Original subtitles

The dictatorship of Bashar al -Assad is crumbling.

Correspondent Martin Smith investigates the rise of Ahmed al -Shara from al

-Qaeda commander to Syrian leader.

I don't know of anyone who accurately predicted he was likely to pose a real

threat to the Assad regime.

And the country's uncertain future. You can't say for us all today, I am Angel

and forget my history. There are still extremist elements.

Mr. al -Shara is walking a tightrope.

Now on Frontline, Syria after Assad.

this program contains graphic content viewer discretion is advised

I've been seeing these amazing images all day coming out of Syria, right, of

tens of thousands of people.

out on the street celebrating a new Syria and also tasting freedom after

of repression.

Quite

simply, no

one saw this coming.

Bashar al -Assad has clung on to power through years of civil war.

But now a new rebel movement has managed to topple his regime in less than two

weeks.

What we've been seeing from the rebel leadership is a clear attempt to signal

that they want an inclusive Syria and that they want to avoid more conflict.

leader, al -Jilani, has even interestingly dropped his jihadi nom de

now calls himself by his original birth name, Ahmad al -Shara.

Even that is a signal that he is not trying to impose his jihadist position.

We are tracking

one of the most extraordinary events in Middle East history.

It will have a profound impact on the region and beyond.

There is real joy here, but there's also real concern.

No one knows what's going to happen then.

I met Ahmed Alshara in 2021 in Syria's Idlib province.

My cameraman and I were the first Western journalists to meet him.

At the time, he went by his nom de guerre, Abu Muhammad al -Jalani.

He was also then a wanted man with a $10 million bounty on his head, and he had

a long history as a jihadist.

At age 21, al -Jalani joined al -Qaeda in Iraq to fight and kill Americans.

Captured by U .S. forces, he spent five years in Iraqi prisons.

including Abu Ghraib and Camp Buka.

Soon after he was released, he came back to Syria and formed an al -Qaeda branch

to fight Assad.

By the time we met, al -Jilani had broken

ties with al -Qaeda and was trying to moderate his image.

to get the world to reconsider him.

He took us to a camp of internally displaced Syrians where he assured the

residents that he was planning to defeat Assad and send them home.

Al -Jalani's key ally in the region was Turkey.

It was Turkish intelligence that had taken us into Idlib so Al -Jalani could

heard. But at the time, Jalani's odds of victory were very long.

Assad controlled most of the country.

However, with his army, Hayat Tahrir al -Sham, or HTS,

al -Jilani was determined to strike at the heart of the Assad regime and march

straight to the capital.

All together, I spent seven days in Idlib.

Al -Jilani struck me as remarkably open.

At one point, we were taken to his military command headquarters.

Al -Jilani had come to review the current situation on their front line.

They were facing pressure from Assad's principal allies, Iran and Russia.

So are the Russians flying drones over this area?

I hear it.

I hear it.

The

day

after showing me his map, al -Jalani sat down for an interview.

You are in a box, it seems to me, with the Russians, with the Iranians,

with the regime.

What is your strategy?

After I left

Idlib, I posted a picture of al -Jilani and me on Twitter.

The post went viral.

Al -Jilani was ridiculed for wearing a suit.

I was criticized for talking to a terrorist.

So how did an obscure, besieged rebel leader manage to topple a dictator?

It began three years after I met Al -Jilani.

In November 2024, when his forces launched an assault on Aleppo, Syria's

largest city, they entered from above and below ground, a coordinated

ambush utilizing a vast network of tunnels.

The attack blindsided everyone.

I don't know of anyone who accurately predicted that Jolani was likely to pose

real threat to the Assad regime.

And I was the deputy national security advisor, had access to all the

intelligence information, analytic information the U .S. government has. I

heard that we should be watching Aleppo from somebody outside of the U .S.

government.

He said, you might want to pay attention to what is happening here. It is

different from what we've seen before.

The city fell to al -Jolani in three days.

I truly think that they only thought that they were going to take over Aleppo

and then hold there and see how that went and then try to build themselves up

strong enough to then move on elsewhere and that it might take some time. But in

fact, because there was no true counteroffensive, the military people

all right.

Nobody's going after us. Let's keep on going.

Syrian rebel fighters are advancing southward after seizing control of

That's one of Syria's largest cities.

