
The capture of Aleppo by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) was the first vital step towards the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and the result of a two related developments. On the one hand there was the slow decay of the state institutions which was behind the regime’s failure to repel an attack carried out initially by as few as 250 fighters. Many countries, especially in the West, had based their Syria policies on keeping the regime in place, thereby preserving state institutions and avoiding chaos. In fact, it was the opposite that occurred. For the last ten years, the regime itself has carried out a long term subversion of public institutions : unregulated privatisations, generalised predation, reinforcement of militias at the expense of the regular army, and an economy based on drug-trafficking.
In terms of the armed forces, the result was an incompetent military bureaucracy, command chains which no longer functioned, orders that never got through. Nor did communication between the front lines and the arms depots. Beaten to the draw by the blitzkrieg staged by the rebel forces under the leadership of HTS, the army was incapable of regrouping. On the battlefield, the men gave up without a fight, the tanks ran out of petrol, the reserves having been sold on the black market by the soldiers, often young Sunni Muslim conscripts and their underpaid officers. As for the Alawite militias, when the fighting moved closer to Homs, they simply refused to endure a new blood-bath.
A “proper management” of the war
The second development which explains the rapid fall of Aleppo and the regime collapse in the rest of the country is the ideological mainstreaming carried out by the HTS commanders since 2017. In his rhetoric addressed to the civilian population, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani took pains to present himself as a national leader, with messages of peace addressed to the local communities, Christian and Shi’a, and a refusal to attack the Kurds in their Aleppo strongholds, Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh. For the first time in the history of the Syrian revolution, this attitude became the determining principle of the fighters’ rules of engagement. In the heat of the battle for Hama, an emergency disciplinary force of nearly 10,000 men made it possible to avoid any large scale atrocities or looting in the various neighbourhoods of Aleppo. Similarly, there was no mass exodus of the population. For one thing, orders were certainly given that ensured that troops were under control. Some of the Aleppo Christians were also meanwhile in touch with others in the regions of Idlib who reassured them, having been happy to live there under the authority of HTS.
That relatively “proper” conduct of the war, attested by dozens of eyewitness reports from local Christian, Kurdish and Shi’a dignitares in Aleppo, Homs and Damascus, is often attributed to the movement’s pragmatism. In fact, it is the consequence of a profound ideological transformation carried out by HTS in the Idlib enclave in “peacetime”, well before this war.
In fact, HTS is not a movement which has transformed itself as a result of a vast doctrinal revision or deradicalisation as some Egyptian or Libyan groups have done. Rather, it has undergone a journey of deradicalisation for several years via a succession of tactical adaptations to a new geostrategic or local environment. These adaptations will prove to be the main driver for a political mainstreaming which however is not founded on a new theology. Though not theorised, this “silent revolution” is both deep and lasting.
The break with al-Qaida
The first stage of this mainstreaming was a break with global jihad and the rupture of organisational ties with al-Qaida, extending into an ideological breach with the theoreticians of global jihad, such as Abu Muhammad al-Maqdissi. The latter had been especially worried by the dilution of jihadism in such a revolutionary move with ill-defined political and doctrinal outlines.
The dissociation from global jihad went along with a reconnection to the local context which began a year later, in 2017. In that year, HTS helped set up a first centralised structure in Idlib, the Syrian Salvation Government.
Taking institutionalisation as its guiding principle, it concentrated all the power in its hands. From that point on, all the local bodies - factions, local opposition committees, all those opposition bodies supported by the West - became its rivals. Though in principle an instrument of control, the government became at the same time, for HTS, a space for ideological transactions and concessions. Unlike the Kurds with their autonomous administration in the North-East, who possess an ideology and a real state bureaucracy, HTS did not commit the Salvation Government to any utopian project. In fact Jolani defined it as a government of “crisis management”, in other words a provisional one.
