HTS in Syria: From Jihad to Politics

The POMEPS Podcast Returns, 2024 in review, and the latest from the MENA academy

The sudden fall of Bashar al-Asad’s regime to a military offensive led by the jihadist organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) has brought forward urgent questions about its ideology, organization, governance ambitions, and ability to govern a diverse and fragmented Syrian nation. So I am thrilled to be able to launch the spring 2025 season of the POMEPS Middle East Political Science Podcast with a conversation with Jerome Drevon, one of the few Western scholars who has spent significant time with the group’s leaders and done substantial field research on it both in Turkey and in Idlib Province after 2019.

Listen to the full podcast here:

Drevon discussed his book From Jihad to Politics, published in 2024 by Oxford University Press, which explored the divergent trajectories of Syrian jihadist organizations such as HTS and Ahrar al-Sham. His book asked both why jihadist groups largely won out over non-jihadist groups within the Syrian insurgency, and why some jihadist groups outperformed others, arguing in favor of organizational rather than ideological explanations. Our conversation covers both the book and the remarkable events of the last few weeks.

One interesting thread of the conversation was the similarities between the Islamic State’s sudden surge in Iraq in 2014 and HTS’s in Syria in 2024: in both cases, during what seemed like a “frozen” conflict, the jihadist organization had been rebuilding itself, transforming internally, and consolidating power by killing, imprisoning or absorbing members of competing factions. When HTS launched its surprise attack, it really wasn’t just a replay of, say, the 2015 Jaysh al-Fatah jihadist coalition offensive — it had unified its ranks, organized fighters into more disciplined and trained combat units, and had an effective state-like institutional structure behind it. Like with ISIS in Mosul in 2014, where a division of the Iraqi military just dissolved and ran away, Drevon thinks that HTS was likely surprised by the lack of resistance it encountered from Asad’s forces in its initial limited attacks and adapted to a full campaign for regime overthrow on the fly. Unlike in Iraq, though, Asad couldn’t call on either U.S. assistance (however conditional) or on the kind of Popular Mobilization Forces which quickly formulated through Ali Sistani’s fatwa and the IRGC’s backing to defend the capital.

The way HTS won, and the specific forms of its organizational restructuring during the previous five years in Idlib, has implications for how it is likely to govern. Drevon is guardedly optimistic about Syria’s trajectory — he sees HTS as relatively weak within the constellation of Syrian forces, dependent on coalitions with other jihadist and non-jihadist groups, desperate for international aid and assistance to finance and develop the hollowed out remnants of a state Asad left behind, and necessarily responsive to popular mobilization by revolutionaries and civil society (which often have the ear of the foreign powers, like the US, which HTS needs to persuade). His long observation of HTS governance in Idlib leads him to expect it to be pragmatic rather than ideological, out of necessity if nothing else. While everything is obviously fragile, he argues that thus far there has been less violence and revenge killing than might have been expected, and Ahmed Shar’a (the leader of HTS) has shown great pragmatism (backing down on decisions which prove unpopular) and an intent to be inclusive.

For those who want more on HTS, I reviewed the book on the blog here, along with a special issue of a journal I edited on “Islamists in Warscapes”:

2024 in Review

I have found it difficult to write the traditional 2024 year in review post for the blog. The gap between my personal joys (Hazelnut is doing great!) and publications of which I’m genuinely proud (our book Making Sense of the Arab State! our Studies in Conflict and Terrorism special issue on Islamists in Warscapes! Multiple Foreign Affairs articles!) and the horrors of Gaza and the return of Trump just seems like too much. But, for the record, the State of the Blog is strong! I am so appreciative of all my subscribers, especially those paid subscribers who so generously support my work and Hazel’s diaper supply chain). One intriguing trend I noticed is that the average readership of each post has steadily grown, but the most read posts are almost those which speak to current events. The top three most read posts for 2024 were: What Trump’s Win Means for the Middle East (November), The Message and Israel’s One State Reality (October), and Five Thoughts on Syria’s Unfrozen Conflict (December). That suggests that I should continue the regular featuring of all the great scholarship on the Middle East, but also try to do more posts focused on regional politics and current events — and that’s the plan for 2025!

