Ahmed al-Sharaa


Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, also known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Julani, is a Syrian politician and former rebel commander who has served as the president of Syria since 2025. He previously served as the emir of Al-Nusra Front from 2012 to 2017, the emir of Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham from 2017 to 2025 and was the de facto leader of Syria from December 2024 until his appointment as president in January 2025.
Born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to a Syrian Sunni Muslim family from Daraa and the Golan Heights, he grew up in Syria's capital, Damascus. Al-Sharaa joined al-Qaeda in Iraq shortly before the 2003 invasion of Iraq and fought for three years in the Iraqi insurgency. American forces captured and imprisoned him from 2006 to 2011. His release coincided with the Syrian revolution against the Ba'athist dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. Al-Sharaa created Al-Nusra Front in 2012 with the support of al-Qaeda to topple the Assad regime in the Syrian civil war. As the emir of al-Nusra Front, al-Sharaa built a stronghold in the northwestern Idlib Governorate. He resisted Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's attempts to merge al-Nusra Front with the Islamic State, leading to armed conflict between the two groups. In 2016, al-Sharaa cut al-Nusra's ties with al-Qaeda and launched a crackdown on its loyalists. Since breaking with al-Qaeda, he has sought international legitimacy by presenting a more moderate view of himself, renouncing transnational jihadism against Western nations, and focusing on governance in Syria while vowing to protect Syria's minorities.
Al-Sharaa merged al-Nusra with other organizations to form HTS in 2017 and served as its emir from 2017 to 2025. HTS established a technocratic administration known as the Syrian Salvation Government in the territory it controlled in Idlib Governorate. The SSG collected taxes, provided public services, and issued identity cards to residents, though it faced protests and criticism within Idlib for authoritarian tactics and suppressing dissent. Al-Sharaa launched an 11-day offensive against the Assad regime in November 2024 which saw swift victories in Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and Damascus; Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia as his government collapsed.
Al-Sharaa became Syria's de facto leader, heading the post-revolutionary caretaker government from 8 December 2024 until 29 January 2025, when he was appointed president of Syria at the Syrian Revolution Victory Conference held in the People's Palace. As president, he focused on consolidating power, rebuilding state institutions, integrating military factions, and restoring Syria's international relations, including with the United States, Russia, and regional powers. Domestically, al-Sharaa pursued economic recovery, security stabilization, the return of Syrian refugees to their homes, and minority reconciliation, including signing an agreement with the Syrian Democratic Forces to integrate their military and civil institutions into the state, though negotiations on integration remained inconclusive. In 2026, after clashes in Aleppo between the transitional government and SDF forces, he signed a decree stating that Syrian Kurds are an essential part of the Syrian people and recognized the Kurdish language. His government launched an offensive against the SDF, initially in the eastern Aleppo Governorate around Deir Hafir and Maskanah, before expanding to Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor, and Al-Hasakah.
Al-Sharaa's first year as president saw massacres targeting Syrian Alawites and clashes in southern Syria, both involving government-affiliated troops, which led to criticism. After breaking the 1974 agreement, Israel intensified its limited invasion of southwestern Syria from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Al-Sharaa reaffirmed Syria's commitment to the 1974 deal and has opposed renewed conflict with Israel. He has condemned Iranian influence and plans to hold elections. Al-Sharaa signed a constitutional declaration establishing a five-year transition period and announced the formation of a transitional government.

Early life and military career

Youth in Syria

Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa was born on 29 October 1982 in Riyadh to a middle-class family, of four brothers and two sisters. According to family tradition, the family traced their ancestry back to the Islamic prophet Muhammad. According to The New York Times, the family discussed politics at home but had no record of involvement in Islamic extremism.
His father, Hussein al-Sharaa, worked as an oil engineer at the Ministry of Oil and Mineral Resources, and his mother was a geography teacher. The family returned to Syria in 1989, settling in the affluent Mezzeh neighborhood of Damascus, where his father opened a real estate office. Whilst living in an apartment block in the Mezzeh neighbourhood in the west of the city, al-Sharaa worked part-time as a child in a grocery store owned by his father. He frequented the Shafi'i mosque in his neighbourhood, and at the age of seventeen, he became religious, habitually wearing a long austere tunic and a knitted cap.
According to Hussam Jazmati, who wrote a biography of him, al-Sharaa's classmates remembered him as a studious but unremarkable boy who wore thick glasses and avoided attention. During his youth, he was described as "bookish", "quiet" and "shy", "manipulatively intelligent" but "socially introverted", and was noted for his "good looks" and a romance with an Alawite girl which both families opposed.
Al-Sharaa said that, while he largely disagreed with his father ideologically, they both shared a commitment to defending the Palestinians. Besides the displacement of his grandfather and his family from the Golan Heights, al-Sharaa said that the Second Intifada in 2000 had an impact on his life choices. According to an interview with Frontline in 2021, al-Sharaa stated he was radicalized by the Palestinian Second Intifada in "the early 2000s." He said: "I started thinking about how I could fulfil my duties, defending a people who are oppressed by occupiers and invaders." In a 2024 interview, when about his reaction to the September 11 attacks, al-Sharaa stated that "anyone who lived in the Islamic or Arab world at the time who tells you he wasn't happy about it would be lying", but added that he understood "regret" about the killing of innocent people.
Al-Sharaa enrolled at Damascus University, studying media studies and enrolling in the Faculty of Medicine for two years. Whilst being a university student, he travelled from Damascus to Aleppo on Fridays to attend the sermons of Mahmoud Gul Aghasi there. After studying for two years, he moved to Iraq in 2003 without telling his family.

