In recent days, new leaders have come to town in Syria. The Assad Dynasty has crumbled, and its former high-rolling leader Bashar Al-Assad has fled the nation.
His tyrannical regime was hijacked by less diplomatic tyrants, how ironic. Although Assad has a reputation of barbarism, nothing compares to the new leaders of the majority of the Syrian land, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham and its allies.
HTS sprang to action with its anti-Assad buddies to take over a massive chunk of the Syrian land mass. Now being one of the largest conquerors of the Syrian land, the international community should know who they are, who they were, and what they do.
Syria’s new leader, the leader of HTS, is Abu Mohammad Al-Julani. Al-Julani is affiliated with the controversial Al-Qaeda terrorist organization.
Beginning his journey to Islamic radicalization by joining the Nusra Front, a local Syrian branch of the Al-Qaeda terror network.
In 2003 he headed to Baghdad to fight against Western forces in Iraq. In the early 2010s he returned to his homeland, Syria, where he used his militant experience to fight against the dictator Bashar Al-Assad.
Al-Qaeda branches began to break away and pursue their own interest, including ISIS. As ISIS did a few years before, the Nusra Front broke away from Al-Qaeda in 2016.
This split does not mean that members of the Nusra Front lost their radical Islamist identity or ideology; it simply means that Al-Qaeda wasn’t focusing enough on the goal of their branch, which was to take Syria from the hands of Al-Assad.
Although the Nusra Front never lost its terroristic ideology, it did drop one aspect of its group. It changed its name and was known as the Jabhat Fatah Al-Sham. The following year, a super merger of the groups Liwa Al-Haqq, Jaysh Al-Sunna, Jaysh Al-Ahrar, and Jabhat Fatah Al-Sham took place.
The merger of these four key radical factions birthed a new organization, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham.
HTS quickly rose to prominence, securing the title of the largest rebel faction in Northern Syria.
Although HTS was involved in trivial disputes with other rebel groups, what set it apart from the rest is that it called for peace and unity among the rebel groups to prevail against their common enemies — such as the Assad regime, Al-Qaeda (who became a general competitor in the area), and ISIS (who became a competitor in Northern Syria).
As HTS grew, so did its call for unity to defeat Assad. It became exceedingly clear to Syrians in the region that its objective was to win Syria for its terror aligned interests, even if it had to abandon its petty fights with other Islamist rebels.
An interesting bit about HTS is that it used unconventional methods, for a terror organization, to take out its enemies. Its methods included working with established authorities like counter-terrorism groups and police forces in areas it controlled to drive out competing militants in the area.
It also employed the techniques of centralized government. One example is the Syrian Salvation Government, founded in 2017, which HTS used to implement more of its terroristic tactics — albeit with some sort of legality.
This governmental structure continued to grow as the group attempted to forge relationships with Kurds and the Turks; however, Turkey still recognized HTS as a terrorist group despite its attempts at a relationship to fight against insurgence within Al-Qaeda groups.
However, by 2020 HTS was very explicitly working with Turkish aligned rebels in the North. By 2024, it had observed that Assad’s main allies, Russia and Iran, had been occupied with other conflicts.
This enabled HTS to prepare a full scale accosting of the Syrian government, which it did. Once HTS reached Damascus, Assad’s birthplace, Assad fled to Moscow where the Russian government granted him asylum.
On the same day, Damascus fell to HTS. Now as HTS controls Syria, it is looking to expand its presence, with Al-Julani speaking to the international community as Syria’s de-facto leader.
From the Assad Dynasty’s brutal rule to HTS’ brutal takeover, it’s shaping up to look like Syria is trapped in a ruthless cycle of switching out one dictatorship for another. This is the Shakespearean tragedy of Syria.
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