The presence in Syria of thousands of foreign fighters who helped oust the Assad regime could now pose a threat to President Ahmed al-Sharaa's political survival.
DAMASCUS, Syria -- When Syrian insurgents rode victorious into Damascus late last year, their rebel leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, was relying, in part, on thousands of foreign fighters to help overthrow Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship.
Six months on, Sharaa is president, and the continued presence of those same Islamist militants, who came from as far afield as Europe and Central Asia to join the revolution, could now pose a profound challenge to his political survival.
Sharaa has appointed some of them to top positions in the Defense Ministry and suggested that many in the rank and file might receive Syrian citizenship, but the Trump administration is demanding that all of these foreign fighters be kicked out as a condition for easing of U.S. sanctions that have crippled Syria's economy. Shortly after President Donald Trump met Sharaa in Saudi Arabia this month, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tweeted that Trump had urged Syria's new leader to "tell all foreign terrorists to leave."
Moreover, while Sharaa seems intent on keeping a contingent of foreign allies around him, some of these hard-line Sunni Muslim militants are already making trouble for him. According to monitoring groups, some of the fighters who participated in a rampage two months ago through Syria's coastal communities, killing hundreds of members of the Alawite religious minority, were foreign militants. These sectarian tensions threaten to destabilize Sharaa's fragile transition.
The most hard-line of these fighters are already turning their ire on Sharaa, angry that their former comrade in arms -- who long went by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani -- has not yet imposed Islamic sharia law and alleging that he has cooperated with the United States and Turkish forces to target extremist factions. "Jolani is attacking us from the ground, America from the sky," said one European militant, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he had been ordered not to talk, who was interviewed in the northern city of Idlib.
Tens of thousands of foreign fighters flocked to Syria and neighboring Iraq over the past two decades, many joining the fight against Assad during the nearly 14-year civil war. Many foreign fighters joined extremist groups like the Islamic State, while others signed up with less radical factions. Researchers estimated that 5,000 remain in Syria. Many of them are integrated into local communities, especially in the northwest corner of the country, and are married to Syrian wives with children who have been growing up there.
Sharaa himself fought as a member of al-Qaeda in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003 and later founded Jabhat al-Nusra in his home country of Syria. When the group rebranded as Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in 2017, it cut ties with al-Qaeda and cracked down on other Islamist factions, consolidating its power as the dominant rebel force.
As the new president grapples with his tough balancing act, the foreigners have been ordered by the government to lay low and not speak out, according to political analysts and the fighters themselves.
On three previous visits to Syria since Assad's fall in December, Washington Post reporters encountered foreign fighters in several parts of the country. In December, for example, they were stationed along the road to the central city of Hama; and Turkish fighters secured a hilltop road to the Zayn al-Abidin shrine, where the bloodiest battle had raged; and Iraqi militants wandered the city as tourists. In March, a fighter from Central Asia commanded a checkpoint blocking the route to Damascus's iconic Qasiyoun mountain.
Then in early May, they were largely gone -- from the checkpoints and streets of central and southern Syria, at least.
"The government has tried to isolate them," said Jerome Drevon, a senior analyst on jihad and modern conflict at the International Crisis Group. "But there's a real issue with implementing the U.S. demand. They say all terrorists out, but that raises the question: Who are the terrorists in this case?" Only several dozen of the fighters have been designated as terrorists by the United Nations, and in many cases, home governments have only limited information on the activities of their nationals in Syria.
"And then when they say 'out,' okay, but where?" Drevon asked. "Their countries do not want them."
Making a life in Syria
Today, the majority of foreign fighters are under the flag of HTS, the Islamist group Sharaa heads, or the loosely allied Turkistan Islamic Party. Most live in Idlib province, the area HTS had ruled as a rump state through the final years of Assad's rule.
On a recent day in Idlib province, the men zipped through busy streets on motorbikes to buy bread and groceries, and headed in groups to the mosques in response to the amplified call to prayer. Many were recognizable as foreigners, appearing to hail from Central Asia. Some wore fatigues, others normal clothing. Those who were willing to be interviewed insisted on a degree of anonymity because of the orders that they avoid the media.
