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Who Is Syrian Rebel Leader Mohammad al-Jolani?
With the toppling of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, terrorist leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani is stepping into the spotlight.
In about two weeks, the 42-year-old head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) — a U.S.-designated terrorist organization and the most successful of the Syrian rebel groups — toppled the tyrannical Assad regime in an unexpected offensive.
But who exactly is he?
Once affiliated with Al-Qaeda and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, al-Jolani has had a $10 million FBI bounty on his head since 2017. The leader of a rebel pseudo-government in northwestern Syria, he has been accused of grave human rights violations and wants to impose Sharia. But he’s also sought to reinvent himself as a moderate force for a tolerant Syria.
Here’s what you need to know.
Al-Jolani’s Origins
Al-Jolani, whose real name is Ahmed Hussein al-Shara, was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 1982 to parents exiled from Syria, according to The New York Times. His nom de guerre, al-Jolani, refers to the Golan Heights, the area his family hailed from, which Israel occupied and annexed after the Six-Day War in 1967.
Al-Jolani’s father, Hussein Al-Shara, was an Arab nationalist who was imprisoned for protesting against the 1961 Ba’athist coup in Syria as a student, according to al-Jolani. He eventually escaped and fled to Baghdad to continue his studies, and briefly went to Jordan to work with Palestinian groups opposing Israel. After returning to Syria and making a failed run for parliament, Al-Shara moved to Saudi Arabia to work in the oil industry. By the end of the 1980s, he returned to Syria with Al-Jolani, a child at the time.
Despite living in what he describes as a middle-class liberal neighborhood, Al-Jolani says he was radicalized by the Second Intifada in the early 2000s.
“I was 17 or 18 years old at the time and I started thinking about how to fulfill my duties defending the nation, which was being persecuted by the occupiers and invaders,” he said in an interview with PBS, adding that he was a young man so it was a “spontaneous, innate thought.”
Someone advised him to pray at a mosque during this time, which he said made him grow in his Muslim faith.
“There was something inside of me that was pushing me to search for the truth. How do we reach justice? How can we relieve the people of oppression? How can we spread goodness among people? I started searching for all of these meanings in God Almighty’s book, the Holy Quran, in the practices of the prophet.”
Two weeks before the United States invaded Iraq, al-Jolani, then 21 years old, said he went to Baghdad to join Al-Qaeda in the fight against the United States.
He told PBS that he was against Al-Qaeda’s tactics of deliberately targeting civilians, stating that “many of us with a conscience and a true understanding of Islam were against the killing of any innocent person even in cases where killing many enemies was going to cause the death of one innocent person.”
When asked why he didn’t leave Al-Qaeda at the time, he deflected, telling his interviewer that “if there was no American presence, there would not have been a resistance.”
Al-Jolani rose through the ranks of Al-Qaeda until he was arrested by U.S. troops around 2005 and imprisoned for about five years in various prisons including Abu Ghraib. He said he used his time to write a long document about how to advance jihad in Syria.
“It was long, like a research paper, analytical, close to 50 pages in which I recounted Syria’s history, its geography and sectarian diversity and how Assad’s family came to power, etc,” he said, adding that he no longer has a copy of it. After his release, he became an Al-Qaeda commander in Mosul and sent his paper to eventual ISIS leader al-Baghdadi.
“I wrote my thoughts about Syria to him,” al-Jolani told PBS. “I had numerous observations about it. Mainly, we should not repeat the Iraqi experience in Syria.”
He believed that any mission in Syria would differ from Al-Qaeda in Iraq because the focus would be to oppose Assad rather than launch a sectarian conflict.
When al-Jolani met al-Baghdadi, he said he was “surprised” by his lack of “competence to analyze situations” and his lack of “strong personality.”
Al-Jolani then returned to Syria with six men — wearing a suicide belt in case he was caught — in 2011 after the Arab Spring kicked off and led to mass protests in Syria, according to PBS. He claims he was given about $50,000 for the six-month mission.
With the uprising already in full swing, al-Jolani formed the group Jabhat al-Nusra and pledged its allegiance to Al-Qaeda in 2013, making it the Syrian affiliate of Al-Qaeda. That same year he was designated a global terrorist by the State Department and was sanctioned, which made him subject to having his assets frozen, a travel ban, and an arms embargo, according to the FBI.
Al-Jolani said he used the money allocated to him to strike military targets rather than civilians. Like ISIS and Al-Qaeda, al-Jolani’s group has used suicide bombers, though he claims they were deployed against military targets rather than civilians. Experts told PBS it is true that his tactics differed from the other terrorist groups and he did not indiscriminately target civilians, but that his hands aren’t entirely clean.
At the time, al-Jolani borrowed tactics from Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood to win the hearts of Syrians including providing the necessities and social services people needed to survive, which the government was failing to do, PBS reported. In one year, Al-Jolani said he grew the group from six men to 5,000.
To raise money, the group took donations from sympathizers in the Arab world, looted factories, and ransomed foreign civilians. One of the hostages was American freelance reporter Theo Padnos, who said he was subject to torture and imprisoned for just under two years. The group demanded 22 million euros for his release.
“For months and months and months they were just beating me,” Padnos said of his time in prison. “They would pretend that this was an interrogation, but they weren’t taking notes. …They were not after specific information.”
In his interview with PBS, al-Jolani said he had not heard of Padnos.
The group became so prosperous that al-Jolani even gave a $2 million payment to support al-Baghdadi in Iraq as ISIS murdered civilians, PBS reported.
Al-Baghdadi, threatened by al-Jolani, declared that the name Jabhat al-Nusra would be banned and the group would be absorbed by the newly-renamed ISIS, which added Syria to what had previously been the Islamic State of Iraq.
