The Islamist group which rules Syria from Damascus, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has long been designated as a terrorist organization by the UN, US and UK. But once the hardline group toppled Assad, things changed rapidly.
The group's leader and self-declared interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa (Abu Mohammed al-Jolani) until very recently had a $10 million bounty on his head. In May, President Trump met with Sharaa in Saudi Arabia, praising his "very strong past" - after which US sanctions on Syria were dropped. That 'strong past' was terrorism plain and simple, including attacks on civilians and overseeing Sharia executions in AQ-held Idlib provice.
A week before the Gulf meeting with Trump, Sharaa had suggested the idea of building a Trump Tower in Damascus. Since then, Sharaa has engaged with several US delegations, pushing for positive relations amid an effort to present a 'moderated' and 'reformed' leadership, despite that Jolani had even been part of ISIS early in the Syrian proxy war.
This is why a headline which emerged Tuesday is absurd and shocking: the man who founded the Syrian al-Qaeda group Al-Nusra Front is coming to America.
One international report says:
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa will visit New York in September to participate in the United Nations General Assembly, according to Sky News Arabic.
Reports of Sharaa’s intention to address the UN have emerged in Arabic-language media in recent weeks.
This would mark the first time a Syrian president has addressed the UN since June 1967, when Nureddin al-Atassi did so after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War.
Earlier this week, the US endorsed Sharaa's controversial proposal to integrate thousands of foreign jihadists from his group, HTS, into the Syrian military. This is tantamount to Washington nodding in agreement with a plan to regularize global jihadists in the heart of the Middle East.
However, Sharaa has certainly not been universally welcomed even in the region. In April, Iraq invited him to the Arab League summit in Baghdad, but his past as a senior member of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) led to strong opposition, given AQI is responsible for thousands of brutal killings of Iraqi civilians.
Sharaa chose not to attend the Arab League amid the pressure, and his reported upcoming visit to the UN in New York City could provoke similar resistance. The legal loop hole in all this is that despite his terrorism past, US law allows for sitting heads of state to attend UN headquarters in NY City. And this question is somewhat moot anyway, given that President Trump has already full embraced him, during last month's Riyadh visit.