Iraq war

Al-Sharaa traveled from Damascus to Baghdad by bus just weeks before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. In 2003, he was detained and questioned by the Syrian Military Intelligence Directorate for his illegal departure from Syria to Iraq, but was released after denying affiliation with any political parties or extremist groups. After arriving in Iraq, al-Sharaa quickly rose through the ranks of al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Times of Israel claimed in 2013 that al-Sharaa was a close associate of AQI leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In later years, al-Sharaa denied ever meeting al-Zarqawi and asserted that he served only as a regular foot-soldier under al-Qaeda against the American occupation. In 2004, Iraqi intelligence believed al-Sharaa was Zarqawi's deputy, according to The Economist.
Iraqi officials have stated that after Zarqawi was killed in a US airstrike in 2006, al-Sharaa left Iraq and briefly stayed in Lebanon, where he provided logistical support to the Jund al-Sham jihadist militant group. Before the beginning of the Iraqi civil war in 2006, al-Sharaa returned to Iraq to continue fighting. However, he was arrested by American forces while planting explosives and imprisoned for over five years in various detention centres, including Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca, Camp Cropper and Camp Taji prisons. Al-Sharaa convinced the Iraqi authorities holding him that he was a local Iraqi, not a foreign fighter, by speaking in Iraqi-accented Arabic and using a pseudonym, Amjad Mudhafar. It is said that during this time, al-Sharaa taught classical Arabic to other prisoners, increasing his popularity.

Syrian civil war

Syrian uprising and foundation of al-Nusra

During a routine detention review, Iraqi authorities, finding no charges against al-Sharaa's pseudonym, Amjad Mudhafar, released him on 13 March 2011, days before the beginning of the Syrian Revolution. Al-Sharaa was tasked in August 2011 by al-Qaeda Emir Ayman al-Zawahiri and al-Qaeda's central command to establish al-Qaeda's mission in Syria. The leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, gave him $50,000 to establish a branch of the group in Syria. Alongside senior operatives from al-Qaeda's central command, he formed "Jabhat an-Nuṣrah li-Ahl ash-Shām", also known as the Al-Nusra Front, which was envisioned by al-Zawahiri as a broad coalition of Islamist militant groups led by al-Sharaa in Syria, with direct allegiance to al-Qaeda's central command. During this time, al-Sharaa went under the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Julani, which is sometimes transliterated as Joulani, Jolani, and Golani. According to one source, his "al-Julani" nisba referred to the al-Julani neighborhood of Fallujah in Iraq where he had distinguished himself.
Despite tensions with the leadership of al-Qaeda in Iraq, who were content with his departure, al-Sharaa proceeded to orchestrate an agreement with al-Baghdadi to expand al-Qaeda's Syrian branch, Jabhat al-Nusra. The group maintained this alliance with the ISI until 2013, with an arrangement between al-Sharaa and al-Baghdadi to resolve disputes through mediation by al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Over time, al-Sharaa began distancing himself from transnational jihadist ideology, increasingly framing his faction within the context of a nationalist Syrian struggle. ISI initially provided al-Sharaa with fighters, weapons, and funding to establish the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria. Al-Sharaa implemented these plans alongside ISI leaders after his release from prison.
Sources differ on whether Sharaa was the one who came up with the idea of forming Jabhat al-Nusra or another leader in the Islamic State of Iraq; however, what is certain is that al-Sharaa became the "general emir" of al-Nusra when it was officially announced in January 2012. By December of that year, the US Department of State designated Jabhat al-Nusra as a terrorist organization, identifying it as an alias for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The US State Department listed al-Sharaa as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in May 2013. Under al-Sharaa's leadership, al-Nusra Front emerged as one of Syria's most powerful rebel groups. Its stronghold was centered on the Idlib Governorate in northwestern Syria, where they attacked both Ba'athist Syrian government forces and US-supported opposition groups.