By and by, Ahmad al-Sharaa, stage name Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, will probably rule Syria as a dictator and oppress the country’s non-governing Alawite minority, particularly given its association (synonymity) with decades of repression under the Assad family.

If that’s how it plays out, it’d be an inversion of the internal dynamics that typified five decades of hereditary dictatorship during which the Alawite elite perpetuated an increasingly absurdist personality cult around Hafez al-Assad and his less-capable son, Bashar, to the detriment of… well, more or less everyone if we’re honest, but particularly Syria’s Sunni majority.

That was itself an inversion of the pre-Ba’athist landscape in which the Alawites were marginalized as poor and backward and struggled for representation and influence in the fraught process of creating a modern state post-French colonialism.

This is a crude (borderline objectionable) characterization, but here it is anyway: You can take the Sunni extremist out of the jihad, but you can’t take the jihad out of the Sunni extremist. And al-Sharaa led al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise along with a series of successor outfits for the entirety of Syria’s civil war. Under Assad, it was illegal to be a member of a Salafist organization, and al-Qaeda’s quintessentially (manifestly, archetypically) Salafist.

At best, al-Sharaa will establish something like a Sunni-dominated, rubber-stamp legislative body with token representation for Syria’s kaleidoscopic demographics while insulating himself through a military-security apparatus comprised mostly (and likely entirely among senior officials) of former Sunni jihadists exhibiting varying degrees of bloodlust for Shiites, Christians, Kurds and sundry other mulhidun and apostates.

At worst (and, I should add, at present), Hayat Tahrir al-Sham will establish a de facto state for itself in Syria, which is to say Syria is currently, and may well remain, a national manifestation of al-Qaeda’s defunct local franchisee.

As things stand today, a year on from the collapse of the Assad regime, it’s entirely fair to suggest Syria did in fact become the Salafist state imagined by ISIS — which, at its peak, controlled half the country including Raqqa, Syria’s sixth-largest city — just not under the group’s banner.

Where ISIS went wrong strategically was making itself an enemy of everyone, including al-Qaeda. Ideologically anyway, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and ISIS are aligned, even as al-Sharaa would vehemently deny such an assessment, and while conceding that ISIS’s methods and uncompromising (to put it lightly) approach to administering captured urban areas distinguishes it as too barbaric for the 20th century, never mind the 21st.

The idea that al-Sharaa’s serious about reestablishing secular pluralism in Syria is risible until proven otherwise. I say “reestablishing” not because anyone took the Assad regime’s pretensions to inclusivity and secularism especially seriously, but rather because what’s on the cards for Syria in the event Hayat Tahrir al-Sham can’t shake its core ideology may look considerably worse than the stability-through-repression tactics which defined the Assad family’s decades-long dictatorship.

Of course, al-Sharaa won’t initially have the Assad regime’s organizational capacity to systematically root out, imprison, torture and kill dissidents. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham hasn’t established anything that even loosely approximates unified control over the country, and while the group does have quite a bit of administrative experience having set up the trappings of civil service in Idlib, rebuilding and administering an entire country following one of modern history’s worst civil wars is a Herculean endeavor. It’ll be particularly challenging in Syria given the country’s demographic heterogeneity which, to reiterate, hardly lends itself to government by an erstwhile Salafist terror cell.

Assuming Syria doesn’t descend back into anarchy, which in this case means assuming al-Sharaa survives as “president,” the most likely outcome is a Sunni fundamentalist, quasi-fiefdom for Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in the population centers from Damascus up through Idlib and Aleppo with varying degrees of de facto self-rule and localized administration outside the western corridor.

That’s the context for the death of two American troops and their interpreter over the weekend in Palmyra, near the Unesco World Heritage site ISIS (in)famously destroyed in 2015 (morons that they were, because who blows up a bargaining chip?).

Somehow, a single gunman in the city managed not only to kill two US special operators and their sherpa, but wound five more military personnel before local security forces managed to subdue him. Apparently, the US soldiers were there to provide security for a meeting between envoys from al-Sharaa’s central government and local officials.

Someone from al-Sharaa’s nascent interior ministry said they tried to alert the US. “The international coalition forces did not take the Syrian warnings about the possibility of an ISIS breach into account,” the spokesman said.

On Sunday, Damascus said the shooter was himself a member of the Syrian security forces. He was under investigation for “extremist views,” and was scheduled for dismissal. Subsequent media reports indicated al-Sharaa brought in a dozen people for questioning in connection with the plot.

In other words: Saturday’s incident was probably an inside job, underscoring the blurry line between Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and ISIS. It’s not that “HTS = ISIS.” It doesn’t. But not in the same way that Hamas doesn’t equal ISIS.

Members of al-Sharaa’s group are, or at least were, full-on jihadists with no guiding political ideology unless you count killing infidels. It’ll be hard to integrate them into a professionalized military whose purpose for existing is providing for safety and security in the name of stability as opposed to killing and maiming in the name of religion.

These are the people Syria’s religious minorities are supposed to trust to reestablish order and keep the peace. Bear in mind that even in cases where al-Sharaa’s security forces aren’t extremists (or are genuinely reformed), many of them will still harbor deep-seated resentment against Alawites for atrocities committed against Sunnis during the civil war, and for political oppression in the decades previous.

Pete Hegseth released a ridiculous statement following the deadly incident in Palmyra. “If you target Americans you will spend the rest of your brief, anxious life knowing the United States will hunt you, find you and ruthlessly kill you,” he fumed. Donald Trump said something similar, promising “very serious retaliation.” Suffice to say none of that means anything to a Salafi jihadist, resigned as they are to a bloody death, which is part and parcel of the job description.

While he was in Washington last month, al-Sharaa agreed to cooperate with US forces still stationed in Syria with a mandate to prevent an ISIS resurgence. I suppose that means the al-Tanf US base in the country’s southeast doesn’t constitute an illegal occupation anymore.

Al-Tanf’s strategically significant, but as we saw in early 2024 — when three US servicemembers were killed at the nearby Tower 22 logistics hub in a one-way drone attack launched by Iran’s proxies in Iraq — it’s also a target. During the original fight against ISIS, it served as a training camp for the repeatedly reheated leftovers of Syrian opposition forces, which were reconstituted and renamed so many times even they didn’t know who they were or what they were called on any given day.

These days, al-Tanf’s considered to be baggage the US would be better served to shed. Three servicemembers injured in Saturday’s attack were flown there by helicopter after being shot. There are around 1,000 US troops still operating in Syria despite Trump’s efforts (which I think are earnest) to extricate the US from the country entirely.

For now, al-Sharaa seems more befuddled by Trump than anything else, but once the novelty wears off, he may see an opportunity in an eminently exploitable US president with an affinity for strongmen.

At their White House meeting last month, Trump baptized al-Sharaa with branded cologne. “It’s the best fragrance,” Trump said, of his signature, unisex perfume, before offering al-Sharaa an extra bottle for every woman in what he imagined was a Damascus harem. “How many wives?” Trump asked. “With you guys, I never know.”