Has Julani become a pragmatic politician after being a jihadist leader? - opinion

Over the past few weeks, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, or “Ahmed al-Sharaa” as he would like to be referred to these days, has been conducting a PR campaign directed at Western audiences to amend his reputation and appear as a reformed pragmatic and even moderate leader. 

He has conducted interviews with media outlets such as the BBC and CNN at his behest. He met with German and British diplomats, trying to appear like the leader of a country and not of a militant jihadist organization. 

He changed his name back to his birthname rather than his nom de guerre, shedding insurgent apparel for suits, and switched his rhetoric of jihad and conquest to advocating coexistence between minorities in Syria.

Julani has been crafting for years his image as a moderate leader, unlike his image of a bloodthirsty Salafist Jihadist despite his association with Al Qaeda and ISIS.

Has he really changed, or is Julani a clever politician who knows how to direct the right message to his target audiences?

Dodging questions for which answers would be uncomfortable for the West

To Western audiences, he sent the message after the fall of the Assad regime that the rights of minorities would be protected and that the technocrats of the Assad regime would keep their post in order to keep the country functioning. 

He said in interviews with Western outlets that he wants Syria to have functioning institutions, dodging the question of which laws would govern the new Syria, specifically the level of enforcement of Sharia Law.

When asked point blank by a BBC journalist about the laws in the new Syria, including the prohibition of alcohol, Julani dodges the question, saying, “There are many things I don’t have the right to talk about because they are legal issues.”

The interviewer, Jeremy Bowen, later stated that Julani struck him as an intelligent, politically savvy interviewee who managed to evade straight answers on contentious subjects.

History of political maneuvering in terrorist organizations

Very little is known about Julani except for the curated statements he has made to Western outlets or the messages his group released, which presented him as a reformed pragmatic leader who has left his Jihadi past behind him.

Julani grew up his entire adult life inside the Jihadist insurgent ecosystem- there, he learned skills that would prove instrumental to his strategy that eventually resulted in organizing factions into a cohesive, relatively disciplined organization and establishing himself as an effective leader.

Starting in 2005, when he was imprisoned by the US after fighting in Iraq, Julani said that he spent his time writing about how to fight Jihad in Syria. 

The 23-year-old Julani met Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in prison, the future leader of ISIS, who took him under his wing and made him his protégé.

Initially joining Al Queda, he was sent by Baghdadi to start the Syrian branch of Al Queda. 

After the ISIS- Al Queda split, Julani managed the intra-jihadist politics by sticking with Zawahiri of Al Qaeda and ditching the megalomaniacal Baghdadi, who wanted other factions to be incorporated as part of ISIS with himself as the caliph.

Later, Julani based his power on enough followers from different factions, including foreign fighters: Chechens, Uyghurs, and Western Muslims, among others.

Using his new status and rare political skill, Julani decided to cut his ties with Al Qaeda, changed the name of his organization multiple times until he landed with a less militant name, “The Organization for the liberation of the Levant” (no longer using combative words like “Front,” “Army,” or “Conquest”).

During the mid-2010s’, ISIS received a lot of media attention with their horrific, graphic, barbaric videos. This prompted an international coalition of countries, including opponents, to fight ISIS. Even the US collaborated with its adversaries, Russia and Iran, to defeat ISIS.

From this experience, Julani must have realized that he must distance himself from ISIS and his past, vying for Western support in his bid to oustAssad. 

In 2021, he allowed a PBS team to interview him in a mini-documentary trying to brandish his image as a terrorist.

This media-savvy did not start with Western media but with a series of interviews given to Al Jazeera starting in 2013. 

Essentially, Julani used the platform that was given to him to buy some positive PR for himself and his organization.

Distancing himself from Radicals

When HTS was taking over sites in Syria he gave instructions not to desecrate shrines and minority cultural heritage sites, such as the Sayyeda Zaynab sanctuary, which was associated with ISIS as it was vandalized by the group.

To distance itself from associations with Iran, Julani issued a notice banning all its troops from interfering with how women dress.

All of these steps are meant to assuage Western fears of Julani creating an Islamic caliphate in Syria like ISIS or the Taliban in Afghanistan. 

This is part of a well-planned strategy to pretend to moderate in order to have Western leaders lift sanctions from HTS, provide legitimacy to the group, and essentially allow Julani to receive backing from the West. 

Julani recently met with Barbara Leaf, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, and managed to convince her and the State Department to drop the $10 million bounty on himself. 

Now, Julani is trying to get HTS off the designated terror list. After the meeting, Leaf said that she met a “pragmatic” leader.

It is also worth remembering that Bashar al-Assad, in his early days, was seen by some in the West as a pragmatic, Western-styled leader after his stint as a physician in London and his UK-born wife. 

What began with hopes of an open, inclusive Syria ended with unprecedented carnage.

It is enough to learn from the past to see how HTS would rule. It has controlled Idlib under the Syrian Salvation Government since 2017; numerous incidents of human rights abuses were documented, such as the bombing of a town after its residents refused to pay a new tax levied upon them by SSG. 

The SSG fought rival groups in their region of controlled, tortured, and imprisoned political opponents. 

SSG governed with an authoritarian Islamic rule that was just a tad more functional than the failed states in the region by having technocratic aspects to it and more development of infrastructure compared to the Assad regime.

Whether or not there is some moderation with the stances of Julani, it would be advised for Western leaders to follow the Jewish adage “Respect them and suspect them.”