Syria (Taylor's Version) pt. 2

You are somebody that we don't know, but you're coming at my friends like a missile.

M. in Philadelphia wants a summary of the current situation in Syria.

Last time, we left off around 2017 when Islamic State had been defeated. After this the Syrian opposition went into serious decline. They had lost a lot of people during the war against the regime and the IS invasion, and after the main jihadist force was wiped out Russia turned its firepower against the opposition forces. Putin’s army and air force decimated them (along with civilians who had the gall to live nearby), and Hezbollah deployed thousands of veteran troops into Syria, allowing Assad to claw back regions that had been under opposition control. In the north, the Kurds took advantage of the regime-opposition-IS vacuum to take over basically the whole northeast of the country on their side of the Euphrates river. After that the situation reached a very static phase, which lasted for years and years until December 2024:

In the north, we’ve got the Kurds and some green rebel zones, that’s all that was left of the opposition. The Kurds were in good shape, but the opposition rebels were pretty drained and couldn’t do much on their own. Lacking other sources of international support, the opposition aligned itself with Turkey and clashed with the Kurds occasionally.

There were also tens of thousands of disarmed former IS fighters and their families living in these giant refugee/prison camps out in the desert. Plenty of foreigners among them, but no one wanted to take them back or deal with them, so they’ve just been rotting there.

The green zone in the south, whose size is waaaaay exaggerated because that’s all empty desert, was a US military base where they kept some surviving opposition rebels. They weren’t strong enough to keep fighting, but the US didn’t want to abandon them (or god forbid, admit them as refugees to the United States), so they let a couple hundred survivors camp out at this base in the middle of nowhere for years and years.

And then there’s that white “AQ” patch, which suddenly became important in 2024.

Back in 2011 when things first got spicy, al-Qaeda in Iraq’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi sent an agent over to Syria to see what he could do about the situation. The guy dispatched there was called Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, a Syrian who had joined the cause as an al-Qaeda fighter during the Iraq war and was held in US military prisons from 2006-2011. al-Jolani went over to the white area on the map, Idlib province, to set up a local al-Qaeda franchise called Jabhat al-Nusra, which means “Victory Front”. Quickly, al-Nusra established a name for themselves as component fighters (blowing shit up in Iraq for 8 years helped build practical skills) and took control over most of Idlib province in 2012-2013, back when things were going well for the opposition. The US considered them a terrorist organization because they were officially still part of al-Qaeda and put a $10 million bounty on al-Jolani’s head.

At the time of the al-Qaeda/Islamic State split I mentioned last time (IS broke off because they wanted to kill more people and that made al-Qaeda uncomfy), the main IS operation in Iraq was trying to rein in al-Jolani, so he broke with the Iraqi organization and pledged himself to the original al-Qaeda. While sharing a similar jihadist/Islamist ideology, al-Nusra wasn’t completely insane and genocidal like IS was, and in 2015 they ended up denouncing al-Qaeda and becoming their own thing. After the world turned on IS, al-Nusra needed to distinguish themselves in order not to end up as just another grease stain courtesy of the US Air Force. But still, they weren’t lovely people: they committed various crimes such as murder, forced expulsions, and terrorist bombings. Russia and the regime couldn’t ever oust them from Idlib province because they were good fighters, so they stayed in control of that little white zone on the map for many years.

From 2020 - 2024 not much happened and the war seemed to be over. The regime survived, and though the cities were in ruins, with millions having fled and the economy reduced by 85% compared to pre-war levels, Assad and his cronies still managed to prop themselves up by manufacturing and selling a form of methamphetamine. Very little territory changed hands, and the countries that had once sought to oust Assad were now starting to make gestures towards accepting him. Vague mumblings were made about a new constitution and power-sharing, Assad met with other Arab leaders, and he was starting to be reintegrated into international society. 12 years of war and 600,000+ fatalities had failed to oust him, he had survived the whole chemical weapons “red line” thing, IS had made it seem like maybe a strongman was preferable to jihadist genocide, and Sleepy Joe certainly wasn’t going to do anything about it.

Then very suddenly, over the course of a week in December 2024, al-Nusra and other rebel groups broke out of their little enclaves, advanced towards the capital, and Assad had to flee the country. Literally overnight, al-Nusra was now running Syria. So why did this happen so fast?

The entire Middle East balance of power had changed dramatically over the course of the prior year. Putin had been keen to employ troops and tanks in Syria back in the good old days of 2015-2018, but the Ukraine war has forced him to scrape the absolute bottom of the barrel for warm bodies he can throw at the Ukrainian trenches. Keep in mind, while we were busy with The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess and brat summer, Russia has been taking almost-unimaginable losses in Ukraine: at least 200,000 men killed and 3000+ tanks lost. Putin can’t waste a spare tire putzing around in Syria anymore. As a result, rather than launch the kind of offensive in support of Assad they might have mustered in previous years, once the rebels started their attack Russia pulled back to their bases and started shipping their boys home.

Hezbollah was another one of Assad’s allies, and they did a lot of the heavy lifting during the fighting against IS and the opposition. But since Israel went on the offensive against Hezbollah in 2024 they have almost eradicated the big H as an effective military force. Say what you will, regardless of the morality of it: that pager thing was the most impressive piece of espionage in 50 years. It blew my mind, and it blew a lot of other people’s hands and nuts off (too soon?) Initially I thought Israel would not be successful at taking out Hezbollah, since they failed to do so during their 2006 war, but they’ve successfully killed all of the leadership, wiped out many of the fighters, and destroyed most of their heavy weaponry. So that’s another pro-Assad army that has vanished into thin air.

