Understanding the ‘extreme centre’ of Syria after Assad

The 14 years under Assad’s authoritarian leadership has been brutal but now Syria is facing many other challenges, including a recent surge of sectarian violence

Opposition fighters celebrate after the Syrian government collapsed in Damascus in December 2024. File picture: Omar Sanadiki/ AP

• Transformed by the People 
• Patrick Haenni and Jerome Drevon
• Hurst, €23.99 

This past February, the UN development programme published The Impact of the Conflict in Syria. 

The report assessed the impact of almost 14 years of conflict in Syria, noting that nine out of 10 Syrians presently live in poverty and face food insecurity; 50% of the country’s infrastructure has been destroyed or rendered dysfunctional, and 75% of the population now depends on some form of humanitarian aid.

In early August, Syria signed several investment deals with regional and international companies worth an estimated $14bn. 

The infrastructure project is set to modernise Syria’s international airport and build a new subway system in the country’s capital, Damascus. 

That grandiose post-war plan was announced just one month after US president Donald Trump ended many US economic sanctions on Syria.

“If those sanctions were not lifted, Syria might have headed towards failed state status,” Patrick Haenni explains — via Zoom — from his home in Lausanne, Switzerland. 

For now, that scenario seems to have been avoided, but there are still many challenges ahead for Syria.

Haenni is a senior advisor for Middle East affairs at the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, an NGO that specialises in conflict mediation. 

He has recently published Transformed by the People, with Jerome Drevon, a fellow Swiss political scientist, who works for Brussels-based NGO, Crisis Group. Both specialise in jihadism, political Islam, and conflict mediation-resolution.

Their co-authored book begins on December 8, 2024, when Syria’s then president Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow, after a rebel alliance, led by Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, and the Islamist group, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham — entered Damascus and launched a sweeping military campaign against the Syrian regime. 

The last 14 years under Assad’s authoritarian leadership, following the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in March 2011, had been especially brutal. 

Syria’s major cities — including, Aleppo, Homs, and Raqqa — were subjected to relentless bombings. 

Thousands of Syrians were put in prison; the population was attacked with chemical weapons; hundreds of thousands were killed, and 13m were displaced from their homes.

Last December, three days after becoming Syria’s de facto leader, al-Sharaa, gave an interview to Western media. “People are exhausted from war,” he said. 

So too was al-Sharaa. For more than two decades he had been fighting an Islamist cause, as Drevon explains, joining the call from Geneva. 

Ahmed al-Sharaa, former rebel commander and current president of Syria. File picture: Mosa'ab Elshamy/ AP

“Al-Sharaa is a committed Muslim, but he is also a political pragmatist who is guided by political reality more than ideology.”

Now Syria’s president, Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, was born on October 29, 1982, in Saudi Arabia, and returned to Damascus as a small child. 

When a US-led coalition invaded Iraq in March 2003 al-Sharaa, then 21 years old, had already crossed the border from Syria to fight.

Two years later, he joined the Iraqi insurgency, integrating into the ranks of a Salafi jihadi organisation that became Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) in 2006. US troops had arrested al-Sharaa the previous year, in Mosul.

He spent five years in Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca, where the CIA secretly tortured detainees in US custody. 

In prison, al-Sharaa wrote a 50-page thesis about bringing jihad to Syria. He eventually took that plan to then newly appointed head of ISI, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who gave al-Sharaa some financial assistance.

In August 2011, al-Sharaa and six al-Qaeda operatives left Iraq, strapped with suicide belts in case they were caught. They made it safely across the border to Syria. 

Six months later, al-Sharaa set up Jabhat Al-Nusra, which defined itself as the front of support for the Syrian revolution.  The radical Sunni Islamist group saw itself as part of a wider global network. 

Foreign civilians kidnapped to raise funds

Within a year of its founding, Nusra evolved from an army of six men to 5,000. Nusra kidnapped foreign civilians and took in tens of millions of dollars from ransom payments.

By the summer of 2015, Nusra controlled most of Idlib: a province in northwestern Syria that borders Turkey. There, the group established Sharia courts and took over the running of local government services. 

Nusra also tortured their prisoners, and, using the Islamic penal code, carried out executions against individuals accused of partaking in extramarital relations, prostitution, and apostasy. 

In Idlib, Nusra banned music, smoking, and gender mixing. Gradually, other internal changes happened within Nusra, too.

In April 2013, al-Baghdadi announced a plan to integrate Nusra into the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Al-Sharaa wasn’t consulted about the move. 

Fearing he would lose half of his fighters to ISIS, he wrote to al-Qaeda’s co-founder, and then leader, the Egyptian physician, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda. 

Then in July 2016, Nusra parted ways with al-Qaeda, too. “Al Sharaa understood that the al-Qaeda brand was dangerous and that nobody would deal with [him] if they remained within al-Qaeda,” says Drevon.

Both authors note that from this point, al-Sharaa distanced himself from global jihad, focusing instead on the specifics he felt were needed to win the Syrian revolution. 

Nusra was dissolved and became known as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, which eventually transformed into Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in January 2017. 

That October, HTS played a leading role in establishing the salvation government — a civilian governance project that ran a de facto state in the Idlib province. But HTS did not have the financial resources to govern 3.2m people, so it outsourced many functions.

Haenni and Drevon are both experts on this recent chapter of Syrian history, having watched much of it unfold in real time. 

They have carried out more than a decade of field research in North-West Syria, which eventually led them to interview al-Sharaa and his close associates.

“We interviewed al-Sharaa from 2020 to 2024 and spoke to him up until the few weeks before the takeover of Damascus last December,” Haenni says.

“HTS’ transformation and deradicalisation was driven more by practical necessity than by ideological revision [and it] stands out as one of the few Sunni Islamist movements to have genuinely and sustainably established territorial control,” both authors write in Transformed by the People. 

They also argue that this political transformation is a silent revolution that has brought HTS to “the extreme centre”.

This has seen al-Sharaa occasionally draw from the authoritarian playbook — applying security pressure, conducting arrests, and delegitimising certain opposition actors.

“But Al Sharaa is pragmatic politician, who is not a replica of autocrats like Bashar al-Assad,” Drevon insists.

Syria, though, is facing many other challenges, including a recent surge of sectarian violence. 

On August 10, the UN Security Council expressed alarm at the sharp escalation of violence in Syria’s Sweida region, since mid-July, condemning attacks against civilians and calling for urgent protection and humanitarian access. 

The following day, Syria’s interior ministry said it would hold accountable those responsible for the apparent killing of an unarmed man at a hospital during violence last month in Druze-majority Sweida province after a purported video of the incident emerged. Keeping that radical violence under control may prove difficult in the long run though.

“Before, radicalism [in Syria] was framed by Salafi jihadism, specifically with groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda. It wasn’t so difficult to deal with that,” Haenni concludes.

“This new type of sectarian radicalism is not framed in ideological terms, but by revenge seeking, and that is much more difficult to manage.”