Known in Spain as El Pelirrojo (“the Ginger”), Suri was not the sort of ginger jihadi Britain produced, the kind who chased you around Whitechapel distributing leaflets proclaiming “sharia-controlled zones”. Instead, he belonged more in a Joseph Conrad novel. Living a quiet life in Neasden, he fused Islamist ideology, Marxism and modern insurgent tactics into a worldview whose legacy has colored countless later terrorist campaigns. For while bin Laden became famous for the hierarchy of al-Qaeda, Suri quite deliberately, wanted its opposite. As such, modern violent Islamism, with its lone-wolf protagonists and random stabbings, takes from Suri, not bin Laden, even as the Syrian’s legacy continues to loom large.

Born in 1958, into a conservative Aleppan family with a strong Sufi tradition, Suri came of age as Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father and Syrian dictator from 1970, was tightening his grip on power — and crushing the Islamist opposition as he went. As a young man, Suri joined an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood known as the Fighting Vanguard, and which concluded that the only way to overthrow the regime was through armed struggle. Trained in explosives, Suri was part of a campaign of bombings and assassinations against the Assad regime, culminating in a massacre of army cadets in 1979.

The confrontation reached its climax in 1982, when the Fighting Vanguard, joined by local supporters, rose against the regime in the western Syrian city of Hama. Hafez’s brother Refaat crushed the rebellion with  brutal force, effectively ending the Muslim Brotherhood as an organized force inside Syria and scattering the survivors of the Fighting Vanguard. Many, including Suri, made their way to Afghanistan to fight the USSR.

Suri found himself in Peshawar, in north-west Pakistan, alongside Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian cleric often described as the godfather of global jihad. In the rugged mountains abutting Afghanistan, he also met a wealthy Saudi benefactor — Osama bin Laden. According to Suri’s own account, he spent three years training bin Laden and other so-called “Afghan Arabs” before traveling to Madrid, acquiring Spanish nationality by way of marriage, then eventually settling in London in 1994.

In the Nineties, London had become an unlikely haven for Islamists, to the late 20th-century Muslim world what Paris, Istanbul, Cairo and Beirut had been to political dissidents in the 19th. The city’s cosmopolitan character made it the intellectual center of the Anglophone Muslim world, teeming with bookshops, activists, Afghan war veterans and assorted other political exiles — all trying to make sense of their movement’s future.

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It was in London, too, that Islamists began developing a bewildering range of political philosophies. At one end stood Tunisia’s Ennahda movement, looking to Britain’s parliamentary democracy for inspiration. At the other were those who dreamed of planting the black flag over 10 Downing Street. It was in this extraordinary milieu that Suri started turning the lessons of Syria and Afghanistan into a theory of global insurgency.

That theory marked a radical departure from the way Islam’s martial tradition had long been understood. Traditionally, anti-colonial figures in places like Algeria had conceived of jihad as a form of resistance. To them, noble means led to noble ends. The rules were simple: the enemy was the Western invader. No women. No children. No priests. Only combatants.

Suri threw those assumptions aside. Instead, he asked a wholly different set of questions, the sort that anarchists and Marxists wrestled with in the last century. Does terror achieve political aims? How should asymmetric warfare be waged? Are Muslim governments legitimate targets, as the Algerian military junta had become for Islamist militants? In many ways, Suri reimagined jihad into what the American writer Robert Taber called “war of the flea”: a strategy of guerrilla warfare, terror and asymmetry designed for the weak against the strong.

For a brief moment, following a series of terror attacks in France, Suri was noticed by MI5. But that was about it. The British security services largely turned a blind eye to Islamist activity throughout the Nineties, partly because they had yet to grasp the problem of blowback. There was also an understanding, as the infamous Abu Hamza of Finsbury Park Mosque once put it, that Islamist dissidents were free to agitate against their own governments so long as they did not bite the hand that fed them.

There was another calculation too. Some of these dissidents might one day overthrow the regimes they opposed, so it was better to keep them close than drive them underground. Indeed, some of the sons and daughters of Syrian Muslim Brotherhood exiles, who themselves grew up in London, are now advising the government in Damascus. Suri, however, always had far more global ambitions. In 1991, he attended the Popular Arab and Islamic Congress in Sudan, where he mingled with everyone from Hezbollah militants to Afghan mujahideen to Carlos the Jackal. Another attendee recalls meeting Suri there, describing him as intensely angry and confrontational.

Back in London, Suri helped publish the influential Islamist magazine Al-Ansar, publishing letters from leading jihadist figures, including al-Qaeda’s future deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. Suri also arranged for Western journalists to travel to Afghanistan to interview bin Laden, becoming one of the unlikely intermediaries between Britain’s Islamist exile scene and the emerging leadership of al-Qaeda. Suri was also an advocate of the Taliban, and its leader Mullah Omar, encouraging bin Laden to fall in line and preserve the nascent emirate.

By the late Nineties, Suri had returned to Afghanistan, settling in the outskirts of Kabul. Talha Ahsan, a former jihadist and Dulwich College alumnus who met Suri at this time, remembers him as “one of the smartest people” he had ever encountered. His vision foreshadowed practices that later became commonplace among groups such as ISIS. As Ahsan tells me, Suri believed in recruiting criminals, men with the courage to do things that bourgeois kids like himself could not. It was precisely these sorts of men, alienated from ordinary life, who would later carry out many of the atrocities that scarred Europe during ISIS’s heyday.

Suri’s 1600-page magnum opus, The Global Islamic Resistance Call, which appeared online in 2004, was a hard-nosed articulation of what modern jihad should look like. In it, he anticipated the lone wolf and the autonomous cell, each operating without a rigid hierarchy. The destruction of the Fighting Vanguard had convinced Suri that formal organizations were too easily dismantled. Jihad, then, had to become leaderless, to exist beyond any single group. In modern parlance, he wanted the fight to go viral.

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To that extent, Suri was not opposed to the objectives behind 9/11 — so much as the way al-Qaeda was organized. He well knew that charismatic leaders could be hunted down, leaving the movement in disarray. Bin Laden’s death and the subsequent decline of al-Qaeda, followed years later by ISIS’s struggles after the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appeared to prove him right. All the while, Suri argued that jihadist organizations wasted too much energy on theological infighting, instead of concentrating on what he saw as their wider struggle against the West and its allies.

Though Suri remained in the fringes during his lifetime, his ideas nonetheless seeped into the Islamist discourse via the internet and radical preachers. There are doubts as to how far he masterminded the Madrid bombings of 2004 and 7/7, yet both attacks were certainly Suri-esque. “[In my teachings] I have mentioned vital and legitimate targets to be hit in the enemy’s countries,” he remarked later. “Among those targets that I specifically mentioned as examples was the London Underground. [Targeting this] was and still is the aim.”

Beyond outrages like 7/7, Suri’s decentralized approach helped inspire other atrocities: including Nidal Hasan’s shooting at Fort Hood, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to bring down an American airliner in 2009. The countless stabbings, vehicle attacks and small-scale acts of terror carried out over the next 15 years would become the most enduring and disturbing expressions of Suri’s ideas.

Suri himself spent his last years hiding from the Pakistani authorities, before being captured and transferred to a Syrian prison around 2005. Widely believed to have died there, he disappeared into the same system of repression that had shaped him decades earlier.  But his ideas did not die with him. For if bin Laden is remembered as the face of global jihad, Suri may prove the more consequential figure in the long run, especially as warfare is becoming increasingly asymmetric and unconventional. Besides all that, the Syrian who once edited magazines in London, and took British journalists to meet bin Laden, bequeathed his successors something more durable than an organization. He left behind a method, one that continues to echo wherever individuals kill not in the name of a group — but, in vivid Conradesque fashion, in the name of an idea.

