Hussein al-Sharaa

Hussein Ali al-Sharaa (born 1946) is a Syrian economist, researcher, and writer. He is the father of the current President of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa.

Born into a family in Daraa, Syrian Republic, he graduated from the University of Baghdad with a degree in Economics and later earned a Ph.D. In 1961, he joined protests against the Baathists following their coup against the United Arab Republic and the Arab Socialist Ba'ath party coups in 1963. His family was displaced during the 1967 Israeli occupation. He was forced to leave Syria due to the worsening political and security situation and fled to Jordan, where he was imprisoned again. He was eventually given the choice to travel to either Saudi Arabia or Iraq, and he chose Iraq, which was then under President Abdul Salam Arif.

Al-Sharaa escaped from prison in 1971 to pursue his higher studies in Iraq. He later went to Jordan to cooperate with the Palestinian fedayeen. After returning to Syria in the 1970s, he served in the ministry of petroleum under Hafez al-Assad before eventually moving to Saudi Arabia with his family. He remained in the Syrian oil sector until 1979, when he was hired by the Saudi Ministry of Petroleum as an economic researcher. He returned to Syria in 1989 with his family and was briefly imprisoned again before serving as an advisor to the ministry of petroleum, a position he eventually left. After the Syrian civil war broke out in March 2011, al-Sharaa resettled to Egypt.

After the fall of the Assad regime, he criticized the caretaker government’s plan to privatize public institutions but later defended it, saying it had a clear vision for Syria’s future without outside influence. He also condemned Israel after an attack in Damascus and warned that Syria would not remain silent. In June 2025, al-Sharaa said that Benjamin Netanyahu underestimated Iran’s strength and referred to the destruction in occupied Palestinian cities.