Last December, after years of building a powerful armed faction—Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, classified internationally as a terrorist group—Ahmed al-Sharaa and his rebel alliance toppled Bashar Assad’s brutal government in Syria.
Once aligned with al-Qaeda and then ISIS, the soft-spoken al-Sharaa later fought both groups aggressively to ensure his fighters answered to him. More recently, he assembled alliances with other Syrian rebels, often at gunpoint, and secured Turkish support. He also established a religiously conservative statelet in northwest Syria that ruled effectively and reached out to reassure minority groups—to beat Assad, the ambitious al-Sharaa understood he had to become a political leader as well as a military force.
Now interim President of all Syria, al-Sharaa balances between militants he once led and liberal Syrians relieved Assad is gone. Observers are left to wonder if al-Sharaa is an Islamist extremist whose moderate poses are only ploys for temporary political gain, or if he’s more a pragmatic politician who exploited extremist groups to gain power.
Ford served as U.S. ambassador to Syria from 2011 to 2014