US officials discussed merits of removing $10m bounty on HTS leader

US officials have discussed the merits of removing a $10m bounty on Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, whose rebel group swept into Damascus and toppled the government of Bashar al-Assad on Sunday, a senior Arab official briefed by the Americans told Middle East Eye.

Ahmed al-Sharaa, commonly known as Jolani, has been designated as a terrorist by the United States since 2013, whilst his organisation, HTS, was proscribed by the Trump administration in 2018 when a $10m bounty was placed on his head.

For years, HTS lobbied to be delisted, but its pleas largely fell on deaf years with the group relegated to governing just a sliver of northwest Syria. 

But the lightning blitz by the rebels, which saw Assad’s iron-grip rule end in spectaular fashion on Sunday, has since forced Washington to rethink how it engages with the former al-Qaeda affiliate.

The senior Arab official, who requested anonymity due to sensitivities surrounding the talks, told MEE that the discussions had divided officials in the Biden administration. Meanwhile, when asked about the discussions, one Trump transition official disparaged the Biden administration.

Jowlani, 42, gave a rousing victory speech in Damascus’ iconic Umayyad Mosque on Sunday and is widely expected to play a key role in Syria’s transition after 54 years of Assad family rule.

“Today, Syria is being purified,” Jolani told a crowd of supporters in Damascus, adding that “this victory is born from the people who have languished in prison, and the mujahideen (fighters) broke their chains”.

He said that under Assad, Syria had become a place for “Iranian ambitions, where sectarianism was rife,” in reference to Assad’s allies Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah.

‘Saying the right things now’

Speaking several hours after the fall of Damascus, US President Joe Biden called the rebel takeover a “fundamental act of justice,” but cautioned it was “a moment of risk and uncertainty” for the Middle East.

“We will remain vigilant,” Biden said. “Make no mistake, some of the rebel groups that took down Assad have their own grim record of terrorism and human rights abuses,” adding that the groups are “saying the right things now.”

“But as they take on greater responsibility, we will assess not just their words, but their actions,” Biden said.

Later, a senior Biden administration official, when asked about contact with HTS leaders, said Washington was in contact with Syrian groups of all kinds.

The official, who was not authorised to publicly discuss the situation and spoke on condition of anonymity, also said the US was focused on ensuring chemical weapons in Assad’s military arsenal were secured.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that US intelligence agencies were in the process of evaluating Jolani, who it said had launched a “charm offensive” aimed at allaying concerns over his past affiliations.

Jowlani was born to a family originally from the occupied Golan Heights and fought in the Iraq insurgency and served five years in an American-run prison in Iraq, before returning to Syria as the emissary of Islamic State founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. 

“A charm offensive might mean that people are turning over a new leaf and they think differently than they used to so you should hear them out. On the other hand, you should be cautious because charm offensives can sometimes be misleading,” the US official said.

“We have to think about it. We have to watch their behavior and we need to do some indirect messaging and see what comes of that,” the official added.

But, US President-elect Donald Trump, who will be entering office in just five weeks, has left few doubts where he stood on the conflict, saying Washington “should have nothing to do with it [Syria].” 

In a social media post on Saturday, Trump wrote that Assad “lost” because “Russia and Iran are in a weakened state right now, one because of Ukraine and a bad economy, the other because of Israel and its fighting success”. 

Trump used Assad’s fall as an opportunity to call for an end to the war in Ukraine, without mentioning the Syrian opposition or the US’ Syrian allies. 

Jordan lobbies for Syrian Free Army

Assad’s ouster has seen Nato-ally Turkey cement its status as the main outside power in Syria at the expense of a bruised and battered Iran and Russia.

But the US holds vast amounts of territory in Syria via its allies, who joined a race to replace the Assad regime as its soldiers abandoned villages and cities en masse. 

The US backs rebels operating out of the al-Tanf desert outpost on the tri-border area of Jordan, Iraq and Syria. 

The Syrian Free Army (SFA) went on the offensive as Assad’s regime collapsed taking control of the city of Palmyra.

The SFA works closely with the US and its financing is mainly run out of Jordan. The SFA also enjoys close ties to Jordanian intelligence. 

A former Arab security official told MEE that Jordan’s King Abdullah II met with senior US officials in Washington DC last week and lobbied for continued support for the Syrian Free Army.

However, maintaining stability in post-Assad Syria will be key for Jordan as it looks to send back hundreds of thousands of refugees and ensure a powe vacuum does not lead to more captagon crossing its border, the former official said. 

In northeastern Syria, the US has roughly 900 troops embedded with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).  

Arab tribes linked to the SDF swept across the Euphrates River on Friday to take a wide swath of strategic towns, including Deir Ezzor and al-Bukamal. The latter is Syria’s strategic border crossing with Iraq. 

The US’s support for the SDF is a sore point in its ties toTurkey, which views the SDF as an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). 

The PKK has waged a decades-long guerrilla war in southern Turkey and is labelled a terrorist organisation by the US and the European Union. 

Turkey’s concerns about the PKK led it to launch an invasion of Syria in 2016, with the aim of depriving Kurdish fighters of a quasi-state along its border. Two more military forays followed in 2018 and 2019. 

The SDF is already being squeezed in the north with Turkish backed rebels called the Syrian National Army entering the strategic city of Manbij. According to Reuters, the Turkish backed fighters already control 80 percent of the territory around the city center. 

During Syria’s more than decade long war, the US slapped sanctions on Assad’s government, enabled Israel to launch strikes on Iran inside Syria, and backed oppositions groups that hold sway over around one-third of the country.