Even during the most febrile and frenetic phases of the Syrian civil war, the opposition to President Bashar al-Assad failed to control all of Aleppo. Now they have taken the whole country in just ten days, ending decades of autocratic rule by the Assad dynasty. The sudden and dramatic collapse of Assad’s forces across the country caught everyone by surprise and, in the process, has catapulted the rebel leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani into the spotlight as the next potential ruler of Syria.

As the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS; whose name means: Levant Liberation Committee), Jolani has also been keen to reassure the international community of the rapidly evolving events in Syria. ‘The most important thing is to build institutions,’ he told CNN about his ambitions. ‘We’re not talking about rule by individuals or personal whims. It’s about institutional governance. Syria deserves a governing system that is institutional, not one where a single ruler makes arbitrary decisions… The revolution has transitioned from chaos and randomness to a state of order both in civil and institutional matters and in military operations.’

This messaging speaks to a very deliberate image Jolani has cultivated for himself as an elder statesman of the global jihad movement, one who matured from terrorist to technocrat. ‘We must adhere to the ethics of victory,’ he said as his forces stormed across Syria at blistering pace. ‘Be a role model of tolerance and forgiveness… today we are working day and night for the future Syria, the Syria that will be a country of justice, dignity, and freedom for all Syrians.’

That approach has been coupled with overt displays of outreach towards minority communities in areas taken by the rebels. They have been told to look towards the experience of Christians in Idlib, the last redoubt of the Syrian revolution from 2017 until the extraordinary events of last week. In August 2022, for example, mass was held on St Anna’s Day in Yacoubia’s Armenian Apostolic Church, based in Jisr al-Shughur. Jolani personally spearheaded these efforts after visiting the area the previous month, while ensuring that Islamist hardliners were prevented from acting as spoilers.

HTS also released a statement at the time saying they regarded the local Christian community as being ‘part of society with the right to live in their homes and go about their business and activities since the beginning of the revolution, and to be blessed with security’. As it has taken new territory now, the group has therefore been keen to show public Christmas trees being erected in predominantly Christian districts of Aleppo, such as Aziziyyah, as a symbol of their willingness to accommodate minorities.

For years now, the group has tried to demonstrate both its willingness and ability to accommodate Syria’s minorities, whose fate has long been a source of contention. While the early rebels failed to build meaningful alliances with minorities, having become overrun by the millenarian mullahs gripped by jihadist fervour, Jolani has shown he is far shrewder and more pragmatic than his counterparts.

It has paid dividends. Having built goodwill among Idlib’s Christians, his march into Aleppo was broadly welcomed by church leaders, who expressed cautious optimism about the regime’s sudden collapse and what might come next. Moreover, Jolani’s conciliatory tone was echoed by other prominent members of the opposition, too, including the opposition-appointed Grand Mufti of Syria, Osama al-Rifai, who also advised that local Christian populations be left alone.

HTS then turned its attention to Hama, securing another hugely symbolic victory with almost minimal pushback. Although the rebels never took control of Hama during previous phases of the civil war, it has been a historic hotbed of opposition to the Assad dynasty, with a serious insurrection mounted there against Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, in 1982. Estimates of the numbers killed by Assad pere vary between 10-40,000, with the draconian crackdown serving as a precursor to what Assad fils would do later.

The group’s current emphasis on outreach and dialogue rather than violence meant that, as they pushed into Hama, they were able to negotiate their entry into Salamiyah after discussions with both religious and political leaders. Notably, the city is home to one of the largest concentrations of Ismailis in the world, who are Shia Muslims; a branch of Islam that jihadists traditionally view as being heretical and whose members they regularly target. Yet reports suggest HTS negotiated the agreement with the Aga Khan, the Paris-based leader of most Ismailis globally, allowing them to enter the city without a single shot being fired.

This reveals the extent to which HTS has developed a sophisticated model of diplomacy, reaching out to traditional foes and assuaging their fears. This even extends to the optics of the group’s current takeover. Consider that shortly after Aleppo was taken from Assad’s forces, HTS’s Military Operations Administration issued an order to its fighters to refrain from moving around the city in military fatigues and to not move combat vehicles or weapons through it either. It further prohibited them from opening military offices in civilian areas, all of which it says are designed to avoid causing undue alarm or distress to residents. Indeed, across the Aleppo governorate, the group has tried to restore a sense of normality as quickly as possible by announcing the creation of new bus routes, boosting mobile phone coverage in poorly networked areas, and even creating a hotline for citizens to report any problems.