A French fighter, who spoke on the condition that he be identified only by his first name, Mustafa, said he had traveled from Paris to join the fight against Assad’s forces in 2013, first with a small faction composed mostly of Egyptians and French, and later with Jabhat al-Nusra, the previous incarnation of HTS that was affiliated at the time with al-Qaeda.
In his glass-fronted shop in central Idlib, barber Mohammed Kurdi, 35, said he always started his appointments by asking where his client was from. “We’ve ... had people from Belarus, Chechnya, Uzbekistan and places,” Kurdi said. Sometimes, he’d ask after clients who no longer visited the shop. “We’d find out that a lot of them had been killed,” he said.
Experts monitoring the Islamist groups say the fighters as a whole have grown less radical over time, although most mostly remain deeply conservative.
"The overwhelming majority of those who had stayed under HTS until they advanced to Damascus have been co-opted and contained, one way or another," said Orwa Ajjoub, a doctoral candidate at Malmo University who studies the group.
None of the fighters interviewed wanted to leave Syria, citing the potential of arrest or even the death penalty in their home countries. The French fighter, Mustafa, said that returning to Paris was not an option. “I’m wanted in most European countries,” he said. Another added: “We don’t have anywhere else to go.”
Heat from the hard-liners
While most of those interviewed said they support a gradual imposition of sharia law, a small hard-line contingent is impatient. On social media, the men have criticized the new authorities as un-Islamic, for not implementing sharia law and for meeting with Western leaders they ideologically oppose.
"The immigrants have become a burden on al-Jolani," said Kuwaiti cleric Ali Abu al-Hasan, a former religious official in Jabhat al-Nusra, writing on his Telegram channel earlier this month. "He will get rid of them once he secures an alternative."
Adding to the hard-liners' indignation is their belief that Sharaa has cooperated with U.S. and Turkey in targeting Islamic State and al-Qaeda cells with airstrikes as he pushed to consolidate HTS control first in Idlib then in Damascus. "They helped us a lot," Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said in December. "Over the years they cooperated with us in providing intelligence." The following month,The Post reported,the new Syrian government used U.S. intelligence to help thwart an Islamic State plot to attack a Shiite Muslim religious shrine outside Damascus.
"We're seeing posts that say patience is running out. Some of them speak about how they are ready to fight a new tyrant," said Broderick McDonald, an associate fellow at Kings College London's XCEPT Research Program, whose fieldwork has focused on foreign fighters. "They're looking at the situation and asking if this is what we fought 14 years for."
Inside an Idlib mosque,a European fighter from the disbanded al-Qaeda faction Hurras al-Din described Sharaa as just as much of an enemy as the U.S. "They are giving our coordinates to the Americans to bomb us," he said.
Sharaa strikes a balance
For now, the government is wary of being seen to target fighters who have remained loyal or to provoke hard-liners who have grown disillusioned.
"It doesn't want to betray them because it ultimately doesn't know what they will do," Drevon said. "They might disappear; they might join other groups; they might start to engage in sectarian violence; and things might get worse."
Instead, authorities are trying to set clear guidelines for how foreigners are expected to behave,he said. They are to avoid inciting sectarian or political violence and to refrain from calling for attacks on other countries.
The Sharaa government is also seeking to integrate most foreign fighters into the country's new army. "The idea is that you put them in a military structure and it's easier to control them that way," Drevon said. But progress has been slow.
Sharaa has already named six foreigners to senior positions in the Defense Ministry -- a move that experts said was designed to insulate him against potential coups by placing security positions, including at the head of his presidential guard, in the hands of foreign loyalists who do not have an independent power base. But these appointments have proved especially controversial with many Syrians and in Western capitals.
In a letter to the U.S. administration several weeks before Trump's trip to Saudi Arabia, Sharaa's government said that it had suspended the issuance of senior military ranks to foreign nationals but did not clarify whether the prior promotions had been rescinded,Reuters reported.
The newly appointed U.S. special envoy for Syria,Thomas Barrack, praised Sharaa's administration in a May 24 statement for taking "meaningful steps" on the foreign fighter issue,without sharing further details.
"He's walked this line for a long time to balance his constituencies," McDonald said of Sharaa. "This is a big test now."