A leopard cannot change its spots.
Why would anyone think that Syria’s jihadist President Ahmed Al-Sharaa (aka Abu Mohammed al-Jolani) would suddenly transform into a civilized leader and protect the rights of religious minorities in Syria?
Al-Sharaa is waging jihad against Syria’s non-Muslim minorities
U.S. Needs to Protect Syrian Minorities
Michael Rubin is dismayed over the way Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa has convinced President Donald Trump and his Middle East envoy Tom Barrack that he has abandoned his previous support for Al Qaeda — not so long ago the American government had a $10 million bounty on his head — and can now be trusted to be a moderate, ready to make peace with all of his neighbors, including Israel, and prepared to treat Syrian minorities fairly. Rubin thinks it is the Americans who should protect those minorities by establishing no-fly no-drive zones in the territories where they live. More of his argument can be found here: “Syrian Kurds Need a No-Fly, No-Drive Zone,” by Michael Rubin, Middle East Forum, January 29, 2026:
Please read the whole text below the fold.
Syria: Muslim screaming ‘Allahu akbar’ and carrying Qur’an enters Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarchal cathedral
Nothing will be done about it. These things did not happen under Assad.
The Two Mr. Trumps
BY
The ISIS flag flies again in Raqqa, thanks to the man who drove them out a decade ago.
No one ever thought this day would come: On Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2026, the flag of the Islamic State (ISIS) flew once again over Raqqa, the Syrian city that once served as its capital.
It was around ten years ago now that ISIS controlled a territory in Iraq and Syria that was larger than Britain. Given Barack Obama’s indifference (which is the best face one can put on his behavior) to its continued presence and even expansion, the ISIS caliphate looked as if it was here to stay. Then, however, came Donald J. Trump.
In a major speech on counterterrorism in August 2016, Trump pledged that “my administration will aggressively pursue joint and coalition military operations to crush and destroy ISIS.” The promise was made, and the promise was kept. Within a matter of months after his inauguration, the ISIS caliphate was no more.
And that wasn’t all. Trump said we could not only could we not allow ISIS’s evils to continue, but “nor can we let the hateful ideology of Radical Islam – its oppression of women, gays, children, and nonbelievers – be allowed to reside or spread within our own countries. We will defeat Radical Islamic Terrorism, just as we have defeated every threat we have faced in every age before.”
As part of that effort, in June 2017, President Trump called out Qatar: “The nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level. And in the wake of that conference, nations came together and spoke to me about confronting Qatar over its behavior. So we had a decision to make: Do we take the easy road or do we finally take a hard but necessary action. We have to stop the funding of terrorism. I decided along with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, our great generals and military people, the time had come to call on Qatar to end its funding. They have to end that funding. And its extremist ideology in terms of funding. I want to call on all other nations to stop immediately supporting terrorism.”
Qatar paid no attention. On October 7, 2023, top Hamas leaders were in Doha, watching video of Hamas’ massacre of Israelis and glorifying Allah for the carnage. Nevertheless, when Trump two years later forced Israel to stop pursuing its goal of destroying Hamas utterly and ending its ongoing threat against Israeli civilians, he praised Qatar’s role in bringing about this spurious peace: “Qatar was a tremendous help to getting this done. I hope people can realize that. It was very tough and very dangerous for Qatar. They were very brave.” He even provided Qatar a guarantee of its security in case of attack.
None of this has ever been explained. Trump has never made reference to his 2017 statement about Qatar funding terrorism. Nor has he explained how his wholehearted embrace of Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former al-Qaeda leader who has shown not a single concrete sign of having genuinely changed his beliefs or goals, squares with his previously stated determination to fight “radical Islamic terrorism.” He doesn’t speak about that anymore, either.
It was Trump’s apparent admiration for al-Sharaa that led directly to ISIS’ reappearance in Raqqa. The Middle East Forum noted Monday that “in 2025 and 2026, Tom Barrack, the U.S. presidential envoy to Syria, threw the Kurds under the bus to appease a former U.S.-designated terrorist. In January 2026, the U.S. government pushed the Kurds to accept a fourteen-point plan, a ceasefire and integration agreement between the Transitional Syrian Government and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. It was a choice between a deeply flawed peace and the possibility of ethnic cleansing.”
