Ahmed al-Sharaa’s first year in power bodes ill for Syria’s future |
Ahmed al-Sharaa in Moscow, 2025. Photo by Sergey Bobylev/TASS/Wikimedia Commons.
Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former Islamist commander linked to al-Qaeda factions, toppled Syria’s long-time dictator Bashar al-Assad on December 8, 2024. For a fleeting moment, Syrians flooded the streets in jubilation, believing decades of tyranny, censorship, and religious repression had finally ended. But the celebration was short-lived. Within weeks, the revolution’s promise of justice and freedom curdled into fear. The prisons reopened under new names, dissent vanished again, and the economy, already shattered by years of war and sanctions, continued to collapse. A year later, Syria remains a nation suffocating under renewed authoritarianism, caught between the ghosts of the old regime and the brutal certainty of the new.
In the early months after Assad’s fall, all eyes were on the man labelled a terrorist, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, who had rebranded himself as President Ahmed al-Sharaa. The United States and its allies hailed the end of Assad’s rule, a day they had been eagerly anticipating. They also embraced the new government, one they expected to align with their interests. There is no doubt that Assad ruled as a dictator, and for decades, Syrians suffered deeply under his regime, none more so than the Kurds. However, one year into al-Sharaa’s presidency, it is clear that if he is not worse than Assad, he is at least no better. Washington and its partners continue to overlook his repression, embracing him as a necessary actor in a fractured region.
Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, also known as Abu Mohammed al-Julani, was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 1982, and returned with his family to his home country, Syria, in 1989. Al-Sharaa passed through several jihadist groups after moving to Iraq in 2003 to join al-Qaeda in the fight against US forces, later joining al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), which became the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) in 2006.
On May 14, 2005, he was detained by US forces and held for five years at Camp Bucca, where he met militant collaborators. During his imprisonment, he wrote a 50‑page booklet outlining strategies to topple the Assad regime, where, ironically, his father’s cousin Farouk al-Sharaa served as vice president from 2006 to 2014, unaware of young al-Sharaa’s whereabouts. In 2011, al-Julani coordinated with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, head of al-Qaeda’s Islamic State of Iraq (which later became ISIS/ISIL), and was tasked with establishing al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria, the al-Nusra Front, which became influential in opposition-held areas, especially Idlib, during the war.
In 2017, he formed Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) when several Islamist factions merged in northwestern Syria. By 2019, Human Rights Watch documented that HTS had arbitrarily arrested residents in Idlib, Hama, and Aleppo and funded its activities through local taxes and tariffs. For nearly eight years, HTS governed Idlib and other areas, committing countless crimes, and at the end of 2024, the group had seized full control of Syria, overthrowing Bashar al-Assad on December 8 and ending more than half a century of al-Assad family rule, setting the stage for al-Julani to declare himself president.
The fall of al-Assad was not the only shocking event in Syria in 2024. Equally striking was the transformation of al-Julani into Ahmed al-Sharaa, a change from “terrorist militant” to statesman. Shedding his battle attire and turban for a suit and tie, al-Sharaa presented himself as a champion of