Syria’s interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa, previously known as the Al-Qaeda chief Abu Mohammad al-Julani, was selected as one of Time magazine’s yearly list of the 100 'most influential' people.
Former US ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, who played a role in and advocated for Washington’s regime change policies in the country, put forward Sharaa for the Time 100 list. "Last December, after years of building a powerful armed faction – Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), classified internationally as a terrorist group – Ahmad al-Sharaa and his rebel alliance toppled Bashar Assad’s brutal government in Syria," the write-up reads.
"Once aligned with Al-Qaeda and then ISIS, the soft-spoken Sharaa later fought both groups aggressively to ensure his fighters answered to him. More recently, he assembled alliances with other Syrian rebels, often at gunpoint, and secured Turkish support. He also established a religiously conservative statelet in northwest Syria that ruled effectively and reached out to reassure minority group – to beat Assad, the ambitious Sharaa understood he had to become a political leader as well as a military force," Ford wrote.
He went on to say that "Now interim President of all Syria, Sharaa balances between militants he once led and liberal Syrians relieved Assad is gone," adding that "observers are left to wonder" if he is an extremist or a "more a pragmatic politician who exploited extremist groups to gain power."
This year’s list comes as Sharaa has been hoping to secure international support and sanctions relief, a little over a month after his government’s forces killed around 1,700 Alawites in a series of sectarian killings along the Syrian coast.
The killings have continued. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), 42 people have died in sectarian killings since the end of Ramadan on 30 March. Incidents have spread from Latakia to Tartous and inland to Homs. The forces of Sharaa’s government have also recently blocked aid deliveries to the affected areas.
Up until last year, the new Syrian president was known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani. He was the head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the extremist militant organization that took power in Syria in December last year after the collapse of former president Bashar al-Assad’s government.
His group has its roots in the Nusra Front – which was Al-Qaeda’s official branch in Syria before being rebranded several times and becoming known as HTS. It now makes up the bulk of the new Syrian military, alongside other ISIS and Al-Qaeda-linked factions backed by Turkiye.
In an earlier life, Sharaa had studied media briefly and then joined the medicine faculty at Damascus University before leaving to join Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) following the 2003 US invasion.
He served as the deputy to ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi back when the group was known as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). Sharaa was dispatched by Baghdadi in 2011 to enter the war against Assad’s government in Syria, where he took part in the launching of deadly suicide attacks against both security personnel and civilians before founding the Nusra Front in 2012.
A US terror designation and $10 million dollar bounty for Sharaa’s capture was lifted in January 2025.
The UK and several European countries have begun easing sanctions on Syria, and Washington provided a six-month exemption from some sanctions in January. The US has reportedly given Syria a list of demands that it wants Damascus to fulfill in exchange for partial relief from sanctions. Sharaa’s government is also set to receive support from Turkiye, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.
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