Suffice to say this was not an old spit-and-sawdust sort of gym. Yet more than its style, what makes BoxCentric truly remarkable is how unexceptional it now feels. All over London, similar boxing boutiques are sprouting up like welts on a fighter’s face. BXR, founded by Olia Sardarova and backed by Anthony Joshua, has membership fees starting in the thousands. Then there’s JAB Boxing in Victoria, which features champion boxers from Harlem Eubank to Caroline Dubois in its slick promotions. Boxing, a working-class sport, sneered at by the likes of George Orwell, has been repackaged for the affluent.

Boxing’s migration into luxury gyms is easy to mock, but harder to dismiss. These clubs are opening the sport to women, professionals and people who would never enter a traditional gym. They are also giving fighters and trainers a way to earn outside the sport. The problem is not that the rich have discovered boxing. It is that, just as boxing becomes fashionable among the wealthy, the grassroots clubs that made it socially useful are starting to decay — with ominous consequences for the sport and its future.

As a boxer myself, it’s easy to scoff at the posh hitting pads. “This isn’t real boxing,” one England prospect tells me, “it’s feel-good boxing.” In practice, that means less actual sparring and more bag work, circuits and pads, played to some trippy music. Yet it’s precisely the pressure of being punched in the face, to paraphrase Joshua Buatsi, the Ghanaian-British Olympian, that makes diamonds. And for those of us who used to pay £2 in subs, £225 a month feels like a hook in the liver. For me, then, visiting BoxCentric felt rather exclusionary, a far cry from boxing’s egalitarian motto: all are welcome, rich or poor, black or white as long as you can fight.

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The economic upper cut stings in other ways too. Think again to our England prospect. He wakes up early, cycles across London to teach a class, then returns for his own training in Brixton. And for what? Life for kids like him is hard. “You spend 10-to-15 years in the amateurs and get your brains bashed in,” says Dan Morley, a pundit and former professional. “There’s no money in the gym. We make little money from it.” It’s easy, then, to resent the suit turning up in a sanitized gym, thinking that a few hits makes him Balham’s answer to Joe Frazier.

All the same, I’m not sure sneering is quite right. “Everyone,” Morley points out, “should have an opportunity to try a sport.” That’s especially true when these new spaces have opened boxing up to people who would never have walked into a traditional gym. Louie Basso, a manager at JAB, tells me that around 65% of their clients are women. This is unsurprising. I myself have seen many women wanting to enter my gym, but finding the old boxing environment intimidating.

Morley makes a similar point. “It gives people who in previous eras would turn their nose up at boxing an understanding of how difficult it is — the technical aspect.” If a cleaner, safer, better-lit gym gets more men and women hitting pads, learning footwork and discovering the discipline of the sport, that’s hardly a bad thing, especially when audience numbers continue to drop.

As our England prospect’s early-morning hustle implies, meanwhile, luxury boutiques help boxers themselves. That £225 a month has to go somewhere, and fighters need all the help they can get. As Mark Turley shows in Journeymen: The Other Side of the Boxing Business, the average journeyman’s living often depends less on ability but on the fact that he’s a poor ticket seller. Few know that the fight game is stacked in favor of the ticket seller; as Morley puts it, the industry is “fucked”, controlled by promoters and with very few opportunities for outsiders. Boutique clubs offer former fighters a way to earn money outside the magic circle. Visit 12×3, a gym in the City, you can be taught by Darren Barker, a British, Commonwealth and world champion. George Veness, the founder of JAB, is another good example. A Newham boxing vet who fought for England before leaving the sport, he began training Victoria’s Secret models before replicating the idea at JAB.

There’s a broader point here too. Boxing may have been the poor man’s sport, but few boxers would begrudge men like Veness from making money. That, after all, is what prize fighting is all about. And there are other reasons to feel relaxed about boxing’s posh turn too. When the Marquess of Queensberry put his patronage behind the sport in 1867, he helped civilize it. From the brutal brawling days of old, gloves, rounds, the 10-second knockout rule were all introduced. Without the Queensberry Rules, without money, boxing may not have survived in the form we know it. Certainly, many young men would have pointlessly lost their lives.

If rich people want to pay for expertise — let them. Even if the next Mike Tyson doesn’t come from Knightsbridge, we may still reap the benefits of high-flyers becoming advocates for the sport, just like the Marquess of Queensberry himself. Like it or not, it’ll be precisely these people who become future school governors, magistrates and lawyers, and who may actually advocate for boxing as a way of solving London’s epic social problems.

Having worked with young men involved in knife crime, I know that the first thing you teach a novice is not aggression. It’s emotional regulation. You teach balance, positioning, defense and timing. And that can only be achieved if you can stay calm, as Teddy Atlas, Mike Tyson’s old trainer, put it, “in an un-calm environment”. In sparring, the aim is not simply to hit the other man. It is to create enough distance to think and act, not merely react. To remain composed while someone is offloading on you is a beautiful thing. It gives you immense confidence in the ring, but also in life, business, conflict and personal relationships.

All that’s useful whoever you are, but especially for Londoners born on the wrong side of the tracks. Social workers and youth-offending teams in overstretched boroughs like Croydon recognize the benefits of boxing, often taking their charges to the gym. Every single kid that I myself trained up in Croydon had an absent father; what boxing gives them is not merely toughness. It gives them discipline, restraint and, believe it or not, gentleness. Little wonder that gyms often act as a mediator with law enforcement, even as some police forces have funded clubs as a preventative measure against antisocial behavior.

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What a shame, then, that while places like BoxCentric thrive, their working-class cousins are struggling. Once again, money is key to this dynamic, with soaring rents a particular blight. Consider the plight of Broad Street Amateur Boxing Club. A typical East London community center, nestled between Shadwell’s council estates, it has a 138-year tradition in the sweet science. But then, in 2024, it received an annual rent increase of more than £60,000, saved only by a public campaign. Nor is this just a London problem. Stockbridge ABC in Liverpool has struggled. The late Ricky Hatton’s old club, Hyde & District Amateur Boxing Club near Manchester, is at risk too. Sudbury Boxing Club, with a 70-year pedigree, recently needed Eddie Hearn, the larger-than-life promoter, to step in and appeal for funding.

These sorts of things create resentment because property owners and councils are removing one of the things that allows for Britain’s poorest to succeed. When someone chooses to “turn over”, or become a professional boxer, it’s often because other doors are closed to him. To prevent a young man from carving out a future with the only thing he has — his fists — seems to me a grave injustice. And what councils fail to grasp is that offering to move a club elsewhere doesn’t solve the issue. I saw this myself at Sting ABC, a club I once boxed and coached at. Too many of the gym’s young boxers were lost to the streets of Croydon, despite the dedication of coach Bruce Smith, an ex-British army veteran. Only now, after years of struggle, has Sting ABC finally re-found its feet in Lewisham.

After all, the young people who frequent a club can’t move with it. A boxing gym isn’t just a room with bags. It’s a local institution and a source of pride. Each gym has its own character, whether that’s the spartan white paint of Miguel’s in Brixton, or the converted church at Ingle Boxing Gym in Sheffield. Or else go to London Military Boxing Club and watch my own teachers, Andy Haines and Del Ali, teach their boys how not to lose control, how strength without composure is useless. That’s why boxing was once taught in schools. Boxing absorbs social pressure and tensions from home and the schoolyard. It creates intergenerational authority. It gives difficult boys structure, in a way no Tube poster campaign ever could.

So yes, let the lawyers, bankers, influencers and executives box. Let women find confidence in gyms that feel safe rather than hostile. Let old fighters earn proper money holding pads for people who want to feel, for an hour at least, that they are part of the fight game, that there is no tomorrow, that they are really in a Rocky movie. Boxing and wealth need not be enemies.

But if boxing becomes only a premium lifestyle product, something has gone badly wrong. The sport’s glamor has always depended on the existence of the unglamorous rooms beneath it: the local clubs, the volunteer coaches, the kids paying a few quid to train, the veterans wrapping hands, the smell of sweat and leather, the lessons in restraint disguised as violence. Whatever happens, after all, the rich will always be able to buy the feeling of boxing. But the poor will need its function.

