The final terrorist designation of the United States for the Syrian Rebel Group whose leader now directs Syria

The State Department said Monday that it will lift the designation of the Syrian Rebel Grupo Hayat Tahrir al-Sham as a foreign terrorist organization, months after the group leader defeated the Assad regime and swept power as president of Syria.

The change will enter into force on Tuesday, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a statement. The group, previously known as Jabhat Al-Nusra, has been on the list of foreign terrorist organizations in the United States for more than a decade, which dates back to its affiliation with Al Qaeda. The terrorist designation makes it more difficult for the group or its leaders to accept the help of Americans, work with US banks or travel to the United States.

Rubio said that the revocation of the terrorist status of the group “recognizes the positive actions taken by the new Syrian government under President Ahmed al-Sharaa.”

Directed by Al-Sharaa, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, helped lead an impressive offensive that extended to Damascus at the end of last year, ending the 54-year control of the Assad family on Syria. Since then, Al-Sharaa has served as interim president of Syria, and has tried to portray his government as a moderate and inclusive force, and a possible bulwark against Iranian influence.

Al-Sharaa said earlier this year that HTS will dissolve, along with all the other rebel groups that fought against the Assad government during the bloody civil war of 13 years of Syria. Rubio cited that movement, and the “commitment of the new government to combat terrorism in all its forms”, in his decision to raise the terrorist designation.

President Trump made a surprise announcement in May that elevation sanctions Against Syria, a significant impulse for the new government of the country. Syria had faced severe US sanctions for more than a decade, a remnant of the brutal dictatorial rule of the Assad family that restricted the economy of Syria and made it difficult to accept foreign money.

Trump also met with Al-Sharaa in Saudi Arabia in May.

“Young people, attractive type, hard guy, past strong,” Trump said about the new Syrian leader.

But HTS’s past as a hard -line Islamist rebel group has distrusted some observers. Al-Sharaa participated In the insurgency against the US forces in Iraq in the 2000s, before being sent to Syria to help lead the Al-Nusra Jabhat ally by Al Qaeda in the fight against the Bashar Al-Assad government. Jabhat Al-Nusra was appointed by the United States as a foreign terrorist organization in 2014, and Al-Sharaa had an American reward of $ 10 million in the head until last year.

More than a decade ago, the group broke with the insurgent leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and refused to merge with his organization now infamous, the Islamic state of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. Since 2016, the Al-Sharaa group has Al Qaeda distancedand Al-Sharaa has said that it does not agree with some of the methods of the global organization of the terrorist organization. He told the “first line” of PBS in 2021, “our participation with Al Qaeda in the past was an era, and ended.”