged understanding "regret" about innocent deaths—but only in retrospect, and only partially.
He enrolled at Damascus University, studying media and spending two years in the Faculty of Medicine. But his real education was happening elsewhere. On Fridays, he traveled from Damascus to Aleppo to attend sermons by Mahmoud Gul Aghasi, known as Abu al-Qaqaa—a charismatic preacher who attracted young men with jihadist sympathies.
In 2003, just weeks before the American invasion, he boarded a bus to Baghdad. He didn't tell his family.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq
What happened next is murky, and the murkiness is part of the story. Different sources tell different versions, and al-Sharaa himself has offered selective accounts.
What's clear: he joined al-Qaeda in Iraq, the organization led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant whose brutality shocked even other jihadists. Zarqawi pioneered the theatrical beheading video; he orchestrated sectarian massacres of Shia Muslims; he attracted fighters from across the Arab world to kill Americans and plunge Iraq into civil war.
Al-Sharaa's exact role remains disputed. He told Frontline he was merely a "regular foot-soldier." Iraqi intelligence, according to The Economist, believed he was Zarqawi's deputy by 2004. The Times of Israel claimed he was a "close associate" of the leader. Al-Sharaa denies ever meeting Zarqawi personally.
The discrepancy matters. A foot soldier follows orders. A deputy shapes strategy. The difference between these roles is the difference between a young man swept up in events and a man who helped architect some of the worst violence of the Iraq War.
In 2006, an American airstrike killed Zarqawi. Al-Sharaa left Iraq briefly, reportedly spending time in Lebanon supporting a jihadist group called Jund al-Sham. Then he returned to Iraq—and was captured by American forces while planting explosives.
The American Prison System
For over five years, al-Sharaa cycled through American detention facilities: Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca, Camp Cropper, Camp Taji. These were the prisons where the United States held suspected insurgents, and they became, inadvertently, networking hubs and radicalization centers for the jihadist movement.
Camp Bucca, in particular, was notorious. It held thousands of detainees in crowded conditions, and it brought together militants who might never have otherwise met. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—who would later declare himself caliph of the Islamic State—was held there. So were many of his future lieutenants.
Al-Sharaa used his time strategically. He taught classical Arabic to other prisoners, which built his reputation and expanded his network. He also maintained a useful deception: he convinced his captors he was a local Iraqi, not a foreign fighter, by speaking in Iraqi-accented Arabic and using a fake name—Amjad Mudhafar.
This deception worked. During a routine review, Iraqi authorities found no charges against "Amjad Mudhafar" and released him on March 13, 2011.
The timing was extraordinary. Days later, the Syrian Revolution began.
Building Al-Nusra
Within months, al-Sharaa received a mission from the highest levels of al-Qaeda. Ayman al-Zawahiri—Osama bin Laden's successor as leader of the global jihadist network—tasked him with establishing al-Qaeda's presence in Syria. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, still leading al-Qaeda's Iraqi branch, gave him fifty thousand dollars in startup capital.
The organization al-Sharaa built was called Jabhat al-Nusra, which translates roughly as "The Support Front for the People of the Levant." It was envisioned as a coalition of Islamist militant groups operating under al-Qaeda's umbrella but with direct allegiance to al-Qaeda's central command—not to al-Baghdadi in Iraq.
This distinction would prove crucial.
Al-Sharaa adopted a new identity for this phase of his life: Abu Mohammad al-Julani. The name al-Julani is a nisba, an Arabic naming convention indicating place of origin or association. One account claims it referenced the al-Julani neighborhood of Fallujah, where he had distinguished himself during the Iraqi insurgency.
Al-Nusra announced itself publicly in January 2012. By December, the United States had designated it a terrorist organization, identifying it as essentially an alias for al-Qaeda in Iraq. By May 2013, al-Sharaa personally was listed as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist.
But on the ground in Syria, al-Nusra was becoming something more complicated than a simple al-Qaeda franchise.
The Pragmatic Jihadist
Under al-Sharaa's leadership, al-Nusra carved out a distinctive approach. Yes, it was violent. Its fighters carried out suicide bombings in Damascus that killed dozens of civilians. They participated in sectarian massacres against Syria's religious minorities—Alawites, Shia, Druze, Christians. In one notorious incident, al-Nusra claimed credit for "storming and cleansing" the town of Hatla, killing between thirty and sixty Shia civilians.
But al-Nusra also provided social services. It cooperated with other Syrian rebel groups rather than trying to dominate them. It presented itself as fighting specifically against the Assad regime rather than waging global jihad.
This pragmatism made al-Nusra popular in ways that concerned its Iraqi patrons. Al-Baghdadi, watching from Iraq, grew suspicious. He sent his top aide, Abu Ali al-Anbari, to investigate al-Sharaa. The aide's conclusion: al-Sharaa was "a cunning person; two-faced; [...] [who] glows when he hears his name mentioned on satellite channels."
The assessment was meant as criticism. It might also have been prescient.
The Split with ISIS
In April 2013, al-Baghdadi made his move. Without consulting al-Qaeda's central leadership, he announced that al-Nusra would merge with his organization to form a new entity: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, better known as ISIS.
The merger would have eliminated al-Nusra's independence entirely, placing al-Sharaa and all his fighters under al-Baghdadi's direct command.
Al-Sharaa refused.
Instead, he publicly pledged allegiance directly to Ayman al-Zawahiri in al-Qaeda's central command, bypassing al-Baghdadi entirely. It was a calculated move—swearing loyalty to one jihadist leader to escape the control of another.
Al-Zawahiri backed al-Sharaa. He issued a declaration confirming al-Nusra's independence and restricting ISIS's authority to Iraq. He appointed an emissary to mediate between the two groups.
Al-Baghdadi refused to accept this ruling. The emissary was assassinated in February 2014. By then, al-Qaeda had formally severed all ties with ISIS, leaving al-Nusra as al-Qaeda's sole representative in Syria.
What followed was a war within a war. Even as both groups fought the Assad regime, they also fought each other. The split would shape the Syrian conflict for years.
The Atrocities
Any account of al-Sharaa's rise must reckon with what his organizations did.
Under his leadership, al-Nusra and its successor groups perpetrated suicide bombings, forced conversions, and sectarian massacres. The January 2012 al-Midan bombing killed 26 people and wounded 63. Al-Nusra was suspected in the May 2012 Damascus bombings that killed 55 and injured over 400, and in the February 2013 Damascus bombings that killed 83—most of them civilians and children.
In 2015, al-Nusra fighters killed Druze villagers in what became known as the Qalb Loze massacre. In 2016, rebel militants led by al-Nusra massacred 42 civilians and 7 militiamen while kidnapping up to 70 people after taking control of the Alawite village of Zara'a.
The violence extended beyond Syria. Al-Nusra conducted or was suspected in multiple bombings in Lebanon targeting Alawite and Shia populations, including attacks in Tripoli and Beirut.
Al-Sharaa's defenders point to statements he made denouncing some of these attacks as unauthorized actions by individual fighters. His critics note that he built and led the organizations that carried them out.
Breaking with Al-Qaeda
In 2016, al-Sharaa did something remarkable: he publicly cut ties with al-Qaeda.
The announcement came with a new name for his organization—Jabhat Fatah al-Sham—and a new narrative. Al-Sharaa presented himself as focused specifically on Syria, not on global jihad against the West. He cracked down on al-Qaeda loyalists within his own ranks.
In 2017, he merged several groups to form Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, usually called HTS. This organization established something unprecedented: a technocratic administration in the territory it controlled in Idlib Governorate. They called it the Syrian Salvation Government.
The Salvation Government collected taxes. It provided public services. It issued identity cards. It was, in effect, a proto-state run by former jihadists.
The transformation wasn't complete. HTS faced protests and criticism within Idlib for authoritarian tactics and suppressing dissent. The organization's past didn't vanish. But al-Sharaa was clearly building toward something different than what he had been.
Eleven Days in November
On November 27, 2024, HTS launched an offensive against the Assad regime. What followed stunned the world.
In eleven days, al-Sharaa's forces swept through Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and finally Damascus itself. The Assad regime, weakened by years of war and abandoned by its Russian and Iranian backers who were distracted by other conflicts, collapsed with shocking speed. Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia.
A dictatorship that had ruled Syria since 1970—first under Hafez al-Assad, then under his son Bashar—was finished.
Al-Sharaa became Syria's de facto leader.
The President
From December 8, 2024, al-Sharaa headed a caretaker government. On January 29, 2025, at a conference held in the People's Palace—once the seat of Assad's power—he was appointed president of Syria.
His early presidency focused on tasks that would be familiar to any post-revolutionary leader: consolidating power, rebuilding state institutions, integrating the various military factions that had fought the Assad regime into a unified national force.
He also worked to restore Syria's international relations. He met with American officials. He engaged with Russia, which still maintained military bases in Syria. He navigated relationships with regional powers including Turkey, which had backed various rebel groups, and Gulf states that had their own interests in Syria's future.
Domestically, he pursued economic recovery in a country devastated by more than a decade of civil war. He worked on security stabilization, trying to prevent the power vacuum from being filled by chaos. He announced efforts to facilitate the return of Syrian refugees—millions of whom had fled to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Europe.
Most delicately, he pursued what was called "minority reconciliation." Syria's Alawites, Christians, Druze, and other minorities had reason to fear a Sunni Islamist government, given what organizations like al-Nusra had done. Al-Sharaa's challenge was to convince them that his transformation was genuine.
The Complications
The early months of al-Sharaa's presidency were not smooth.
Massacres targeting Syrian Alawites occurred, involving government-affiliated troops. Clashes broke out in southern Syria. Critics noted the gap between al-Sharaa's rhetoric of reconciliation and the violence being carried out by forces nominally under his authority.
Israel complicated matters further. After the Assad regime fell, Israel intensified what it called a "limited invasion" from the occupied Golan Heights into southwestern Syria, breaking a 1974 agreement that had governed the armistice line for fifty years. Al-Sharaa found himself in an awkward position: he couldn't effectively resist Israel militarily, but he also couldn't be seen as accepting Israeli expansion. He reaffirmed Syria's commitment to the 1974 agreement while opposing renewed conflict.
Negotiations with the Syrian Democratic Forces—the Kurdish-led group that controlled northeastern Syria with American backing—remained inconclusive. Al-Sharaa signed an agreement to integrate their military and civil institutions into the state, but the details proved difficult.
He signed an interim constitution establishing a five-year transition period. The implication: Syria would not hold immediate elections, and al-Sharaa would remain in power while the country stabilized.
The Question
What are we to make of Ahmed al-Sharaa?
One interpretation: he is a genuine example of political evolution, a man who was radicalized by injustice, committed terrible acts in the fog of war, gradually recognized the limitations of jihadist ideology, and transformed himself into a pragmatic leader capable of governing a diverse nation. This interpretation notes his years-long trajectory away from al-Qaeda, his establishment of functional governance in Idlib, his consistent messaging about protecting minorities, and his diplomatic engagement with the international community.
Another interpretation: he is a shrewd operator who adopted extremism when it served his ambitions, shed it when it became a liability, and has consistently demonstrated a talent for telling powerful people what they want to hear—from al-Zawahiri to American diplomats. This interpretation notes the atrocities committed under his command, the gap between his rhetoric and the violence that continues, and the convenience of his ideological shifts.
Perhaps both interpretations contain truth. Political transformations are rarely pure. People change, but they also calculate. Al-Sharaa's past cannot be erased, but neither can Syria's future be built without engaging with the man who now leads it.
The bookish boy from Damascus who avoided attention has become one of the most consequential figures in the modern Middle East. Whether he represents redemption or deception—or some complicated mixture of both—may take years to determine.
What's certain is that his story isn't over. It's barely begun.