KHREBET HIDIR, Syria — They swept in around noon in Toyota Hilux pickup trucks mounted with machine guns. “There were around 40 of them. They wore black ski masks and carried pistols, knives and hand grenades. One of them held a gun to my son’s head and said he would execute him,” Daham Abdi, the sheikh of this now empty Yazidi village lying northeast of the town of Hasakah, recalled of the ordeal that unfolded in 2013. 

“My wife pleaded for mercy. ‘Don’t kill my children,’ she said.” They spared the boy’s life but took all the family’s cash, gold and jewelry. “They said they were Jabhat al-Nusra,” Abdi told Al-Monitor on a recent afternoon at his abandoned family home over small cups of coffee.

Ahmed al-Sharaa is the former leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda's Syrian franchise. Twelve years on, he is the interim president of Syria after toppling longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad in December last year. He has severed ties with global jihad, swapped his military fatigues for sleek suits and pledged to create an inclusive Syria with equal rights for all its citizens regardless of their ethnicity or faith. Sharaa has made a point of meeting with Christian faith leaders and — even before seizing power in the capital — he allowed Christmas and Easter celebrations in his northern stronghold of Idlib as he sought international legitimacy. 

But in northeast Syria, an area that covers a quarter of the country and is run by secular and Western-friendly Kurds, many locals — non-Muslim minorities in particular — express deep worry about Sharaa, who until recently went by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Golani. “It is very heavy for us to see him in power. We don’t believe that Golani has changed. He is a very bloody man,” Abdi said.