A Year Without Assad| The metamorphosis of a jihadist
With the first anniversary of the unlamented fall of the Assad regime, it is worth pausing to consider the year’s most consequential figure: Ahmad Al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammad Al-Joulani; two names that coexist uneasily, rather like some Cairo streets.
His successive transformations have dominated analysis and commentary. His political rise, in Syria and beyond, has been nearly as dramatic as the removal of the Assads themselves, with their mass graves, chemical weapons, and sprawling Captagon factories.
In January, Al-Sharaa/Al-Joulani proclaimed himself interim president of the Syrian Arab Republic. By May, he was meeting US President Trump in Riyadh under Saudi sponsorship. What followed was a succession of diplomatic reversals: the lifting of European sanctions on Syria; then the removal of British and UN sanctions on Al-Sharaa dating back to his jihadi past; and, finally, the US decision last month to lift its own sanctions as he traveled to Washington. He has become the first Syrian president to set foot in Washington since the country’s independence in 1946.
One head, many hats
Al-Sharaa/Al-Joulani has become the central figure around whom Arab, Turkish, and international efforts to rehabilitate Syria now revolve. Syria’s regional weight is considerable: it is pivotal for the return of millions displaced by the Assad regime’s violence, for containing transnational jihadist networks, and for limiting Iran’s reach through its proxies.
This broader agenda has required recasting Al-Joulani as Al-Sharaa, transforming a jihadi shaped by ISIS and Al-Qaeda into a putative statesman. His experience governing Idlib appears to have been decisive in this metamorphosis, reshaping both the individual and the organization he leads.
Setting aside the practical question of his role in rebuilding Syria’s state institutions, his personal trajectory is analytically significant in its own right. It becomes particularly revealing when situated within the longer evolution of Arab political Islam.
With his post-Assad project, Al-Sharaa/Al-Joulani embodies the descent of jihadi political Islam from celestial abstraction to political earth. The utopian claims have vanished. No caliphate, no promise of implementing sharia as the foundation of a just society, no anti-colonial narrative. What remains is a single, diminished objective; to secure a governing authority within the post-independence state, or whatever portion of it remains.
On the economic front, the emerging vision is unabashedly neoliberal: attracting capital at virtually any cost and opening airspace and territory to the military presence of competing foreign powers. There is no meaningful conception of sovereignty in this framework, nor any effort to reclaim what the Assad regime itself surrendered when it invited Russian and Iranian forces—among others—to preserve its rule against its own people.
Worse still, this transformation is taking place at the political and economic levels without any corresponding ideological shift—not toward the nation-state, not toward a Syrian national project, and certainly not toward any federal or democratic conception. The underlying worldview remains unchanged.
Rotten goods, nicely wrapped
On the ground, the project reconciles its internal contradictions by adopting a discourse of Sunni victimhood. Within this narrative, Syria’s rehabilitation, an explicit regional and international priority, whether to counter terrorism, facilitate refugee returns, or contain Hezbollah and the broader Iranian axis—ultimately hinges on securing understandings with the United States and the European Union, and even with Israel itself.
The expectation behind these arrangements is that they will elicit a willingness to overlook the repression of minorities—Alawites, Druze, and Kurds—without offering any prospect of genuine national inclusion. The ideological framework remains unable to accommodate pluralism except through archaic notions of dhimmi status and recurrent pledges to “protect” minorities. This may help explain why Christians have, at least thus far, fared comparatively better.
What we see, then, is a collapse into bluntly sectarian configurations, whose highest political aspiration is to secure an understanding with Israel regarding the Druze and with the United States regarding the Kurds.
To this must be added what is arguably the most significant crisis to confront the Islamist project in the Middle East over the past forty years: its most durable and institutionally successful political experiment has been Shiite rather than Sunni—the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Iran established a theocratic constitution, built resilient state institutions, and cultivated a broad political class, managing to function under sanctions that have shadowed the republic since its inception.
The Islamic Republic represents the boldest attempt to date to reconcile a variant of Islam with the structures of the modern state. It offers the “Islamic Republic” as a conceptual template, in stark contrast to a series of far less successful Sunni experiments, from the internecine mujahideen and later the Taliban in Afghanistan, to the Bashir–Turabi partnership in Sudan, to the episodic Islamization of the military in Pakistan.
The 2003 US invasion of Iraq and the sectarian civil war that followed in 2006 deepened the rift between the Shiite and Sunni strands of political Islam. The Islamic State in Iraq once fought Iran’s allied Shiite forces and deployed extreme violence against Iraqi civilians in an effort to derail Washington’s misguided post-Saddam project—a project that mirrored, in Sunni form, the authoritarianism of the Baathist Assad regime.
Al-Joulani has now carried this trajectory to its logical conclusion. His regional role is tied to confronting and constraining the Iranian axis, but not in the service of any alternative Islamist vision. Rather, his position aligns seamlessly with a Turkish–Gulf strategy—backed by the United States—to roll back Iranian influence following the setbacks suffered by Tehran’s proxies in Gaza and Lebanon and the attacks on its nuclear facilities.
A seller with no buyers
Here the paradox reaches its starkest point. Even this central role in countering Iran earns Al-Sharaa/Al-Joulani little recognition in Israel, which continues to seize every opportunity to undermine the emerging Syrian regime and to humiliate it on the ground.
Meanwhile, retired jihadis in Syria issue empty declarations professing their willingness to make peace with Israel—on the condition that it surrender the Druze, so they may complete what they began months earlier.
None of these developments should be surprising. They follow the long-term contraction of the jihadi constituency—Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and their analogs, whose ranks, drawn from multiple nationalities and ethnicities since the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, have gradually been folded into larger geopolitical projects. These projects rarely align with their original ideological agendas, and often directly contradict them.
A case in point is the use of these militants to obstruct Kurdish aspirations for autonomy or independence in Syria. They have been repurposed as instruments of Turkey’s nationalist project—a project that has always stood at odds with the transnational Islamist vision, not to mention the Kemalist foundations of the Turkish state.
They have also been redeployed as fighters against Shiite Islam across the region, reproducing confrontations such as those between the Islamic Republic and ISIS, or between Ansar Allah and Ansar Al-Sharia in Yemen—only now in the service of a broader American strategic framework.
For all the banality of the project he now leads, Al-Sharaa/Al-Joulani will enter the region’s history as marking a pivotal turning point in the trajectory of jihadi political Islam. Paradoxically, this current has secured victories across political, military, and diplomatic arenas. Yet the choices it is now making amount to the practical defeat of the very project it once claimed to advance.