Yet many remain sceptical of what Jolani can achieve and just how far his edicts will be adhered to at local levels. As HTS forces marched into Muhrada, an area of Hama that is home to a large Christian population, the majority of residents elected to flee. This happened despite Jolani addressing them through a dedicated communique to reassure them that they will be protected, citing the experience of their counterparts in Idlib and Aleppo. Given that Muhrada has stood with the regime throughout the conflict, the communique urged local residents not to stay and to resist ‘psychological pressure’ from Assad loyalists.

Similarly, despite a high-profile endorsement of Jolani from Salih Muslim, Chairman of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), one the main groups running the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), most Kurdish forces also remain uneasy about events in western Syria. In recent days, Muslim has said he is optimistic about HTS and has instead expressed more concerns about Turkish-backed rebel factions (known as the Syrian National Army), a nod to Ankara’s ongoing animus towards an empowered Kurdish movement along its southern border. For its part, HTS had said it believes the Kurds are an ‘integral part’ of the Syrian identity and have the right to live in ‘dignity and freedom’.

Most notably, Jolani has also issued a direct appeal to the Alawites – a heterodox offshoot of Shia Islam to which Assad belongs. It is also the community that has provided the majority of troops for the regime’s most brutal loyalists, such as those in the 4th Armoured Division, which played a key role in suppressing the revolution, and has committed significant atrocities against civilians.

Addressing them directly, an official HTS communique argues that ‘Syria will be a unified Syria with all its sons, where every individual can live in dignity and security’. It goes on to argue that Assad has used and exploited the sect for his own ends, and that they should separate themselves from his regime ‘and be part of a future Syria that does not recognise sectarianism’. For now, these pleas have largely gone unanswered, as Alawites flee to their coastal redoubts of Latakia and Tartous, away from the rebel push southwards from Aleppo into Hama, and now towards Homs.

This kind of approach has earned Jolani the scorn and derision of other jihadists, who regard him as having lost his way. In its weekly newsletter known as al-Naba, ISIS has slammed HTS for pursuing a nationalist agenda and laments its decision to ‘coexist with pagan and esoteric minorities such as the Alawites and Ismailis’. In essence, the group’s editorial suggests there is no difference between Assad’s Syria and the one being pursued by Jolani, as neither is based on Islamic principles.

Context is important for understanding Jolani’s dramatic rise to power. A bewildering number of competing factions previously characterised the Syrian civil war, each jockeying for position with its own separate organisation, aims, objectives, methods, strategies and beliefs. Barely anything united them, and they often found themselves fighting against each other as much as they fought against the regime. When Russia formally entered the conflict in September 2015, it launched a brutal aerial assault on rebel-held territories, which allowed forces loyal to Assad – primarily Hezbollah – to launch a revanchist campaign. Opposition forces lost huge swathes of territory, were pushed back, and eventually retreated into the relatively small envelope of Idlib province along with three million Syrians – many of them displaced from other parts of the country.

It was a formative moment for the opposition and a seminal one for Jolani. There was an acceptance that these groups would need to unite if they wanted to meet the challenges presented by Russia’s entry into the conflict. Lazy efforts at doing so had delivered few tangible results and, by December 2016, the rebels had lost the jewel in their crown: eastern Aleppo. A more serious effort would be needed, prompting the creation of HTS in January 2017, with the involvement of some of the revolution’s largest Islamist factions including, among others, Nour al-Din al-Zenki, Liwa al-Haqq, Jaysh al-Ahrar and Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS). The last of these groups, JFS, was the short-lived name for the once al-Qaeda-aligned Jabhat al-Nusra, which Jolani had led in Syria since 2011.

His involvement with the global jihad movement began in 2003 when he joined al-Qaeda to oppose the invasion of Iraq. Although he denies having held leadership roles during this time, he was imprisoned by US forces in some of its notorious wartime installations, which housed those who would go on to head groups such as ISIS, including its eventual leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Indeed, Jolani was working under him when the Syrian uprising began in 2011. Together they decided that Jolani would take the Syrian members of al-Qaeda’s outfit in Iraq back into their native country under the name Jabhat al-Nusra to avoid detection and capitalise on the deteriorating security situation as President Assad tried to suppress the nascent protest movement.

Jolani steered the group through the early days of Syria’s fratricidal war with great success because his fighters were highly disciplined and possessed something their counterparts lacked – combat experience. Having previously battled against US troops in Iraq for nearly a decade, they knew how to fight, unlike defecting soldiers from the Syrian Arab Army (who went on to create the Free Syrian Army). Yet, when Baghdadi later announced that Jabhat al-Nusra was actually his creation and that Jolani was his delegate, the latter went rogue. He insisted that Nusra was entirely independent, that he was his own man, and that he would not subordinate himself or his group to Baghdadi’s ISIS.

