Syrian rebels have swept through major cities and captured territory across four provinces in a dramatic new offensive, and the Islamist leader heading the charge says their aim is nothing short of ousting President Bashar al-Assad.
After attracting little notice for years, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani and the rebels he leads shocked the world by launching the most significant challenge to Mr. al-Assad’s rule in a decade. He told The New York Times in an interview this week that he was confident the rebels would score more victories against weakened and demoralized government forces.
“Our goal is to liberate Syria from this oppressive regime,” he said in an hourlong video interview from an unknown location.
Appearing relaxed and confident, but struggling at times with a persistent cough, he was unwavering in his contention that the rebels could end the longtime Syria’s leader’s brutal, authoritarian rule. “This operation broke the enemy,” he said of the rebels’ lighting offensive.
Mr. al-Jolani, 42, leads Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist group once linked to Al Qaeda, that has controlled most of the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib for years.
He and his administration have come under criticism from inside and outside the country for using authoritarian tactics and cracking down on dissent.
His rebel alliance struck at a moment of vulnerability for Mr. al-Assad, when the president’s allies were weakened or distracted by other conflicts. But some observers are questioning whether the rebels have the resources and capabilities to hold onto all the territory they have captured in such a short time, or to ultimately govern the fractured country.
There are also questions about whether Mr. al-Jolani’s form of rule — where some conservative Muslim strictures have been imposed on the population — would be widely accepted across Syria. He and his group espouse government guided by a conservative and at times hard-line Sunni Islamist ideology.
But he has formed an alliance with a variety of other rebel factions, some backed by Turkey, that hold more moderate views.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham was previously affiliated with Al Qaeda, but broke ties with it in 2016. Despite the split and attempts to gain international legitimacy, the group is still designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and the United Nations.
The rebels launched the offensive from their base in northwestern Syria on Nov. 27, and in just over a week, they took over major cities, where government forces quickly retreated. They captured a significant stretch of territory spanning parts of four provinces in northwestern and western Syria, according to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a crisis monitoring organization.
In some of the most dramatic gains so far, the opposition forces captured nearly all of the major city of Aleppo, once the country’s commercial capital, and another important city, Hama, moving rapidly in the direction of the capital, Damascus.
In a video circulated this week by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Mr. al-Jolani jubilantly called on his fighters to march on to Damascus.
In his interview, Mr. al-Jolani gave no hint that he was surprised at how easily rebels had managed to wrest territory from government forces that have better weaponry and powerful international backers like Russia and Iran.
His group had been preparing for this offensive for a year, training its own fighters as well as those of allied groups, becoming better armed, more organized and more disciplined, according to Mr. al-Jolani and analysts.
“Until now, it has accomplished huge results,” he said of the offensive. Dressed in civilian clothing with a collared, button-down shirt, Mr. al-Jolani sat in a room in front of a huge banner on the wall that proclaims command over the military operation in progress.
The Syrian civil war began in 2011 after the Assad regime violently suppressed peaceful antigovernment protests. Soldiers defected en masse and ordinary Syrians took up arms against the government.
After years of conflict and turbulence, the rebels seemed all but defeated and the war had been largely frozen since 2020.
But Mr. al-Jolani said the rebels were now picking up where they left off in the fight, with the same goal they started with — getting rid of Mr. al-Assad.
“The regime shut down all political solutions and used suppression and violence and imprisonment and chemical weapons,” he said, referring to the tactics Mr. al-Assad used to suppress the uprising.
Still, Mr. al-Jolani signaled he would be open, eventually, to a political solution to finally end Syria’s long war. But now is not the time, he said.
Laying out the rebels’ strategy, he said they would try to capture airfields to curb the Syrian government’s ability to carry out airstrikes. His forces captured Aleppo’s international airport and five military air bases, but many other airports remain out of their control.
Over the past week, Mr. al-Assad’s government forces and their Russian allies have once again resorted to airstrikes on rebels and civilian populations, according to the United Nations and human rights groups. Dozens of civilians have been killed, according to the United Nations and the White Helmets, a rescue group based in opposition areas of Syria.
In some of the territory taken over by rebels, residents have already voiced fears that they would become the next targets of government airstrikes. Others appear to fear the rebels more than the government, and are fleeing ahead of their advance.
Mr. al-Jolani acknowledged the harm the offensive could cause to civilians, but he laid the blame squarely on Mr. al-Assad.
“Of course there is a cost for war,” he said. “But we are defending ourselves and then he comes and carries out these strikes.”
At the height of the civil war, the rebels controlled large parts of north, south and east Syria as well as areas around Damascus. But they lost almost all of it to Syrian government forces backed by Russian warplanes, fighters from the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and militia forces sent by Iran.
The rebels ended up in a much smaller corner of northwestern Syria, where millions of displaced people, many from opposition strongholds that had been recaptured by government forces, flooded in and struggled to rebuild their lives.
Abu Mohammad al-Jolani was born Ahmed Hussein al-Shara in Saudi Arabia, the child of Syrian exile parents, according to Arab media reports. In the late 1980s, his family moved back to Syria and in 2003, he went to neighboring Iraq to join Al Qaeda and fight the U.S. occupation.
He spent several years in a U.S. prison in Iraq, according to the Arab media reports and U.S. officials.
He later emerged in Syria around the start of the civil war and formed the Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate, which eventually evolved into Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. At some point, he took on the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani.
Since breaking ties with Al Qaeda, Mr. al-Jolani and his group have tried to gain international legitimacy by eschewing global jihadist ambitions and focusing on organized governance in Syria.
Once seen as one of the Syrian opposition’s most militant factions, the group has since taken a more pragmatic approach to both governance and its relationship to other rebel groups. But its retreat from imposing certain aspects of its ideology has not been welcomed by all within its ranks, including the more hard-line elements, a tension that could worsen if it expands its rule.
Syria’s population includes many Muslims who are more liberal or secular than Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or follow different faiths, and would likely chafe under the imposition of the group’s rules.
In Idlib province under its rule, it is now nearly unheard-of for women to go without the hijab, the Muslim head covering, even though there is no law enforcing this.
But Mr. al-Jolani’s group has not gone to extremes like banning smoking or music, or forcing women to cover their faces, as some hard-line Islamist groups have done elsewhere.
He and his group have built an administration in the territory they govern, collecting taxes, providing limited public services and even issuing identity cards to residents, according to a U.N. report.
Earlier this year, some residents of Idlib province demonstrated for months against both Mr. al-Jolani and his administration. They protested the imprisonment and torture of critics and exorbitant taxes “indifferent to the dire economic and living conditions faced by both residents and displaced persons,” according to Syrians for Truth and Justice, a human rights advocacy group.
In some cases, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham responded with force to suppress the protesters, the rights group reported.
“There is no government that is accepted by all the people,” Mr. Jolani said in the interview, responding to the criticism. He accused some of the protesters of destroying property.
Since the rebel offensive began, Mr. al-Jolani has sought to reassure minority communities from other sects and religions. While Syria is a majority Sunni Muslim country, it has significant communities of Christians, Druse and people who adhere to other sects of Islam.
A few days into offensive, as rebels advanced on Aleppo, Mr. al-Jolani ordered his fighters not to “instill fear” in people of different sects.
“Aleppo has always been — and continues to be — a crossroads of civilizations and cultures, with a long history of cultural and religious diversity,” he told them.
In his interview with The Times, he also tried to strike a tolerant note.
“You can’t force your ideas on people,” he said.
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