From jihadist terrorism to the top of Syrian politics: political laundering, rebranding, and resistance in Rojava and post-Assad Syria

Armed organisations seek legitimacy as they move from insurgency to governance, yet the perspectives of rivals who experienced jihadist violence remain underexplored. Drawing on 16 interviews, this article examines how senior Kurdish political and military officials in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) in Rojava (Rojavayê Kurdistan; Western Kurdistan), interpret the political normalisation of former jihadist-affiliated Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) actors during Syria’s post-Assad transition. First, respondents read HTS’s institutionalisation and rebranding not as sufficient evidence of ideological transformation but as continuity beneath altered organisational and rhetorical forms, and fear future genocidal violence. Second, collective memory of statelessness, jihadist atrocities, state military interventions, political exclusion, and state repression frames their assessments of legitimacy, security, and transformation claims. Third, they distinguish international recognition from locally grounded legitimacy, stressing accountability, inclusion, pluralism, and credible security guarantees. The article conceptualises political laundering: a relational, cyclical process whereby institutional transformation, rebranding, and recognition may reduce the salience of a contested violent past, while collective memory may reactivate it in audiences’ legitimacy evaluations. It contributes to scholarship on legitimacy, rebel governance, and post-conflict state-building, showing that organisational transformation, ideological transformation, and political legitimation are analytically distinct and legitimacy remains relational and contested.