More than 13 million Syrians have been forcibly displaced by the conflict — 6.2 million of them fleeing overseas. The war shaped the circumstances for the rise of the especially barbaric jihadist group Islamic State.
Whether ordinary Syrians are winners depends on what happens next in Syria and if the country steers away from more violence and develops along peaceful lines. Some fear there will be a power vacuum and that the country’s various political factions and religious groups will clash.
There is some cause for concern. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the main insurgent faction, is designated a terror group by the United States. Its leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, has a long history of jihadist militancy and is a onetime ally of the late Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State group (IS), but the pair fell out over tactics and become rivals and bitter enemies.
HTS is a breakaway from al-Qaida, but al-Jolani has done much to rebrand his group, which has an estimated 30,000 fighters, as a nationalist force and has adopted a conciliatory tone towards Syria’s religious minorities. In the Idlib enclave that HTS has been running since 2016, the group softened its attitudes towards the Christian and Druze minorities. On seizing Aleppo, al-Jolani promised Christians they would be safe, and the city’s churches were able to function unmolested.
But have al-Jolani and HTS left behind them their extremists roots? On Friday, al-Jolani said that the group had evolved and that rebuilding Syria is now a priority. “Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is merely one part of this dialogue, and it may dissolve at any time. It is not an end in itself but a means to perform a task: confronting this regime,” he told CNN.
The hope is that HTS has indeed moderated, but “trusting al-Jolani and HTS is very much like Oscar Wilde’s famous quip about second marriages, ‘the triumph of hope over experience,’” warned former U.S. diplomat Alberto Fernandez.
