Is Salafi-jihadism in the Levant unique?

In his 2010 novel Soldiers of God, the Syrian novelist Fawaz Haddad offered a compelling fictional account of post-invasion Iraq, told through the story of a Syrian Communist father who crosses into Iraq in search of his son, who has left Syria to join al-Qaeda and risen to become one of its commanders.

The life story of Hussein al-Sharaa, the father of Syria’s current president, provides a real-world example of one member of that leftist generation whose dreams of Arab unity collapsed, leading him to leave Syria while his son embarked on a perilous journey by joining al-Qaeda. 

Subsequent political and social developments in the region delivered a dramatic reversal of Haddad’s fictional plot. Had the novel predicted the son’s triumphant return to the seat of power, recorded his meeting with General David Petraeus, who would welcome him in Washington and describe Syria under his leadership as an “exceptional model for correcting a series of misguided decisions”, the novel might well have been classified as surrealist literature.

The historiography of armed Salafism is marked by a number of persistent misconceptions. These stem largely from the dominance of a political, academic and security discourse that endlessly reproduces media templates and clichés, erecting an artificial wall between ideology and reality. Another source of distortion lies in the tendency to treat Saudi Najdi Salafism as the primary driver of Arab Salafi movements and armed jihadism. 

The fall of the Assad regime has opened the way for a more grounded reassessment of the history of armed Salafi-jihadism in the Levant. This reassessment traces its path from its dramatic break with the models of Islamic State and al-Qaeda – both of which chose confrontation with the entire region and the wider world – to the emergence of its principal faction, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS.) 

Through a gradual process, and largely during its rule over Idlib, the group effectively neutralised its ideological rivals before ultimately bringing down the Assad regime and seizing power in Damascus. This outcome was met with regional and international acceptance, breaking the closed circle in which Islamic State and al-Qaeda remain trapped. It also reopened the possibility of Salafism in its Levantine variant returning to its original historical reformist character: more moderate, non-takfiri, less violent, and accommodating of doctrinal and religious diversity.

The opportunistic use of “terrorism” and armed jihadism as political instruments formed a central pillar of the Assad regime’s narrative. The case of Sheikh Mahmoud Gul Aghassi was a particularly crude example of this strategy. In 2003, under regime direction, Aghassi adopted an overtly Salafi discourse, urging Syrian youth to fight in Iraq. When it became clear that he was part of an intelligence trap, jihadist groups issued religious rulings permitting his killing, and his story ended with assassination in 2007.

Yet the same environment allowed young men such as Ahmed al-Sharaa to enter Iraq in 2003. Years of fighting, imprisonment, and eventual return to Syria provided him with the experience needed to avoid the catastrophic mistakes of al-Qaeda and Islamic State, beginning with breaking organisational ties with both groups, shifting mobilisation into the local social milieu under the banner of “defending the people of Syria”, and then emphasising the national character of a struggle against a regime that had become widely despised. In doing so, he led a process that lasted twenty-one years and culminated in the regime’s overthrow: a moment that represents the fullest embodiment of what the German philosopher Hegel famously termed the “cunning of history”.

HTS’ Levantine jihadist transformation allows for a broader historical synthesis linking the rise of militant Salafism to major intellectual and political crises: the Mongol invasions of the Islamic world and the emergence of Salafi ideologue Ibn Taymiyya in the 14th Century; the Saudi wars against the Ottomans in the Arabian Peninsula in the 19th and the accompanying rise of Wahhabism; the ideological rupture represented by Sayyid Qutb and subsequent Salafi-jihadist movements; and finally the highly volatile 1990s in the Arab-Islamic world that were marked by the Afghanistan wars, the Kuwait crisis, the 9/11 attacks, and the US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. If these phases were plotted on a historical infographic, one would see that periods of militant Salafi ascendance are typically followed by long phases of retreat, during which more traditional scholarly and Sufi forms of Islam regain prominence, often for centuries.