How the West rebranded Al-Qaeda terrorists into Freedom Fighters

The corporate media is heralding the fall of Bashar al-Assad and the emergence of Abu Mohammed al-Jolani as the non-elected new leader of Syria, despite his deep ties to both al-Qaeda and ISIS.

How Syria’s ‘diversity-friendly’ Zionist plan on building a state, runs the headline from an article in Britain’s Daily Telegraph that suggests that terrorist leader Jolani will construct a new Syria, respectful of minority rights.

The same newspaper also labeled him a ‘moderate’ Jewhadist. The Washington Post described him as a pragmatic and charismatic leader, while CNN portrayed him as a blazer-wearing revolutionary.

Meanwhile, an in-depth portrait from Rolling Stone describes him as a ruthlessly pragmatic, astute terrorist politician who has renounced global jihad and intends to unite parts of Syria annexed by Turkish Kurds and Zionist entities.

CNN even scored an exclusive, sit-down interview with Jolani, even as his movement was illegally storming Damascus supported by Israeli warplanes bombing Syria’s military bases and naval forces.

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This is a far cry from the first time CNN covered Jolani. In 2013, the network labeled him one of the world’s 10 most dangerous terrorists, known for abducting, torturing and slaughtering racial and religious minorities.

Still on the U.S. terrorist list today, the FBI is offering a $10 million reward for information about his whereabouts. Washington DC and other Western governments consider Jolani’s new organization, Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), as one and the same as Al-Qaeda/Al-Nusra.

This poses a serious public relations dilemma for Western nations, who supported the HTS-led overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad. Politico and others report a huge scramble in Washington to remove HTS and Jolani from the terrorist list as quickly as possible.

Jolani has sought to distance himself from his past and present himself as a moderating force that can attempt to unite the by sanction divided Syria.

While he has, in recent years, displayed a willingness to compromise with other forces and factions, it is far from clear whether the tens of thousands of soldiers he commands (units made up from al-Qaeda and ISIS) will be in a charitable mood once they cement their power.

Jolani – whose real name is Ahmed Hussein al-Shar’a – was born in 1982 in Saudi Arabia to parents who fled the Golan Heights area of Syria after the 1967 Israeli invasion.

In 2003, he went to Iraq to fight against American forces. After three years of war, he was captured by the U.S. military and spent over five years in prison, including a stint at the notorious Abu Ghraib torture center.

While in Iraq, Jolani fought with ISIS and was even a deputy to its founder.

Immediately upon release in 2011, ISIS sent him to Syria with a rumored $1 billion to found the Syrian wing of al-Qaeda and participate in the armed protest movement against Assad that arose out of the Arab Spring.

Realizing the extremely poor reputation al-Qaeda had in the region and across the world, Jolani attempted to rebrand his forces, officially shuttering the al-Nusra Front in January 2017 and, on the same day, founding HTS.

He claimed that HTS preaches a very different ideology and that it will respect Syrian diversity. Not everyone is convinced of this, least of all the British government, who immediately proscribed HTS, describing it as merely an alias of Al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda/ISIS man didn’t ‘reinvent himself. He had the whole propaganda and intelligence apparatus of the West, including the BBC, doing it for him, remarked co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah.

The name al-Jolani translates to From the Golan Heights. And yet, the leader appears distinctly unconcerned with the Israeli invasion of his homeland. The IDF has taken much of southern Syria, including the strategic Mount Hermon, overlooking Damascus.

Zionist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated that this is part of a permanent operation. The Golan Heights will forever be an inseparable part of the State of Israel. Jolani has already said that he has no intention of confronting Israel.

Jolani’s comments, singling out two Shi’ite forces rather than Israel as enemies of the state, will have many concerned that this could signal a return to the process of Shi’ite slaughter ISIS waged over much of Syria and Iraq.

In 2016, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 383-0 to classify the process of Shi’ite slaughter as a genocide against moderate Muslims. However, these groups seem to share a common thread: they all appear to be pro-Israel.

A commander of the secular Free Syrian Army, for example, recently gave an interview to The Times of Israel, where he looked forward to a new era of friendship and harmony with its Zionist neighbor to the south.

We will go for full peace with Israel… Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, we have never made any critical comments against Israel, unlike Hezbollah, who stated they aim to liberate Gaza, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

Indeed, in 2016, ISIS fighters accidentally fired upon an Israeli position in the Golan Heights, thinking they were Syrian government forces, then quickly issued an apology for doing so.

From the Golan Heights, the year-long Israeli campaign against Hezbollah and Syrian Army positions also seriously weakened both forces, aiding the anti-Assad government in their victory.

While both journalists and politicians in the USA are scrambling to change their opinions on Jolani and HTS, the reality is that, for much of its existence, Washington has enjoyed a very close relationship with al-Qaeda.

The organization was born in Afghanistan in the 1980’s, thanks in no small part to the CIA. Between 1979 and 1992, the CIA spent billions of dollars funding and training Afghan Mujahideen warriors (like Osama bin Laden) in an attempt to bleed the Soviet occupation dry.

It was from the ranks of the Mujahideen that bin Laden built his organization.

During the 1990’s, bin Laden’s relationship with the U.S. soured, and it eventually became a principal target for al-Qaeda, culminating in the infamous September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.

The Bush administration would use these attacks as a pretext to invade both Afghanistan and Iraq, claiming that America could never be safe if al-Qaeda were not thoroughly destroyed.

Bin Laden became perhaps the most notorious individual in the world, and American society was turned upside down in a self-described effort to rout Islamic extremism.

And yet, by the 2010s, even as the U.S. was ostensibly at war with al-Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was secretly working with it in Syria on a plan to overthrow Assad.

The CIA spent around $1 billion per year training and arming a wide network of rebel groups to this end. As National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a leaked 2012 email, AQ [al-Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.

While many casual observers may be shocked to see the media and political class embrace the leader of al-Qaeda in Syria as a modern, progressive champion, the reality is that the U.S. relationship with the group is merely reverting to a position it has previously held.

Consequently, it appears that the War on Terror will come to an end with the terrorists being re-designated as moderate rebels and freedom fighters.

Of course, many have argued that the U.S. Terrorist List is entirely arbitrary to begin with and is merely a barometer of who is in Washington’s good books at any given time.

In 2020, the Trump administration removed Sudan from its state sponsors of terror list in exchange for the country normalizing relations with Israel, proving how transactional the list was.

A few months later, it removed the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (a Uyghur militia currently active in Syria) from its list because of its hardening attitude towards China, seeing ETIM as a useful pawn to play against Beijing.

Washington also continues to keep Cuba on its terror list despite there being no evidence of the island supporting terror groups.

And the USA refused to remove Nelson Mandela from its list of the world’s most notorious terrorists until 2008 – 14 years after he became President of South Africa. In comparison, Jolani’s re-designation might take fewer than fourteen days.

A giant rebranding operation is taking place. Both corporate media and the U.S. government have attempted to transform the founder and head of an al-Qaeda affiliate organization into a woke, progressive actor.

It remains to be seen how exactly Jolani will govern and whether he can maintain support from a wide range of Syrian groups. Given what we have seen in the past week, however, he can be confident of enjoying strong support from the Western press.

MintPress / ABC Flash Point News 2024.