ASPEN, Colo.—As sectarian violence continues across Syria following Bashar al-Assad’s fall from power, retired U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus believes warlord-turned-interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa can still prove to be the right man to unite the war-ravaged country.
Sharaa, who has gone by the nom-de-guerre Abu Mohammad al-Julani, seized Damascus in December at the head of an army of Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a Sunni Islamist faction that the U.S. government had designated as a foreign terrorist organization until this month. HTS is itself a rebranding of al-Nusra Front, a Syrian offshoot of al-Qaeda.
