When I arrived in Damascus, mere weeks after Assad fell, there wasn’t a single foreign fighter in sight. The country’s new ruler, Ahmed al-Sharaa, once known to the world by his jihadist nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, made sure that the capital’s checkpoints were manned by Syrian provincials. It seemed like he wanted to reassure Damascenes frightened by decades of Assad propaganda, real and imagined, about the deeds of foreign jihadists. He wanted to show the world that Assad’s downfall was a nationalist victory, not a jihadi one.
But the foreigners were there all right, as I found when I met a busload of Uyghur fighters visiting the horrific Sednaya Prison. They were al-Sharaa’s most disciplined fighters and crucial in his rise to power. Six months on, however, the very fighters who delivered him victory now threaten his bid for international legitimacy. For if the Trump administration has just announced that it will no longer designate al-Sharaa’s group as a terrorist threat, Syria’s new president may yet be unable to contain the foreign extremists who brought him to power — without plunging his country, and the wider region, back into blood-stained chaos.
When the Syrian uprising began, back in 2011, foreign fighters Instagrammed their “five-star jihad” to the world, a life filled with swanky villas and the latest gaming consoles. There were tens of thousands, then, from all over the world, from red-bearded Chechens to diminutive Maldivians. The survivors now have beards flecked with grey, and wander through the Umayyad Mosque pushing prams, as their wives snap photos in fake Gucci shades. Perhaps al-Sharaa, or just life, had tamed them.
But given how jihadist foreign fighters had dominated the news cycle and occupied the nightmares of Western policy makers for over a decade, beheading journalists in Raqqa and launching terror attacks on European streets — their very presence in Syria needed a response. They couldn’t be left to rural obscurity in the desert. When Donald Trump met al-Sharaa in Saudi Arabia, back in May, no wonder the Americans gave him an ultimatum: get the foreign fighters out, and crushing US sanctions will be lifted.
Trump’s offer was immediately celebrated in Syria. Billboards all over Damascus thanked the president for finally lifting the sanctions. Fair enough: Syrians are tired of the crushing poverty sanctions have brought, with shoppers forced to carry around bundles of Syrian pounds in black plastic bags. Yet amid the jubilation, there were questions too. Whatever the benefits of taking Trump’s deal, would al-Sharaa really sell out the men who stood by him through the hardest of times? No wonder Western media speculated that the American offer might prompt yet more bloodshed, with the Washington Post suggesting that al-Sharaa’s foreign fighters “pose a profound challenge to his political survival”.
But as the political analyst Jerome Drevon points out, how does one expel the foreign fighters to their homelands when they’re clearly not wanted there? European capitals, after all, are hardly likely to take their jihadis back, given both the security threat and the populist far-Right sentiment sweeping the continent. In any case, many of these foreign fighters have no desire to return to Europe. Many face long prison sentences for terror-related offences, and even those who don’t suffer long-term surveillance and social exclusion. Female returnees also aren’t able to access basic services for their children, thanks to the absence of legal documentation. That, in turn, means they become wholly reliant on state handouts.
And if these foreign fighters cannot stay in Syria or go to Europe, that could lead them to places where the state is weak: Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan. In a worst-case scenario, in fact, they might be roused from quiet domesticity and join Ahmed al-Assir brigade, a newly formed Lebanese jihadi group that’s actively recruiting. Or, perhaps, they instead lend their support to Free Masked Youth, a new opposition group intent on bringing down the house of Saud? Or, buoyed by the fall of Damascus, they could even start agitating in Gaza and Jordan.
In other words, then, their departure from Syria could mean foreign jihadis scattering embers across a region already primed to burn. And, in such volatile circumstances, it will be these very same foreigners who’ll likely emerge as the victors, as they’ve become immensely adept at surviving for over a decade of savagery. Letting them go could turn them into jihadi Ronin — masterless and wholly unpredictable. And no one wants that.
“Letting them go could turn them into jihadi Ronin — masterless and wholly unpredictable.”
Yet the truth, as one anonymous Syrian government insider tells me, is that “everyone is really exaggerating the ‘burden’ of foreign fighters”. In many ways, after all, most of these people have already signed up to al-Sharaa’s vision. He has happily given many foreigners high-ranking roles in the new Syrian military, while others work as civil servants. No less important, those who don’t like his vision know that it’s not worth taking him on. Certainly, Donald Trump himself saw something he liked, referring to him as an “attractive, tough guy” as if he were a UFC fighter.
