Updated December 20, 2024 at 10:30 AM ET
LONDON — The rebels who've taken control of most of Syria haven't published a budget or donor list. Their fundraising is opaque, and methods have changed wildly in the past decade.
Speculation swirls online and in conversations over which countries — Turkey, Arab and Gulf states, Ukraine, even the CIA or Israel — may have helped them with cash, weapons or training.
But scholars who've tracked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, for many years say the group is largely self-funded. They say it has raised most of its money by levying taxes in its power base of Idlib, in northwest Syria, and by running a key border crossing there with Turkey. It has also likely received remittances from wealthy Syrians abroad who opposed the now-deposed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime.
As for weapons, HTS' arsenal is believed to consist of munitions it captured on the battlefield — from Assad's forces, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah or other militant groups — as well as weapons it manufactures on its own. Some of the latter may be based on prototypes donated from outside Syria — possibly by Ukraine — and reverse-engineered locally with 3D printers, experts say.
HTS may have benefitted indirectly from Turkish, Israeli and U.S. support for other anti-Assad rebel groups. Its leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa — formerly known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani — had contact with U.S. officials through intermediaries in the past. But HTS remains a designated terrorist group by the United Nations Security Council, the United States and other countries, and no direct funding or links have been made public.
"Jihadis like HTS historically have always been independent and don't want to have anything to do with any country because they consider them to be either apostates or infidels," says Aaron Zelin, an expert on jihadi politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "In this new stage though, clearly they want to have relations to legitimize this new [HTS-led Syrian] government, as well as get a lot of money and aid to help rebuild Syria."
HTS has not granted NPR's request for an interview with its leader. And the group has said little publicly about the sources and volume of its funding and weapons. So NPR asked six scholars and analysts who have tracked the group for many years. Here are some of their findings.
HTS' old funding model
The rebel group was founded around the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011. Some of its members were linked to a precursor of the Islamic State in Iraq. In 2013, they broke with ISIS and pledged allegiance to al-Qaida instead.
After that, they rebranded several times, and in 2017, began using the name Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which in Arabic means Organization for the Liberation of Greater Syria. It was part of what the group has described as a transformation away from hard-line Islamist politics, to governance in northwest Syria.
Before that, though, HTS relied on traditional militant fundraising methods: extortion, kidnapping and oil-smuggling. The rebels made at least $94 million from prisoner-exchange deals with the Syrian government, Iran, Lebanon and Italy, according to 2021 research by the Middle East Institute.
"Going back to 2011, we regarded them as a straight jihadist group, with funding from oil-smuggling and extorting local people," says Barry Marston, who manages what the BBC calls its jihadist media team, which monitors what HTS and its rivals say online. "But the last decade has seen this transition from being jihadists to essentially a bureaucracy — a very bureaucratically minded entity that we saw in Idlib."
Idlib is the province of northwest Syria that's home to up to 5 million people, where HTS has run a de facto quasi-state since 2017, called the Syrian Salvation Government (SSG).
Taxation in Idlib
In Idlib, the HTS-run government fingerprinted residents, issued photo IDs and levied taxes. Those fees included a 2.5% flat tax for Muslim charity, as well as a road tax and various income taxes on individuals and small businesses, Zelin says.
HTS used that revenue to pay salaries to its fighters, and to manufacture drones and other weapons. But it also saved lots of the money for future battles.
"Farmers' olive produce for example, they [HTS] would be extracting like 5% tax — that sort of thing," Marston says. (Other analysts say that in some cases, olive farmers paid as high as 10% tax.) "But a very large proportion of the funds they were getting were saved for, in their words, 'liberating the remainder of the country.' "
The fact that tax revenue didn't go directly back into the community, to fix roads and bridges damaged by years of fighting, made some residents angry — and fueled protests.
"Syrians in Idlib complained a great deal about the lack of resources, about the terrible infrastructure — about how HTS was not really providing goods and services to the population," says Fawaz Gerges, professor of Middle Eastern politics at the London School of Economics.
Some of those residents' needs ended up being met by relief from the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations.
"[HTS] actually benefit from the fact that three-fourths of the population that they controlled in Idlib was IDPs [internally displaced people]," notes Zelin, from the Washington Institute. "So they didn't necessarily need a super big budget because the U.N. and other NGOs helped out in the IDP camps."
However, HTS also asked IDPs to pay annual rent for tents placed on public land.
HTS runs border crossings with Turkey
The rebels set up toll booths at Syria's international border with Turkey, where they collected customs fees from aid deliveries and commercial traffic. Fees ranged from $3 to $7 for each ton of goods, experts say.
At the Bab al-Hawa crossing — the main entry point to northern Syria for civilian, humanitarian and commercial traffic — HTS collected up to $15 million per month.
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Analysts believe HTS also confiscated weapons from other militant groups at border crossings too.
Is HTS tied to Turkey? Trump thinks so
President-elect Donald Trump told a press conference Monday that Turkey was behind Assad's downfall, calling it an "unfriendly takeover."
Most of the experts NPR interviewed say Turkey may benefit from the HTS takeover of Syria. But that doesn't mean the country directed or funded it, they say.
"Turkey is really the winner of what happened in Syria," says Gerges of the London School of Economics. "Without at least a green light or a yellow light by Turkey, I don't think HTS would have risked all-out war against Assad."
But Turkey, a NATO member, still officially considers HTS a terrorist group. However, the Turkish foreign minister on Wednesday told Al Jazeera he thinks entities should remove that designation, starting with the U.N.
HTS leader Sharaa told a Turkish newspaper Wednesday that Syria would establish strategic and commercial relations with Turkey, and that it would not forget the "kindness" Turkey has shown to Syrian refugees.
