AS THE commander of Al Qaeda’s franchise in the Syrian civil war, Abu Mohammed al-Golani was a shadowy figure who kept out of the public eye, even when his group became the most powerful faction fighting President Bashar al-Assad.

Today, he is the most recognisable of Syria’s triumphant insurgents, having gradually stepped into the limelight since severing ties to Al Qaeda in 2016, rebranding his group and emerging as the de facto ruler of rebel-held northwestern Syria.

The transformation has been showcased since rebels led by Golani’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), formerly known as the Nusra Front, swept through the nation and declared they had ousted Assad on Sunday after seizing the capital.

Golani has featured prominently in the takeover, sending messages aimed at reassuring Syrian minorities who have long feared the rebels.

Despite spending five years in US custody for fighting alongside Al Qaeda in Iraq, the radical Islamist leader of HTS eventually found himself on the ‘right side’ of Washington’s military alliance

“The future is ours,” he said in a statement read on Syria’s state TV, urging his fighters not to harm those who drop arms. When the rebels entered Aleppo, pre-war Syria’s largest city, at the start of their sweep to Damascus, a video showed Golani in military fatigues issuing orders by phone, reminding fighters to protect the people and forbidding them from entering homes.

He visited Aleppo’s citadel accompanied by a fighter waving a Syrian revolution flag: once shunned by Nusra as a symbol of apostasy but recently embraced by Golani in a nod to Syria’s more mainstream opposition.

Before founding the Nusra Front, Golani — whose real name is Ahmed al-Sharaa — had fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq, where he spent five years in a US prison. He returned to Syria once the uprising began, sent by the leader of the Islamic State group in Iraq at the time — Abu Omar al-Baghdadi — to build up Al Qaeda’s presence.

The US designated Golani a terrorist in 2013, saying that Al Qaeda in Iraq had tasked him with overthrowing Assad’s rule and establishing Islamic sharia law in Syria, and that Nusra had carried out suicide attacks that killed civilians and espoused a violent sectarian vision.

Turkey, the Syrian opposition’s main foreign backer, has designated HTS a terrorist group while supporting some of the other factions that fight in the northwest.

Golani gave his first media interview in 2013, his face wrapped in a dark scarf and showing only his back to the camera. Speaking to Al Jazeera, he called for Syria to be run according to sharia law.

Some eight years later, he sat down for an interview with the US Public Broadcasting Service, saying that his the terrorist designation was unfair and that he opposed the killing of innocent people.

He said that his group had never presented 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 carrying out operations outside of Syria, and it’s completely against our policy to carry out external action.”

Published in Dawn, December 9th, 2024