On Sunday morning, a bearded year-old man wearing a plain green military uniform walked into the Umayyad mosque in Damascus and addressed a small crowd, the Syrian nation, the region and the world. For most of the last two decades, the de facto ruler of much of Syria has not used his real name at all. Ahmed al-Sharaa, who grew up in a progressive household in a prosperous neighbourhood of Damascus and studied medicine, entirely disappeared.
In his place was Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, a nom de guerre formulated according to the convention of jihadi militants seeking new identities redolent of historic Muslim glory and offering the shield of anonymity. So it was Jolani who fought US soldiers in Iraq alongside jihadi insurgents between and , and was then incarcerated there for five years in detention camps. It was Jolani too who returned to Syria in to play important roles in the campaigns of both the Islamic State IS and then al-Qaida.
Last month, it was Jolani who launched a rebel coalition dominated by HTS on its blistering day campaign that ended in Damascus on Sunday. There is little consensus on the answer. Sharaa himself is reported to have led diplomatic efforts to win over Ismaili Shia leaders and so secure key towns for the rebels without loss.
Nor is this a sudden shift. Sharaa, even in his former avatar, had turned against both al-Qaida and IS, fighting their militants and savagely purging his own group of anyone suspected of dual loyalties.
Dropping it sends a message, they say. Quite how this welfare is best achieved is where Sharaa might well begin to diverge from his carefully curated image as a reformed man. Wearing a plain uniform does not just signify a change from the standard garb of a militant Islamist fighter, it is a rejection of the robes, gold braid and medals that are so often marks of rank in the region.