As al -Jalani's forces headed south toward Damascus, the assumption was

that Iran and Russia would come to Assad's rescue. Those rebels have just

blitzed through the countryside and made enormous gains in the east, in the

south.

More celebrations today in the city of Hama.

The rebels advance across the country. There's been lightning fast.

But where's the Syrian army in all of this? Because they mostly seem to be

surrendering or defecting. The Syrian regime completely gave up.

Assad's officers on the front line were getting paid $30 a month.

Enlisted men, about $10 a month.

Joshua Landis is a professor at the University of Oklahoma, director of

Center for Middle East Studies.

American sanctions had really hollowed out that regime.

And when we saw the rebel soldiers come down, and many of them had night vision

goggles on their, and these fantastic uniforms, much better than anything

Assad's soldiers had, it was clear that Turkey had been really building up these

militias.

And also, Assad lost all of his allies.

Hezbollah had been decapitated by Israel. They were major supporters of

Assad regime.

Hezbollah and its patron, Iran, became increasingly engaged with Israel.

They had shifted their focus away from Syria.

And Assad's other ally was also distracted.

And Russia, of course, was completely preoccupied in the Ukraine and had not

been resupplying him. So Assad was cut off. And after decades in the country,

Russia is pulling back. This video shows military vehicles and Russian flags

leaving the Damascus region.

According to my contacts, Russians were ready to go back to the bombing campaign

that had been so effective in beating down the Syrian opposition.

However, they immediately saw, A, that there was no real effective infantry

because there was almost no Iranian proxy forces from Hezbollah. And once

fell, it was obvious that whether the Russians dropped bombs or not, it wasn't

going to stop this massive offensive.

Last week it was Aleppo, yesterday the city of Homs, last night the outskirts

Damascus. At this point it appears that the dictatorship of Bashar al -Assad is

crumbling. Nobody read what was happening on the ground correctly, not

outsiders, not Assad and his backers.

So Jalani finds himself pushing on an open door.

Exactly.

Everyone misread the situation except al -Jalani.

In this meeting with followers nearly five years earlier, He predicted

how he would achieve victory.

So al -Jilani, in less than two weeks, conquered Syria, just as he had

Why should Americans care about what happens in Syria? Why should Americans

about the fall of Assad or the rise of al -Sharaf?

It's not that Syria per se is important, it's that what happens in Syria impacts

all of the Middle East.

Syria can generate massive refugee flows, and it has terrorism that does

stay in the region, as we saw all over Europe in 2015 -16 with the Islamic

State. These are issues at the center of the Middle East.

And Syria sits squarely in the center of the Middle East.

sharing borders with five U .S. strategic partners in the region,

Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon.

Should it be considered an intelligence failure that we didn't see either that

Jalani at that time was a potent force to be dealt with or that Assad,

the regime, was rotting from within?

Look, I think...

Anyone you might have asked, either in the policy side, the intel side, whether

in state, NSC, DOD, our folks in the field, people would have been easily

to reckon, yes, the regime is stagnant.

You know things are brittle, but you don't know how brittle they are. And you

don't know what kind of punch knocks the whole thing to pieces.

More than two weeks after Assad fled Syria, Syrian families are still

for answers about so many of their loved ones taken by Assad's secret police

over the years. At least 200 ,000 people are missing.

I have trouble thinking of the collapse of the Assad regime.

It's 54 years.

54 years that the Syrians have been repressed.

And so when in 11 days a regime like this collapses, it takes you time to

understand it, to believe it.

And what we're identifying is multiple mass graves. All these places where

hundreds of thousands of bodies, men, women, children, elderly, had been not

just shot in the head, but mostly tortured to death. Really a sadistic

Anything was better than the Assad regime.

We saw the videos, how prisoners were treated.

The brutality of the regime.

Children born from...

raped mothers in prisons that were born in prisons.

Anything other than Assad is good, even if it's the devil.

During his first weeks in power, Alshara walked the streets of Damascus, talking

to people, reassuring everyone what his plans were.

From day one, when Ahmed Alshara took Damascus, he talked

about peace and reconciliation, reunifying the country.

He talked about disarmament, demobilization, reintegration. He used

phrases that you would read in a textbook about a political transition.