Almost 18 months after Bashar al-Assad fled into exile, such frantic improvisation is unsurprising. It’s also necessary. For if, by its end, his Baathist regime had transformed the country into a virtual narco-state, whose products surfaced in ports from Rotterdam and Genoa, the Syrian drug trade is alive and kicking. Indeed, one of the civil war’s most enduring legacies is that Assad’s former country has now become a major transit and drug hub, not just in Europe but across Asia and Africa too, encompassing narcotics as varied as crystal meth and liquid cocaine.

Yet it’s Captagon that truly keeps Syria’s drug empire afloat. Offering a blend of euphoria and detachment, the stimulant is popular among young Gulf club-goers and overstretched medical students seeking an edge in their exams. Over time, it’s become one of the country’s most lucrative exports. As he visits London for the first time today, President Ahmed al-Sharaa will doubtless parade a new Syria, one primed for investment and revived Western contact. The truth, though, is that Syria has become a legal black hole, a place where drugs can disappear, before reappearing elsewhere with little law enforcement scrutiny. That matters: not only for Syria and its own fragile future, but also for the region, Europe and the wider world.

Before the revolution, drugs weren’t really part of Syria’s story. There was cannabis, of course, grown in pockets around Baalbek, Homs and Latakia, and peddled by small-time gangsters and Hezbollah. But overall, Syria wasn’t known as a drug-exporting state, while dealers themselves were dealt with harshly. I remember living in a Damascus suburb and seeing funerals for local dealers who’d been killed in shootouts with police. Then, young men would smoke cigarettes like chimneys (they still do), and might have the odd drink, but it was rare to hear of drug-taking. There was a special stigma attached to its use. Captagon, for its part, was virtually unheard of. Syria did not present itself, to its neighbours, to Europe, or to its own citizens, as a country whose most lucrative export was narcotics.

Then came the war, and it turned Bashar al-Assad into a narco boss with a country attached. Captagon’s appeal isn’t hard to grasp. Over the past decade, parts of the Middle East — particularly the Gulf — have experienced a gradual loosening of social and religious restrictions. Among a young, affluent population with disposable income, ample free time, and a growing appetite for entertainment, the inexpensive stimulant has found a ready market. Easy to manufacture, easy to package, easy to move, it requires no fields, seasons or harvests.

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All a would-be kingpin needs are chemical precursors —  usually a mixture of amphetamines, caffeine and various fillers — alongside machinery and protection. As Assad was crushed by sanctions and the demands of an insatiable war machine, Captagon production proved to be an invaluable financial lifeline. By this stage, the regime boasted a growing ecosystem of militias and businessmen who propped up what remained of the hollowed-out state. Only trouble was, they all needed paying, and Captagon was the answer. And since the regime was now involved, they could manufacture most of those chemicals themselves, or else import them under official cover, attracting little scrutiny about their intended use. Importers like Eyad Lahham and former MPs like Amer Tayseer Kheiti were in on the racket, as was Assad’s brother Maher, who added drug running to his list of dubious accolades. Reports suggest that the Assads legally imported chemicals from India before producing Captagon from a disused potato-chip factory in the Damascus suburb of Douma.

At first, the Assad regime denied any connection to the drug. Its appearance was instead blamed on ISIS, with the “jihadi drug” supposedly used by fighters to remain calm in battle. On 1 July 2020, Italian police seized 14 tons of Captagon in Salerno, a port south of Naples, and initially seemed inclined to believe the shipment was indeed intended to fund ISIS. The Italians also explored links between the Islamists and the Neapolitan Camorra. No Camorra-ISIS connection was ever substantiated. What is known, though, is that one of Europe’s biggest drug traffickers, with Camorra ties, was arrested by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — al-Sharaa’s former outfit — while attempting to cross into regime-held territory in 2022.

Assad-linked networks were, by then, the drug’s main manufacturers and exporters. Maher al-Assad is again a case in point: his notorious Fourth Armored Division got so rich of Captagon that it reportedly maintained an $80 million cash reserve at a time when the average Syrian was surviving on just $2 a day. Maher and his associates meanwhile flaunted their wealth — supercars, watches, funds parked safely abroad — embodying the stark inequality that Assad’s narco-economy had created. All the while, this bonanza offered opportunities for ordinary Syrians. A young soldier might supplement his poor salary; a Bedouin school kid, instead of going to school, could smuggle Captagon and earn $1,000 a day.

The profits, then, were simply too hard to ignore. But so too is the social impact it’s wrought. Some weeks ago, while visiting friends in the war-scarred city of Raqqa — the former de facto capital of ISIS — my host warned me not to leave belongings in the car. Anything left behind, he said, would likely be stolen and sold to finance an addict’s drug habit. A UN employee from the city, speaking on condition of anonymity, describes the situation as an epidemic. Things are exacerbated, he adds, by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a group of mostly Kurdish fighters, whose personnel turn a blind eye to trafficking — and allegedly take a cut of the action.

In this, al-Sharaa is surely an improvement. His new government celebrated the end of the trade, partly for propaganda reasons but also sincerely. For Muslims in general, and Islamists in particular, drugs aren’t just criminal but impious. Mere weeks after his victory, in the grand setting of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus no less, al-Sharaa announced the end of “the largest Captagon factory in the world” to a rapt audience.

All that was ultimately dismantled, however, was the regime-era infrastructure; a decentralized “cottage” industry of smaller players remain. Logistics is on their side. From there, consignments are moved towards Jordan using smuggling tactics that sound like folklore until you meet the men tasked with stopping them, with everything from livestock to drones used to hide the drugs. The real key, though, is to secure the networks through which you can move your goods — and those criminal networks didn’t go away when Assad fell.

The point, here, is that Syria’s narco-state didn’t disappear. Rather, it decentralized, its remnants scattering and grouping in enclaves where government control was weakest. Many former regime producers, as analyst Charles Lister has noted, fled to join the area controlled by Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, the de facto ruler and spiritual head of the Druze community in Suwayda. From 2018, the Assad regime allowed the province, not far from the Jordanian border, a degree of self-rule and a free hand in Captagon. For Hijri, handing over power to Damascus would effectively cut off the trade that funded both his militias and the autonomy they implied. Following his split from Damascus last year, and the creation of an independent enclave closely aligned to Israel, Hijri has emerged leader of what one expert calls a “narco-statelet” — one far closer to cartel-run corners of Mexico than any imagined Druze utopia.

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The Damascus authorities are hardly blind to this reality. But the fact remains that anti-drug campaigns are overstretched, under-resourced and often improvisational. Yet again, this can partly be explained by the 2024 revolution. Many experienced law-enforcement officers fled after Assad’s fall. In some areas, policing has since fallen to young local men, often without much training. Responsibility for counter-narcotics rests largely with the Interior Ministry and a security apparatus still being built, all while confronting more immediate threats. The result is a nationwide game of whack-a-mole, with raids, seizures, shootouts and occasional successes — followed by the reappearance of dealers elsewhere.

Meanwhile, officials I speak to describe increasingly sophisticated smuggling methods, from hidden tunnels to the sea route via Latakia. Scarcity has driven up prices; tighter restrictions have paradoxically made Captagon more lucrative. The trade adapts because, once more, its incentives are structural. According to the World Bank, extreme poverty still affects one in four Syrians, and with basic services like electricity eye-wateringly expensive, drugs remain a tempting option. That’s clear enough online. In forums I follow, there’s a lively trade between punters and traders, discussing prices, routes and volumes with the casual tone of men selling spare parts. Sometimes an odd request for a gun or cocaine is thrown in with a picture, and the trader asks for the buyer to DM him. Users sometimes upload images to show they’ve picked up their stashes, their dealer responding with a jaunty thumbs-up emoji.

