Rebel chief Sharaa, who toppled Assad, named Syria’s interim president
New leader authorized to form temporary legislative council until new constitution is drafted; armed factions in country dissolved, will be absorbed by state institutions
DAMASCUS, Syria — The leader of the former rebel group that toppled Syrian president Bashar al-Assad last month was named the country’s interim president on Wednesday, following a meeting of the former insurgent factions.
The appointment of Ahmed al-Sharaa, a rebel once aligned with al-Qaeda, as the country’s president “in the transitional phase,” was expected. The announcement was made by the spokesperson for Syria’s new, de facto government’s military operations sector, Col. Hassan Abdul Ghani, the state-run SANA news agency said.
Abdul Ghani also announced the cancelation of the country’s constitution passed in 2012 under Assad’s rule, and said al-Sharaa would be authorized to form a temporary legislative council until a new constitution is drafted.
He also announced the dissolution of the armed factions in the country, which he said would be absorbed into state institutions.
Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Julani, is the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist former insurgent group that led the lightning offensive that toppled Assad last month. The group was once affiliated with al-Qaeda but has since denounced its former ties, and in recent years al-Sharaa has sought to cast himself as a champion of pluralism and tolerance.
The United States had previously placed a $10 million bounty on al-Sharaa, but canceled it last month after a US delegation visited Damascus and met with him.
Since Assad’s fall, HTS has become the de facto ruling party and has set up an interim government largely composed of officials from the local government it previously ran in rebel-held Idlib province.
As the former Syrian army collapsed with Assad’s downfall, al-Sharaa has called for the creation of a new unified national army and security forces, but questions have loomed over how the interim administration can bring together a patchwork of former rebel groups, each with their own leaders and ideology.
Even knottier is the question of the US-backed Kurdish groups that have carved out an autonomous enclave early in Syria’s civil war, never fully siding with the Assad government or the rebels seeking to topple him. Since Assad’s fall, there has been an escalation in clashes between the Kurdish forces and Turkish-backed armed groups allied with HTS in northern Syria.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces were not present at Wednesday’s meeting of the country’s armed factions Wednesday and there was no immediate comment from the group.
Al-Sharaa was expected to appear in a televised speech following the meeting, but it remained unclear if he would. The exact mechanism under which the factions selected him as interim president was also not clear.
Israel sent troops into the demilitarized buffer zone on December 8, the day Assad was toppled, originally describing the move as a temporary measure designed to prevent hostile actors from utilizing the power vacuum and taking over the strategic territory to threaten Israel. However, on Tuesday, Defense Minister Israel Katz said forces will remain in the zone indefinitely.
After the fall of Assad’s regime, al-Sharaa responded to Israeli concerns and offered reassurance that the new Syrian government would not threaten the Jewish state or allow Iran to reestablish itself in Syria.
Sharaa has also asserted that Israel had a right to target Iranian-backed forces, who supported Assad and backed Hezbollah, prior to the former Syrian leader’s fall, but he contended that Israel has no legitimate basis to keep operating in Syria since the regime change.