The Latest in the MENA Academy

Finally, I want to feature just a few great articles published by friends of POMEPS in the last few weeks. I will try to catch up on other articles I haven’t yet included in a roundup soon, but for now I’d like to recommend a phenomenonally interesting piece by Kali Rubaii, who was a key part of our multi-faceted warscapes project, on cement processing and the poisonous legacy of the war in Iraq; an innovative look at online Syria organizing by Rana Khoury and Alex Siegel; a thoughtful piece on the politics of “major non-NATO ally” designations by Tyler Parker; and a fascinating piece on the limits of Islamist influence on religious instituitions in Tunisia by GWU’s Bedirhan Erdem Mutlu.

Kali Rubaii, “Cement and displacement: Material life in the wake of extractive war.” American Ethnologist (December 2024). ABSTRACT: Displaced people have not escaped war and do not live apart from it. This is evident in the material life of internally displaced Iraqi farmers seeking refuge in a concrete construction site, downstream from a cement-processing plant in Iraqi Kurdistan. There, one family has repeatedly tried to build a traditional tannour (bread oven) out of unworkable, cement-infused materials in their environment. As their experience shows, physical brushes with the cement industry, rather than kinetic violence like bombs and battles, lie at the heart of what war is. Through ambiguously embracing cement's contaminating qualities, displaced people open a space to reckon with their predicament.

Rana Khoury and Alexandra Siegel, “Civil Organizing in War: Evidence from Syrian Facebook Communities,” Perspectives on Politics (December 2024). ABSTRACT: Where, when, and why do civilians organize during war? We propose a research agenda that expands the scope of variation in civil organizing and identify mechanisms to explain its emergence and evolution. Drawing on a large-scale original dataset of public Facebook posts produced by Syrian organizations from 2011 to 2020 and qualitative case studies based on 10 months of field research among Syrian activists in Turkey and Jordan, we systematically examine geographic, temporal, and substantive variation in civil organizing. We find that civil organizing can persist in the face of ongoing violence and displacement, focusing not only on concerns of protection and survival, but also on governance and even contentious politics. This organizing increasingly shifts from within Syria to border states, with translocal organizations—operating both inside and outside Syria—playing a particularly active role. This work contributes to literature on conflict processes and contentious politics by emphasizing the importance of organizations, centering refugees and civilians as agential and strategic actors, and using novel evidence to describe variation in wartime organizing over time and space.

Tyler Parker, “Accepting Appreciation: Partner Perceptions and Major Non-NATO Ally Designations,” Journal of Global Security Studies (June 2025). ABSTRACT: A diverse group of governments have accepted “Major Non-NATO Ally” (MNNA) status since the designation's establishment in the late 1980s. This United States (U.S.) designation signals friendship and facilitates cooperation, but it provides no formal security commitments. Why and when have U.S. partners accepted MNNA status? I argue that designees will accept the status when they are ready to acknowledge America's appreciation—a perceptual and relational concept that conveys gratitude absent guarantees. For some designees, untimely embrace of U.S. appreciation could negatively impact their relations with their societies and/or third-party states. For others, accepting appreciation would preclude forming a formal alliance with the U.S. I analyze published sources and incorporate interviews to compare Qatar, which accepted MNNA status in 2022, and the United Arab Emirates, which has not accepted the status as of late 2024. This article contributes to the literature on asymmetric security alignments by centering the Gulf governments and it provides a timely evaluation of an underexplored aspect of global alliance politics.

Bedirhan Erdem Mutlu, “Islamists and the Religious Field: (Non-)Transformations of the Religious Institutions in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia,” Middle East Law and Governance (December 2024). ABSTRACT: This article questions the impact of an Islamist party’s ascent to power on the state-run religious institutions through a case study of Tunisia. Literature highlights that pre-existing institutional entanglements between religion and modern states in the mena region provide the Islamists with a chance to launch a state-led project of religious revival. However, Tunisia after the 2011 Revolution presents a “negative case” where Ennahda Movement was unable to capitalize on their position in government to control, empower, or transform religious institutions due to both the democratic power balance in the country and the movement’s strategic choices. Only one major institution, Zitouna University, experienced restructuring and expansion, allying itself with Ennahda thanks to increased institutional autonomy and Bourdieusian field dynamics. These findings suggest that government by Islamists doesn’t necessarily lead to top-down restrengthening of religious authorities, but certain institutions can still form strategic alliances with the Islamists at the bottom.

Thanks for reading Abu Aardvark’s MENA Academy — we will be back next week!