What becomes evident from these conversations is that Captagon’s reach extends far beyond the Levant or even Europe, and now encompasses far-off East Africa and the Ivory Coast. One network, operating laboratory facilities in Turkey, shared wholesale prices that illustrate this reach. A million pills were apparently sold for around $150,000, with smaller batches priced in neat increments.

And if the Syrian trade was made by Captagon, there are ominous signs that diversification is the order of the day. That Turkish network doesn’t only deal in Captagon, but also heroin, Tramadol, Ritalin, Modafinil, Lyrica, hashish and crystal meth. Of course, not every claim made online is necessarily true. But that matters less than what these claims reveal: traffickers now think globally, because the market itself is global.

Given all this, how can the authorities respond? Beyond ad hoc raids — officials recently seized a major shipment of liquid cocaine from the port at Latakia — one senior Syrian official I speak to is skeptical. Dismantling an industry built over a decade and a half, he suggests, would take two or three years of sustained effort. What with its global spread, even that estimate may be optimistic. To be fair, there are now signs of cross-border cooperation, like when the Jordanian airforce recently bombed Captagon supply lines in Suwayda. More than that, though, the Syrians themselves need help: both technical support and investment.

After all, places like Suwayda rely on Captagon because of political or militia power — but also because of poverty. And if Syria and the international community aren’t careful, this small pill may yet prove more destabilizing than anything the region has seen, like a modern Pied Piper, luring its youth with the promise of oblivion. Add the networks expanding across Europe and we may soon find Captagon on the streets of Britain. Whatever al-Sharaa might claim, Syria’s civil war isn’t over yet.

Idlibi, like many Syrians, did not interpret the taking of Damascus through geopolitics — but as divine intervention. This wasn’t because he was a mindless zealot. Far from it. He is one of the most well-read men I know. But, to his mind, the fall of Damascus was so sudden, so unexpected, that only the miraculous could explain it. The victory, he noted, had been achieved by those who had been motivated by Islam. Help had come from foreign fighters, the mujahideen, who traveled from across the globe to aid their co-religionists. And the campaign had been led by a former jihadi, Ahmed al-Sharaa, now the interim president of Syria. At the time, the old al-Qaeda operative, then known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, had a $10 million American bounty on his head.

After more than a decade of slaughter, no one had expected the capital to collapse. Assad, then president, had seemed like a stubborn wart: unpleasant but immovable. Jolani’s rebel enclave in the northern city of Idlib looked too small, too besieged, to pose a serious threat — though in fact it was performing better economically than inflation-ravaged Damascus, helped along by a reliable flow of Turkish hard currency. I myself expected the rebels to negotiate. What leverage did they have? Yet this rebel government, roughly the size of Croydon, took over the instruments of state, and since then has avoided stumbling into a new civil war.

The unexpected and largely peaceful victory was attributed to piety, prophecy, steadfastness. Some have even compared the final conquest of Damascus to Muhammad’s bloodless conquest of Mecca in 630. The idea of a “miracle”, here, is not mere rhetoric — it shapes political expectations. Some Syrians, at least based on my social media, think all this makes Sharaa “the one”, with my Facebook messages and WhatsApp chats awash with prophetic readings of the present. One believed Syria would now enjoy 10 years of peace before the war with Israel begins. Perhaps, he suggested, this was the prelude to the end of times. After all, so-called “Greater Syria” — encompassing much of the Levant — plays an important role in the Syrian and indeed Muslim sacral imagination. It is where prophets walked and is the place where many of the end of times narratives will play themselves out.

Yet if the fall of Damascus seemed miraculous to many Syrians, the survival of the new administration will depend less on providence than on governance. Despite his past, Sharaa has so far demonstrated an unexpected level of political finesse. He has kept the constitution, held elections — albeit with 70 seats appointed by himself — and all the while has acted the statesman. He is savvy enough to not mind having President Trump spray his latest fragrance on him in the Oval Office, or Syrian Jewish rabbis blessing him.

Sharaa has made some promising early decisions. By keeping the civil service intact, he has avoided the catastrophic purge that helped destroy post-invasion Iraq. He should continue recruiting highly-educated young Syrians from the diaspora — people familiar with Western administrations and political norms. Even so, the administration still has a tendency to fear scrutiny and behaves as if under siege. It should welcome a regulated free press, which would expose blind spots, not undermine authority. The British press has reported that Jonathan Powell’s Inter Mediate is working with the new government. This should be welcomed rather than criticized — not only for reasons of conflict resolution and soft power, but for its value in statecraft and building institutional capacity.

Sharaa’s priorities for the coming year are clear. The country remains immensely fragile, caught in a regional tug-of-war between Israel and its neighbors, and divided along ethnic and sectarian lines. The situation could easily drift into a reprise of Lebanon’s civil war. Sharaa’s first task is therefore to mend Syria’s sectarian and ethnic fractures with a sense of equity. The trials that began this month over the coastal massacres in Latakia will be an important test of how the country intends to move forward. The Druze and Alawite communities — already bruised by conflict and mistrust — require justice delivered without the language of sectarianism.

Meanwhile, Kurdish anxieties must be addressed by ending the Arab-first ideology of the old regime. Syria has never been a purely Arab country: even its favorite son, Saladin, the builder of that hospital I visited and whose grave in Damascus still draws multitudes, was a Kurd. Last year’s tentative permission for Kurdish new year celebrations (Newroz) suggests that a more pluralist future is possible. Yet it remains unclear how far Kurdish cultural expression will be allowed to develop. Already this month, exchanges of fire between Syrian government forces and Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) units under Kurdish command show how fragile the situation is.

Perhaps the most difficult balancing act involves the foreign fighters who fought on Sharaa’s side. They carry immense symbolic weight in Syrian society — and are the cause of immense fear in the West. Many are ready to resume normal life, but others still see themselves as Islam’s warriors. Recent clashes in the Idlib countryside involving French foreign fighters reflect anxieties that any rapprochement with the West might see them handed over to their home governments. The image of Sharaa standing beside Trump, receiving a symbolic “anointing” of his new fragrance, alarms them even if such engagement is politically necessary.

Granting these fighters legal status, regularizing their papers, integrating some into the national army or demobilizing them with stipends and educational opportunities — not unlike the GI Bill for US veterans — could go a long way toward neutralizing one of Syria’s most volatile pressures.

Then there is the conundrum of Israel. On this, Sharaa has cultivated deliberate ambiguity. At the United Nations, Syria has repeatedly noted its restraint regarding Israel’s illegal strikes on Syrian territory, yet Sharaa has resisted pressure to join Trump’s flagship Abraham Accords. Signing them now would be political suicide. But ambiguity buys him room to maneuver — and time to consolidate the state. The question is how long this can last.

For its part, the West has worked to prevent Syria from sliding into another civil war — one that would inevitably spill over into Europe, potentially replaying the exodus of 2015. With regional partners like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, Western governments have effectively restrained Israeli escalation, aware that renewed instability would eventually reach Jerusalem’s door. It’s not impossible to imagine rebels, having overthrown a “pro-Western stooge” like Sharaa and aided by foreign fighters, actually marching toward Israel, convinced that “the infidels” will never allow them to determine their own future. As they did in Damascus, so too — in their imagination — must they do in Jerusalem.

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Thus far Sharaa has governed with surprising openness. He has welcomed Britain’s foreign secretary David Lammy, met American diplomats and General David Petraeus, played basketball with US soldiers, and cooperated in counter-terrorism operations. He has also restored relations with London, with foreign minister Asaad al-Shaibani reopening the Syrian embassy.

If Western governments refuse to work with him because of his Islamist roots, they will share responsibility should Syria fracture again. Sharaa’s past is not erased; he may remain an uncomfortable partner. But what is the alternative? That he be excluded from political life and drift into a Castro- or Maduro-like role on the sidelines? If the Saudi Crown Prince can be brought in from the cold after the Khashoggi murder, then almost anything is possible.

