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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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