The Assad–Sharaa Connection Nobody Wants to Talk About

There are two inconvenient truths about Ahmad Sharaa that haven’t gotten much attention ever since the ouster of Bashar al-Assad in 2024.

(1) Syrian Wahhabis including Ahmad Sharaa were long allied with Bashar al-Assad’s intelligence services.

(2) Syrian Wahhabis including Sharaa began blowing up Shia marketplaces and mosques in Iraq long before Assad’s crimes in the Syrian War.

Contrary to what Syrian Wahhabis claim today, their relationship with Bashar al-Assad is not one of simple opposition.

Historically, al-Assad viciously persecuted Sunni Islamists (especially the Muslim Brotherhood) and also strongly opposed Wahhabism.

Nevertheless, his policies were flexible.

Both Assad’s Syria and Saddam’s Iraq were Baathist states hostile to Israel – and by extension – the United States.

When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, Assad feared that if the US were successful, Syria would be targeted next.

For this reason, Assad’s Syrian intelligence services developed an alliance with militant Wahhabi groups (including al-Qaeda and and what would become ISIS) which lasted at least until 2009. Syrian intelligence provided various forms of assistance to the Wahhabis, helping them funnel men and supplies over the Syrian border into Iraq. These resources were then used to fight the US.

In fact, Ahmad Sharaa was directly involved in this operation. He was among the Syrian jihadists who traveled to Iraq in 2003 through the logistical networks operating in Syria, networks that the Assad regime was simultaneously facilitating and exploiting for its own regional purposes.

While in Iraq, Sharaa came under the influence of the leading Wahhabi militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who successfully pushed for a shift in strategy among other Wahhabi militants in Iraq.

Breaking with other figures in al-Qaeda, al-Zarqawi held that the fight should not focus on the US army. Rather priority should be given to fighting Iraqi Shia instead.

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Beginning in 2004, al-Zarqawi and Sharaa began blowing up mosques and marketplaces to create a sectarian civil war within Iraq.

This is important to keep in mind, as Syrian Wahhabis and followers of Sharaa now claim that their hostility to the Shia is a result of Iranian assistance to Assad during the Syrian War.

But the Syrian war did not begin until 2011. Syrian Wahhabis like Sharaa were bombing Shia marketplaces and mosques for many years before this.

Ultimately, Sharaa’s political and ideological formation occurred inside a Wahhabi movement whose sectarian worldview and campaign against Shia were already well established before the Syrian uprising and before Iranian forces intervened directly in the Syrian conflict.

This debunks the claim of Sharaa supporters that their grievance with Shia Iran is simply a response to Iranian support of Assad in the Syrian War.

Proof of Assad’s alliance with Syrian Wahhabis is given in the two excerpts below from Chulov and Drevon.

Excerpt from Martin Chulov “Isis: The inside story” Guardian (11 December 2014)

Syria’s links to the Sunni insurgency in Iraq had been regularly raised by US officials in Baghdad and by the Iraqi government. Both were convinced that the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, allowed jihadists to fly into Damascus airport, where military officials would escort them to the border with Iraq. “All the foreigners I knew got into Iraq that way,” Abu Ahmed told me. “It was no secret.”

 

From 2008, when the US began to negotiate the transition of its powers to Iraq’s feeble security institutions – and therefore pave the way to its own exit – the Americans increasingly turned to only a few trusted figures in the Iraqi government. One of them was Major General Hussein Ali Kamal, the director of intelligence in the country’s Interior Ministry. A secular Kurd who had the trust of the Shia establishment, one of Kamal’s many duties was to secure Baghdad against terror attacks.

 

Like the Americans, General Kamal was convinced that Syria was destabilising Iraq, an assessment based on the interrogations of jihadists who had been captured by his troops. Throughout 2009, in a series of interviews, Kamal laid out his evidence, using maps that plotted the routes used by jihadists to cross the border into western Iraq, and confessions that linked their journeys to specific mid-ranking officers in Syrian military intelligence.