Here I recall a meeting with former Saudi spy chief Turki al-Faisal in his South Kensington apartment after the release of his memoir. Faisal lamented how his advice went unheeded after the Afghan-Soviet war. He had urged the international community to launch something akin to a Marshall Plan — an investment program to stabilize Afghanistan. Had that happened, the region might not have unraveled. Instead, the country collapsed into years of civil war.

Likewise, fully lifting sanctions on Syria and providing a major investment program, coupled with training and cultural exchange, could restrain the country’s more radical elements. Reining in Israeli escalation, de-escalating the Druze conflict, and mediating between the SDF and Damascus would all help prevent new wars. On this, the West could also spare itself a future security headache by helping Damascus regularize or demobilize foreign fighters rather than leaving them to drift. This would all help to displace messianism.

What, then, would such investment bring the West, beyond avoiding another gaping wound on its eastern flank? For sure, it will not turn Damascus into another Beirut, a place for foreign journalists to party, nor into a Deano-friendly Dubai. Syria will likely remain socially conservative, more like Muscat in Oman. Given time, however, it could become a commercial hub with a distinct cultural life, just as it has been for much of its epic history. This isn’t mere optimism: Sharaa turned Idlib, once a distant town, into a magnet for Damascenes seeking commercial opportunity. Investment now would bring the West a friendly partner, business prospects and political influence. The choice is stark. With support, Syria could become a kind of West Germany: rebuilt, integrated, and stable. Without it, the country risks becoming a new Jerusalem — a battleground charged with fire and prophecy.

Back home, however, things feel anything but open. Over recent months, this has been most clear in Sweida, a southern town rocked by anti-government protests. Sweida is home to many Syrian Druze, a syncretic faith born out of Shi’ism, and which claims the loyalty of 3% of Syrians. The protesters waved Israeli flags, and for the first time in Syria’s history demanded self-determination. They have also set up their own “national” guard, born out of the militias that enforced order during the long years of civil war.

No one apart from Israel — which has been lobbying Washington for a weak Syria — wants to see the Balkanization of the country. Al-Sharaa himself is now distancing his country from the putative Abraham Accords. The Americans, certainly, are keen on stability, and have stepped in to avert a civil war. The fact al-Sharaa took time out of his busy New York schedule to meet both Secretary of State Marco Rubio and General David Petraeus, the ex-commander of US forces in Iraq, certainly hints at the hopes the White House now places in him.

Be that as it may, the Sweida violence suggests a country spiraling out of control, as do rumors of a resurgent Assadism on the coast. Yet in the end, such pessimism would be to misdiagnose the unrest. For the chaos is not an aberration, a disaster to be averted, but rather represents the birth pangs of a process long underway: the Sunnification of Syria. Whatever al-Sharaa’s claims, as he enjoys the world’s attention in Manhattan, what we are witnessing is the emergence of a new Sunni state — and not the pluralist nation that foreign analysts might like to imagine.

Outsiders often read the Syrian revolution as romantically simple: the people rose up against the tyrant, and after years of brutal struggle finally secured their freedom. But that overlooks other interpretations, especially when it comes to religion. The Syrian conflict, after all, was also about the long-oppressed Sunni majority versus the Alawite minority — another heterodox offshoot of Islam to which the Assad dynasty belonged. Viewed through that lens, the fall of Damascus, and al-Sharaa’s own triumph, was merely the culmination of Sunni empowerment.

I witnessed these tensions first hand, in 2009, while I was teaching business English to staff at the Syrian National Bank. By then, I had lived in the country long enough to discern a student’s sectarian background through dress, mannerisms, attitudes. My classroom reflected the country: Sunnis — including Kurds — made up around 70%; Christians 10%, Druze 3%; and Alawites 13%. The students were all supposedly supportive of the stern-looking president, Bashar al-Assad, whose portrait hung in every room, paid their salaries, and claimed to run the country under the banner of Baathism, a secular pan-Arab socialist ideology which didn’t care about your sectarian affiliation.

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That, of course, was a lie. The Assad dynasty had stayed in power for 50 years by pitting the resentments and fears of the various sects against each other. They promoted Sunni clerics to positions of influence, based Syrian family law on Islamic jurisprudence, even married into a Sunni family — as Bashar did — yet still kept Sunnis out of power. All the while, they propagated the message that only they could protect minorities from Sunni tyranny. It was not uncommon for pro-government rallies to come with banners declaring “no to sectarianism”, the implication being that Sunni domination would result in the marginalization of Christians and others.

Such sectarianism also played out in my classroom. On exam day, no matter how hard the Sunni employees studied, or how rigorously I marked the papers — the Alawite students and those connected to the government would end up top of the class, with the results bitterly accepted by the Sunnis. Of course, I didn’t have the courage to make an issue of it. All of us, whether Syrian or not, knew what happened to the unruly. The horrors of Tadmor prison lived alongside us, as did slaughters of 1982, when the Hafez al-Assad crushed a Muslim Brotherhood-led uprising in the central Syrian town of Hama.

In 2011, that brittle sectarian order shattered. Bashar al-Assad repeated his father’s strategy and tried to crush the Sunni-led discontent. The Sunnis, in turn, went from peaceful demonstrations during Friday prayers to violent insurrection, with al-Qaeda-affiliated Ahmed al-Sharaa being one of the rebellion’s most effective leaders. Eventually, his victory came not from the international community, but from a rebellious Sunni redoubt of Idlib, a small town in northern Syria which prided itself on having quite literally thrown a sandal at Hafez al-Assad. The Sunnis, in short, had helped themselves to power: or so they told themselves.

Throughout all this, Syria’s minorities were in an impossible situation. Should they side with the tyrant they knew, or with the revolutionaries, some of whom were jihadists? At the same time, they were bombarded with regime propaganda, plenty of it real. Sunni Islamists, after all, had massacred the Druze at Qalb Lozeh in 2015, and ISIS had attacked them at Sweida. Christians, for their part, had their churches desecrated, their people killed or kidnapped. The prospect of joining the revolutionaries, then, was not as clear-cut as it seemed to many Sunnis. But with victory going to al-Sharaa’s forces, even neutrality could be interpreted as complicity, especially given the terrors Assad had inflicted on Sunni civilians.

Out of this sectarian chaos came Ahmad al-Sharaa. He was a jihadist, aggressively Sunni, who believed that minorities like the Alawites should not only renounce their support for Assad, but also their “heretic” faiths. Yet by 2017, al-Sharaa was courting Druze and Christian leaders in his newly established “Salvation” government in Idlib. Either he had changed — or he was just a political Machiavel.

Whatever the case, al-Sharaa reversed a lot of the damage that his group had been responsible for. On 10 June 2022, for instance, he visited Qalb Lozeh. Many Druze in the area had been forced to convert to Islam, the better to escape the clutches of Sunni extremism. In a marked departure from his earlier rhetoric, however, al-Sharaa publicly assured Druze leaders that there is no compulsion in religion, and that they were free to practice their faith without fear. This statement sent a strong signal to his followers that his Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Islamist group was changing.

Indeed, according to an informative new book on HTS, its political evolution is not unlike that of far-Right groups in Europe. To wield power, explain its authors Patrick Haenni and Jerome Drevon, al-Sharaa had to move to the center. Of course, there are still radicals on the periphery, but he increasingly relied on a broad Sunni populism over hardcore ideologues. Extremists — notably Osama Qasem, leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and once celebrated for his ties to al-Qaeda — were compelled to step down after being deemed a “liability”.

In al-Sharaa’s Salvation government was also a clue as to how the new Syria might look. His rump in Idlib was essentially a Sunni proto-state, as al-Sharaa transferred power from the warlords to a civilian government, run by a new generation of Islamist technocrats, each intimately connected to al-Sharaa himself. Certainly, Syria’s interim president has followed a similar path once he eventually took power in Damascus, filling state institutions, long hollowed out by Assad, with his own supporters, friends and family.

