The British NGO That DIDN'T Make al-Jolani into al-Sharra
Some claim a British NGO pulled Syria’s new president from the ranks of jihad. But mistaking late encounters for origin stories obscures local agency and carries an orientalist tint.
The easiest way to explain developments in the Middle East is to throw a blanket of American, British, or French involvement over them and see what it catches. And often, it does catch something: some partial truth, some moment of contact but never the whole story. Which is why it ends up misleading.
As readers of this space and anyone with even a basic grasp of history would know, this is not to suggest that former or current imperial powers are absent from the region’s present. They remain deeply entangled, both openly and covertly. They have been for more than 150 years—building, destroying, configuring, reconfiguring. But to extrapolate every development in the Middle East from the activities of Western intelligence services is to deny the agency of local political and social actors. There’s something orientalist in that impulse, don’t you think?
A prime example has been unfolding in recent months with the rise of Ahmad al-Sharra as interim president of Syria. I’ve written extensively about his and HTS’s trajectory, from the post-2015 shift toward localised jihadism to the pragmatic governance style in Idlib that drew the attention of policymakers and scholars alike.
Still, it’s far more tempting to frame al-Sharra’s path from Idlib to Damascus as an Anglo-American project than to follow his actual political steps and situate them within Syria’s broader Islamist and wartime landscape.
The British NGO Inter Mediate—founded by Tony Blair’s former advisor and current national security chief to Keir Starmer, Jonathan Powell in 2011—is now being credited, in some circles, with “pulling al-Sharra from the ranks of terrorism into formal politics.” This story first surfaced during a gathering of establishment figures in Baltimore in early May, where former U.S. diplomat Robert S. Ford recounted his experiences in the region.
Ford, who served in Iraq, Algeria, and Syria, claims Inter Mediate hired him to travel to Idlib in 2023 and again in 2024 “to help with their efforts to get this man out of the terrorist world and into normal politics.” He admits he was initially hesitant: “I imagined myself in an orange jumpsuit with a knife to my neck,” but later decided to go after speaking to others who had met al-Sharra.
As you can see, the tone is unserious at best. It drips with condescension, theatrical self-importance, and the failed wit of a certain kind of retired diplomat suddenly cut off from the corridors of power. Attention is addictive, especially for those who once moved within its glow. Ford’s delivery, unfortunately, reflects a broader tendency among U.S. diplomats in the region. Surely, there are exceptions, to be fair.
His comments, accompanied by a ‘before-and-after’ photo of al-Sharra (first in a beard, then in a suit), inevitably fueled conspiracies about British intelligence staging Assad’s fall and installing a new ruler. But a more sober reading of the Syrian civil war and the autonomous governance al-Jolani established in Idlib, largely enabled by Turkey offers a far more plausible explanation than three meetings between Jolani and a few Western institutions.
There’s also a basic fallacy of causation at work. A substantial body of research on jihadist groups in Syria highlights a process of internal rupture and adaptation that began around 2015, well before any Western NGO set foot in Idlib. By 2021, Jolani had stepped into the spotlight, most notably through his interview with PBS Frontline, where he presented himself as a political actor rather than a militant. It was precisely this transformation that made meetings with organizations like Inter Mediate possible in 2023. Otherwise, as Ford himself admits, they would have ended up “in orange suits with a knife to their throats.” The timeline alone makes his account implausible. Do you see what I mean? But it does serve a purpose.
This is how al-Sharra and the Syrian interim government came to be portrayed in some Arab media as the product of British intelligence. I’m not sure how Inter Mediate, a registered NGO, morphed into MI6 in this telling, or how a handful of public meetings in 2023 supposedly enabled al-Sharra to depose Assad and install a new regime. One outlet even claimed that Inter Mediate now has an office inside the presidential palace in Damascus and advises the government directly. The Syrian interim administration has denied this, and rightly so. What actually happened is far less cinematic. Inter Mediate, alongside other NGOs, met with al-Sharra in Idlib because it was one of the few governates functioning with any semblance of administrative order, serving a population of over four million. That’s all.
Yes, Jonathan Powell’s background makes the story seem more plausible and provocative. But the real story of al-Sharra is more grounded in Syrian politics than the spy thriller version suggests. There are gaps, especially regarding his time in U.S. custody in Iraq in 2006, but his activities since establishing himself in Idlib are traceable.
These facts, however, don’t seem to matter when the mythology of Anglo-American omnipotence takes over. Ford’s speech has now circulated in Turkish media, feeding into domestic anxieties.
There are two reasons for this. First, Turkey is engaged in sensitive negotiations with the Kurdish movement and the PKK, and any shift in Syria’s internal dynamics has the potential to impact the process either stabilising it or pushing it toward derailment. Syrian Kurds, aligned closely with the PKK, remain in a deadlock with al-Sharra’s administration—a political standoff with serious consequences. At such a moment, narratives that further delegitimise the interim government gain traction. Already weakened on the international stage by its mishandling of sectarian violence against Alawites and the ongoing strife between Druze communities and Bedouin Arabs, the administration is vulnerable. So I can see the logic behind these stories. But the al-Sharra government is already walking a minefield; it doesn’t need a fabricated narrative to undermine or discredit him further.
Second, Powell’s past involvement in Turkey’s earlier peace talks with the PKK at the end of the 2000s, along with his role in the Northern Ireland negotiations during the 1990s, adds to the intrigue. I interviewed Powell in 2013 at the height of the last peace process. That conversation remains the most cited in Turkish media on conflict resolution. But it also marked the end of Powell’s active role in the Kurdish file.
So let’s be clear: neither Powell nor Inter Mediate is involved in the current process between the PKK and the Turkish state. In fact, the entire negotiation dynamic is so quintessentially ala Turca shaped by the extremely weird choreography between Bahçeli and Öcalan that it defies the logic and structure conflict resolution experts typically bring. The process started without a formal framework, negotiation table, or declared agenda, and is at the moment unfolding through signals and symbolic gestures by actors who usually speak in riddles.
Over the years, one rule of thumb has served me well both as a journalist and as a scholar of the region: if a theory claims to explain everything, it usually explains very little about the actual politics at play.
(Next week, let’s turn to a different anxiety involving another American diplomat. Tom Barrack, the current U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and special envoy to Syria, made remarks that added to the debate about the so-called “Lebanonization of Turkey.”)
This was very well and memorably put: “if a theory claims to explain everything, it usually explains very little about the actual politics at play”
Also, very much looking forward to the Tom Barrack piece!