International diplomats reacted cautiously Monday to the prospect of the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group taking control in Syria after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad. HTS has its roots in the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda and is proscribed as a "terrorist" organisation by Western governments. Aaron Y. Zelin, Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, says that HTS' governance in Idlib was not a "liberal democracy by any stretch of the imagination".
