How Syria's President Transformed His Image

CNN’s fawningly positive coverage of this guy is nuts: https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/09/politics/video/syrian-preside.... He’s an actual Al Qaeda who violently conquered Syria. But now he puts on a suit and gets a haircut and suddenly CNN is smitten?

Yes, he looks good in a suit. I guess that makes people forget he’s a terrorist: https://nypost.com/2025/10/13/media/syrian-leader-appears-to...

Video, roughly 2.5 minutes long.

Summarized for those already familiar with al-Shara: "He disavowed Al-Qaeda in 2016".

The video itself is propaganda because the West wants new Syria to align with them instead of Russia and Iran. (Putin's also met with al-Shara.) You can tell because it's free, edited for mass distribution via TikTok and Instagram, and the controversies/ongoing criticism is vastly understated, while still being present. A kind of innoculation of the mind to soften the blow of future, harder criticism.

Even the long(er)-form article from yesterday is outside of the paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/world/middleeast/syria-al...

This is not to say that al-Shara is worse than al-Assad, but this video is shockingly reductive.