That structure was to set itself up in collaboration with local elites, revolutionary or Islamist technocrats like Mohammad al-Bashir, entrusted today with the formation of the first transitional cabinet in Damascus. Al-Bashir is an academic and an engineer with a background in theology, but he was never a radical Islamist. Nevertheless, when it comes to issues of strategy, the government remains under the control of Jolani’s immediate entourage. The goal of this institutionalisation was to shed a two-fold legacy. On the one hand, that of the fragmentary character of what was originally a “leaderless revolution”, still represented in many local factions and councils. The other legacy is that of Jabhat al-Nusra’s decentralised structure which functioned by sectors, each led by a duo representing the religious and military authorities; a structure which retained elements of the radical current from the early years of jihadism.
Thus the “relocalisation” required to break away from the global jihad led at the same time to a dynamic of deradicalisation, not out of a concern for moderation but out of a desire for control.
Society’s revenge
In order to offset the influence of the global jihad sheikhs and establish a different ideological framework while continuing to put down local roots, HTS adopted the Shafi’i school of jurisprudence, which was closer to the Sufism of the local populations. This enabled it to continue minimising the weight of the salafi jihadi old guard while tracking down the remaining cells of al-Qaida and ISIS, thanks to two specialised units of General Security in Idlib. Some were simply excluded, others were arrested. The rest were “diluted” into broader clerical structures, which the Salafists did not control, like Dar al-Ifta (the House of Jurisprudence), the institution tasked with issuing religious opinions.
In order to run the 1,200 mosques in Idlib, HTS had to choose between imposing its own men or leaving in place the lower-level clergy from the local communities. The organization opted for the latter solution, without demanding that the Friday sermons cleave to a single line. At most, the Minister for Religious Affairs proposes themes, related more to ritual issues than to ideological questions let alone jihadist ones, and leaves the preachers free to choose which they will use. In this context, Sufi practices abhorred by the Salafists are making a gradual comeback, with the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday, guidance in religious recitation (dhikr), visits to the saints’ tombs or identification of Sufi religious institutions.
Thus, whereas the Salafists would be demanding a “purification of the dogma” and the reform of society, the opposite is the case under HTS. In Idlib, society is having its revenge, bringing about a profound transformation of the movement, not so much in terms of its ideology - which remains undefined - but in its positions and day-to-day management of things religious in Idlib. Through its interaction with the local communities, HTS has become “desalafied”.
If the group has accepted this swing of the social pendulum, it is first of all because it does not have enough members, and also because it does not want to antagonise the population. It considers that its first priority is the military effort to bring down the regime, not ideological proselytism. Whence its doctrinal espousal of a catch-all theological centrism, “somewhere between exaggerated radicalism (al-ghoulouw) on the one hand and the deviant exuberance of Brotherhood Islam on the other,” in the words of one of the movement’s religious officials.
The fate of religious minorities
As for Jolani, we must not forget that he is a warrior, a revolutionary who dreams of a “Big Night” and is ill at ease in his role as governor of a pocket as poor and strategically unimportant as Idlib. For his goal has always been to take on Damascus. But he is also a politician who must, in dealing with a society which is conservative but by no means radical in its conservatism, make concessions, not only ideological ones but also military and strategic.
In March 2020, following the nine-month battle against the regime and the loss of 30 % of the territory controlled by HTS, Turkey and Russia signed a truce which ended their clashes in north-west Syria. Not only was HTS a party to this arrangement but it also imposed it on the other groups present on the front line.
Again, cooperation with Turkey was counter-intuitive and required an ideological repositioning. The Turkish presence in the rebel-held territories had been challenged in 2018. For some, the Turkish army, part of NATO, coming as it did from a secular country, was an atheistic organisation “seeking support among the infidels” (al-isti’ana bil kuffar)and spurned by some sheikhs now expelled from the movement. Thus this strategic repositioning is going to aggravate polarisation with the remaining radical groups, especially Hurras al-Din (the Guardians of the Faith), the Syrian branch of al-Qaida, which was to launch an assault against the regime in July 2020, breaking the truce. HTS fought back and obliged the movement to demilitarise. Since then, Hurras al-Din has gone underground.
