From al-Qaeda to Government: The Transformation of HTS

In April 2013, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced that Jabhat al-Nusra was merging into the newly declared Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). Al-Jolani rejected the merger in a dramatic audio message, refusing to pledge allegiance to al-Baghdadi and instead pledging bayah (loyalty oath) directly to al-Qaeda's central leadership under Ayman al-Zawahiri. Al-Zawahiri sided with al-Jolani, ruling that Nusra would remain a separate entity. This public split — the first major fracture in the global jihadist movement — created two competing jihadist streams in Syria. ISIS expelled from al-Qaeda in February 2014 after its forces attacked Nusra and other rebels in a brutal campaign. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, ISIS killed over 2,000 FSA and Nusra fighters in Deir ez-Zor in 2014 alone. The split paradoxically enhanced Nusra's standing among Syrians — it was seen as more pragmatic, less genocidal.

On November 27, 2024, HTS launched Operation Deterrence of Aggression alongside allied factions including the FSA-derived Syrian National Army's northern factions. The offensive began simultaneously on multiple fronts in Idlib, Hama, and Aleppo. Within 48 hours, Aleppo — Syria's second city — fell, shocking the regime and the world. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Hezbollah, which had sustained Assad through years of war, were either absent or unable to respond at scale due to degraded capabilities from Israeli strikes and the Lebanon war. Russian air support was sporadic and ineffective. The regime's demoralized and undertrained frontline forces collapsed. Hama fell on December 5. Homs on December 7. On December 8, rebels entered Damascus. Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow on a Russian military aircraft. After 54 years of Assad family rule over Syria, the regime was over in 11 days. Ahmad al-Sharaa, the former al-Qaeda operative from Camp Bucca, became the leader of post-Assad Syria.