Maybe that explains why the Gulf kingdoms, which initially viewed al-Sharaa with deep suspicion due to his Islamism, eventually came round. Perhaps, they thought, he was someone who wanted to build a state not unlike their own — conservative, authoritarian, anti-Iran and pro-stability, all elements the emirs could work with. And, what was more, none of this contravened Sunni Islamic jurisprudence: which, as its long history testifies, has always taken a pragmatic approach to wielding power. Sunni Islam, as historians like Marshall Hodgson have shown, is quietist by temperament, and has happily lived alongside caliphs, sultans and presidents.

At the same time, al-Sharaa’s Salvation government was not intolerant of minorities. That was clear enough in his rapprochement with the Druze and Christians, but also his ban on the notorious jizya payments — a tax levied on non-Muslims for protection and exemption from military service.

By the time Damascus fell, Haenni and Drevon write, Syria’s minorities had gone from “dhimmis [protected minorities] no more” to “citizens not yet”. And if that hints at the ambiguous status they enjoy in the new Syria, al-Sharaa’s country is also being shaped by forces not directly under his control. Once again, the experience of Idlib is revealing here. Under years of Islamist rule, the rural hinterland had inevitably become more conservative. Meanwhile, Druze who had initially converted out of fear found that their children had forgotten the tenets of their faith, and prayed and fasted like Sunnis.

Yet if the Sunnification of northern Syria had begun long before the Assads finally fled, this must once again be tempered by al-Sharaa’s apparent moderation. When I last visited Idlib, in March 2025, it was a bustling town like any other, albeit with the occasional shop selling Kalashnikovs. There was no religious police enforcing the hijab, and shops remained open when the call for prayer came, just as they had before the revolution. Islamic laws were adhered to because people in Idlib — devout or not — accepted them. In post-Assad Damascus, too, life continued as before. In the Christian quarter of the Old City, alcohol was available in the bars, just as it had always been, and I suspect this will remain the case.

That’s shadowed elsewhere too. Al-Sharaa has repeatedly emphasized that the Syrian people are one. By March, when the interim government drafted its 2025 constitutional declaration, it confirmed that Syria would remain a republic, its president would be a Muslim and the republic’s source of law was Islamic jurisprudence. All the while, minorities and their personal beliefs were protected. All this is based on the 1973 constitution, and affirmed the secular social contract first drafted by the Assads.

Even so, and as the constitutional primacy of Muslims implies, Sunnis will ultimately shape Syria’s future. In many ways, it didn’t matter whether they’re Islamists, devout Sunnis or liberals. Most Syrian Sunnis, after all, are small “c” conservatives, traumatized by war and shaped by the fight against Assad. This has glued them together, allowing them to stand alone if need be.

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This Sunni supremacism has manifested itself in other ways too. For one thing, Friday sermons have become overtly Sunni in tone. Hezbollah — a Shia militant group — is referred to as Hizb al-Shaytan (“the party of the devil”). Black and white flags emblazoned with the Islamic declaration of faith, long associated with jihadists, are waved by Sunnis as they go about their business. When the bastion of traditional Sunnism Sheikh Osama al-Rifai — someone who has often disagreed with al-Sharaa in the past — returned from exile in January, he received a rockstar’s welcome. In fact, al-Sharaa appointed him the grand mufti of Syria.

All the while, the war’s aftershocks have continued to play out. In February, former Assadists tried to foment a counter-revolution of sorts, resulting in massacres of Alawites near the coastal city of Latakia. Sunni revanchism soon followed, and old scores were settled: former Assadists, paramilitaries and Alawite officers, who had raped and tortured Sunnis, were killed and buried in unknown graves. But so too were many innocent Alawites, simply caught up in the violence, with the sect increasingly seen as a fifth column. The Druze in Sweida have faced similar troubles. After the summer’s violence, Druze leaders accused al-Sharaa of siding with Sunni Bedouins: but then committed political suicide by calling for Israeli support and demanding self-determination. In the eyes of many Sunnis, they, like the Alawites, are edging towards treason.

In the end, though, Syria’s process of Sunnification will conclude only if Damascus manages to incorporate the Kurds into the new state. Most Kurds are Sunnis, and though they have spent years fighting the Arab majority, Damascus could probably bring them on board more easily than the country’s religious minorities. Mazloum Abadi — head of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and one of the de facto leaders of the Kurdish enclave in Syria’s north — is a formidable political operator. But he is fast running out of political road. For one thing, the PKK, the SDF’s sister organization in Turkey, has disbanded. For another, the US have abandoned Abadi in favor of al-Sharaa, and if the former seeks support from Israel, or allies himself with the Druze, he’ll soon become discredited. The SDF, then, are outgunned both militarily and diplomatically, and the resources required to restart another civil war seem politically out of reach.

Either way, each of these stories — Druze unrest, Alawite reprisals, Kurdish bargaining — all point the same way: towards a Sunni majoritarian state. That doesn’t mean Syria will become an Islamist theocracy. But it does likely mean that pluralism, minority rights and perhaps even democracy itself will operate within a conservative Sunni framework. Whether that’s better or worse for the exhausted people of Syria will probably depend on where and how you pray.

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”.

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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 offenses, 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.

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 radicalized 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 realized 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 defense, while discarding the suggestion that Muslims are obliged to overthrow any government that doesn’t implement Islamic law.

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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 mobilizing 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 neutralized.

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 localized 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 honoring 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.

But it was also a threat. In 2007, 22,000 African Union (AU) troops were brought into Somalia to support Mogadishu’s fragile government. But at the end of this year, they are scheduled to leave. And there’s every reason to believe that al-Shabaab could take over and destabilise neighbouring nations with a large Somali diaspora. Indeed, there are already reports that al-Shabaab is in contact with the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen. Such an alliance would further imperil international shipping routes and have enormous consequences for the world economy.

It could also spark more serious threats closer to home. After all, in the aftermath of 9/11, it was in Somalia — not Iraq or Afghanistan — that a new generation of Western jihadists were spawned.

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By the turn of the century, London had already become a haven for dissident preachers and jihadi ideologues: Abu Qatada, Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, Hani al-Sibai and Abu Hamza al-Masri. But it also produced its own English-speaking radicals, who coalesced in a square mile known as Lisson Green, in the very same borough as the Houses of Parliament.

Many of the youngsters who grew up in the area had been too young to be meaningfully aware of the recent conflicts in Afghanistan or Bosnia, but they swam in the ideological currents of the aftermath. Sheikh Abu Qatadah, a top jihadi ideologue, used to deliver sermons there on Fridays. As did Anwar Awlaki, a firebrand preacher who openly gave jihadist talks and was a favourite of Mohammed Emwazi, the man who would later become known as “Jihadi John”. Just down the road, Muhammad al-Rifai, a man who claimed to be the Caliph of the whole Muslim world, lived in a council flat.

A few years ago, one of those who heard their sermons agreed to speak to me using the pseudonym Abdullah. Abdullah grew up in Lisson Green and attended the youth club where I worked for one summer in 2003. He told me about the Islamist currents that dominated the area: even the local five-a-side soccer team was named the “Shishanees” (the Chechens). Abdullah became devout during his teenage years and joined Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist organisation that called for the return of the Caliphate. As an activist, he invited many of its members to his secondary school to give speeches to the Muslim pupils.

The youngsters stewed in this ideological cauldron when a new conflict emerged in Somalia. The fall of strongman Mohamed Siad Barre’s government in 1991 created a power vacuum and a decade-long civil war. Eventually, the Somali people’s desire for peace and order resulted in the rise of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). This group, founded by religious scholars, established a semblance of law and order in the capital Mogadishu and succeeded in pushing out the nation’s CIA-backed warlords by 2006. In Lisson Green, this was a cause for celebration. A new generation of British Muslims had grown up with tales of Western jihadis and their spirited adventures in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya, and they were eager to emulate them. Suddenly, they saw their opportunity in Somalia.

