The Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which rules Syria from Damascus, has long been designated a terrorist organization by the UN, the US and the UK. But things changed quickly after the extremist group toppled Assad.
The group’s leader and self-proclaimed interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa (Abu Mohammed al-Jolani), had until recently carried a $10 million bounty on his head. In May, President Trump met with Sharaa in Saudi Arabia and praised his “very strong track record” – after which US sanctions on Syria were lifted. This “strong track record” was simple terrorism, including attacks on civilians and monitoring the implementation of Sharia law in AQD-held Idlib province.
A week before his meeting with Trump in the Gulf, Sharaa had proposed the idea of building a Trump Tower in Damascus. Since then, Sharaa has been interacting with several US delegations, promoting positive relations and trying to present a “moderated” and “reformed” leadership, despite the fact that Jolani was even a member of ISIS at the beginning of the Syrian proxy war.
That’s why the headline that appeared on Tuesday is absurd and shocking: The man who founded the Syrian al-Qaeda group Al-Nusra Front is coming to America.
An international report says:
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa will visit New York in September to attend the United Nations General Assembly, Sky News Arabic reported.
In recent weeks, reports have appeared in Arabic-language media about Sharaa’s intention to appeal to the United Nations.
This would be the first time a Syrian president has addressed the UN since June 1967, when Nureddin al-Atassi did so following Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War.
Earlier this week, the US approved Sharaa’s controversial proposal to integrate thousands of foreign jihadists from his group HTS into the Syrian army, tantamount to Washington’s nod to a plan to legalize global jihadists in the heart of the Middle East.
However, Sharaat has not been universally welcomed even in the region. In April, Iraq invited him to an Arab League summit in Baghdad, but his past as a senior member of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) has drawn strong opposition, given that AQI is responsible for the brutal killings of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
Sharaa chose not to attend the Arab League meeting under pressure, and his alleged upcoming visit to the UN in New York could spark similar opposition. The legal loophole in all of this is that, despite his terrorist past, US law allows sitting heads of state to attend UN headquarters in New York. And that issue is somewhat moot anyway, given that President Trump has already fully embraced him during his visit to Riyadh last month.
