BEIRUT: Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) leader Abu Muhammad al-Golani, a shadowy figure who stayed out of the public eye, commanded the coup that toppled the government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
Today, he is one of the most recognizable of the victorious Syrian rebels, who have gradually stepped into the limelight since cutting ties with al-Qaida in 2016, changing their group’s name and taking control of rebel-held northwest Syria. emerged as the original ruler of
The shift comes as rebels led by Golani’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), formerly known as the Nusra Front, swept across the country and announced that they had taken control on Sunday. Assad has been deposed after capturing the capital Damascus.
Golani has played a prominent role in the takeover, aimed at reassuring Syrian minorities who have long feared the jihadists.
“The future is ours,” he said in a statement read on Syrian state TV, urging his fighters not to harm those who threw down their weapons.
As the rebels entered Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, at the start of their sweep into Damascus, a video showed Golani in military fatigues issuing orders by phone, reminding fighters to protect people and Forbidden to enter the houses.
He visited the Aleppo citadel with a fighter waving the flag of the Syrian revolution: once abandoned by Nusra as a symbol of apostasy, but more recently by Golani to the mainstream Syrian opposition. Hugging him while pointing.
“Golani has been smarter than Assad,” said Joshua Landis, a Syria expert and head of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. come forth.” .
PR effort?
Aaron Lund, a fellow at the think tank Century International, said that Golani and HTS had clearly changed although they were still “pretty hard-line”.
“It’s PR, but the fact that they’re joining the effort shows that they’re not as tough as they used to be,” he said.
Golani and the Nusra Front emerged as the most powerful of the rebel factions that emerged in the early days of the uprising against Assad a decade ago.
Before founding the Nusra Front, Golani fought for al-Qaeda in Iraq, where he spent five years in a US prison. After the uprising began, he returned to Syria, having been sent by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, then the leader of the ISIS group in Iraq, to expand al-Qaeda’s presence.
The United States designated Golani a terrorist in 2013, saying al-Qaeda in Iraq had tasked him with overthrowing the Assad regime and establishing Islamic Sharia law in Syria, and that Nusra had carried out suicide attacks that included Civilians were killed and a violent sectarian approach was advocated.
Turkey, the main foreign backer of the Syrian opposition, has designated HTS as a terrorist group, while supporting some other factions fighting in the northwest.
Golani gave her first media interview in 2013, her face wrapped in a dark scarf and showing only her back to the camera. Addressing. Al JazeeraHe demanded that Syria should be run according to Sharia law.
About eight years later, he sat for an interview on the US Public Broadcasting Service’s Frontline program, facing the camera and wearing a shirt and jacket.
Golani said that it is unfair to call him a terrorist and he opposes the killing of innocent people.
He detailed how the Nusra Front grew from the six men who came with it from Iraq to 5,000 within a year.
But he said his group never posed a threat to the West. “I repeat – our involvement with al-Qaeda has ended, and even when we were with al-Qaeda we were against operations outside of Syria, and it is absolutely against our policy to operate outside of Syria.”
A message to minorities
Golani fought a bloody war against his old colleague Baghdadi when ISIS tried to unilaterally overthrow the Nusra Front in 2013. Despite its ties to al-Qaeda, Nusra was considered more tolerant and less heavy-handed in its dealings with civilians and other rebel groups than ISIS. .
The group was later beaten out of areas it held in both Syria and Iraq, including by the US-led military coalition.
While ISIS was being dismantled, Golani was consolidating HTS’ grip on the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib, establishing a civilian administration known as the Salvation Government.
Assad’s government considered HTS to be terrorists along with the rest of the rebels.
The HTS administration has issued statements to reassure Alawites and other Syrian minorities. A statement urged Alawites to be part of a future Syria that “does not recognize sectarianism”.
In a message to residents of a Christian town south of Aleppo, Golani said they would be protected and their property protected, urging them to stay in their homes and the Syrian government’s “psychological Reject war.
“He’s really important. The rebel leader in Syria,” Lund said.
He said the HTS had demonstrated “logistical and governance capacity” by ruling its territory in Idlib for years.
“They have adopted the symbols of the wider Syrian uprising… which they now use and try to claim a revolutionary legacy – that ‘we are part of the 2011 movement, the people who rose up against Assad. were’.”