The world's press soon arrived to meet and talk with

the new leader.

As did a parade of foreign diplomats.

The world rushed to Damascus.

Foreign ministers, emirs, prime ministers, presidents are seeking to

al -Sharaf's hand, amazed by this historic opportunity, first time in more

50 years, to reshape the heart of the Middle East for the better.

As we all turn to the question of what comes next in Syria.

In Washington, the Biden administration was weighing what it should do.

We've taken note of statements by the leaders of these rebel groups in recent

days.

And they're saying the right things now. We were struck by the interviews that

Jolani gave in the early days after assuming power, in which, yes, he quote

-unquote said the right things, but said them with a degree of sophistication

and conviction and detail.

He gave us some reason to believe that this might be a different sort of

So we decided that at a certain point we would need to engage.

Less than two weeks after Alshara's victory, a U .S. State Department

headed by Barbara Leaf set out from neighboring Jordan to meet with him.

We took off down the highway at speed, and we drove through a very...

Dilapidated countryside, I will say. Really looked beaten down.

As we got into Damascus, it was difficult to measure what security would

like.

Were there militias roaming at will? Was there any security? Had all the

remnants of the regime fled for good?

They arrived at the presidential palace 12 days after Assad had fled to Moscow.

So we were walked into this big cavernous palace and taken

upstairs, and all of a sudden, there they were.

Talk about how he struck you.

Having worked for many four -star generals in the American military, I

I was talking to a very senior general, not that different than an American

commander, who had a very deep understanding of warfare, economics,

he wanted to achieve, how he might want to achieve it.

I walked away impressed.

He just had this air of calm, quiet authority and a whiff of charisma,

I mean, I had to almost close my eyes and remind myself I was talking to a

Syrian official with the very easy way he talked about Israel.

No diatribes, no recitation of 40 years of history, you know, the way Hafez al

-Assad would let me tell you about 1948, sort of start of the conversation.

And of course, at that time, The Israelis had moved in up on the Golan

And they were bombing?

And they were bombing.

Israel, long in a state of war with Syria, immediately started bombing and

dismantling Syria's remaining military capabilities.

Israel's been bombarding every part of Syria's military.

Fighter jets.

Naval assets, surface -to -surface missiles, they have taken out

The Israelis say they told the Biden administration what they were planning

do.

Alshara asked Barbara Leaf to get Israel to stop.

He was very matter -of -fact in his request.

He said, could you get the Israelis to stop bombing? They're scaring my people.

And he was at pains to say repeatedly, we have no argument with Israel.

I don't doubt that Ashara has no interest in going to war with Israel.

Michael Herzog was Israeli ambassador to the U .S. at the time.

He told me that Israel was particularly worried about Assad's weapons and

chemical stockpiles falling into the wrong hands.

We all know the background of Ashara and the people around him.

They all come from the schools of Al -Qaeda and ISIS.

They all have jihadi background, and that was and remains a source of concern

Israel. How does continuing to strike militarily with bombs

encourage al -Sharah's moderation? It would seem to me the opposite is true,

that that encourages the jihadists. Well, Israel is not going to...

Initially,

Israel did say the bombing campaign would be brief.

It is a very limited and temporary step.

But Israel has continued striking targets for months, killing an estimated

two dozen civilians in the process.

Israel has also seized land in southern Syria, expanding what it calls its

security zone.

At an Arab summit in March, Al -Shara asked for help.

I think behind Israel is an agenda, is an intention to weaken

Syria, to break it up and to expand Israeli boundaries.

without any accountability by the international community.

And that is really the recipe for future violence, not for peace.

They don't see it that way.

The French and the British, when they carved up the Middle East, didn't see it

that way either.

By mid -January 2025, when I returned to Syria, I was planning on seeing al

-Shara again, but it seemed he was distracted.

His honeymoon was coming to an end.

Resistance to his government was emerging around the country.

A large pocket was here in the south, in the city of Sueda, the heartland of

Syria's Druze.

The Druze are a minority religious group, an ancient offshoot of Shia

And since Al -Shara came to power, they have been reluctant to support him or

trust his jihadist followers.

Saqiba Zahm is commander of a large Druze militia called the Mountain

His people, he said, felt excluded.

He complained that the new government was stacked with al -Shara's own people.

