Where is this marriage of convenience heading?
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The sight of the Syrian President doing his world tour of western leaders will, for many, be distressing. This is, after all, a terrorist whose legacy is chilling. Who can forget the head chopping of foreign journalists and aid workers, or those who were burnt alive in cages? And then there’s the iconic photo of him holding up two severed heads.
In fact, the infamous photo wasn’t actually of Mohamed Al Jolani but of an Australian jihadist who was finally killed in the war, but his background as the leader of Al Nusra, an ISIS splinter group, cannot be refuted or airbrushed out of internet archive files.
Jolani, or as he prefers to be called these days Al-Sharaa, was the head of the most brutal extremist terror group in recent times, which will not be forgotten easily, but his acknowledgment now of being a leader who the West can work with is a reminder that the U.S., UK, France and others are happy to pay and support terrorists in the Middle East as long as they sign up to western hegemony. The old saying ’he may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch’ applies here, and the visit to both London and Washington is a reminder that Al-Sharaa is going to be around for quite some time after his CIA makeover.
Al-Sharaa does have a history as a jihadist, no question, and it could be argued that he is a creation of U.S. failed strategies in the region, following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
When that happened, he joined Al Qaeda and then the Islamic State (IS) group. After the Syrian civil war began in 2011, he founded the Al-Nusra Front, a group which for a while was linked to Al Qaeda.
In 2017, Al-Sharaa joined forces with other Islamist movements to form HTS, which seized part of Idlib province in northern Syria and was accused of carrying out brutal abuses on dissenters. Consequently, the U.S. State Department classified HTS as a terrorist outfit until just recently, when it was finally removed from the department’s blacklist.
But who is he, and whose interests does he serve? While the two scalps photo is going to haunt him for some time (even though it wasn’t even him), there are more misunderstandings and internet myths being bandied about. The main one being that he is a western puppet and a protégé of Israel’s leader Netanyahu, which largely came about when Al-Sharaa’s men took Damascus and control of Syria in December 2024. The latter, his link to Netanyahu, stems from two key facts. One, during the Syrian war, Israel supported Al Nusra by giving its wounded fighters free operations in Israel; and secondly, by overthrowing Assad, Al-Sharaa would be ideally aligned to Israel and its geopolitical goals. Not quite.
In reality, both Netanyahu and Al-Sharaa are ideologically opposed in many areas, even though they are against Iran and its proxies in the region. Al-Sharaa is backed by Turkey’s president Recep Erdogan, who is building up quite a head of steam against Israel and its ideas of creating a greater Israel, encompassing Syria, parts of Iraq and Jordan — and Lebanon, of course.
Of course, the West doesn’t want Syria to revert back to being anything even resembling an Iranian proxy, and so it needs someone who can keep things in order, even if his methods are rather brutal. This was best summed up by a Damascus-based researcher called Mahmoud Bitar, who seems to believe that Al-Sharaa is not even really a partner or ally of western leaders, more of a paid agent.
“The West does not trust Al-Sharaa,” he wrote recently. “Al-Sharaa does not align ideologically with the West. But both sides understand that continued chaos in Syria benefits no one: it fuels extremism, destabilises the region, and prolongs humanitarian disaster. Engagement, however uneasy, becomes the least bad option.”
“Geopolitics is not a story of heroes and villains and puppets and puppet masters,” he adds. “It’s a constant negotiation between constraints, risks, and grey choices. States don’t get to pick ideal partners; they deal with whoever holds power and can influence outcomes.”
And so where is this marriage of convenience heading? For the moment, it is clear that Al-Sharaa is happy playing the role of western puppet to open up aid and trade for Syria, which has suffered from years of excruciating sanctions that have bled the country dry. When a power play gains momentum between Israel and Turkey, it is likely that Washington would align itself with the former, alienating its NATO partner who was the genius behind Al-Sharaa’s bloodless coup d’état — unless, of course, relations between Trump and Netanyahu suddenly go sour, and then Erdogan would be a useful tool for Washington’s objectives in the region. The wait-and-see game still has some time yet before it provides clearer answers, but in the meantime, the world is going to have a hard time shrugging off the image of a terrorist in a cheap suit unable to open a new-fangled mineral water bottle top and having to rely on a western woman to do it for him.
