What al-Jolani’s past can reveal about Syria’s future – analysis

What can be learned from HTS’s seven year experiment at governance in Idleb?

By Jonathan Spyer, Middle East Forum

In late February 2012, I was travelling through Syria’s Idleb province. I stayed for a few days in a town called Binnish, not far from the province’s capital. It was, at that time, under the tentative control
of the newly hatched insurgency against the regime of Bashar Assad.

The young host of the place I was staying – I’ll call him ‘D’ – was connected to the fledgling structures of what at that time was widely known as the ‘Free Syrian Army’.

But through a cousin of his he also had links to another group of fighters just getting organised in the town.

These men were a little older than the FSA members, and were more obviously Sunni Islamist in their appearance and their orientation. D told me at the time that ‘this thing [the civil war] started in Idleb, and it will end in Idleb too’.

It seemed an absurdly self important statement at the time. Assad’s army were still in control of the greater part of the province. The insurgents had just a few rifles to put up against the dictator’s military machine.

As it turns out, though, D was right. Not just in his general sentiment that the insurgency would be victorious.

But in his precise prediction that the Islamist circles organising in Binnish at that time, who were a very early iteration of what would eventually become Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), would be the ones to bring victory.

Because, of course, contrary to all predictions, it was from the province of Idleb, long forgotten by the world, that the Syrian Sunni Islamist insurgency erupted in late November to make its final triumphant run through Syria’s cities to Damascus.

As a result of that bold move, HTS leader Ahmed Sharaa/Abu Mohammed al-Jolani is now the de facto ruler in the Syrian capital.

Western media and governments are weighing his every utterance in an effort to understand what may lie in Syria’s future. Has he moderated? Is he still a jihadi? Are there hopes for more representative government in Syria?

But there is a better way than textual analysis of al-Jolani’s every sentence to try and grasp what may now lie ahead.

In the period between 2017 and 2024 al-Jolani and his movement were the de facto rulers of Idleb province. So close observation of how they governed there is likely to yield more clues to the direction of events now than parsing of the PR-savvy al-Jolani’s statements over the last week.

What does HTS’s governance record tell us? Before looking into this, it is perhaps important to give a nod to the man who made HTS governance in Idleb possible in the first place, and who in so doing turns out to have achieved a strategic masterstroke.

The one who deserves credit for this is not al-Jolani, but Turkish president Recep Tayepp Erdogan.

It was Erdogan’s stubborn refusal to ever pull the plug on the seemingly defeated insurgency, and his determination to maintain a tiny corner in north west Syria for it, which was the necessary condition for everything which has now followed.

Western governments saw the Turkish leader’s decision as a bizarre refusal to accept an obvious reality. Russia and the Assad regime, meanwhile, were happy to take advantage of it.

Insurgents in other parts of the country who refused ‘reconciliation’ with the regime were bussed up to the small Turkish enclave in the north west.

It became a convenient dumping ground for the irreconcilables. Moscow and Assad assumed that these men would live on in obscurity and irrelevance. Instead, this incubator was where HTS erupted from in late November.

So, what can be learned from HTS’s seven year experiment at governance in Idleb? An Israeli researcher, Alex Grinberg has made a close study of the record in work soon to be published by a Jerusalem think tank.

What did he find?

Firstly, what’s important is what is not there. HTS in Idleb did not go in for the mad excesses of their rival jihadis in the Islamic State (IS) organisation.

There was no enslavement of non-Muslim women (that’s actually not quite true. A few slaves of the IS, still held by families who made their way into Idleb after the Islamic State’s fall, have been found. But the institution of slavery was not officially approved by HTS).

There was no cannibalism, no effort at the mass slaughter of perceived devil worshippers. None of the lurid insanity associated with the name of IS.

On the other hand, what was established was a repressive, authoritarian statelet ruled in accordance with Islamic Sharia law. Women were required to wear the hijab, music and alcohol was banned.

No opposition was permitted to the edicts of HTS. Non-Muslims and women were not allowed to be present in the representative bodies established.

Al-Jolani, the organisation’s leader, was essentially the de facto dictator of the province. In his prisons, incarceration without trial and the practice of torture were routine.

There is every reason to believe that the system developed by al-Jolani’s ‘Syrian Salvation Government’ in Idleb will now be installed throughout the country, or at least in those parts of the country he controls (30 per cent of Syria remains in the hands of the Syrian Kurdish forces).

This week he even appointed his ‘prime minister’ from those days, Mohammed al-Bashir, as the interim prime minister in Damascus.

In terms of the ideas that underlie HTS’s administration in Idleb, the organisation’s highest religious authority is Abd al-Rahim Atoun.

Atoun’s attitudes toward governance may be gleaned from the fact that in September 2021 he delivered a lecture in Idleb entitled ‘Jihad and Resistance in the Islamic World: the Taliban as a Model’.

Elsewhere, in reference to the 7 October attacks of last year, Atoun said that ‘what the mujahideen are doing for the sake of Allah Almighty in the Battle of the Flood of Al-Aqsa is the greatest act of Islam in this era, and it is a blessed jihad to repel aggression and defend religion’.

Atoun compares HTS’s march from Idleb to Damascus to the 7 October attacks, and requests ‘the Almighty to disgrace the Jews, suppress them, and curse them and those who support and back them against the mujahideen’.

Atoun is the highest religious authority of HTS and may therefore be considered al-Jolani’s guide in these matters.

This organisation, and this outlook, is what D was referring to as the force that would both start and end the Syrian civil war in Idleb – as in fact happened.

This is the force that, thanks to Erdogan’s impressive strategic foresight, incubated over seven years in the province.

As has been widely reported, the government of Israel has been engaged in recent days in preventing the emergent Islamist regime in Damascus from possessing any but the most rudimentary military capacity.

Some have questioned the motivation for this action. In this regard, it may safely be assumed that what the civilian researcher (and former IDF military intelligence officer) Alex Grinberg knows, the government of Israel also knows.

What HTS started and finished in Idleb is now in Damascus. Israel’s decision to disarm it as far as is possible is likely to yet be considered prescient.

Abu Mohammad al-JulaniHTSSyria