Is HTS really 'Syria's Taliban'?

Ahmad Al Shara, leader of the militant group Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, makes a victory speech in Damascus's Umayyad Mosque. AFP

The parallels between recent events in Syria and those that transpired in August 2021, in Afghanistan draw themselves. An Islamist insurgency listed by many countries as a terrorist group, which has controlled a portion of its home country for years, overthrows the national government in a sudden blitzkrieg – surreal, even to those leading the charge. Photographs circulate on social media showing men with guns and austere expressions posing in state rooms left vacant by senior officials from the ancien regime, who left in a hurry. The world watches on, wondering what the handover of ministries, state television, arsenals and electricity grids to the militants will mean.

It has only happened this way these two times, and so the sense of fraternity between the Taliban in Afghanistan and Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS) in Syria is understandable. The first country to congratulate the Syrian people for the fall of Bashar Al Assad on December 8 was Afghanistan.

Actually, the statement issued by the Taliban’s foreign ministry first congratulated HTS, and then the people of Syria – as if to breathe life into the questions many asked when the Al Assad government fell: is HTS Syria’s Taliban? Is this Afghanistan all over again? As Graeme Smith, a senior analyst at International Crisis Group, has written: “There is no playbook for Islamist insurgents faced with the challenges of running a country. But there is a precedent, in Afghanistan.”

It must be said upfront that, despite the parallels, the circumstances are very different. That is why other parts of these two stories feel very different. For days after the Taliban entered Kabul, the streets were deserted, except for the airport, where tens of thousands of terrified Afghans had gathered trying to force their way onto evacuation flights. In Damascus, Syrians have packed the streets in celebration.

Damascus in high spirits after Assad regime collapse

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Is that because most Syrians aspire to an Islamist theocracy, and most Afghans did not? Not at all. Afghanistan is a far more religiously conservative country. By contrast, secularism runs deep in much of Syria, including in most big cities.

The explanation for the different reactions is straightforward: while most Afghans and Syrians dislike their previous governments, the hatred for Bashar Al Assad among Syrians is many, many orders of magnitude greater than that of Afghans for Ashraf Ghani, the deposed leader of Afghanistan’s republic – and justifiably so.

There is also a narrative that has taken shape – rather quickly – that HTS is chastened by Syria’s immense religious and political diversity, and that its leader, Ahmad Al Shara, formerly known as Abu Mohammed Al Jawlani, understands that his organisation cannot remake the country in its image. Over the past several years that HTS ruled the Syrian province of Idlib, it oversaw the reopening of a church, cracked down on terrorist groups with ambitions for global jihad and allowed girls to attend school.

When the militants advanced from Hama to Homs, they left the majority-Ismaili city of Salamiyah untouched, purportedly to show respect to that religious minority community. When they entered Aleppo, they reassured the local priests that they do not intend to persecute Christians. The poetry in all this happening on the road to Damascus has been irresistible to some commentators. Headlines in western media are using the words “pragmatism”, “tolerance” and “pluralism” after Al Jawlani’s name.

Demonstrators protesting against HTS rule in Idlib province, in March. AFP

It is too early to say whether this knee-jerk rehabilitation of HTS is merited. But as someone who reported on the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan and has visited Taliban-ruled Afghanistan many times since, I cannot help but find it remarkable. That is because the Taliban had a similar stump speech on its campaign trail: Taliban 2.0 respects Afghanistan’s minorities, rejects global jihad and even accepts girls’ education “in line with Islamic principles”. Some US diplomats pushed that line, too, hoping it would make America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan more palatable. Yet at the time, few outside Afghanistan, and even inside Afghanistan, seemed to believe them.

The cynical – and I think partially true – explanation is that this was because the Taliban were fighting western forces, and not one of the world’s most reviled dictatorships. Of course, if you speak to Taliban fighters and Afghans sympathetic to them, you will hear many vivid and real stories of disappearances, torture, night raids, drone attacks and secret prisons run by the Afghan republic and its western backers. A photo of a rust-covered corridor in the now-liberated Sednaya Prison in Damascus looks eerily similar to one of the notorious Bagram Prison near Kabul.

The past three years of Taliban administration show it is not easy for an Islamist insurgency to keep all of its campaign promises. There are elements within the Taliban who want to see girls in school, but more powerful elements clearly find the idea too difficult to stomach. The Taliban has not, as a matter of policy, persecuted any religious minorities – it makes a serious effort to protect them from groups like ISIS – but nor has it embraced them as equal stakeholders in government. After all, there must be at least some of Taliban 1.0 in Taliban 2.0 if it is still to be the Taliban.

It is too early to say whether the knee-jerk rehabilitation of HTS is merited

The HTS that took Damascus over the weekend is version 4.0, which says it wants an inclusive, unity government in Syria. But the beta version, it is worth remembering, grew out of a group that eventually became ISIS; Mr Al Shara got his start as a lieutenant of ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi. HTS 2.0 was subordinate to Al Qaeda, and HTS 3.0 rose to become Idlib’s supreme Islamist faction. Are three iterations of evolution enough to reassure Syrians that HTS has completely transcended its roots?

Life in Idlib under HTS can provide some insight. Throughout its rule, and even after its “rebrand”, HTS closed down entertainment venues, imposed strict rules governing social life and occasionally executed people convicted of apostasy. One person who worked in the province’s school system tells me HTS authorities had preferred to bar teenage girls from the classroom, but relented after western donor countries threatened to withhold teacher salaries if they did.

Already, there is evidence that in the past few days HTS or associated groups have carried out executions, and some militants have not adhered to instructions to leave people and buildings in peace.

That is not to say that HTS will be able to replicate Idlib's mode de vie across Syria. The Taliban were far better set up for authoritarian rule than HTS is. Many in Afghanistan’s capital feared the Taliban’s power and severity, but not its religiosity. The local culture’s own deep-rooted conservatism primed urban Afghans to be pleasantly surprised when they found that, actually, Taliban 2.0 doesn’t cane women in the streets or chop off the hands of every impoverished pickpocket. It also – unfortunately, in my view – gives Afghan men greater patience for the Taliban’s excuses for its restrictions on women, even if they find them deeply frustrating.

Moreover, the Afghan civil service and civil society, which could have provided a counterweight to Taliban impulses, were completely broken by the time the militants took charge, in no small part because their most influential people were evacuated out of the country by foreign powers. In Damascus, where no one bats an eyelid at unveiled women or alcohol-fuelled nightlife, HTS’s bar for societal acceptance will be much higher. And there is no airlift removing Syrian civil society from the country.

But what Afghanistan might teach Syria is that the greatest shaper of newly empowered Islamist militant movements is not external pressure – be it from the people they rule, foreign powers or international sanctions regimes. It is intra-militant politics. Reformist militants face an uphill battle internally, and foot-soldiers who fear that their ideals are being sacrificed are not easy to rein in.