A quarter of a century after al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Syria is now ruled by a leadership that emerged from the al-Nusra Front, an international Salafi-jihadist formation long associated with al-Qaeda. Several prominent figures now in power in Damascus fought U.S. forces in Iraq. Among them is Syria’s transitional president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani. He founded and led the al-Nusra Front and was once the target of a $10 million U.S. bounty.
And yet Washington is now on good terms with Syria’s new rulers. The United States has even removed Ahmed al-Sharaa from its list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists. More recently, it removed Syria from its list of state sponsors of terrorism, along with the sanctions that came with that designation. The earliest sanctions even date back to the late 1970s.
The facts themselves are extraordinary. Just two years ago, they would have been unimaginable.
There are two radically different ways to read this turn of events. Syria could represent the greatest success yet of the Salafi-jihadist project. Or it could be the place where that project comes to an end. The first interpretation is that the heirs of al-Nusra now govern Syria; that Syria may be the only Arab and Muslim country where foreign jihadists hold official positions, some in the military and others in the administration; and that Salafism has never wielded as much influence in Syrian society as it does today. The other view stems from a different fact: Hayat Tahrir al-Sham broke with al-Qaeda as early as 2016. Arab and Western countries then opened up to it, and it joined the fight against ISIS and other extremist Salafi groups from the same milieu as the current leadership. Perhaps that is precisely what makes it the best antidote to them.
We find the second interpretation more convincing. Post-Assad Syria is, at the same time, post-al-Qaeda Syria. This may be good news for the “international community.” But can it be the same for Syrians as a whole, after fifteen years of violent conflict that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and devastated their local communities?
The new Syrian leadership has abandoned Salafi jihadism as a global ideology, along with its terrorist tactics. But the new order remains deeply conservative in religious terms, with Salafism still deeply embedded in it. It seems that religious conservatism is the price to pay for abandoning and confronting Salafi jihadism without causing the current ruling team to fall apart.
This religious dimension is part of a broader ideological framework. It combines neoliberal market fundamentalism at the economic level with a policy of normalization with Arab countries and the international community at the geopolitical level. The seemingly cordial relationship with the Trump administration is one of its clearest expressions.
But this combination contains major contradictions that could eventually cause it to unravel. Syrian society is too pluralistic for its stability and public freedoms to depend on a form of religious conservatism that even Sunnis do not share unanimously. Yet Salafism is now the most vocal current within Sunni Islam. It is repressive toward women and hostile to art and culture, while also becoming increasingly intrusive and aggressive when it comes to social freedoms, threatening an already fragile stability in the country. It is also deeply divisive within the Sunni community itself.
In a society where nearly 90 percent of the population lives at risk of poverty, the cult of investment and market fundamentalism hardly seems suited either to reviving the economy or rebuilding the country. Social protests are already emerging around “real estate development” projects and investment schemes that strongly favor the wealthy.
Normalization with the United States also appears superficial, as it is tied to the Trump administration, Israel’s strongest backer. This is particularly striking as Israel has expanded its occupation into Syrian territory and is working to keep Syria extremely weak, not only as a military power but as a state. With Europe, normalization is driven primarily by the issue of refugee returns. With Arab countries, it is based on Syria’s departure from the Iranian axis and the hope of bringing stability to the country.
Alongside this threefold combination of religious fundamentalism, market fundamentalism, and normalization with the Arab and Western worlds, power has steadily become more concentrated in the hands of al-Sharaa and his inner circle over the past twenty-one months. This suggests that we are heading toward a new authoritarian regime, but in even more difficult circumstances. The popular and national roots of the Syrian revolution are absent from both the structures and the direction of the current leadership.
Post-al-Qaeda Syria is therefore, in a broader sense, also post-revolution Syria. The country’s problems no longer come primarily from Salafi jihadism, which has become no more than a security problem. They stem from the fact that the current threefold combination of religious fundamentalism, market fundamentalism, and normalization imposed from above leaves little room for social participation, at a time when democratic norms are eroding everywhere. It also stands in the way of a more rational political and social order.
Religious fundamentalism and its heavy-handed interventionism provoke tense, and at times hostile, reactions among non-Sunnis as well as many Sunnis. Market fundamentalism concentrates wealth rather than reducing poverty, fueling resentment and extremist tendencies. Normalization with the United States, which does nothing to restrain Israel, likewise has a radicalizing and irrational effect. As for normalization with Arab and European countries, it has yet to produce economic benefits that might ease social tensions. If the country’s real problems remain unresolved, strong authoritarian rule may become the one point of consensus among the key actors.
The fear is that the failure to ease the social tensions caused by religious rigorism, poverty, and the appropriation of public resources by a new Sunni bourgeoisie, combined with the country’s fragile security situation and the continuing Israeli threat, will ultimately leave authoritarianism as the only option.
We have indeed entered the post-al-Qaeda era. But al-Qaeda is only one problem among many, all of them rooted in authoritarianism and irrationality, and in the international support that has allowed both to persist in the Arab world.