The next day, al-Jolani responded, stating that he was not aware of the announcement until he saw it in the media. In an interview with Al Jazeera at the time, al-Jolani said Al-Nusra would continue to operate as an independent group. By 2014, the two were full-blown rivals, with Al-Baghdadi seizing Raqqa from al-Jolani.
Breaking from Al-Qaeda
In 2016, he revealed his face in public for the first time, broke ties with Al-Qaeda, and changed the name of his group to Jabhat Fath Al Sham (Conquest of the Levant Front). The group later evolved into Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (Organization for the Liberation of the Levant).
In a video announcing the split, al-Jolani said the new formation “has no relation to any external party.” Analysts believe the split was driven by the burden of its Al-Qaeda affiliation which was a liability when seeking out new partners to work with.
The split kicked off a war between al-Jolani and ISIS and other groups operating in the area.
“Though we tried hard to avoid this confrontation, it was inevitable, so we fought against ISIS,” al-Jolani said. “Our security forces captured and imprisoned many of them. They were trying to sabotage the Syrian revolution.”
He took part in operations against ISIS, which included the 2023 killing of ISIS leader Abu Hussein Al-Husseini al-Qurashi, CNN reported.
“We are against killing innocent people, even if we’re the ones who were oppressed and defending our rights,” he added. “So when it reached this level, we split, and we distanced ourselves from those who kill innocent people. That was the defining compass.”
“If we had planes, we would have used planes,” he said. “So what’s the difference between a plane that drops a barrel bomb and kills innocent people, which is not condemned, while he who wants to defend those innocent people so he sacrifices himself so they can live in safety, is condemned.”
Ruling In Idlib
Al-Jolani has governed Idlib, home to over 3 million people, under the Syrian Salvation Government (SSG). The pseudo-government was created to provide civil services, education, healthcare, a judiciary, and even collected taxes and issued identity cards, according to the New York Times and Al Jazeera.
“I don’t claim that the situation in Idlib is ideal,” he said. “But I’m saying that given the current circumstances…there’s a self-asserting model that is capable of running the whole area’s affairs according to Islamic rule.”
Al-Jolani supports Sharia law, and plans to impose it in Syria following the ousting of Assad.
(Photo by OMAR HAJ KADOUR/AFP via Getty Images)
“It is a just and right call,” al-Jolani said of Sharia in the PBS interview. “This mercy, humanity, justice that it contains can embrace all factions, including Christian, Jews and other factions belonging to Islam and other doctrines.”
“Calling for Sharia law does not mean we want to exclude the others,” he added. “It’s the complete opposite.”
In Idlib under his rule, there have been unlawful killings, unjust detention, kidnappings, recruitment of child soldiers, and other human rights abuses, according to a 2022 State Department report. Al-Jolani has denied most accusations.
“There is no torture,” he said. “This is completely rejected. Human rights organizations could come and inspect the prisons or take a tour. Our institutions are open to everyone. We have no problem and if there are any mistakes, we will rectify them.”
Claiming A New Image
While al-Jolani in 2014 threatened to attack U.S. troops if his fighters continued to be attacked with airstrikes, he has spoken about his opposition to fighting the United States and the West as early as 2014.
al-Jolani bluntly said he will not support any attacks on the United States in his PBS interview.
“I repeat and reiterate that the era — our involvement with Al Qaeda in the past was an era, and it ended, and even at that time when we were with Al Qaeda, we were against external attacks, and it’s completely against our policies to carry out external operations from Syria to target European or American people,” he said.
The interview was his first time speaking to a Western reporter, in what appears to be an effort at overhauling his image to Western audiences. He even shed his terrorist military garb for attire that many have pointed out is similar to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s style.
In the interview, he denied that he is a terrorist.
“That is an unfair characterization,” he said. “It’s a political label that carries no truth or credibility. We haven’t posed any threat to Western or European society. No security threat, no economic threat, nothing.”
“Our message to them is brief: We here do not pose any threat to you, so there is no need for you to classify people as terrorists and announce rewards for killing them,” he said.
Jolani reached out to the Trump administration during Donald Trump’s first term, asking to partner, claiming they weren’t terrorists but only opposed Assad. Former Ambassador James Franklin Jeffrey, who was the U.S. Special Representative for Syria Engagement told PBS he did nothing in response.
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“Why should I take the high risk position of urging someone to get dropped from the terrorist list?” Jeffrey said.
In a rare interview last week with CNN, al-Jolani blamed his youth for his radical affiliations with Al-Qaeda when he was younger.
“A person in their twenties will have a different personality than someone in their thirties or forties, and certainly someone in their fifties,” he told CNN. “This is human nature.”
While ruling Idlib, al-Jolani has tried to appeal to various minority communities including the Druze and the Kurds, PBS reported.
During the CNN interview, al-Jolani acknowledged that minority groups such as Christians have suffered from jihadist groups during the Syrian civil war but said they will live safely under the new regime.
“There were some violations against [minorities] by certain individuals during periods of chaos, but we addressed these issues,” al-Jolani said. “No one has the right to erase another group. These sects have coexisted in this region for hundreds of years, and no one has the right to eliminate them.”
Since capturing Damascus, al-Jolani has attempted to set the tone for what comes next, making an appearance in the city’s Umayyad Mosque where he declared the fall of Assad and declared “victory for the entire Islamic nation.”
A senior rebel commander appeared on state TV later on, declaring, “Our message to all the sects of Syria, is that we tell them that Syria is for everyone.”
As the situation continues to develop, it is unknown how Islamic Sharia will impact Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities as well as the secular Muslims living in the country.
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