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Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa made his first trip overseas since his formal appointment as head of state on Sunday, receiving a warm welcome in Saudi Arabia.
Sharaa, formerly known as “Abu Mohammed al-Jolani,” is a wanted terrorist and leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an al-Qaeda offshoot. HTS won the Syrian Civil War, which lasted nearly a decade and a half, in December after longtime dictator Bashar Assad fled the country. Assad received political asylum in Russia, leaving HTS in charge of the country.
Sharaa has spent much of his time in power promising Syria’s many minority groups, including Christians and Kurds, that he would build an “inclusive” government and urging global powers to invest in his regime. To comfort concerned free nations, Sharaa has abandoned his jihadi nom de guerre and now wears Western-style suits, but he has repeatedly defended Islamist rule and suggested that he would impose a sharia regime.
“People who fear Islamic governance either have seen incorrect implementations of it or do not understand it properly,” Sharaa told CNN shortly before HTS’s conquest of Damascus.
The “Military Operations Command” of HTS, the de facto ruling government of Syria, announced last week that it would officially install Sharaa as its president, dissolve the Assad-era constitution, and grant Sharaa the power to establish an interim legislature to pass new laws. The Command promised to dissolve HTS and all other militias emerging from the Civil War, eventually seeking to turn them into a functional Syrian armed forces. Assad’s armed forces collapsed after HTS attacked Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city, in November.
In his first foreign trip as president of Syria, Sharaa visited Riyadh, where he received a warm welcome from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, commonly known by his initials MBS. The crown prince is the prime minister and de facto ruler of the country, leading the day-to-day operations of Saudi Arabia. Sharaa and his foreign minister, Asaad al-Shaibani, met with MBS to discuss, among other issues, Saudi Arabia financially and diplomatically supporting the reconstruction of Syria after the war.