The US sat this one out because the al-Nusra attack came during the lame-duck period after the 2024 election. As mentioned, America had already been mentally checked out regarding the Syria situation for years and years, and they certainly weren’t going to do anything about it now, even though they still considered al-Nusra a terrorist organization. The man who would be king has his eyes on Ontario, not Syria.

Besides the geopolitical shifts, another reason the al-Nusra offensive was successful is because of branding. Realizing that their prior associations were a bit icky, al-Nusra renamed themselves Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) or “Organization for the Freedom of Syria”. Rather than murdering and enslaving people IS-style, or stoning women Taliban-style, HTS tried to build a coalition among the surviving opposition forces during their low point and unify them under the HTS banner. They absorbed other Islamist groups, ousted any al-Qaeda loyalists (assassinating them in some cases), and made nice with Turkey to protect the northern flank. They are still officially Islamist, but they’ve tried to rehabilitate their image to gain support among non-Sunni non-Arab groups. Which is essential for taking control of Syria, because as IS learned: you can’t genocide your way to power in such a diverse region. Other people tend not to like it, and they have guns too.

Since all this transpired, al-Jolani, a man who formerly had a $10M FBI bounty on his head, has become the President of Syria. He’s stopped calling himself al-Jolani, actually, which was an al-Qaeda pseudonym, and is now going by his birth name Ahmed al-Sharaa. In his new post he’s tried to appeal to the nation to come together and move on from the war years.

The way he’s been dressing gives us good insight into his intentions. I’m no Miranda Priestly, but bear with me a minute here as we take a look at his wardrobe.

In 2016 he was wearing this Osama bin Laden cosplay:

Then at the time of the December 2024 offensive, the first time he was really in the international public eye, he was wearing this Fidel Castro thing:

And now:

What a glow-up. And I’m not kidding, his clothes are really significant. Qutbist jihadists do not dress like this. After the Islamic Revolution in Iran, neckties were actually banned, and most Islamist radicals always wear either traditional clothes or combat uniforms. What’s he’s signaling to the outside world, and to his fellow Syrians is: I’m not like the other Islamists, I’m a cool Islamist. I want to be seen as the kind of guy the IMF gives a $200B reconstruction loan to. We’re not gonna be instituting burqas and chopping heads off, so give me a bit of leeway and work with me here.

But the question is, how genuine is this? Has al-Jolani/al-Sharaa really abandoned his old ways, or is this a Trojan horse to gain people’s trust before turning on them? Only time will tell. But initial signs are promising. Since taking control of Syria the new government is talking about the need to include Syrians from all different groups. Hilariously for a former al-Qaeda offshoot, they now sort of sound like a corporate HR department, putting out statements saying “diversity is a strength”. In December there were some people getting worked up about a Christmas tree that was set on fire by a couple of yahoos, but that’s a pretty low-level atrocity, and not really comparable to the absolute depravity IS unleashed back in 2014-2016. The new government does seem to be making a genuine effort, and HTS’s outreach to the Druze and Christian communities dates back several years, so it doesn’t appear to be just a show for the TV cameras. Again, you aren’t going to control this country without making some allowances for the other groups. al-Jolani/al-Sharaa, whatever his actual beliefs, clearly understands this.

The people suffering since the new regime came in are the Alawites, who have been linked with the Assad family since Daddy Hafez’s days. In March 2025 there were clashes and killings in Alawite areas: armed Assad loyalists attacked the new government and Alawite civilians were murdered in reprisals. Former regime officials and judges have been targeted for revenge killings since many Alawites served the regime until the end. About 1000-1500 people have been killed since this started, and supposedly it was non-HTS foreign jihadists who were to blame rather than government forces. And just in the past week there have also been clashes between Druze militias and government-aligned troops. The difficulty for the new HTS government has been bringing together hundreds of different opposition groups, many of which are nothing more than bandits, and forming them into a disciplined national army. Each little armed group carved out its own fiefdom during the war years, and they weren’t used to any central authority telling them what to do. Whether or not the government can establish real control over such a diverse, war-torn, and heavily-armed country remains to be seen.

The situation is still very much in flux. Syria is in the process of writing a new constitution and planning for elections. The Kurds are hanging onto their territory and guns, though they’ve tentatively agreed to integrated into the new government. The Turks are hanging onto the border region they control, and America is trying to exert whatever influence they can through the few US-backed rebels that survived until this point (but generally the new administration doesn’t care about Syria at all). As I mentioned in the Islamism series I keep referring back to, there are many types of Islamists and not all of them are murderous IS types. al-Jolani/al-Sharaa certainly would have fit the bill of a bin Laden-inspired terrorist 20 years ago, but he has been doing things his own way for a while now. Whether this was out of genuine conviction, or it was a Machiavellian power-play to take control of all Islamist forces in Syria, only he knows, but his behaviour towards non-Muslim minorities in recent years does seem to indicate it’s not just a trick.

We’ll see. We’ve been here before:

Newspaper profile of Osama bin Laden, 1993

If you have a question or topic you want me to write about next, email distilledhistory@substack.com