The complaint that I heard is that Shara was talking his cabinet

with friends from his government in Idlib and they were all fellow

Was it inevitable that al -Shara did that?

Yeah, I think it is. You know, he's been fighting a war since he's 20 years old.

He's been a warrior. He's been leading a militia that is deeply Islamist.

When he first got to Idlib, he said, this is going to be an entity for

And so there's this deep Sunni supremacist attitude that comes along

Under scrutiny was one of al -Shara's initial cabinet members.

His justice minister was filmed in 2015 overseeing the execution of two women in

Idlib accused of corruption and prostitution.

How do you explain his appointment of a justice minister who

is in video executing two women?

protests over this.

There are still extremist elements, and this is the source of concern to many

secular Syrians.

Mr. Alshara is walking a tightrope.

Alshara has since replaced his justice minister, and by the end of March, he

formed a new cabinet that was much more inclusive.

Very interesting.

Do you speak English?

But these Druze leaders may not be assuaged. They cite too much bad

You can't say for us, oh, today I am an angel and forget my history.

You know?

It's not enough to say, OK, yesterday I was with Qaeda, yesterday my leader is

Osama bin Laden, but today my leader is the Syrian Muslim.

Ten years earlier, members of Al -Shara's group executed 20 Druze in an

village accusing them of heresy.

Al -Shara's group later said the attack went against his orders.

Today in Suwaida, the Druze are refusing to give up their guns.

How many men do you have in arms?

The day

after my meeting with the mountain brigade, we got a tip from a local

journalist.

There was a large convoy of al -Shara's soldiers patrolling in the nearby

countryside.

They were going from town to town in a show of

force, assuring Syrians that al -Shara was restoring order in the country.

But the soldiers were also here demanding loyalty, warning everyone

in no uncertain terms to cooperate in the fight against any armed resistance

al -Shahr's government.

At the end of the day, these soldiers pause to pray, a common Muslim ritual.

But al -Shara's forces are staunchly conservative Sunnis.

As seen by the Druze from nearby Sueda or by defeated Assad loyalists, rule by

band of Islamists is deeply troubling.

Under Assad, religion was downplayed.

Assad was an Alawite, a minority sect of Islam.

but he promoted a largely secular vision for Syria.

Assad's base was here along Syria's Mediterranean coast, in communities with

concentration of Alawites.

After Assad's defeat, some coastal residents feared for their safety, and

were reports that some were being targeted.

Then, in early March, Some Assad loyalists attacked one of Al -Shara's

government patrols.

Sixteen men lay dead, and more lethal attacks followed.

And today we will say that huge... security operations targeting forces

the Assad regime.

And so there was a general mobilization of the military.

And then the mosques began to call for jihad.

Tensions had been building for weeks with provocative online threats like

against the Alawites.

Some linked to suspicious foreign accounts.

Put hate in

your hearts, go to that coast, smash the Alawites.

Thousands of militiamen joined al -Shara's government forces and descended

the coast.

And then just a flood of videos began to come out. And some of the soldiers and

these militiamen making alouettes, you know, long strings of them, walk on

hands and knees, bark like a dog.

And then they started carrying out these massacres.

Just shooting people up and down.

It was a free -for -all. They were having a good time.

This eyewitness says three of his family members were executed, were blurring

his face to protect his identity.

So you wake up to these images that are then online and you and your wife are

together. Yeah.

She's Alawite. She's Alawite. You have relatives, in -laws living there. Yeah.

And three of my wife's cousins wrote us the next day. People came to their door.

Bang, bang, bang.

You open it up.

Who are you, Sidney or Alloway? It was the first thing that each one of them

said. They were asked.

One cousin who grew up with my son, we knew well, was shot at his doorstep. He

was 19, 20 years old.

Over the course of several days, An estimated 1200 people were killed,

Alawites.

Al

-Shara called

for a thorough investigation.

This investigation committee, will they actually provide reports with names?

Will those people be held accountable?

Those are real tests.

So look at them and ask Al -Shara. If you do that, we trust you. If you don't,

no, we don't trust you.

Damascus says it has successfully contained the offensive on the coast.

But while Ahmed al -Shara may be in control of some of the men in uniforms,

is not in control of all of the men with guns.

