Former al Qaeda member Ahmad al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, has been named as Syria’s president for a transitional period.
“We announce the appointment of Commander Ahmad al-Sharaa as head of state during the transitional period. He will assume the duties of the president of the Syrian Arab Republic and represent the country in international forums,” commander Hassan Abdel Ghani, spokesman for the Syria Military Operations Command, said in a statement Wednesday.
“The president is authorized to form a temporary legislative council for the transitional phase, which will carry out its duties until a permanent constitution is enacted and put into effect,” Ghani added.
The command also announced several resolutions, including the suspension of the country’s constitution, the dissolution of the country’s parliament, and the dissolution of the former regime’s army and its Baath party.
Al-Sharaa was the leader of the main militant group that spearheaded the lightning offensive that led to the overthrow last year of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whose regime had been in power for several decades.
His task now will be rebuilding a country torn apart by more than a decade of civil war that has killed more than 300,000 people and displaced millions more, according to the UN. The conflict broke out during the 2011 Arab Spring when the Assad regime suppressed a pro-democracy uprising and soon plunged into a full-scale war that pulled in other regional powers from Saudi Arabia and Iran to the United States and Russia and enabled ISIS to gain a foothold – for a while – in the country.
Shortly before he was named president, Al-Sharaa said the Assad regime had “left behind deep societal, economic, political and other wounds, and fixing them requires great wisdom, hard work and doubled effort.”
A sense of duty was what Syria “needs today more than ever,” he said.
“Just as we were determined in the past to liberate it, our duty now is to be determined to build and develop it,” Al-Sharaa added.
Who is Ahmad al-Sharaa?
Al-Sharaa became a Syrian “foreign fighter” in his early 20s, crossing into Iraq to fight the Americans when they invaded the country in the spring of 2003. That eventually landed him in the notorious US-run Iraqi prison, Camp Bucca, which became a key recruiting ground for terrorist groups, including what would become ISIS.
Freed from Camp Bucca, he crossed back into Syria and started fighting against the Baathist Assad regime, doing so with the backing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who would later become the founder of ISIS.
In Syria, he founded a militant group known as Jabhat al-Nusra (“the Victory Front” in English), which pledged allegiance to al Qaeda, but in 2016, he broke away from the terror group, according to the US Center for Naval Analyses.
Since then – unlike al Qaeda, which promoted a quixotic global holy war – Al-Sharaa’s group, now known by the initials HTS (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham), has undertaken the more prosaic job of trying to govern millions of people in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib, providing basic services, according to the terrorism scholar Aaron Zelin who has written a book about HTS.