Don’t believe the nonsense about the new Syrian president’s reform

Michael Rubin | American Enterprise Institute

In the last weeks of the Biden administration, Assistant Secretary of State Barbara Leaf traveled to Syria to meet Ahmad al-Sharaa, the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham leader whose December 2024 march on Damascus ended the Assad family’s half-century reign of terror.

At the time of their meeting, Sharaa was still a wanted terrorist in the United States with a $10 million bounty for information leading to his arrest because of his previous embrace of al Qaeda. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, meanwhile, remains a designated terrorist group even as the U.S. and international community treat its members as the de facto leaders of Syria.

On its face, al-Sharaa’s claim to leadership is farcical. His coalition, on paper, controls at most half of Syria. He has no direct sway over either the Kurdish-governed northeastern region or the Druze region in southern Syria; his control in the Alawi regions along the Mediterranean Coast is shaky at best.

With Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham militiamen rampaging through Alawi- and Christian-populated areas and slaughtering civilians, it is clear the image al-Sharaa and his apologists in Washington promote is false.

There are two possibilities: Either Al-Sharaa is sincere but does not have control over hardliners in his own organization, or Al-Sharaa is insincere. But this is a distinction without a difference. It is also a dynamic that both the Islamic Republic of Iran and Turkey have exploited for decades to excuse terrorism and advance anti-American policies.

With calls for a “dialogue of civilizations,” Iran’s self-described reformers charmed their Western counterparts. Even if they were sincere, they held no real power. While successive former U.S. secretaries of state, from Madeleine Albright to Colin Powell to John Kerry, sought to engage Tehran’s reformers, the Iranian regime pushed forward with its covert nuclear program, its efforts to build proxies to destabilize neighboring countries, and its embrace of terrorism.

Iranian officials bragged openly about their deceit. Gholam Reza Aghazadeh, former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami’s spokesman, bragged, “We had an overt policy, which was one of negotiation and confidence building, and a covert policy, which was continuation of the activities.”

Turkish diplomats, meanwhile, drank raki or wine with their Western counterparts, all while Turkey was supporting the Islamic State and supplying al Qaeda-linked groups and Hamas.

Perhaps some of Iran’s reformists or Turkey’s traditional Europe-leaning secularists wanted more productive relations with the liberal world, but they never had the power. The wishful thinking of a generation of American policymakers, at best, gave hardliners time to consolidate power and, at worst, enabled terrorism.

Syria is the same story. The mirage of al-Sharaa’s moderation and reform is no different than the mirage of former Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini’s commitment to democracy, former Presidents Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Khatami, and Hassan Rouhani, or current President Masoud Peseshkian’s commitment to pragmatism and reform.

President Donald Trump prides himself on not letting history be a constraint. In his first term, his willingness to break diplomatic China led to the Abraham Accords and European states contributing more defense spending to NATO.

It would be ironic if, in his second term, he let the wishful thinking of the State Department and some think tankers empower terrorists and extremists at the expense of religious freedom and U.S. national security. Trump should reimpose the bounty of al-Sharaa and revoke even de facto recognition of his Turkish-backed regime.

Michael Rubin is a former Pentagon official whose major research areas are the Middle East, Turkey, Iran and diplomacy. He is author of “Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes” (Encounter, 2014). He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute AEI. His major research area is the Middle East, with special focus on Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Kurdish society.

The article first published at aei.org

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