The peace was more than deeply flawed; it was entirely chimerical. The Syrian army of Ahmed al-Sharaa is made up of his Hayat Tahrir al-Sham jihad warriors, who proceeded to attack the Kurds in the same way that they previously attacked the Druze, the Alawites, and the Christians of Syria. ISIS jihadis flowed back into Syria from their refuge in Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, eager to take up where they left off. They encountered no impediments to their doing so. The Kurds drove them out in the first place, with Trump’s backing, but now the Kurds have been betrayed. With Trump’s backing.
There have been two presidents who have been elected to two non-consecutive terms, Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump, and both are numbered twice on official lists of presidents. So we have, in effect, two President Trumps, 45 and 47, and they’re increasingly different from one another.
“The rise of ISIS,” the first Trump said in that August 2016 speech, “is the direct result of policy decisions made by President Obama and Secretary Clinton.” He was right. It is also right to say that the return of ISIS is the direct result of policy decisions made by President Trump and Tom Barrack. That is, the second Trump.
Will the first Trump return and clean up this mess?
Al-Sharaa, the Al Qaeda Terrorist is Still the Same Man
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa must think President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, let alone the U.S. Senate, are idiots. While he talks about reform and a tolerant, peaceful Syria, Al-Sharaa is a former Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist who once had a $10 million U.S. government bounty on his head.
While Al-Sharaa changed his style, his language, and his tactics, there is little evidence he has changed his ideology. In an October 2025 trip to Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, I visited United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee (UNHCR)-managed facilities and shanties for new arrivals from Syria. Alawis from Latakia and Homs not only spoke about the arrival of Al-Sharaa’s forces, but they showed videos of the subsequent harassment, beatings, and shootings of unarmed civilians. The interviewees in question were not Assad-era war criminals; UNHCR screens its refugees to limit services to non-combatants and Bashar al-Assad did not draft elderly women into his army. In visits to Syria and Armenia, Druze from Suwaydah and Christians from Aleppo told many of the same stories….
Al-Sharaa’s army attacked the Alawites in Latakia, killing more than 1,500 in March 2025. The victims were described as “remnants” of the Assad regime, but they were almost all civilians, not military men, murdered simply for belonging to the same sect as Bashar al-Assad. The Druze minority was also attacked in Sweida governorate; the Druze had been fighting with local Bedouin, and al-Sharaa sent in his army, ostensibly to impose a “peace” between the parties but instead his soldiers attacked Druze villages, killing more than a thousand. Israel came to the rescue of the Druze, by bombing Syrian military sites in Damascus, including a military headquarters and, as a pointed warning, a site right next to the presidential palace, as well Syrian army outposts in Sweida. Al-Sharaa got the message, and the Syrian army pulled out of the Druze stronghold.
As such sectarian and ethnic violence becomes the rule rather than the exception, the excuses of Al-Sharaa and his apologists in Turkey and among some Washington think tanks wear thin. U.S. Envoy for Syria Tom Barrack has embraced a vision of strong, centralized leadership across the Middle East, one in which strongmen guarantee security and investors can grow economies. It is a naïve read of the Middle East for two reasons: First, it discounts ideology. As an investor and a real estate developer, business deals and making money may motivate Barrack, but projecting this onto Islamists is naïve. Men like Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei may embezzle billions of dollars, and Al-Sharaa, by putting his brother in charge of investments and Syrian contracts, may also aspire to, but their goals for government and society are less material.
These Islamic strongmen like money, of course, just as Trump and Barrack do, but they are also warriors for Islam. They know, as Muhammad said, that “Islam is to dominate and not to be dominated.” Barrack fails to appreciate the effect of their faith on the Muslims with whom he hopes to strike a deal, Muslims such as Ahmed al-Sharaa.
Trump, unfortunately, remains much impressed with al-Sharaa, whom he called after first meeting him in Washington a “great man,” a “fighter,” a “very strong leader ” and said “I think this leader can do it.” He hasn’t changed his mind. Just a few days ago, after Al-Sharaa had launched his offensive against the Kurdish-run SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces), instead of telling al-Sharaa to call off his attack on the Syrian Kurds who had been our closest ally in fighting ISIS, Trump said this: “I had a great conversation with the highly respected president of Syria, and all of the things having to do with Syria and that area. It’s working out very well, so we’re very happy about it.”
With that kind of response after al-Sharaa’s attack on the Kurds, how can anyone hope to change the president’s mind, and persuade him to impose no-fly and no-drive zones in order to defend the minorities in Syria against an aggressive central government in Damascus run by a smooth-talking jihadist?