Seventeen of the 25 most important Islamic State leaders now running the war in Iraq and Syria spent time in US prisons

 

As Isis activity ebbed in Iraq, he had become increasingly obsessed with two meetings that had taken place in Syria early in 2009, which brought together Iraqi jihadists, Syrian officials and Ba’athists from both countries. (Kamal, who was diagnosed with a rare cancer in 2012, died earlier this year, and authorised me to publish details of our conversations. “Just tell the truth,” he said during our last interview in June 2014.)

 

When I first met him in 2009, he was poring over transcripts of recordings that had been made at two secret meetings in Zabadani, near Damascus, in the spring of that year. The attendees included senior Iraqi Ba’athists who had taken refuge in Damascus since their patron Saddam was ousted, Syrian military intelligence officers, and senior figures in what was then known as al-Qaida in Iraq. The Syrians had developed links to the jihadists since the earliest days of the anti-US insurgency and had used them to unsettle the Americans and their plans for Iraq.

 

“By early in 2004/05, Islamic elements, jihadists and disenfranchised Ba’athists were starting to get together,” said Ali Khedery, the former adviser to American ambassadors and senior commanders in Bagdhad. “They were naturally disciplined, well organised people who knew the lay of the land. And over time, some folks who were Ba’athists became more and more Islamist and the insurgency raged. By 2007, General [David] Petraeus was saying there was crystal clear intelligence of cooperation between Syrian military intelligence and the jihadists. Though the motivations never really aligned 100%.”

 

In our conversations, Abu Ahmed emphasised the Syrian connection to Iraq’s insurgency. “The mujahideen all came through Syria,” he said. “I worked with many of them. Those in Bucca had flown to Damascus. A very small number had made it from Turkey, or Iran. But most came to Iraq with the help of the Syrians.”

 

The supply line was viewed by Iraqi officials as an existential threat to Iraq’s government and was the main source of the poisonous relationship between Nouri al-Maliki, then Iraq’s prime minister, and Bashar al-Assad. Maliki had become convinced early in the civil war that Assad was trying to undermine his regime as a way to embarrass the Americans, and the evidence he saw in 2009 from the meeting in Damascus took his loathing of the Syrian leader to a whole new level.

 

“We had a source in the room wearing a wire,” at the meeting in Zabadani, General Kamal told me at the time. “He is the most sensitive source we have ever had. As far as we know, this is the first time there has been a strategic level meeting between all of these groups. It marks a new point in history.”

 

The Ba’athists present led the meeting. Their aim, according to General Kamal’s source, was to launch a series of spectacular attacks in Baghdad and thereby undermine Maliki’s Shia-majority government, which had for the first time begun to assert some order in post-civil war Iraq. Until then, al-Qaida in Iraq and the Ba’athists had been fierce ideological enemies, but the rising power of the Shias – and their backers in Iran – brought them together to plan a major strike on the capital.

 

By July 2009, the Interior Ministry had increased security at all checkpoints across the Tigris river into Baghdad, making a commute at any time of day even more insufferable than normal. And then General Kamal received a message from his source in Syria. The extra security at the bridges had been spotted by the attack plotters, he said. New targets were being chosen, but he didn’t know what they were, or when they would be hit. For the next two weeks, Kamal worked well into the evening in his fortified office in the southern suburb of Arasat, before being sped by armoured convoy across the July 14 Bridge – which had been a target only days earlier – to his home inside the Green Zone.

From Chapter 2 “Creating an Insurgency” in Jerome Drevon, From Jihad to Politics: How Syrian Jihadis Embraced Politics (New York : Oxford University Press, 2024).