By implication, many of the foreign fighters still in Syria have accepted al-Sharaa’s more moderate politics, too. Taken together, US envoy Thomas Barrack’s recent comments — that keeping the foreign fighters within the Syrian state project rather than excluding them — surely make sense. And if that wasn’t enough, the Americans have history on their side too: from Northern Ireland to the Balkans, bringing extremists into the political fold can bring results.
Then there’s al-Sharaa himself. Immensely affected by the Palestinian issue and US intervention in the Middle East, he was essentially radicalised and travelled to fight the Americans in Iraq. It is even said that he fought in the brutal battle of Fallujah, when militants killed dozens of US troops in 2004.
According to one former associate, however, al-Sharaa “joined al-Qaeda because it was the only group that took in foreigners”. And while he received an intimate education in insurgency, his experiences also turned al-Sharaa into a skilled politician. As one insider who knows him puts it, he’s alternatively known as “Machiavellian” and “muwaffaq” — someone who knows just how much to push and get away with it.
It was these attributes that allowed him to emerge on top. In 2013, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the sometime ISIS head, tried to reassert his authority over al-Sharaa’s group. Al-Sharaa refused, and an intra-jihadi conflict duly broke out in northern Syria. With al-Sharaa’s back to the wall, he outfoxed al-Baghdadi by swearing allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri: Baghdadi’s boss. Al-Zawahiri backed al-Sharaa’s cause, and many foreign jihadists rallied to his standard.
At some point around 2015, meanwhile, al-Sharaa realised that no state in the Middle East could flourish with a transnational jihadist vision. Certainly, the downfall of the Islamic State testified to that. Of course, that didn’t mean that al-Sharaa had suddenly turned into an Arab liberal who’d happily crack open the arak. Far from it: he remains an Islamist and has not abandoned the idea of jihad. What he has done, however, is keep the bit that serves as a vehicle for national liberation and defence, while discarding the suggestion that Muslims are obliged to overthrow any government that doesn’t implement Islamic law.
This ideological clarity was accompanied by a series of remarkable power grabs. After 2016, al-Sharaa renounced al-Qaeda and formed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). By 2020, what al-Qaeda called “the betrayal” was complete. Al-Sharaa had crushed all his former jihadi friends, while also mobilising his band of well-disciplined Uyghur fighters against Ahrar al-Sham, the dominant rebel faction in northern Syria. By the time he set up a civilian government in northern Syria, then, al-Qaeda’s foreign fighter networks had been neutralised.
Taken together, then, al-Sharaa is well placed to control the foreign fighters in his midst — or destroy any dissenters if needs be. No less important, he’s in a strong position with places like al-Hol, detention camps which hold ISIS wives and children, many of whom are from Europe. Nor does he seem particularly troubled by the ISIS fighters held by the Kurds.
Yet if al-Sharaa is safe from a practical perspective, more symbolic challenges remain. Foreign fighters carry immense symbolic weight in the Syrian religious imagination, with many known as Ansar. “Helpers” in Arabic, the Ansar in Islamic tradition supported the early Muslim community, and are viewed in a sanctified light. After the failure of the international community to act against Assad, it was these latter-day Ansar, and their Syrian brothers-in-arms, who stepped into the breach.
That fact has its own status both in Syria and across the Muslim world. The Syrian revolution, after all, is not just a national one but one replete with religious symbolism. Jihadism — albeit in its localised form — is no longer external to Syria’s revolutionary movement. Rather, it is woven into the social and political fabric of the country. Wander around the markets of Damascus and you’ll see the revolutionary banner alongside jihadi ones. Stop at a checkpoint and you’ll find long-haired and bearded Syrians, emulating the jihadi style.
It’s easy to see how that could cause problems for al-Sharaa, especially now that relations with the US seem so crucial to his future plans. Beyond removing HTS from the terror hit list, after all, Secretary of State Marco Rubio also expects Damascus to “combat terrorism in all its forms”. But doing so might alienate al-Sharaa from both his foreign supporters, and those Syrian jihadis who view them as brother-in-arms. At best, anyway, such a move could lead to civil unrest. At worst, the President risks damaging the foundational myth of the revolution. That would obviously undermine his credibility, even as the West might lose a willing and cooperative partner.
What al-Sharaa must therefore do, and it is by no means easy, is to strike a balance between honouring the foreign contribution to the revolution — while sidelining them or co-opting them into the state. Fail, and he risks suffering a similar fate to Bashar al-Assad.
