![\"\"](\"https:\/\/stateofthenation.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Screen-Shot-2025-04-18-at-7.29.12-AM.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
READ HERE:<\/p>\n
Syria\u2019s interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa, previously known as the Al-Qaeda chief Abu Mohammad al-Julani, was selected as one of\u00a0Time<\/i>\u00a0magazine\u2019s yearly list of the 100 \u2018most influential\u2019 people.<\/p>\n
Former US ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, who played a role in and advocated for Washington\u2019s regime change policies in the country,\u00a0put forward<\/a>\u00a0Sharaa for the\u00a0Time\u00a0<\/i>100 list.<\/p>\n \u201cLast December, after years of building a powerful armed faction \u2013 Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), classified internationally as a terrorist group \u2013 Ahmad al-Sharaa and his rebel alliance toppled Bashar Assad\u2019s brutal government in Syria.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce aligned with Al-Qaeda and then ISIS, the soft-\u00adspoken Sharaa later fought both groups aggressively to ensure his fighters answered to him. More recently, he assembled alliances with other Syrian rebels, often at gunpoint, and secured Turkish support. He also established a religiously conservative statelet in northwest Syria that ruled effectively and reached out to reassure minority group \u2013 to beat Assad, the ambitious Sharaa understood he had to become a political leader as well as a military force,\u201d Ford wrote.<\/p>\n He went on to say that \u201cNow interim President of all Syria, Sharaa balances between militants he once led and liberal Syrians relieved Assad is gone,\u201d adding that \u201cobservers are left to wonder\u201d if he is an extremist or a \u201cmore a pragmatic politician who exploited extremist groups to gain power.\u201d<\/p>\n This year\u2019s list comes as Sharaa has been hoping to secure international support and sanctions relief, a little over a month after his government\u2019s forces killed around 1,700 Alawites in a series of sectarian killings along the Syrian coast.<\/p>\n The killings have\u00a0continued<\/a>. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), 42 people have died in sectarian killings since the end of Ramadan on 30 March. Incidents have spread from Latakia to Tartous and inland to Homs. The forces of Sharaa\u2019s government have also recently\u00a0blocked<\/a>\u00a0aid deliveries to the affected areas.<\/p>\n Up until last year, the new Syrian president was known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani. He was the head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the extremist militant organization that took power in Syria in December last year after the collapse of former president Bashar al-Assad\u2019s government.<\/p>\n His group has its roots in the Nusra Front \u2013 which was Al-Qaeda\u2019s official branch in Syria before being rebranded several times and becoming known as HTS. It now makes up the bulk of the new Syrian military, alongside other ISIS and Al-Qaeda-linked factions backed by Turkiye.<\/p>\n In an earlier life, Sharaa had studied media briefly and then joined the medicine faculty at Damascus University before leaving to join Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) following the 2003 US invasion.<\/p>\n He served as the deputy to ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi back when the group was known as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). Sharaa was dispatched by Baghdadi in 2011 to enter the war against Assad\u2019s government in Syria, where he took part in the launching of deadly suicide attacks against both security personnel and civilians before founding the Nusra Front in 2012.<\/p>\n A US terror designation and $10 million dollar bounty for Sharaa\u2019s capture was lifted in January 2025.<\/p>\n The UK and several European countries have begun easing\u00a0sanctions<\/a>\u00a0on Syria, and Washington provided a six-month exemption from some sanctions in January. The US has reportedly given Syria a list of demands that it wants Damascus to fulfill in exchange for partial relief from sanctions.<\/p>\n Sharaa\u2019s government is also set to receive support from Turkiye, Qatar, and\u00a0Saudi Arabia<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\n