Hama Is Protesting Again — But Against Whom? Syria, Jolani, Israel and the Danger of Reading Every Crowd Through One Conspiracy
Videos from Hama are being framed online as a mass uprising against an Israel- and Trump-backed 'al-Qaeda president.' The crowds are real. The slogans are mixed. The politics are more complicated than the viral story suggests.
Hama is one of those places where every protest arrives with historical echoes already attached to it. That is why new videos from the Syrian city are being read so emotionally and so politically. Online, the framing is maximalist: mass protests have erupted in Hama against Ahmed al-Sharaa, still widely referred to by his old nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani; he is described as a beard-wearing Zelensky, a CIA asset, even an “al-Qaeda president” indirectly backed by Trump and tolerated by Israel. Some posts go further and say the demonstrations prove Syrians are preparing to turn the country into a new anti-Israel front and liberate the Golan Heights.
What is true in that narrative, and what is projection?
Begin with the verified baseline. Ahmed al-Sharaa is indeed Syria’s current president, and his past as the former head of a jihadist movement is not a fringe allegation but a matter of public record. Reuters reported in 2025 when Sharaa was formally elevated to the transitional presidency after leading the coalition that toppled Bashar al-Assad. Reuters also reported in January 2026 that the Syrian government had retaken large parts of northern and eastern Syria from Kurdish forces, consolidating Sharaa’s rule and effectively replacing the Kurdish-led administration as Washington’s main Syrian partner. In other words, Sharaa is no invented figure, and suspicion of his ideological past is not conspiracy. It is part of the core political problem of post-Assad Syria.
But suspicion about his past is not the same thing as evidence that he is simply a U.S. or Israeli puppet. In fact, one of the most consistent themes in reporting on Syria’s transition has been ambiguity. Western states have tried to work with Damascus on stability, prisoner issues, and containment of the Islamic State. Regional states have tried to normalize or manage the new order. Israel, meanwhile, has often viewed the Syrian arena primarily through the lens of border security, militia entrenchment and the Golan. Those interests overlap at points. They are not identical.
That matters because viral commentary often flattens every uncomfortable overlap into a single master theory: if Sharaa is not directly confronting Israel, he must be serving Israel; if Washington has dealt with him, he must be a CIA asset; if protests occur against him, they must be proof that the Syrian street has seen through the plot. This is neat storytelling. It is also analytically lazy.
So what do the Hama protests mean?
At least three interpretations compete.
The first says the protests reflect authentic Syrian anger at the new order from below. This is plausible. Post-Assad Syria remains a country of deep exhaustion, fragmented loyalties and unhealed trauma. Many Syrians did not experience the fall of Assad as a clean democratic rebirth. They experienced it as a transfer of power toward an Islamist-led authority that now asks for obedience, centralization and national consolidation while offering uncertain economic relief. In that context, any protest can quickly absorb multiple grievances at once: political exclusion, fear of renewed repression, anger at foreign influence, and resentment at the state’s inability to protect sovereignty.
The second interpretation says the protests are less about ideological opposition to Sharaa than about competition over what “new Syria” is supposed to mean. Reuters reporting from early 2026 on Sharaa’s consolidation campaign showed a government trying to pull the entire country back under central authority, including through agreements, pressure and troop movements involving Kurdish-led areas. That process inevitably creates winners and losers. A protest can therefore be anti-government without being pro-Assad, anti-Israel without being pro-Iran, and anti-Jolani without being reducible to sectarian or foreign manipulation. Social media hates that kind of ambiguity. Real politics is full of it.
The third interpretation says the demonstrations are being rhetorically repurposed by regional actors who want Syria to become another front in the wider war. This is where the Golan slogans become important. Calls to “liberate the Golan Heights” are emotionally resonant and politically powerful in Arab discourse. But chanting for the Golan is not the same thing as having a coherent military or state strategy to challenge Israel. It can be a protest slogan, a symbolic claim to sovereignty, a way of denouncing passivity, or a signal to the government that it risks being seen as weak. It can also be used by outside actors to imply that Syria is naturally re-entering the anti-Israel axis whether Damascus wants that or not.
The most dangerous analytical mistake is to treat protest footage as a self-explanatory referendum. Crowds rarely mean only one thing. In Hama especially, they carry accumulated memory: of repression, of rebellion, of betrayal, of Islamists, of foreign powers, of sectarian fear, of shattered hopes. That memory makes every current event easier to overread.
The “Zelensky with a beard” line captures this overreading perfectly. It is not analysis. It is a rhetorical compression device. It takes a leader whose legitimacy is disputed, combines foreign dependence, wartime survival, and symbolic performance, and turns that into a meme. Memes can point toward a truth. They can also erase the structure beneath it. Sharaa may be dependent on outside toleration, but Syria is not Ukraine, and the power matrix around Damascus is not the same as the one around Kyiv. Similarly, calling him a CIA asset may reflect distrust of Western engagement, but it does not substitute for evidence.
What, then, is the smarter way to read Hama now? As a warning sign rather than a verdict. The warning is that Syria’s post-Assad settlement remains unstable enough that any regional escalation can be domesticated instantly into Syrian protest language. Anti-Israel anger, anti-American anger, anti-government anger and anti-Islamist anger can all occupy the same square at once. That does not mean they are the same movement. It means the state has not yet created a political container strong enough to separate them.
That is why these protests matter for the wider Iran Israel USA war. Every regional actor is looking for secondary fronts, symbolic openings and narrative leverage. Syria, because it is still unfinished politically, is uniquely vulnerable to being read as all of them at once.
The crowd in Hama may be saying many things. The most revealing fact may be that so many outsiders are trying to decide for it which single sentence counts.