It is in Syria's far northeastern corner where al -Shara faces perhaps his

biggest challenge.

This is the homeland of Syria's Kurds.

the largest non -Arab minority in Syria.

Kurds have long been subject to systematic discrimination, including the

arbitrary denial of citizenship to around 150 ,000 Syria -born Kurds who

not allowed to have passports, who can't own property, get a marriage license or

find work, whose children are also considered non -citizens.

Kurds have not fared well elsewhere either.

They formed the largest stateless ethnic group in the world, with 30 million

people concentrated in an area straddling Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and

After Syria's civil war began in 2012, Kurds here in the northeast broke free

Assad and established a semi -autonomous region they call Rojava.

How did Syria ever lose control of the northeast?

When Assad's forces faced massive armed opposition during the Arab Spring,

they pulled troops out of the northeast to hold off against the opposition, the

resistance in the rest of the country.

So the Kurds split off, and they're currently a state within a state.

I went to Rojava in April 2025 to see and hear the Kurds' powerful and

popular rebel leader, General Mazloum Abdi Kobane.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

After the conference, I met with General Mazloum at his headquarters.

I want to begin by talking about this unity conference that took place

yesterday. I was there.

What is the significance of the declaration that came out of that

Do the people trust a former al -Qaeda commander to rule Syria

or to preserve or to give you autonomy?

From al -Shara's perspective,

Integrating the Kurds back into Syria is essential.

He needed to make a deal.

And why is northeast Syria important to al -Sharraf?

I mean, northeast Syria contains 80 % of Syria's natural energy resources.

So oil and gas, hugely significant, the lifeblood of the Syrian economy.

And then on top of that, it's the agricultural belt of the country. So if

is able to get anywhere close to feeding itself, It needs that region of Syria.

Without that under Damascus' control, there really is no hope.

And then there's water.

Rojava controls the Euphrates River in part, and the dam.

So that northeast, very important for the economy, oil, agriculture, water.

Mazloum also leads a 100 ,000 -man U .S.-backed army, the Syrian Democratic

Forces, or SDF.

which is battle -hardened and well -supplied.

The Americans trained and equipped the SDF to help them defeat ISIS after a

large swath of Kurdish territory was seized by ISIS in 2014.

The SDF definitely has some power in the negotiation with Shara, not only in

terms of the resources, but also because they have a pretty robust military

that's been trained by the United States and the Global Coalition, too.

And some have said that it might even be a larger military than the one that's

currently in Damascus.

But the Kurds still have an ISIS problem.

They have around 10 ,000 suspected ISIS fighters locked up in Kurdish prisons,

along with two massive camps filled with 40 ,000 women and children, the

families of these prisoners.

In the Kurdish city of Hasakah, I was allowed a look inside one of these

prisons. This one, filled with foreign fighters.

The

Kurds

need help repatriating these prisoners.

No one wants to take them.

29 prisons full of ISIS prisoners.

You're trying to repatriate them.

After weeks of

negotiations, Mazloum set out for Damascus to meet al -Shara and hammer

agreement. on Kurdish rights, autonomy, on resources, the military, and ISIS.

The broad outlines were that Muslim would put the SDF, Syrian Democratic

under the authority of the Ministry of Defense in Damascus.

And they came up with an agreement on oil that was going to give Kurds a big

share of all oil revenues.

And finally, there were issues concerning Kurdish status in the new

Al -Shara specifically agreed to recognize Kurds as fully Syrian, and he

guaranteed their constitutional rights.

The Kurds wanted Syria to be called the Syrian Republic, so it would be Syria

for all Syrians.

Traditionally, it's been the Syrian Arab Republic.

Initially, Kurds celebrated the agreement.

Then, three days later, al -Shara issued a new Syrian constitution.

It was not what Mazloum envisioned.

It had Syrian Arab Republic right at the top, and it didn't write the Kurds in.

It didn't give them representation.

It didn't outline the agreement.

The Constitution did promise to protect minority rights, but the Kurds said the

language was too vague.

The document also contained Article 3, which deals with Islamic jurisprudence.

It was changed from Islamic law will be a source of law.

That's what it was under Assad. Now it's Islamic law.

will be the source of law.

So this makes it very potentially Sharia law will become the law of the land.

This sent a shudder through many of the minority communities.

