What Would It Take to Remove Syria’s New Government From the U.S. Terrorism List?

Editor’s Note: Can the United States work with the new government in Syria? One of the obstacles is the U.S. government’s listing of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the organization’s leader—Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani, now the Syrian president—as terrorists linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Jawlani has claimed to have reformed, and some analysts argue that delisting is a necessary step toward sanctions relief and postwar recovery. The Middlebury Institute of International Studies’s Jason Blazakis explains what the process for delisting should look like, if done right.

Daniel Byman

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On Dec. 8, 2024, a designated terrorist group took over Syria’s government. This has sparked an intense debate over whether the U.S. should remove the terrorist designation tag that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) has carried for the past decade. On the one hand, advocates for HTS’s delisting as a terrorist group argue that this is critical to the process of rebuilding Syria. Skeptics of delisting are uncertain of HTS’s true stripes given the group’s and its leadership’s ties to terrorist outfits like al-Qaeda. HTS is treated as a terrorist group not only by the United States, but also by the United Kingdom and the European Union, and is listed at the United Nations 1267 Sanctions Committee due to its links to al-Qaeda.

Delisting terrorist groups is not easy work. I know because, for more than a decade, I led every effort in the State Department related to the additions and subtractions to the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs). I directed the office that first added HTS to the FTO list, when we amended the al Nusrah Front (ANF) FTO designation in 2018 to add HTS as an ANF alias. Before that, in 2013, my previous office at the State Department designated HTS’s current leader, Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani, as a specially designated global terrorist. Make no mistake, when these terrorist designations were made there was little doubt that Jawlani, ANF, and HTS came from the same tree of terror as al-Qaeda and Islamic State. The Biden administration knew this and chose to defer the decision on whether or not to remove HTS from the FTO list.

Jawlani was assigned by Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to represent the Islamic State’s interests in Syria during the height of the Syrian civil war. While Jawlani and HTS claim to have broken ranks from the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, it is important that any possible delisting of Jawlani and HTS go by the book.

The first step in an especially sensitive delisting is to have the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau work with the intelligence community to assess HTS’s activities. Their charge is to determine whether the group has engaged in acts of terrorism or has current links to groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. The situation in Syria is murky, and, as a result, policymakers need a detailed intelligence report from the U.S. intelligence agencies to guide them. To move forward, HTS would require a clean bill of health—meaning that the group is no longer carrying out attacks against civilians, does not represent a threat to U.S. national security interests, and does not maintain active links to al-Qaeda or the Islamic State.

If HTS gets a clean bill of health and it looks like the group and Jawlani have truly reformed and walked away from their terrorist past, the government has three options to proceed. Any of them could be time consuming. Common reasons why groups are slow to move off the FTO list include the inherently long bureaucratic process to delist groups because of the need for intense interagency coordination and persistent uncertainty regarding intelligence about the group’s activities. The process can also be slowed by a lack of urgency and risk aversion; senior policymakers might not have a strong interest in removing a former terrorist group from the list or fear a removed group might reengage in terrorist activity and make them look weak on terrorism.

But if the process moves forward, the most common pathway is for the State Department to base its decision on a “change of circumstances.” This is the approach used to delist terrorist groups when they have reformed—for example, by disavowing violence—or have been determined to be defunct. This was used when the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army (FARC), a Colombian-based group that engaged in terrorism for five decades, disarmed and dissolved.

The other two options are not commonly used. During the Obama administration, Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), an Iranian terrorist outfit, was removed from the FTO list based on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s discretion. In theory, the new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, can also remove any group from the FTO list with one swipe of the pen.

The third pathway is removing an FTO from the list based on “national security reasons,” but, for good reason, this has never been used. Such a delisting would imply, as the discretionary pathway would, that the U.S. government does not have the legal basis to establish that the group no longer engages in terrorism.

The safest pathway for the Trump administration is the “change of circumstances” approach. This will require a comprehensive assessment of HTS’s current strategy, its intentions, and its connections to other groups. As the former U.S. ambassador to Syria recently stated, the Trump administration should make clear to HTS now what milestones the group needs to meet in order for it to be removed from the FTO list. That starts with explaining the technical, legal steps the U.S. government must pursue to delist the group.

While the FTO review of HTS’s listing status is occurring, policymakers would be wise to extract a range of concessions. This is especially important to pursue because Syria is still on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. As such, the Trump administration must get HTS to fight against a possible Islamic State resurgence, destroy any remaining chemical weapons in Syria, and evict Russia’s military from Syria once and for all. If the United States can achieve those policy concessions over the next few months and the U.S. government assesses that HTS and al-Jawlani have snapped the branch that connected it to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, then the group should be removed from the list of terrorist organizations.