It opened a vicious rupture between the two men, prompting direct confrontations between their groups while also revealing something else: Jolani was a slick and stubborn operator. He refused to be brought to heel, but also created pragmatic alliances to ensure the survival of his endeavours. He tied his group closer to al-Qaeda’s central leadership in the AfPak province, which brought much needed resources, support and protection. Once the situation changed following Russia’s entry into the conflict, however, the al-Qaeda affiliation began to cost Jolani more than it offered. Other groups reasoned they simply could not allow Jabhat al-Nusra to join any united rebel efforts while they retained their al-Qaeda affiliation. Jolani made a near-instant decision to jettison the relationship, dumping al-Qaeda and rebranding his group to Jabhat Fateh al-Sham by mid-2016, just as Assad’s forces were tightening their grip on rebel-held Aleppo. Shedding that association, Jolani demonstrated his willingness to make dispassionate, pragmatic decisions in the interests of not only his group, but also the Syrian revolution more generally.

Jabhat Fateh al-Sham was a short-lived enterprise due to the rebel’s loss of Aleppo in December 2016, which prompted the creation of HTS the following month. Although Jolani was not the initial leader of the group, he retained control over its military operations, thereby ensuring a personal fiefdom of power and patronage around him. As has been the case so often with his personal trajectory, the kaleidoscope of power among Syria’s rebels would soon be recast in his favour. The creation of HTS was not a smooth endeavour and many of the groups that came together to create it suffered schisms from breakaway factions who opposed the idea. One of the most significant challenges came from Ahrar al-Sham, which had been, at that time, a resilient, respected and stalwart Islamist faction in the conflict.

The first leader of HTS, Abu Jaber Shaykh, was himself a founder and onetime leader of Ahrar al-Sham. Thus, when remaining factions of his old group turned against HTS, Abu Jaber found himself unwilling to prosecute a military campaign against his erstwhile comrades and vacated his position. Jolani instantly stepped into the breach, overcoming the sentimentality that had inhibited his predecessor, just as he had shorn his al-Qaeda allegiances the previous year.

He not only fought Ahrar al-Sham but also the remnants of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and any other group that challenged HTS’s pre-eminence. It was a pitiless consolidation of power fraught with challenges. Not only did Jolani have to navigate the spectre of intra-jihadist conflict, but he also had challenges from abroad. Almost as soon as he replaced Abu Jaber, Turkish troops entered Idlib as part of the Astana agreement between Turkey, Russia, and Iran, in which it was agreed that Ankara would create a series of military observation posts inside Idlib.

Again, Jolani revealed himself to be a deft manager of complex and contentious issues. While Turkey believed it was pressing the advantage by entering Idlib and exploiting internal tensions within HTS and the jihadist movement more generally, it was actually Jolani who used their presence to expose querulous Islamist factions in the region before acting against them. When it mattered, Jolani proved himself willing to ruthlessly crush dissent, to eliminate threats to his political project, while constantly calibrating his relationship with external stakeholders, dialling it up or down as needed.

Shortly after taking control, Jolani also oversaw the creation of the Syrian Salvation Government, an ostensibly independent civil administration charged with administering rebel-held Idlib province. The administration has established itself as a largely agnostic, technocratic entity, providing a much-needed sense of normality after years of war by tending to the banalities of local government. Even here, Jolani has used the Salvation Government to cultivate a meaningful support base – this time, among ordinary civilians rather than fighters.

Since 2022 he has made a deliberate point of bolstering his public appearances, not just across Idlib generally, but also among its minority communities. In this regard, Covid-19 had come as a boon to the movement, allowing them to demonstrate capacity by coordinating relief measures with Turkey. Responding to the disease, the Salvation Government’s Ministry of Health published regular figures of how many people were infected, and implemented strategies suggested by the World Health Organisation by February 2021. This included quarantines of seven to ten days for those displaying symptoms, disinfection campaigns around public spaces where people congregated, and the encouragement of mask-wearing. It was clear that, while Jolani and the Salvation Government took the issue seriously, they were also willing to be pragmatic in their response to it. In line with the approach adopted in many poorer countries they did not, for example, order long periods of generalised lockdowns, recognising that many had to work in the day, to feed their families in the evening.

