"The administration of outgoing
President Joe Biden stopped offering on Friday a reward for information leading
to the capture of Ahmed al-Sharaa (formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani),
the de facto leader of Syria.
Sharaa, who abandoned his
jihadist nom de guerre this month, is the head of Hayat Tahrir
al-Sham (HTS), a jihadist terrorist organization. American officials did not
appear to remove HTS from the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organization but
did agree to stop offering incentives for Sharaa’s capture following a meeting
between the jihadi chief and a delegation of senior State Department officials
on Friday.
HTS is an offshoot of al-Qaeda,
formerly known as the Nusra Front. While it has a storied history as a Sunni
jihadist terror gang, HTS branded itself as the most prominent Syrian group
opposing former dictator Bashar Assad and decisively claimed leadership of the
opposition in late November by staging the successful conquest of Aleppo, the
country’s second-largest city. Following the fall of Aleppo, Assad’s army
collapsed and his regime lasted less than two more weeks before HTS arrived at
the city limits of Damascus.
Assad left the country sometime
between December 7 and December 8, receiving political asylum in Russia. In his
absence, Sharaa has taken the helm of the country. He has since abandoned his
jihadi moniker, replaced his military fatigues with a Western-style suit, and
launched a media blitz intended to convince Western nations to invest in his
success despite widespread concerns that he would impose totalitarian sharia
standards on the diverse Syrian population.
Following a conversation with Sharaa in Damascus, top
American diplomat for the Middle East Barbara Leaf told reporters that he was
“pragmatic” and she enjoyed a “quite good, very
productive, detailed” conversation with Sharaa. Given the conversation, Leaf
said, “I told him we would not be pursuing the Rewards for Justice reward
offer.”
Rewards for Justice, the program
offering bounties for the capture of terrorists, appears to have removed the page with information on
Sharaa at press time.
Prior to Friday, the U.S. government
was offering $10 million for information leading to
his capture.
Prior to the deletion of the page,
the Rewards for Justice program described Sharaa as the
head of the Nusra Front and the leader behind “multiple terrorist attacks
throughout Syria, often targeting civilians.”
“In April 2015, ANF [the Nusra
Front] reportedly kidnapped, and later released, approximately 300 Kurdish
civilians from a checkpoint in Syria,” Rewards for Justice recalled. “In June
2015, ANF claimed responsibility for the massacre of 20 residents in the Druze
village of Qalb Lawzeh in Idlib province, Syria.”
Sharaa was identified as a
“Specially Designated Global Terrorist.” A search of the Office of Foreign
Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions list on Friday afternoon still pulls up Sharaa, under the
name “Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani,” as a specially designated global terrorist.
In his most recent interview with a
Western outlet, speaking to the BBC this
week, Sharaa insisted that HTS was “not a terrorist organization” and that it
did not target civilians, though it admitted to using violence against members
of Assad’s military. He also insisted that he would not support imposing
fundamentalist Islamist rule on the people of Syria, rejecting a comparison to
the Taliban’s Afghanistan by insisting that Afghans were “tribal” people and
suggesting Syrians were too advanced to accept such a system.
“The Syrian population has lived
together for thousands of years,” he asserted. “We’re going to discuss all of
it, we’re going to have dialogue and make sure that everyone is represented.
The old regime always played on sectarian divisions, but we won’t.”
When asked whether he would allow
people to practice basic civil liberties, such as consumption and sale of
alcohol of basic women’s rights, however, Sharaa indicated that he would not be
the ultimate authority on those topics. He did commit in the interview to allowing
girls and women to go to school, and claimed he would not persecute Christians
or Kurds, but on the issue of alcohol, claimed that this was a “legal issue”
that appropriate judicial authorities would address, not him.
While Sharaa has studiously repeated
promises to lead an “inclusive” government in Syria, early reports on who is
amassing power in Damascus have alarmed international observers. The
Emirati newspaper the National reported this week
that HTS has empowered extremist clerics to dispense justice on a local level
and that many obtaining key government positions are high-ranking HTS terrorists.
“Almost all of the new appointees
are cadres drawn from HTS, the rebel group Ahrar Al Sham, an ideological twin,
and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, which has found a new political life by
swiftly aligning with him,” the National reported. “Already
some city dwellers feel unease about the influx of people into Damascus, either
as visitors or members of the new HTS order.”
Prior to the fall of Damascus,
Sharaa also alarmed non-Islamists in the country by telling CNN, “people who
fear Islamic governance either have seen incorrect implementations of it or do
not understand it properly.”"
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