They were encouraged in this by Abdul Majid, an outspoken Somali-British local who drew many youngsters into his orbit, especially Bilal Berjawi, who attended the same youth club as Abdullah. Berjawi was a pug-faced bruiser with a Beckham-like voice and a reputation as a fighter. He attracted a circle of boys from the youth club and they travelled to Somalia in 2007.

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Some described the times under the ICU as idyllic. Some, such as Mohammed Ezzouek, went there claiming to want to study Islam and live under Islamic law. But the good times did not last. The Ethiopian government, alarmed by the presence of the ICU on its border, pushed them out of Mogadishu and rearmed the warlords who were back in the capital by the end of the year. This attack on the ICU radicalised its youth wing and it later split off as a separate organisation known as Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen — the Young Mujahideen Movement, or al-Shabaab for short. And as they embarked on a war against the Ethiopians, al-Shabaab declared allegiance to al-Qaeda.

Faced with this threat, the young men from Lisson Green fled Somalia trying to reach safety in Kenya. Once there, some were detained and interrogated, while a handful returned to the UK having turned their back on both Somalia and Islamist ideology. Others, however, became more radicalised. And chief among them was Berjawi, who became a full member of al-Shabaab and was purportedly trained by Harun Fazul, the man behind the 1998 terrorist bombings in East Africa. Indeed, Fazul chose Berjawi as the leader of the London network. Over the next few years, Berjawi came in and out of the UK to fundraise for the group.

After proving himself, Berjawi went on to become an important commander for al-Shabaab, until he was killed in 2012 by the US in a drone strike, reportedly with British complicity. But Berjawi left behind those he recruited: in particular, Mohammed Sakr, Mohammed Emwazi and Alexanda Kotey. Sakr and Emwazi tried to enter Somalia again in 2009, using a cover story that they were going on safari in Tanzania. In Syria, Emwazi and Kotey would become the Western faces of the Caliphate.

Meanwhile, those who could not take part in jihad in Syria were recruited to carry out terror attacks in the UK. Michael Adebolajo, an associate of Berjawi who had tried to join al-Shabaab, murdered British soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich in 2013. Three years later, two promising university students, Tarik Hassane and Suhaib Majeed, were convicted for their part in an Isis terror plot in West London; both men were from Lisson Green or nearby. They had been acting under Kotey’s instructions.

This was the effect of the rise of al-Shabaab. At the time, policymakers appeared to be more preoccupied with threats emerging from Afghanistan and Iraq, or dealing with the aftermath of major terror attacks such as the one that took place in London on 7/7, to appreciate the presence al-Shabaab had on a small but significant number of young Muslims in the West. Somalia appeared distant and war-torn.

Today, we find ourselves in a similar situation, with a turbo-charged jihadi discourse heightened by the horrific situation in Palestine. Young disaffected Muslims watch as the media appears outraged by Russian targeting of hospitals in Ukraine but relatively indifferent when the IDF targets hospitals in Gaza. They see themselves as othered, devalued and forgotten. Spurred on by social media and Telegram groups, they see the likes of the Taliban defeating the Americans or the Houthis doing something for Gaza while the rest of the Muslim world appears impotent.

For them, al-Shabaab offers an animating force. If its flags rise in Mogadishu, a new generation of Western jihadists could return to the Horn of Africa.

While a recent US military review concluded that Logari’s plot was not preventable, the findings were less a vindication of America’s chaotic withdrawal than a reminder of how the US–Afghan relationship had broken down. As US forces withdrew, many Afghan government officials told me that they had warned their US counterparts about the threat of Islamic State – Khorasan Province (IS–KP), the Afghan branch of Isis. But it appears the US had stopped listening to their warnings; and in doing so, it helped to create the very conditions that led to the Abbey Gate attack.

One of the men who had warned them was Ahmad Zia Seraj, the General Director of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS). Once a revered spy chief targeted by the Taliban for assassination, Seraj, now a refugee waiting for his residency papers and teaching at King’s College London, cut a very different figure when we met in a London hotel at the end of last year.

Long before the US withdrawal, Seraj had been telling the American top brass about the threat of IS–KP, and is still doing so. “We had detainees from 15 different nationalities in our NDS detention facilities,” he told me. In fact, Seraj had personally interrogated Logari. He knew him as Hamed, a “bright, intelligent young man who spoke several languages fluently”. Seraj described how he brought religious scholars and even Logari’s father to his cell in an attempt to dissuade Logari from becoming a suicide bomber. But it was no use: “Once a person wants to become a suicide bomber, there’s nothing that can stop him.” Logari didn’t want freedom; he wanted paradise.

Seraj told me that he had shared everything the NDS had with the CIA, who would then brief Nato’s commander in Afghanistan, General Austin Miller, and other US officials. “Frankly speaking we were on the same page.” In fact, he warned anyone who would listen — whether the US, Pakistan, or Central Asian states — about the security threats. So why was he ignored?

During the postmortem of the chaotic US withdrawal, Biden blamed Trump and the US military intelligence apparatus which didn’t anticipate the speed of the Taliban takeover. He also blamed the Afghan government and the unwillingness of the Afghan army to fight. It seemed to play on tropes and criticisms made by journalists and Afghans for decades that Afghanistan was run by corrupt politicians and warlords.

Trump had dealt Biden a bad hand when he came to office in January 2021. The Afghan–American relationship had been damaged ever since the Doha Accords were signed between the Americans and the Taliban in February 2020. The agreement stipulated that the US would withdraw its troops from Afghanistan by 1 May 2021; the Taliban, in turn, promised to cut ties with al-Qaeda and sit down for peace talks with the Kabul government. Yet the democratically elected Afghan government wasn’t part of the discussions. 

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The deal had been engineered by Afghan-American diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad, an experienced figure who served under various US presidents, including Ronald Reagan in the Eighties, but whose rough and tumble diplomacy was not liked in Kabul. The US envoy had reached out to the Taliban without consulting the Afghan government. As Abdullah Khanjani, the government’s Deputy Minister for Peace, told me: “One of the key strategic problems with the whole structure of the peace process was that the Americans did not integrate the Afghan state and Afghan voices into it.”

By contrast, the negotiations empowered and legitimised the Taliban. According to Khanjani, with the Doha Accords, “a strategic propaganda opportunity was given to the Taliban, as an insurgent group. [US Secretary of State] Mike Pompeo sat there to endorse the deal with the legitimacy of being ex-CIA. And this was a shock to everyone. It was a game changer for the Taliban. And this also normalised the Taliban and [changed] the international system of power relations.” A green light was given for other countries to follow suit.

The Doha Accords also set the stage for the Abbey Gate attack. The terms of the deal included a prisoner swap, with the Taliban receiving 5,000 prisoners in exchange for 1,000 captives. The Afghan government was incensed by the condition: the US seemed to be treating Afghanistan as if it was not a sovereign nation but a plaything of empire. One day after the accords were signed, President Ashraf Ghani told reporters that “the government of Afghanistan has made no commitment to free[ing] 5,000 Taliban prisoners”, adding that 400 of those prisoners were “a threat to the world”. Seraj told me that many of those prisoners were involved in high-profile attacks including those on the German embassy in 2017, the Intercontinental Hotel in January 2018 and the G4S compound in November 2018. Some of those released, according to a senior government official, were not Taliban fighters but belonged to IS–KP and were related to the Taliban through familial and tribal links. Their release would mean that many would return to the insurgency. 

Neither the preliminary intra-Afghan peace talks in Doha nor the prisoner swap that followed resulted in a reduction in violence. Instead, they gnawed away at the state, creating the conditions for the chaos to come. According to Shuja Jamal, international relations director at the Afghan government’s National Security Council, more than 21,000 Afghan army soldiers were killed, injured, taken prisoner or deserted between March and October 2020. Attacks on journalists and politicians increased as well.

But perhaps more importantly, the prisoner swap demoralised the NDS — the very agency that the US needed to share vital local information. The officers who had interrogated the prisoners could now be identified and targeted by the Taliban and IS–KP. As Seraj explained, many of the NDS officers no longer wanted to risk carrying out interrogations and debriefings if the prisoners would be released.

