About two decades ago, Ahmed al Sharaa was just another Al Qaeda militant locked up by the U.S. military in Iraq. After Sharaa was released, he formed Jabhat al-Nusra, Al Qaeda’s splinter group in Syria, which utilized suicide bombings against targets in areas of the country controlled by Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Sharaa was, in essence, Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri’s man in the Levant, tasked with overthrowing a family-based kleptocracy viewed in jihadist circles as a godless oppressor.
Of course, the Ahmed al Sharaa of 2025 is no longer the Ahmed al Sharaa of 2003 or even the Ahmed al Sharaa of 2015. The man who once traveled to Iraq to kill Americans will be at the White House on Monday, Nov. 10, clasping hands with an American president and appealing for dollars to help restart an economy that has been torn asunder by nearly a decade and a half of civil war. To say this is quite the transformation would be an understatement of the century.
Granted, there are some constituencies both inside and out of Syria who don’t believe Sharaa has fully transformed himself into a peace-loving, pluralistic democrat. Not without reason; Sharaa’s tenure as Syria’s interim president, which will reach the one-year mark in December, has been host to spasms of sectarian bloodshed perpetrated in many cases by the very Syrian army he’s trying to build from scratch.
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