Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa says he wants feminist solutions to his country's problems. "Polarization can lead to unsatisfying results for the entire [Syrian] people," he said at a meeting in Aleppo, describing a recent study his government carried out. "One of the problems that came up was female representation. A patriarchal society likes to keep women at home." Then Sharaa joked that if he tried to impose gender quotas, people would call him a womanizer.
A month earlier, Sharaa's foreign minister posted a video of the president playing basketball with Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and Central Asia. It was a far cry from just a few months before, when the U.S. government considered Sharaa an outlaw with a $10 million bounty on his head. A few years before that, Sharaa was commander of Al Qaeda in Syria, a rebel army that enforced religious law, including female seclusion, on the territories it controlled.
