From Damascus suburb to presidential palace: Ahmad Al Shara's past offers rare insight into his outlook

Syria's new leader has shed fatigues for suits and spoken extensively since his rebel group toppled the Assad regime, but he remains an enigmatic figure

Syrian President Ahmad Al Shara at the presidential palace in Damascus. The National has spoken to some who knew him in the past. Photo: Syria Transitional Government / AFP

Mammoth concrete apartment buildings line the main motorway running west out of Damascus, relics of a Soviet-style economy that for decades underpinned the iron rule of the Assad family over Syria.

Here in the suburb of Mazzeh was where Syria’s new leader Ahmad Al Shara grew up. Less than three months ago, he led an offensive from the rebel stronghold of Idlib that deposed former president Bashar Al Assad, ending more than 50 years of dynastic rule.

“He was a quiet boy who worked along with his brothers at his father’s grocery store. The Assad regime took it over,” says one neighbour, pointing to a closed shop near the 20-storey building where the family lived.

Both are next to the well-known Al Akram Mosque, and to Parfait, one of the capital’s top cake makers. Although many of the neighbourhood's inhabitants are quite traditional in their outlook, they do enjoy some western treats.

Since his triumphant return to Damascus in early December, Mr Al Shara has become a key player in the Middle East. Exchanging his combat fatigues for a suit and tie, the bearded, soft-spoken former rebel has received leaders and top officials from the region and the West at the presidential palace where he has set up his base. The palace was built by assassinated Lebanese statesman Rafic Al Hariri as a gift to Hafez Al Assad, whose posters, statues and other instruments of his personality cult were all over Damascus when Mr Al Shara was growing up.

Mr Al Shara has declared his goal to be building a new state but has offered little detail about how he intends to go about this. He has also been non-committal about whether Syria, with its numerous ethnic and religious groups, will remain a centrist Muslim country, or become more hardline, a concern raised by his leadership of a group that originated from Al Qaeda.

However, his family history, recent speeches and interviews, as well as the accounts of the people who have known him, offer clues to the personality of the man. Mr Al Shara went from a 21-year-old fighting US forces in Iraq, to founding the Al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front group fighting the Assad regime, to leader of the Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS) rebel coalition that controlled Idlib for years before ultimately seizing power in Syria.

Centre of attention

Mr Al Shara has given numerous interviews since, especially to social media personalities and to podcasters, in a public-relations campaign aimed at a western audience and at Syria's younger generation.

But behind the screen of choreographed appearances and the mostly young staff he has been hiring is a hard-working man who barely sleeps, according to people who have worked with him. Sometimes he cracks jokes to win visitors over, but he rarely appears interested in hearing detailed views from them.

"If I shook her hand, my wife could have become jealous," he joked recently at a private meeting with Syrian expatriates, in reference to having declined to shake hands in January with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock because of perceived religious restrictions.

Now in his early 40s, Mr Al Shara's life has been shaped by his parents and a Syrian preacher who inspired him to fight in Iraq after the 2003 US-led invasion. In his current role of directing Syria's political future, two ultra-loyalists – his foreign minister and intelligence chief – exert the most influence on Mr Al Shara, HTS members who fought directly under his command say.

Nationalist father

In the 1980s, Mr Al Shara’s father, Hussein, returned from work in the public sector in Saudi Arabia and bought the Mazzeh apartment in instalments. The government had provided the land to an association of which he was a member, as was common in the country’s socialised housing sector.

The purchase cemented the family's upper-middle-class status. Hussein Al Shara also opened a small real estate brokerage besides the grocery, although business was light. He had studied economics and his thesis consisted of a proposed plan for a state-run petrochemical industry in Syria.

Mr Al Shara's mother was a geography teacher. When he was based in Idlib, he used to visit her and his father regularly. "He is very close to her," said another neighbour.

His parents fled Damascus to Idlib and eventually settled in the town of Atma, on the border with Turkey, after Mr Al Shara formed Al Nusra Front in 2012. The group later disavowed Al Qaeda and morphed into HTS – a coalition of militant groups dominated by former members of Al Nusra Front.

