Mless than a quarter of a century after the attacks perpetrated on September 11, 2001 in the United States by Al-Qaeda, a prelude to an American “war on terrorism” lasting more than two decades, an armed group from this most radical movement of political Islamism has just played an essential role in the overthrow in Syria of a hated dictatorship, the regime of Bashar Al-Assad. It could play its full part, if an orderly transition were able to take place, in the new institutional order likely to emerge in Damascus.
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Its leader, Ahmed Al-Charaa (known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed Al-Joulani), is a former deputy of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, founder of the Islamic State (IS) organization, which brought a reign of terror on the territory spanning northeast Syria and northwest Iraq from 2014 to 2017, and beyond. Since the victorious offensive of his militia, he has shown concern, as his speech in the Umayyad mosque on December 8 showed, to distance himself as much as possible from the symbols summoned in his time by Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi in that of Mosul after the capture of the city and the proclamation of an essentially totalitarian caliphate. In doing so, Ahmed Al-Charaa has become an interlocutor for the main Arab powers and those outside the Middle East who intend to play a role there. Both have, however, devoted considerable resources in the past to eradicating both Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
The trajectory of the man who currently appears to be the new strongman of Damascus is the product of a form of Darwinism applied to the Syrian civil war. In the first months of the uprising, the Syrian regime had in fact focused its repression on liberal opposition likely to attract the support of Western countries seeking alternatives deemed acceptable in the face of Bashar Al-Assad. At the same time, the latter liberated with great amnesties the radical Islamists who were languishing in its jails. His tactic was to have these perfect foils as his main adversaries.
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