At the same time, Jolani began to believe that the regime’s underpinnnings, especially the Alawite ones, were beginning to weaken. He saw this as an opportunity and wanted to position himself as a figure of national stature. He relied on minorities already present in the Idlib pocket, i.e. three Christian villages where there lived, year in, year out, some 800 people, and a Druze community that had shrunk during the civil war from 18,000 to 6,000.
His first gesture towards these Christians was to give them back their houses, some of them occupied by fighters’ families or by foreign fighters belonging to groups not affiliated with HTS. This required intense negotiations, of course. There were also long discussions, even more complicated, about the restitution of farmland. And these are problems which are still unresolved. However, the dynamic was sufficiently advanced in 2022 for some Christians, escorted by HTS, to leave the regime-controlled areas where they had found refuge and return to their villages on the outskirts of Idlib.
An ideological refocusing
So far, HTS has undertaken no ideological updating. They prefer to maintain a kind of vagueness rather than taking a clear line which might antagonise the conservatives still belonging to the movement. With the fall of Damascus, that ideological clarification is of course more necessary than ever ; at stake are, on the one hand, the movement’s local acceptance and, on the other, the international recognition of the new Damascus authorities. In fact when the movement’s leaders are asked to define themselves, there are as many different answers as there are individuals questioned.
Some define themselves as Sunni conservatives, others as Islamist revolutionaries, still others as political jihadists... Better to wait before putting a definitive label on them. At one point one of their leaders said to me: “We are more likely to be the product of the ongoing dynamic than of any preconceived ideology.”
Thus, HTS is a movement which by turns and by stages is transforming itself significantly for reasons linked either to the strategic constraints imposed by the regional environment (the presence of Turkey) or the need to adapt to local society. It is also evolving towards an ideological refocusing which is at once Sunni, Islamic, conservative and revolutionary. But this is being met with resistance from its most obdurate wings. A concern for cohesion has led to the latter’s exclusion or silencing.
At present it is a sort of Thermidorian logic - a kind of post-revolutionary moderate pushback - which prevails. The page of Terror has been turned and the movement is banking on the different silent majorities as much to consolidate its grip on domestic affairs and eliminate the remains of a radical minority as to present themselves as a national alternative. When Jolani made overtures to the Christian and Druze minorities, contrary to what many observers claimed, his objective was not so much to flirt with the West, as to send a message to the country as a whole that he constituted an alternative of national dimensions and was not just the commander of a local rebellion.
In reality, the shift from the Idlib experience to that of Damascus poses challenges at different levels and of a different type. First of all, qualitative challenges: how to think through this transition for a movement better equipped for armed combat and local rule than for national governance, and which does have a few red lines (avoiding Iraq-style “debaathification”, repressing people’s violent desires for revenge, working with the minorities) but no clear strategy. Next, a quantitative challenge : because the Syrian Salvation Government was a tiny structure of less than 7,000 civil servants. HTS is not a mass movement with dependable roots in the professional sectors and the middle classes.
There is an enormous deficit of human resources and the rulers run the risk of facing impossible demands, if only in the security domain. Today HTS can count between 10,000 and 15,000 fighters. They constitute a dominant force on the battlefield but they are not the only one. They have to control the proliferation of weapons in society as well as the regrouping of rebel militias under cover of the present disorder. Then interfactional competition has to be avoided. And finally the jihadist groups, not only the foreign ones, have to be subdued in a context where confessional rhetoric has reared its head again in spite of the movement’s line and the many efforts towards de-escalation between the new leadership and the various communities. These - Shi’a in Damascus and north of Aleppo, Christians in Aleppo and in Homs, Alawites on the coast and in Damascus, Druze in the south and in the capital - have moreover rapidly cooperated.
While Idlib on the whole belongs to a social environment which HTS finds comfortable (Muslim, Sunni, conservative and revolutionary), the shift from Idlib to Damascus will require some serious thinking about communitarian diversity but also about the commitment of the urban elites of Damascus and about entering into the geostrategic game by the main door - via Damascus.
Translated by Noël Burch.