Hussein Al Shara, now around 80, has written several books and appears to have been an admirer of former Egyptian president Gemal Abdel Nasser and the nationalistic ideology of the secular Baath party, although the two sides were rivals for Arab ideological domination.

The Baath party monopolised power in Iraq and Syria for decades but has been brushed aside by the US-led invasion that deposed Saddam Hussein in 2003 and the 11-day offensive led by Mr Al Shara that toppled Mr Al Assad.

Mr Al Shara's father also did not approve of the Assad dynasty, but was discreet. He took part in what became known as the Damascus Spring, comprising mainly public debates about pluralism that were held shortly after Bashar Al Assad inherited the presidency from his father in 2000. The movement was initiated mainly by Syrian industrialist Riad Seif, who had openly criticised corruption under Hafez Al Assad.

The Damascus Spring was aimed at transforming Syria into an open society, before the regime swiftly crushed the movement and imprisoned Mr Seif and nine other main figures in the enterprise. Hussein Al Shara had never openly challenged the regime and was not jailed.

Showing flexibility

The younger Mr Al Shara inherited such “flexibility" and is "willing to change his mind under pressure, unlike other ideologues", said one of the architects of the Damascus Spring, who recently met Mr Al Shara.

However, the new president does not share his father's socialist ideology, having scrapped a state's import monopoly and curbed other agencies in a drive to attract private investment. He also has little in common with the capital's businessmen who curried favour with the former regime and are keen to profit under the new order, the source said.

A possible distrust of the urban gentry could also be attributed to the influence of his father, who was born in the Zawieh region of the now Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

In one of Hussein Al Shara's books, about the failed Great Syrian Revolt against French rule from 1925 to 1927, he describes the participation of several Al Shara clan members.

He emphasised the Bedouin origins of the family, which could help explain his son's drive to improve ties with Saudi Arabia.

The 2020 book, The Forgotten Syrian Zawieh Revolution, which relies on open-source material and the author's own recollections, concludes with the observation that the rural core of the revolt against the French was sidelined in the political structures that followed.

The main men

In contrast, Mr Al Shara has been staffing the new administration with rural Sunnis who comprised the armed nucleus of the 2011 revolt against the Assad regime, which was dominated by members of the president's Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

Among them is Foreign Minister Asaad Al Shibani from the north-western Hasakah governorate, who previously handled HTS media, and Anas Al Khattab, head of General Intelligence, who is from Jayroud in the countryside of Damascus. Mr Al Shara's bodyguard, Mohammad Yahia, is from the Qalamoun mountain region.

The three men have remained by his side in a long religious-revolutionary struggle that not only eliminated the regime, but also other rebel groups and even non-violent figures seen as potential obstacles to HTS’s ascendancy.

A Syrian businessman, who was part of a group that recently met Mr Al Shibani and then Mr Al Shara, said the President began by apologising for possibly repeating what had already been relayed to them by his Foreign Minister. "It is obvious that Al Shibani is not just a protege. They are very close," the businessman said.

Operationally, Mr Al Shara relies on his intelligence chief. Mr Al Khattab was one of five key figures who helped Mr Al Shara set up and expand Al Nusra Front in 2012, after he returned from US jails in Iraq. The other four have been killed, disappeared or left the organisation.

Pragmatic approach

In the early 2000s. Mr Al Shara became one of thousands of students who were recruited by preachers in Syria to fight in Iraq, with the tacit approval of the authorities in Damascus who were wary of the US presence across the border.

His early adoption of religious ideology was influenced by a Syrian preacher known as Abu Al Qaqa, an Afghan war veteran who operated in the murky world of regime-sanctioned proselytisation, according to an HTS member who lives in Idlib.

Abu Al Qaqa was assassinated in Aleppo in 2007, as the regime started succumbing to US military and diplomatic pressure to stop sending extremist fighters to Iraq.

He advocated an originalist interpretation of Islam, saying the religion must be construed exactly as it was at the time of the Prophet Mohammed. Any divergence, in his view, would undermine Islam's purity, and the Prophet's "clear" legacy.

But he urged his followers to adopt an incremental, pragmatic approach, rather than immediately going after lofty visions and all-encompassing victories that might not be realised.

His disciple also appears to favour the long-term approach.