“You knew the flood was coming, but you didn’t have the tools to fight it,” Seraj added. He had always wanted to model the NDS on the CIA and focus purely on intelligence-gathering, but this soon proved impossible. Instead, Ghani tasked him with strengthening citizen militias that could resist the coming Taliban onslaught. But accepting the task, which he felt should be the military’s remit, made the NDS cumbersome. They were now working with local mayors and tribal and security chiefs on sourcing weapons instead of being the eyes and ears of the republic. And as government forces neared collapse, more problems piled up on Seraj’s desk. Instead of focusing on the enemy, the NDS were forced to investigate corruption allegations against these militias. “80% of our work fell to investigating those charges, while the enemy was at the gates.”

The US withdrawal also meant reducing the air support given to Afghan forces. “Our forces,” said Seraj, “had become so addicted to air support, that without it, it was very difficult for them to fight.” It meant that the Afghan army could not stop the Taliban advance, resulting in the swift collapse of the republic. The Taliban made the situation even more difficult by deliberately targeting Afghan pilots and many were unwilling to fly. Due to a domestic skill shortage the Afghan government tried to source foreign contractors who could service their aircraft, but with little success. In December 2020, National Security Advisor Hamdullah Mohib flew to Azerbaijan to buy drones which Baku had used to devastating effect against the Armenians in the second Nagorno-Karabakh War weeks earlier, but to no avail. Kabul also reached out to Turkey and the US, wanting to set up a special operations team that could deploy Predator and Reaper drones, but the US was reluctant to accede to their requests. 

Meanwhile, Pakistan was working to undermine the Afghan government. Although the US and Pakistan were allies, Islamabad had always viewed the US presence in Afghanistan as a threat to its nuclear arsenal, which it needed to counter its hostile neighbour, India. As a result, it could not support the US-backed government in Kabul and instead provided sanctuary to the Taliban. Seraj had confronted his Pakistani counterparts on the issue many times, but they would often deny or deflect the issue. 

The Trump administration aggravated the situation in other ways. After the US assassination of IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani in January 2020, the situation in Afghanistan became more volatile. Tehran wanted revenge and allowed the Taliban to open up an office in Mashhad in north-eastern Iran. “There was a strong commitment from the Iranians to help the Taliban,” Seraj said. “It’s not that the Taliban are very friendly to them, it was just to see the US leave, and Taliban were used as a tool to expedite that process.”

When Biden came to office in January 2021 he pledged to “lead not merely by example of our power but by the power of our example. We will be a strong and trusted partner for peace, progress and security.” However, as Alexander Ward shows in his new book, The Internationalists, Biden had always been consistent about getting out of the nation-building business. After a review, he pressed ahead with Trump’s withdrawal policy, albeit with a slight delay. American troops would now leave by the end of August 2021.

Biden made the hand that Trump had dealt him even worse, at least from the perspective of his Afghan partners. The fact that they kept on Khalilzad, Trump’s special envoy, was a sign to Mohib that they would get more of the same. “He would be their fall guy,” Mohib told me. Moreover, as if to rub salt in the Afghans’ wounds, a scathing letter from the new US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, was leaked. It urged Ghani to return to the negotiating table, humiliating and alienating the Kabul government further. It showed the world how the US treated their “partners” and destroyed any goodwill left between Washington and Kabul. Afghan government delegations visited both Moscow and Tehran, apparently exploring other political options.

In February 2021, Seraj invited regional intelligence chiefs to a secret conference and urged them to support his government, warning that many of the extremist groups that plagued them, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), had close ties with the Taliban. The response was muted. “Those were the days when the popularity of the government was so low in Afghanistan,” Seraj recalled, “the neighbours didn’t take us seriously because they knew the government was dying.”

Four months later, Biden gave the order to withdraw. It was to be done as fast as possible: Washington wanted to reduce the risk to its own troops, but in its eagerness to leave, created the conditions for suicide bombers to flourish and move undetected. The US assessed that the Afghan army would hold out long enough to come to a negotiated settlement with the Taliban. But they didn’t take into account Pakistan’s role. 

Intense clashes between the Taliban and the Afghan army immediately broke out in Wardak and other areas. In June 2021, the Taliban took more territory and there was fighting in 26 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. Speaking two years later, Fazli Rafi, the former Deputy National Security Advisor, told me that the government assessed that these attacks had a professional command and control structure. “The Taliban knew guerrilla warfare, but this time the Taliban were attacking in 24 different provinces with three different districts in each. That was over 100 battle fronts. We assessed that the Taliban could only attack five provinces. This was the work of a professional army – and Pakistan was implicated.” 

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On 22 June, Seraj’s overwhelming fear was realised. Sher Khan Bandar, the main crossing point on the border with Tajikistan, fell to the Taliban. The dam had been breached. The Afghan government could no longer control its own borders. It was now a case of salvaging whatever one could from the flood. 

Even at the height of the crisis, the president tried to sidestep ministers he felt were close to the Americans. Ghani had become very suspicious of ministers and political leaders. According to insiders, he felt that many Afghan leaders had private back channels with the US and the Taliban and were pursuing their own agendas. But marginalising the ministers only led to more chaos. When they ordered the commanders to do something, the latter responded by saying that the president had told them otherwise.

On 2 July, US troops withdrew from Bagram air base, the key entry point for American hardware and personnel for 20 years. Only a few troops stayed behind to protect the US embassy. By the end of that month, the southern cities of Herat, Kandahar and Lashkar Gah were scenes of intense fighting. In the first week of August, the Taliban assassinated Dawa Khan Menapal, President Ghani’s public relations chief. Reports of Taliban fighters settling old tribal scores on the Spin Boldak border crossing with Pakistan heightened the fear. 

By the time the president fled Kabul on 15 August, all the major cities had fallen. It was on that day that the Taliban opened the gates of Pul-i-Charkhi prison on the outskirts of Kabul. Taliban militants, as well as hardened criminals, emerged into the sunlight to taste freedom. And among the throng was Logari. 

Seraj was shocked by the president’s departure. Moments earlier, Ghani had called him personally saying that “we should not allow thieves and people to create chaos, we should use whatever force we still have to control the situation”. At the time, Seraj was in Kabul scrambling to secure the release of the governor of Herat, Ismail Khan, as well as trying to relieve Mazar-i-Sharif — the largest city in northern Afghanistan. When the Taliban entered Kabul, he made his way to the presidential palace with his side arm at the ready, intending to protect the Commander-in-Chief of the republic until the end. He expected a call from the president to join other ministers and officials at the palace and then wait for him to take a final decision on the right course of action. Ghani’s departure stunned him. He returned to the office and sat on his desk, numb. “I was speechless for 20 minutes.”

One by one, his WhatsApp groups also fell silent, as ministers and senior civil servants started to leave them. He received messages from his colleagues asking for instructions. But what could he tell them? Should he ask them to fight the Taliban? “The elected government that we’re fighting for has collapsed,” Seraj said. “So what was our legitimacy to stay on?” He continued to receive panicked messages from his colleagues asking for orders, but he had none to give, except that they should lie low and find safety as best they possibly can. The republic was no more and they were now on their own. A US State Department contact got Seraj out of the country, and he joined his wife who was already in London. 

As August passed and Seraj began to piece his life together, the chaos of Biden’s withdrawal became apparent. Today, there are already many reports that al-Qaeda are rebuilding, unimpeded. The UN security council recently noted that eight new camps had been established in 2024 alone. An organisation that appeared to be on life support, looking for a reason to exist, appears to be suddenly revived: in a piece published this month, al-Qaeda’s new leader, Sayf al-Adl, called for attacks on Western and Zionist targets. 

In such a world, it’s hard not to be reminded of Seraj’s earlier warning: “You knew the flood was coming, but you didn’t have the tools to fight it.”