The second juncture that catalysed the expansion of Salafi and Islamist activist networks occurred in 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq. This event triggered non-violent Islamist protests in Syria and reignited internal debates on jihad among Syrian Islamists (Al-Haj, n.d.: 27; Mustafa, 2012: 4; Al-Haj, 2013). Although some individuals had discussed jihad in the 1990s, the rise of Jihadi Salafism gained momentum after 2003 in Middle Eastern countries (e.g., Drevon, 2016). Friends and students who were looking for the most appropriate response to what they perceived as a new threat to Islam embraced the Salafi Jihadi approach to Islam (Al-Haj, n.d.: 32). The regime indirectly supported the proliferation of Salafi Jihadi networks in their fight against American forces in Iraq, before clamping down on them in Syria. Numerous interviews with Islamists who remained independent or affiliated with Salafi armed groups during the uprising recognised that they initially embraced this approach to Islam for political more than theological reasons. They perceived al-Qaeda, which virtually monopolised Jihadi Salafism after 9/11 (Drevon, 2017), as the only actor capable of facing the external threats to the Muslim world. Khaled Abu Anas also added that:

 

Many of us come from Jihadi Salafism. This trend is a response to oppression. When Islam is under attack, jihad is a solution and a way out from the conundrum in which we are. That’s why the youths embrace jihad. If you think about it, there are historically only two Islamist models: the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda. In these conditions, which one was the most relevant and convincing? The Brotherhood and its strategy of political engagement or al-Qaeda and armed struggle? Al-Qaeda was more attractive for those who wanted to do something.

 

During that period, a significant number of individuals exhibited a heightened religious commitment, actively seeking increased Islamist influence within Syrian universities. Ahrar al-Sham’s first leader mentioned in an interview shortly before his death that (al-Jazeera, 2016):

 

The university dormitories were small clubs in which we could discuss politics between different intellectual tendencies. Every year the Islamist trend was becoming more powerful.

 

To which Abul Talha al-Ghab, the first military leader of the group, added that:

 

I became practising when I was at the university. I was looking for new references, which I obtained online. I was influenced by [the Muslim Brotherhood intellectual Sayyid Qutb’s] In the Shade of the Qur’an (fi zilal al-qur’an) and Milestones (ma‘alim fil-tariq). There was also a global change with the war on terrorism [after 9/11], which encouraged us to look at Islam more in depth in response.

 

It is worth highlighting that this line of reasoning is a prevailing sentiment among Jihadi groups of all orientations. In private interviews, they acknowledge the political motives for their adoption of this interpretation of Islam, rather than strictly theological ones. They do not merely contend that Jihadi Salafism is a more authentic expression of Islam’s essence. Even the top religious authority of Jabhat al-Nusra, which was established by a network of ISI (Islamic State of Iraq, before the creation of ISIS) commanders before pledging loyalty to al-Qaeda, expressed a comparable view. According to Abu Abdullah al-Shami:

 

Salafism spread in Syria under the influence of the war in Iraq in 2003. For many, the idea was to assess the force that could jihad in the region to resist the American invasion. Salafism was considered the way forward. Its popularity in the current conflict was further supported by the military victories achieved by Salafi armed groups. People follow the successful projects.

 

The relations between the Syrian regime and the Jihadi movement were complex and contentious prior to 2011. Initially, the Syrian government cooperated with the United States against Jihadi networks in the aftermath of 9/11, participating in the rendition of suspects associated with al-Qaeda. According to a former CIA agent, “if you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria” (Guardian, 2011). However, Syria’s regional interests shifted after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and forced departure from Lebanon in 2005, when the regime began to see Jihadi groups as a useful card in the region. This ambiguity led to some controversial interactions, such as the regime’s support for the Palestinian armed group Fath Intifada that helped a new Jihadi group, Fath al-Islam, take over the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in 2007 in north Lebanon (Rougier, 2007, 2015). Additionally, smaller groups like Jund al-Sham and unaffiliated militants launched sporadic attacks inside Syria. The Syrian regime also facilitated the transfer of foreign fighters transiting through the country to fight American forces and their allies in Iraq, including al-Qaeda–linked networks (Lister, 2015b: 31–50). Supporting the Iraqi insurgency was a way to destabilise the American occupation, which could have targeted Syria as well. The regime cracked down on these networks only when it was expedient to support negotiations with the American administration. Most Syrian armed groups and their supporters were subsequently jailed in Saydnaya, a notorious prison in the suburbs of Damascus. Many former prisoners went on to participate in the armed opposition, particularly in Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra.