“Younger, engaging man. A powerful previous. A fighter. (…) He is received an actual shot at pulling it collectively.” Along with his flamboyant fashion, US President Donald Trump supplied Syria’s new chief, Ahmed al-Sharaa, the popularity he had been ready for since he took energy, on December 8, 2024. The efforts that the previous jihadist-turned-reformed chief, 42, put into sharpening his picture and courting Arab and Western leaders have paid off. In Riyadh on Could 14, via the intercession of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, al-Sharaa secured a gathering with Trump and the promise of lifting US sanctions on Syria.
The US president’s outreach was as sudden because it was surprising for al-Sharaa, harking back to the autumn of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Nevertheless, the person was not caught off guard. When he was nonetheless the chief of the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and identified by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Julani, he had developed a transparent imaginative and prescient of the position he supposed for Syria on the world stage. A realistic greater than an ideologue, al-Sharaa had made – as quickly as he broke with al-Qaida in 2016 and rose to energy within the northwestern insurgent enclave of Idlib – “opening as much as the West” a tenet for Syria, beforehand anchored to Russia and Iran.
You’ve 82.12% of this text left to learn. The remaining is for subscribers solely.
