Syria’s new ruler is politically astute

When I left London almost two weeks ago after the rebel coalition captured Aleppo – a resounding victory overshadowed by what followed – I thought I would talk about a shooting war.

The group known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, was sweeping all before it, but I believed the regime would fight, and it did not stop doing so as it lost ground in the years that followed. preceded the Russian intervention in 2015 to bomb. Syrian towns and villages in ruins.

Nearly a decade later, it was clear that Bashar al-Assad's Russian, Iranian and Lebanese allies had other wars to fight.

But while the regime struggled with reluctant conscripts, it could always find Syrians willing to fight and die for it, even at the height of the war after 2011, when rebels controlled much of Damascus outside the center -city and the road leading to Beirut.

I visited these men on the front line several times.

Many of the most effective units were led by officers from Assad's Alawite community.

In Aleppo, circa 2015, an Alawite general handed out glasses of perfectly distilled arak, poured from bottles that once contained Jack Daniels.

He said with pride that arak, an anise-based spirit popular throughout the Middle East, came from the Assad family's hometown in the hills behind the port of Latakia. Outside, his unit shelled the rebel-held eastern part of the city.

Not all of them were Alawites. In Jobar, a neighborhood on the outskirts of central Damascus, a Christian officer loyal to Assad from the Syrian Arab Army took me into the tunnels they had dug beneath the ruins to attack the rebels.

He said the rebels also had tunnels and sometimes they broke into each other, killing in the darkness.

The young man had a crucifix tattooed on his wrist and another around his neck, and he recounted how he had to fight to protect his community from jihadist extremists on the other side.

My instinct about the fighting spirit of the exhausted band of Assad loyalists could not have been more wrong.

On Saturday, December 7, I fell asleep after hearing the news of the fall of Homs.

By the time I woke up, Bashar al-Assad was on his way to Russia and rebel fighters were starting to party in the streets of Damascus.

They fired more bullets into the air in celebration than in anger at Assad loyalists, who were running for their lives.

I saw hundreds of cars lining up to leave for the border with Lebanon, full of disgruntled, defeated men and frightened families.

The rank and file soldiers abandoned their uniforms and weapons without firing a single shot and returned home.

Assad's regime collapsed, hollowed out by corruption, cruelty and brutal disregard for the lives of Syrians. Even Assad's Alawite community did not fight for him.

That's why, on Thursday evening this week, instead of sheltering from shells and bullets on a freezing street in Homs or Hama, as I expected, I walked through the marble halls of the presidential palace from Damascus with Ahmed al-Sharaa, the Syrian president. de facto leader.

He abandoned his uniform and swapped his wartime alias, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, for his real name.

Many Syrians doubt his claim that he has also swapped his old jihadist beliefs for a more tolerant form of Syrian religious nationalism.

It is true that he broke with Al-Qaeda in 2016, after a long career as a jihadist fighter in Iraq and Syria. But as I discovered in Assad's palace, Ahmed al-Sharaa, a tall, discreet man in his forties, is reluctant to be too specific about the Syria he wants.

He comes across as very intelligent and politically astute. Like many wise politicians, he often doesn't give a clear answer to a direct question.

He denied wanting Syria to become an Afghanistan of the Middle East.

The Taliban, he said, ran “a tribal society. Syria is completely different.” Syria's new leaders would respect its culture and history.

When I asked whether women would enjoy the freedoms they expect here, he replied that 60 percent of students at universities in Idlib, his power base, were women.

But he tried not to answer a question about the requirement for hijab – Islamic dress – for women.

Damascus is rife with rumors that bearded HTS men ordered women to cover their hair.

I pointed out that there was a big argument on social media after a woman asked him to take a selfie with him and then pulled up his hood when the photo was taken.

Conservatives criticized al-Sharaa for agreeing to pose with a woman who was not part of his family. Liberals viewed his status as a dark omen for Syria's future.

If he was exasperated by the question, he didn't show it.

“I didn't force it. But it's my personal freedom. I want photos taken for me in the way that suits me. I didn't force it. It's not the same as to have a law on this subject that applies throughout the country. But there is a culture in this country that the law must recognize.

