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 extensive…