"There are lots of rumors and discussions about how Turkey's intelligence agency, the MIT, has assisted them with training, intelligence — even some weapons possibly," Zelin says.
Tacit Turkish support for HTS expansion may have begun as early as a year ago.
In October 2023, HTS expanded its control eastward out of Idlib and into the Syrian city of Afrin and surrounding villages, which had been controlled by Turkish-backed rivals. But the Turkish-backed groups didn't put up a fight. That suggests Turkey may have acquiesced to the expansion of HTS territory, Charles Lister, director of the Syria program at the Middle East Institute, wrote at the time.
Another factor? Drones. Turkey is a major global producer of drones. And HTS has lots of them.
"I have no doubt in my mind that Turkey either supplied the [HTS-led] opposition with drones or even trained them on the use of the drones," Gerges says.
Some HTS drones also look a lot like Ukrainian ones
In October 2023, Syrian rebels used explosive-laden drones to kill dozens of people at a graduation ceremony for officers in Assad's military. It's unclear if HTS was behind it. There was no claim of responsibility.
Zelin says he believes HTS was involved, and that the graduation attack was an early "proof of concept" for what the rebels planned to do countrywide — with the help of 3D printers. "After that, they were able to print and print and print [on 3D printers] and use these [drones] for a broader-scale offensive targeting the regime," he says.
Some Ukrainian and U.S. media have quoted unnamed Ukrainian officials as saying some of the drones used by Syrian rebels over the past year — particularly those used against Russian forces allied with Assad — have come from Ukraine.
The experts NPR interviewed say the Ukrainian claims may be exaggerated. It may actually have been a very small number of Ukrainian prototypes, that HTS was then able to manufacture locally.
"Our understanding is that they did source drones from overseas and then perhaps repurposed them to develop locally," says the BBC's Marston, who has tracked HTS propaganda online. "They were very proud of the fact that they were claiming these were locally produced."
HTS has published propaganda videos of its members demonstrating a type of exploding drone, which it used in battles over Hama and Homs, en route to Damascus earlier this month.
Any truth to the idea Israel might have a hand in this?
In 2019, an outgoing Israeli military commander confirmed in an interview that his government had been arming some anti-Assad rebels in Syria. Over the years, there have also been news reports of Syrian rebels being treated in Israeli hospitals. (NPR has not independently verified these.)
It's true that Israel, the U.S. and Jordan all funded and armed some Syrian rebel factions, Zelin says. But they were rival, secular groups — not HTS.
As in the case of Turkey, Israel — another neighbor of Syria's — may also see opportunities in Assad's ouster. It has seized territory in southern Syria, and unleashed airstrikes across the country. Israel's archrival Iran — which backed Assad and transported arms through Syria to proxy fighters in the region — has also been weakened.
The HTS leader's response to Israeli incursions has been surprising to many Syrians, the BBC's Marston says. While Sharaa called for a withdrawal of Israeli troops, he has said he does not want conflict with Israel and would not allow Syria to become a launchpad for attacks on the Jewish state.
"We did not hear the kind of reaction you might have expected from an Islamist militant group," Marston says. "There's been a lot of criticism from a very vocal Islamist opposition to HTS, accusing them of failing to take a robust stance against Israel, and accusing them of effectively becoming a proxy force for the West in Syria."
That has led to some speculation that Israel may have funded HTS in the first place. But that is unfounded, according to all of the experts NPR interviewed.
Israeli officials were likely caught off-guard by the speed of the HTS takeover, and may have even preferred to keep a weakened Assad in place, for regional stability, Gerges says.
Other Arab or Gulf states?
Qatar helped negotiate a 2014 deal to free U.S. journalist Peter Theo Curtis, who had been held by HTS when the group was called Jabhat al-Nusra and affiliated with al-Qaida. So that Gulf state had some communication with the rebels back then. But that was likely the extent of it, experts say.
Energy-rich Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, may have the cash to fund HTS, but the experts interviewed believe the countries have not done so in the past decade.
"The Saudis and Emiratis are viscerally opposed to Islamists," Gerges says. "In fact, Arab states are very anxious about the resurgence of HTS because of what it means for their own security."
Any popular grassroots revolution, like the one HTS has just led in Syria, could make unelected royals like those in Saudi Arabia quite nervous, he says.
How about Washington?
In the lead-up to the HTS takeover, the U.S. quietly more than doubled its troop numbers inside Syria. On Thursday, Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon spokesperson, said about 2,000 U.S. troops — up from 900 — have been in Syria "at a minimum months ... it's been going on for awhile." The Pentagon says U.S. forces are in Syria primarily to prevent a resurgence of ISIS.
On Friday, a team of senior U.S. diplomats is also in Damascus to meet the rebels. It's the U.S. government's first known face-to-face talks since HTS' 2018 designation as a terrorist group.
But the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and Turkey, James Jeffrey, said in a 2021 TV interview that years ago, he received indirect "communications" from HTS, sent through NGO intermediaries.
"We want to be your friend. We're not terrorists. We're just fighting Assad," Jeffrey quoted Sharaa as saying.
He also asked Jeffrey to take HTS off the U.S. terrorist list, which the U.S. did not do. Sharaa reiterated that request again in interviews this week.
Those early, indirect communications didn't yield any U.S. support for HTS. But they may have convinced the U.S. not to kill Sharaa, Gerges notes, and they may have established a back channel for intelligence sharing.
"There have been a lot of rumors that HTC and [Sharaa] have given intelligence to Turkey — which then passes it on to the U.S. — about ISIS and al-Qaida figures that all somehow end up getting airstrikes on them," the Washington Institute's Zelin says. "But there's no way of confirming that based on anything in the public record."
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