Just a few years ago, he emerged from the shadows as a terrorist in camouflage fatigues – a turban and a $10m American bounty on his head.
Today, Syrian rebel-leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani has removed the turban, swapped the soldier outfit for a smart blazer, and appears to be the leader-in-waiting in Damascus, declaring: ‘The future is ours’.
The $10m bounty, however, remains on his head as a ‘specialist designated global terrorist’, and his suddenly-victorious Islamist militant group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) are still outlawed in Britain.
Regardless of having such powerful enemies, no-one can ignore the fact that while the world’s attention was elsewhere, al-Jolani has dramatically led the final overthrow of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, in spite of his alliances with Russia and Iran.
And in the approach to victory he has done his best to leave behind his and HTS’s origins in Osama bin Laden’s infamous Al Qaeda. He claims now to be a moderate force seeking power for the good of all Syrians, not just its radical Islamists.
Al-Jolani, 42, is a Syrian citizen who was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. By 2003 ago, in the wake of the Western Allies’ conquest of Iraq, he had joined extremists fighting to expel the American occupiers.
He became a member of Al Qaeda in Iraq, led by the notorious Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who later led the even more extreme Islamic State of Iraq, and ultimately Islamic State in Syria before his suicide vest suicide in 2019.
Al-Jolani – who expressed admiration for the Al Qaeda suicide attackers who killed thousands in the 2001 attack on New York’s Twin Towers – was detained by US forces during the fighting in Iraq, but freed.
And in 2011, as the Arab Spring sparked long suppressed uprising in Syria, al-Baghdadi dispatched al-Jolani back to his homeland.
With al-Baghdadi still loyal to Al Qaeda at this point, al-Jolani was tasked with establishing a Syrian local group for the battle against Assad – called the Nusra Front.
It soon became one of the leading forces among a number of rebel groups in Syria, even attracting a rare white British convert to volunteer, Lucas Kinney from Surrey. He became a social media star for the terror group, and is 35 if still alive, though last heard of five years ago .
Al-Jolani, meanwhile, found himself at odds with his terror-kingpin guru.
As the Syrian civil war intensified in 2013, al-Baghdadi ordered him to dissolve the Nusra Front, and formally merge it with other Al Qaeda-inspired fighters, to form the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS.
Al-Jolani refused, pledging his ongoing allegiance to Al Qaeda – and soon his Nusra Front warriors were fighting ISIS, as well as Assad.
As his Sunni Muslim group rose in prominence, he conducted his first interview in 2014, his face masked, as he announced his aims to be the imposition of Islamic law, with no room for Shiite Muslims, let alone Christian minorities.
By a couple of years later he was showing his face, dressed in army greens and a turban, as he said he was cutting ties to Al Qaeda, and changing his group’s name.
By 2017, the rebranded Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – meaning Organization for Liberating Syria – had a firm grip on power in Syria’s north-western Idlib province.
Needless to say, there have been no free elections in Idlib under his rule. Residents have complained of rampant corruption, theft of state resources, and detention without trial for suspected agents of Russia and Hezbollah.
Yet al-Jolani began several years ago to talk, surprisingly, of religious tolerance, and even hint at a belief in democracy, visiting the families of Kurds after their relatives were killed by Turkish-supported militias.
And in 2021 he conducted his first TV interview with an American journalist, wearing a blazer, and with his hair gelled back.
Speaking softly, he insisted: ‘Yes, we have criticized Western policies – but to wage a war against the United States or Europe from Syria, that’s not true. We didn’t say we wanted to fight.’
On the brink of power last week, al-Jolani said in an interview with America’s CNN: ‘Syria deserves a governing system that is institutional, not one where a single ruler makes arbitrary decisions.’
Whether a man so steeped in the most feared terror groups of the 21st century can resist his foundational beliefs remains to be seen.