Who is Al-Jolani, the Syrian rebel who ended Assad’s rule?

What comes next will boil down to how the disparate opposition forces coalesce and how foreign stakeholders exploit the power vacuum created. Almost surely, an economy that had already been shredded by 13 years of civil strife will continue to suffer.

Here’s your guide to the domestic players — including Ahmed Al-Sharaa, the leader of the lightning offensive that toppled Assad — and the external parties with skin in the game.   

What do we know about Al-Sharaa, aka Abu Mohammed al-Jolani?

The capture of Damascus was led by HTS, or the Organization for the Liberation of the Levant, and it has suddenly thrust its leader — a Syrian named Ahmed Al-Sharaa, better known by his nom de guerre, Mohammed al-Jolani — into a highly influential position with a potential say over the future of Syria.

The HTS is the successor to the Nusra Front, which was an affiliate of al-Qaeda, the group responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks on the US. Al-Jolani joined al-Qaeda in Iraq after the US invasion and was detained and jailed by the Americans there. 

The HTS is designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the US and others. The US offers a $10 million reward for information on Al-Jolani, and his past will drag up questions about the extent to which he’s purged the extremist elements in his midst.

He has suggested that he’s a moderating force and, to a degree, disassociated himself from his past; the roots of his group’s rebrand as HTS date to 2017. “I say don’t judge by words but by actions. The reality speaks for itself. These classifications are primary political and at the same time wrong,” he said in an interview with CNN on Dec. 6.  

He appears to be on a charm campaign now, but before the conquest of Damascus, the 42-year-old militant had revealed very little about himself or his journey to become an Islamist fighter.

One clue lies in an interview with the PBS show Frontline in 2021 in which he talked about the second Palestinian uprising in 2000. “I was 18 or 19 years old. I started thinking at that time about how I can pursue my duty of defending the nation, which was being persecuted by the occupiers and invaders,” he said.

Al-Jolani is believed to command about 15,000 fighters and is expected to focus now on building local governance in the newly captured cities, including the capital Damascus, Aleppo, Hama and Homs. Fighters from the Turkey-backed umbrella group known as the National Liberation Front have also joined the HTS. 

Who are the other relevant local forces? 

There are the dregs of the forces loyal to Assad that — with the help of Russia, Iran and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah — had until now managed to confine the territory held by militant groups to about a third of the country. What becomes of them is an open question as they seemingly dissolved away in a matter of days.

Then there is the Syrian National Army. This is the Turkey-backed rebel group working together with other rebels in the assault on the regime. They are not a cohesive group but they appear to share a common goal of overthrowing the regime and containing HTS. 

Another player is the People’s Protection Units, or YPG. It is the armed wing of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party of Syria, which seeks autonomy for Syria’s Kurds and has shown a willingness to work with any power capable of advancing that goal. 

How are the foreign stakeholders gaming this out?

Foreign powers — including Russia, Iran, the US and Turkey — saw the war as an opportunity to extend their influence in a country that straddles the region’s geopolitical fault-lines. Right now, Russia and Iran — supporters of Assad — are seen as losers. Turkey has something to gain. And the US position appears to be in flux, given the transition to a new president in January. 

Russia, a Cold War-era ally of Syria, turned the war in favor of the Assad regime with a bombing campaign starting in September 2015. Russia had long maintained its only military base outside the former Soviet Union at Syria’s Mediterranean port of Tartus and in 2017 made a deal preserving access to an air base near Latakia. But Russia’s attention lately has been focused on its war in Ukraine. TASS state media said Assad and his family were granted asylum in Russia.

Iran deployed its elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to Syria to achieve its objective of ensuring the survival of the Assad regime, its main ally in the Middle East. The alliance gave Iran a land corridor stretching through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon through which it could more easily transport arms and equipment to Hezbollah, which has been greatly weakened by more than a year of conflict with Israel.

Turkey has played a complex role in the war. Initially an ally of Assad at the onset of the uprising in 2011 and then a supporter of the Syrian rebels, Turkey has been a part of the US-led coalition against Islamic State, the al-Qaeda spinoff that used the turmoil of the Syrian war to conquer territory in that country and in Iraq. Turkey, however, has repeatedly attacked the bloc’s most effective ground force, the US-armed YPG. Turkey considers the YPG an enemy because it has roots in the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which has battled for an autonomous region inside Turkey on and off since 1984. 

The US for years provided covert support to Syrian rebels fighting the regime but it ditched that program in mid-2017. The US played a major role fighting Islamic State with an air campaign against the group in 2014 and sent in ground troops the next year to assist the Kurdish forces fighting the jihadists. After Islamic State lost the territory it had controlled in Syria, the US reduced its presence while still maintaining a small force there for the purpose of combating remnants of the radical group. However, President-elect Donald Trump has said the US should “have nothing to do” with Syria.

What is left of Syria’s economy?

The 14-year war has taken a massive toll on Syria’s economy. A scarcity of reliable data makes it difficult to pin down the country’s exact output. However, the World Bank estimated in 2022 that Syria’s gross domestic product had shrunk by more than a half by 2020 from its pre-war level of around $60 billion, and the country has been classified as a low-income nation since 2018 as a result. 

According to data from the United Nations Development Program, employment was at roughly 50% as of 2020 and Syria’s human development index had rolled back 35 years because of faltering education and health services.

Syria was a minnow oil producer even before the civil war broke out, hardly meeting its own domestic fuel needs. There was a niche export market in olive oil and pistachio nuts, but that’s largely gone as the war led to a collapse of Syria’s agricultural production. What the country has become known for is exponential growth in illegal trade in drugs, specifically the super cheap amphetamine-like Captagon pills.

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History recap: Why did Syria become a trouble spot?

Once a French-run mandate, Syria became independent after World War II. In 1966, a splinter group from the Baath Party led by military officers belonging to the Alawite minority took power. That assured the domination of the group, whose faith is an offshoot of Shiite Islam, in a country where about 74% of the people are Sunni Muslim. Syria’s population includes sizable Christian, Druze and Kurdish communities as well. 

Hafez al-Assad, one of the figures of the 1966 coup, carried out a counter coup in November 1970 against his army comrades and built a regime underpinned by absolute power, a cult-of-personality and brutality against his opponents. After his eldest son Basel died in a car crash in 1993, Hafez groomed his second son Bashar to succeed him. Hafez died in 2000 and his son was initially embraced by Syrians and Western powers as a reformer.

As part of the wave of pro-democracy unrest known as the Arab Spring, protests erupted in Syria in March 2011. Using his father’s playbook, Bashar al-Assad used any means necessary — including chemical weapons — to crush dissent. The conflict broke largely along sectarian lines, with Syria’s Alawites supporting Assad and Sunnis backing the opposition.