内容摘要：That would be an uphill battle for Trump as “there’s a lot of congressional sanctions that are predicated on the war in Ukraine,” Greene notes.

That would be an uphill battle for Trump as “there’s a lot of congressional sanctions that are predicated on the war in Ukraine,” Greene notes.

The news sparked celebrations across Syria, where the economy has been ravaged by 14 years of civil war and international isolation. But al-Sharaa still faces daunting challenges to building the kind ofBefore toppling Assad, al-Sharaa was known by the jihadi nickname he adopted,

. His ties to al-Qaida stretch back to 2003, when he joined the insurgency after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.He helped al-Qaida form an offshoot in Iraq that attacked both U.S. forces and the country’s Shiite majority, often using car and truck bombs. He was detained by the U.S. and held for over five years without being charged.The group’s Iraqi leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, sent al-Sharaa to his native Syria in 2011 after a popular uprising led to a brutal crackdown and eventually a full-blown civil war. There, al-Sharaa established an al-Qaida branch known as the Nusra Front.

The two insurgent leaders had a brutal falling out when al-Sharaa refused to join al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State group and remained loyal to al-Qaida’s central leadership. The Nusra Front later battled the Islamic State group.In his first interview in 2014 on Qatari network Al Jazeera, he kept his face covered and said Syria should be governed by Islamic law, an alarming prospect for the country’s Christian, Alawite and Druze minorities. Al-Sharaa also said he couldn’t trust Gulf and other Arab leaders who he said had sold themselves to Washington to stay in power.

“They paid a tax, these Arab rulers, to the United States,” he said.

But in the following years, he began rebranding himself and the armed group he led. In 2016, he announced that he had severed ties with al-Qaida. He began appearing in public unmasked and in military garb, and changed his group’s name to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — the Organization for Liberating Syria — as it consolidated control over a swath of northwestern Syria.Ukraine, meanwhile, has balked at

in return for peace, which Washington has indicated could be necessary.A key point of leverage for Ukraine could be a deal with Washington that grants

Ukraine and the U.S. have made progress on a mineral agreement, with both sides agreeing that American aid provided so far to Kyiv will not be taken into account under the terms of the deal, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said Sunday.“We have good progress,” he said after talks with U.S. Treasury Under Secretary Scott Bessent in Washington.