U.S. ending terrorist designation for Syrian rebel group whose leader now runs Syria
The State Department said Monday it will lift Syrian rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s designation as a foreign terrorist organization, months after the group’s leader defeated the Assad regime and swept to power as Syria’s president.
The change will take effect on Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement. The group, formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra, has been on the U.S.’s list of foreign terrorist organizations for more than a decade, dating back to its affiliation with al Qaeda. The terrorist designation makes it harder for the group or its leaders to accept assistance from Americans, work with American banks or travel to the U.S.
Rubio said the revocation of the group’s terrorist status “recognizes the positive actions taken by the new Syrian government under President Ahmed al-Sharaa.”
Led by al-Sharaa, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, helped lead a stunning offensive that swept into Damascus late last year, ending the Assad family’s 54-year grip on Syria. Since then, al-Sharaa has served as Syria’s interim president, and has sought to portray his government as a moderate and inclusive force — and a possible bulwark against Iranian influence.
Al-Sharaa said earlier this year that HTS will be disbanded, along with all the other rebel groups that fought the Assad government during Syria’s bloody 13-year civil war. Rubio cited that move, and the new government’s “commitment to combat terrorism in all its forms,” in his decision to lift the terrorist designation.
President Trump made a surprise announcement in May that he would lift sanctions against Syria, a significant boost to the country’s new government. Syria had faced severe U.S. sanctions for more than a decade, a holdover from the Assad family’s brutal dictatorial rule that restricted Syria’s economy and made it difficult to accept foreign money.
Mr. Trump also met with al-Sharaa in Saudi Arabia in May.
“Young, attractive guy, tough guy, strong past,” Mr. Trump said about the new Syrian leader.
But HTS’s past as a hardline Islamist rebel group has made some observers wary. Al-Sharaa participated in the insurgency against U.S. forces in Iraq in the 2000s, before he was sent to Syria to help lead the al Qaeda-allied Jabhat al-Nusra in the fight against Bashar al-Assad’s government. Jabhat al-Nusra was designated by the U.S. as a foreign terrorist organization in 2014, and al-Sharaa had a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head until last year.
More than a decade ago, the group broke with insurgent leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and refused to merge with his now-infamous organization, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. Since 2016, al-Sharaa’s group has distanced itself from al Qaeda, and al-Sharaa has said he disagrees with some of the global terrorist organization’s methods. He told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2021, “our involvement with al Qaeda in the past was an era, and it ended.”