I would imagine you were tempted to pick up the phone and call Al -Shara and

say, what's going on?

In an open letter, Kurdish authorities laid out their complete rejection of the

new constitution and its attempt to recreate a dictatorship.

Syria, they wrote, is a homeland for all its people.

we will not accept the reconstruction of an authoritarian regime.

To date, Al -Shara has decided not to revise the constitution.

The question I have is how he could, three days after having this deal signed

with Mazloum, come out with a constitutional declaration. At the very

says the Syrian Arab Republic.

Yes. That is a glaring piece that has not been fixed.

He's making mistakes.

I went back to speak via Zoom with Ambassador Barbara Leaf.

If he wants a stable Syria, he's going to be compelled to take into account the

changed landscape of Syria, changed by 14 years of this brutal civil war.

But he has to look at a longer scope of history where these communities were.

pitted against one another.

So the high degree of mistrust is in multiple directions, but they all

Damascus.

I wanted to hear al -Shahr's response to all the turmoil around the country.

I repeatedly pressed for an interview, to no avail.

We did visit this courthouse in the city of Homs, central Syria.

We met this man, Chief Judge Hassan al -Aqra, a staunch supporter of al -Shahr.

At the time, al -Aqra was systematically going through all the files that were

seized from the Assad regime.

He said new laws were still being written.

But the issue of justice requires a little hesitation until new laws, new

regulations, and new measures come to us.

And we are looking to build Syria for all Syrians.

A Syria that is compatible with all sects, the jurisprudence of Sayyid Ahmed

-Sharah, so that the whole world is reassured that the next Syria is the

Syria.

Today, Syria has a new history to write.

You write it with your own hands.

In May, President Trump made a trip to the Middle East.

There was a jolt of good news for Al -Shara.

After discussing the situation in Syria with the Crown Prince, your Crown

Prince, in Saudi Arabia, Trump announced that economic sanctions imposed during

the Assad regime would finally be lifted. I will be ordering the cessation

sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness.

Despite opposition from some hawks in D .C., Trump was widely praised for the

move.

People in the administration were opposed to this. So what was behind all

I think it's very clear what was behind that. He heard over the last several

months consistently from the Saudis, from Erdogan, from others, that this was

existential moment for Syria to get onto a path, a long one, albeit, but a path

of recovery and successful political and economic and security transition.

And that that would be good for regional interests. That would be good for U .S.

interests.

The following day, Al -Shara and Trump met.

The former al -Qaeda commander, who spent years in American prison camps in

Iraq, accused of making powerful roadside bombs, had come a long way.

Young, attractive guy, tough guy.

You know, strong pass.

A strong pass fighter.

The situation is very fluid.

We just have to wait and see what happens.

We need to see this new administration be inclusive of all Syrians.

We need to make sure that Syria will no longer be a center of terrorism.

If Syria can be united and stable and Iran can be kept out, then the

temporary tactical defeat of Iran and proxies will become a permanent defeat.

If not...

If Syria becomes a failed state, if it goes back to active fighting and various

outside forces intervening and split up, it will open the door for Iran again.

As we were leaving Syria, events underscored just how fragile al -Shara's

is.

Sectarian clashes erupted in several cities after a Druze religious leader

falsely accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad.

Around 100 Druze militiamen and government security forces were killed.

The Israelis, with a large Druze minority

at home, have been issuing warnings to al -Shara not to harm the Druze.

To make their point, an Israeli missile landed right outside al -Shara's palace

gate.

to stop threatening the Druze community.

For now, al -Shara remains popular with the majority of Syrians.

But he has been keeping a lower profile of late, avoiding most interviews.

I mean, he enjoyed a honeymoon.

He talked to diplomats like yourself. He talked to journalists. He visited other

regional states.

But he's been relatively quiet.

He's not in a honeymoon phase anymore.

No, and governance is hard.

The easy part is going on a foreign trip, but the hardest part is

It's governance.

It's the daily slog of reconstructing an administrative apparatus, which is

pretty worn and torn and riddled with corruption from the years of destruction

of the Assad family rule.

It's a hard, hard road ahead.

For more on this and other Frontline programs, visit our website at pbs .org.

Frontline's Syria After Assad is available on Amazon Prime Video.