Like it or not, Western policymakers and Syrian politicians can't afford to ignore HTS for much longer. With the military fronts in Syria largely frozen, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is on a slow and steady state-building mission.

See their neat gazette and compare it with that of the regime. New IDs, a government with clear delineations, real estate and car registries, new industrial zones, a department for registering and managing humanitarian organizations, and most recently an office for coordinating with the UN.

The fact that some developments go slowly and don’t grab headlines should not deceive policymakers; many significant transformations happen under the radar.