Al-Sharaa was referring to the fact that many Syrians, not just in the predominantly Sunni Muslim community, are pious.

Many women wear the hijab. The main thing, secular Syrians would say, is to be able to choose.

During half a century of Assad's rule, Syrians developed survival strategies that often involved hiding their own feelings and doing what was expected of them.

Shocked, nervous secular Syrians showed me videos on their phones of mass prayers in front of universities when students returned last Sunday.

Was this, they asked, real piety or young people doing what they were told because that's the way things have been here all their lives?

According to al-Sharaa, all this will come under a new constitution that will be decided by a group of legal experts.

Critics of Al-Sharaa will point out that as things stand, it is he who chooses the members of the committee which he claims will draft new laws as well as a new constitution.

Ahmed al-Sharaa especially wanted to talk about the oppression of the people by the old regime.

“The Syrian problems are much bigger than the problems you are talking about. Half the population has been expelled from Syria or forcibly displaced from their homes.

“They were targeted with barrel bombs and unguided dumb bombs and more than 250 chemical attacks. Many Syrians drowned at sea while trying to flee to Europe.”

He acknowledged that Syria has no chance of beginning to stabilize and rebuild if sanctions are not lifted.

The sanctions were originally aimed at the Assad regime. Keeping them, he said, meant treating the victim the same as the oppressor.

He has denied that the group he leads is a terrorist organization, which is currently the position of the UN and most of the world's most powerful countries.

Visits by foreign diplomats suggest it might be possible to change both sanctions and terrorist lists.

He was dismissive when I pointed out that I knew diplomats had told him that changing that status would depend on proving he kept his promise to respect minority rights and lead an inclusive political process.

“What matters to me is that the Syrian people believe me. We promised the Syrian people that we would free them from this criminal regime and we did it. That is what matters to me first and last place.

“I don't really care what will be said about us abroad. I am not obliged to prove to the world that we are seriously working to defend the interests of our people in Syria.”

Over the past two weeks, I have heard many Syrians say they want to be left alone to try to rebuild their country.

It seems like a pipe dream.

The war destroyed much of the country, but it also gutted Syria's sovereignty.

Bashar al-Assad became a client of Iran and Russia and fled the country when the latter stopped supporting him.

The United States is present in the northeast of the country to hunt down remnants of the Islamic State and protect its Kurdish allies.

Turkey controls much of the northwest of the country and has its own Arab-led militia.

There are signs that the Turks, who have close relations with HTS, are preparing a new attack against the Syrian Kurds, who have close relations with Kurdish separatists in Turkey.

Israel, currently as aggressive as it has been in many years, has very openly exploited the power vacuum it has seen in Syria.

It continues to bomb the remains of the state's military infrastructure and appropriate more Syrian land to add to the Golan Heights it has occupied since 1967.

The Israelis, as always, justify their actions by self-defense.

The UN special envoy to Syria, Geir Pedersen, told me that Israel's actions were “irresponsible.” Israel, he said, should not act in a way that could “destabilize this very, very fragile transition process.”

Ahmed al-Sharaa knows he cannot stand up to US-backed Israeli power.

“Syria is exhausted by war, whether Israel is strong or not. Syria must become stronger and more developed. We have no plans for aggression against Israel. Syria will not pose a threat to Israel or anyone else. whatever.”

Ahmed al-Sharaa's schedule is saturated.

Syria is a broken country that he says he wants to repair and revive, full of challenges that could make his task impossible.

HTS is not the only armed group in Syria and some want to destroy its new administration. HTS’s enemies within the Islamic State network could attempt destabilizing attacks.

Syrians' desire for revenge against Assad's killers – and against the ex-president himself – could explode into destructive public anger if HTS cannot show it is bringing to justice the men who kept their boots on the throats of Syrians for so long.

Ahmed al-Sharaa rightly sees Syria as a fulcrum at the heart of the Middle East.

“Syria is an important country with a strategic location, very influential in the world. Look at how America is present there on one side, Russia on the other and countries in the region like Turkey, Iran and Israel too.”

This is why, he says, the outside world should help Syria recover.

This is also why powerful states might not allow this to happen.