Leader of rebels who toppled Syrian president Assad named interim president

The leader of the former rebel group that toppled Syrian President Bashar Assad has been named the country’s interim president, following a meeting of the former insurgent factions.

The spokesman for Syria’s new, de facto government’s military operations sector, Colonel Hassan Abdul Ghani, announced the appointment of Ahmad al-Sharaa as the country’s president “in the transitional phase”, the state-run SANA news agency said.

The appointment of Mr al-Sharaa as the country’s president was expected.

He announced the cancellation of the country’s constitution passed in 2012 under Mr Assad’s rule.

He also announced the dissolution of armed factions in the country, which he said would be absorbed into state institutions, and said Mr al-Sharaa would be authorised to form a temporary legislative council until a new constitution is drafted.

Mr al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Golani, is the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an Islamist former insurgent group that led the lightning offensive that toppled Mr Assad last month.

The group was once affiliated with al Qaida but has since denounced its former ties, and in recent years Mr al-Sharaa has sought to cast himself as a champion of pluralism and tolerance.

The United States had previously placed a 10 million-dollar (£8 million) bounty on Mr al-Sharaa but cancelled it last month after a US delegation visited Damascus and met him.

Since Mr Assad’s fall, HTS has become the de facto ruling party and has set up an interim government largely composed of officials from the local government it previously ran in rebel-held Idlib province.

As the former Syrian army collapsed with Mr Assad’s downfall, Mr al-Sharaa has called for the creation of a new unified national army and security forces, but questions have loomed over how the interim administration can bring together a patchwork of former rebel groups, each with their own leaders and ideology.

Even knottier is the question of the US-backed Kurdish groups that carved out an autonomous enclave early in Syria’s civil war, never fully siding with the Assad government or the rebels seeking to topple him.

Since Mr Assad’s fall, there has been an escalation in clashes between the Kurdish forces and Turkish-backed armed groups allied with HTS in northern Syria.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces were not present at Wednesday’s meeting of the country’s armed factions and there was no immediate comment from the group.

Mr al-Sharaa had been expected to appear in a televised speech following the meeting, but it remained unclear if he would. The exact mechanism under which the factions selected him as interim president was also not clear.