Whilst global headlines question the reformed leader of the Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Ahmed al-Sharaa—more popularly known by his pseudonym Abu Mohammed al-Jolani—the inevitable sense of déjà vu crops up, and the first thing that comes to mind is how preceding the fall of Kabul in August 2021, the same world leaders and intellectuals championed the reformed Taliban.
Whilst al-Jolani himself has already dismissed comparisons to the Taliban in a recent interview on the BBC, HTS has held multiple conferences over the years in Idlib on how to learn from the Taliban victory in 2021, and there were celebrations in Idlib when the Taliban marched into Kabul in 2021.
As the Taliban now celebrate the fall of Damascus, the first contact between the two is underway, and although al-Jolani himself says that the situation in Syria is very different to Afghanistan, what the Taliban started in Afghanistan continues to reverberate in the Arab world with regard to a resurgence of political Islam. The symbolic twining of the two victories in the space of three years will echo for the rest of the Middle East.
The lasting impact of 1980s Afghanistan
Almost all the Arab political Islam movements post-1980s and subsequent conflicts between security states such as Algeria, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority, and Syria had their roots in the Western-supported Afghan mujahedeen fight against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
From President Ronald Regan calling the Afghans mujahedeen "freedom fighters" and the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to the vicious civil war in Algeria, there had been clear links and inspiration between the Islamic groups that had triumphed against the Soviets. Just as the Afghan triumph against the Soviets was cheered in the Arab world, so was the recent triumph of the Taliban against the Americans in 2021.
