Ahmed al-Sharaa, until recently known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, has declared himself interim President of Syria following the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad. Sharaa, leader of the al-Qaeda franchise Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), formerly al-Nusra, will lead a provisional legislative body that will function until a new constitution is established.

Before Assad’s ouster, HTS was a designated terrorist organization in the U.S., and Sharaa was a recognized terrorist with a $10 million government bounty on his head. The U.S. government’s Rewards for Justice website charged him with crimes, including kidnapping hundreds of Kurds and massacring villagers from Syria’s Druze religious minority.

However, U.S. efforts to bring Sharaa to justice were abandoned in the dying days of the Biden government, with Western media rebranding his organization as “diversity-friendly” jihadists.

The Sharaa government now claims the jihadist militias involved in ousting Assad have been disbanded. However, the reality is that they are being incorporated into, if not outright displacing, the official military.

Sections of Syria remain outside Sharaa’s control, including the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, or Rojava, long controlled by U.S.-backed Kurdish forces. However, it is likely that Turkey, which supported Sharaa’s offensive against Assad, will now move to destroy this administration.

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