A major sticking point arose, however, with regards to the shuttering of mosques. The Salvation Government called for the suspension of congregational Friday prayers in mosques by April 2020, prompting sharp criticism from prominent members, such as Abu Malik al-Talli (who eventually defected from HTS). This was especially contentious because it was Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting, prayer, and penance. Prominent clerics within Idlib, such as the Saudi Abdullah al-Muhaysini, openly called for the edict to be ignored. ‘This is a wrong decision and should not be obeyed,’ he declared. Along with other hardliners, they continued to meet for congregational services and ignored social distancing measures as a result. Jolani mostly turned a Nelsonian eye to such defiance, having decided this was not a fight worth pursuing.

Working with the Idlib Health Directorate, the Salvation Government promoted vaccine uptake and expressed hopes of vaccinating up to 850,000 people using the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. This set HTS apart from some of its jihadist counterparts, such as al-Shabab, which is affiliated to al-Qaeda, who published a statement calling on its supporters to avoid the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine for a variety of conspiratorial reasons.

Although the group won a lot of goodwill over its Covid response, it squandered this elsewhere by revealing its authoritarian streak. For example, HTS maintains a brutal prison network across Idlib, in which the use of torture is endemic, with many inmates being detained for simply criticising the group’s policies or for other political matters. Nour al-Shilo, a prominent media activist in Idlib and mother of three, was arrested in late 2020 and sentenced to death for allegedly collaborating with the United States. No evidence was produced, and the charges were largely believed to have been fabricated, prompting widespread protest, which ultimately led to her release.

Western supporters of the Syrian revolution, who previously resided in Idlib, such as British aid worker Tauqir Sharif, and American journalist Bilal Abdul Kareem, also found themselves in HTS prisons in 2020 and were tortured. Again, their high-profile status seems to have saved them, with both eventually being released before relocating themselves from HTS-controlled Idlib into areas run by the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army. For years, Kareem has run a campaign urging for HTS to abandon torture in its facilities and to enshrine a prisoner’s charter, although such efforts have been unrealised. In the first quarter of 2023 alone, the group is accused of carrying out 19 extrajudicial killings. The previous year, 30 people are estimated to have been killed in a similar fashion.

Despite Jolani’s current charm offensive, these issues have not abated. ‘Every day, we hear new stories and various accounts of torture in the prisons of the liberated areas, stories that would make one’s hair turn grey,’ reads a report on Kareem’s website from August. ‘Breaking bones has become something normal to our ears, and it is no surprise since the extent of the torture in the prisons of the liberated areas has become evident to everyone.’

The challenges for anyone hoping to govern a post-Assad Syria are steep. Indeed, Jolani now faces a materially different situation in terms of the territory he rules. As the last rebel redoubt, many of those who went to Idlib did so consciously – they were electing to live under rebel governance rather than the regime. They chose Jolani, even if only as the lesser of two evils. By contrast, he now finds himself presiding over a much wider expanse of territory and people. After more than a decade of war many are tired and traumatised, scared and sceptical. They did not choose this and there are reasons to be unsure of just how sincere those who have welcomed the arrival of HTS into their areas in recent weeks are being.

For example, rebel TV channels have been keen to show images of Bishop Hanna Jallouf meeting with members of the group in Aleppo, although what has gone unsaid is that he was previously kidnapped by Jabhat al-Nusra in 2014. Elsewhere, the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army has also accused HTS of riding roughshod in Aleppo, taking sole credit for the military campaign there and seeking to assert itself in partisan – rather than nationalist – terms. ‘HTS’s ideology remains despotic, striving for absolute control over seized territories,’ argued Syrian academic, Rahaf Aldoughli. ‘HTS’s focus is not genuinely on overthrowing Assad but on consolidating its own power and suppressing rivals within opposition-held areas.’

Jolani now finds himself inheriting a country of rubble and ruin that needs rebuilding, an entirely stalled economy, a devalued currency, and hollowed-out public institutions. In the east, too, he will have to contend with Kurdish aspirations for autonomous self-rule, albeit within a federalised accommodation, and the issue of what to do with tens of thousands of ISIS detainees continues to linger like the ghost of Banquo. These issues will require much more expertise than he currently has from running a small statelet in Syria’s north-west.

Whenever pressure has ratcheted on the rebel leader, he has shown a willingness to fall back into authoritarianism. Indeed, for all his posturing as a precise and punctilious technocrat, Jolani has consistently demonstrated his readiness to use force to ensure his survival. Yes, he is savvy and knows how to move his political projects forward, but his real challenges are only beginning now that Assad has fallen. Winning the peace in Syria will require much more thought than simply erecting Christmas trees in Aleppo.