Al-Qaeda in Syria's Ex-Commander Enlists in The War on Terror

Edited by Sam Thielman 

FOR THE LAST nearly 25 years, there have been many predictions, ranging from the merely paranoid to the outright absurd, that al-Qaeda would one day make its presence felt at the White House. None of them were remotely as surreal or implausible as the president of the United States extending an invitation to one of its former commanders. 

The man once known as Abu Muhammad al-Jolani met this morning with President Trump. Now he's Ahmed al-Sharaa again, reflecting his and his organization's transformation from Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda's arm in Syria, into Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the victors of the Syrian civil war and now the kernel of the post-Bashar al-Assad government. al-Sharaa, once a detainee of the United States in Iraq, is going to shake hands with an American president. 

Not long ago, Trump's Syria/Turkey envoy Tom Barrack, boasted that al-Sharaa is committing to the U.S. coalition against the so-called Islamic State, possibly even through signing a formal document. Amberin Zaman of al-Monitor points out that al-Sharaa's signature is a formality. "Sharaa has been discreetly cooperating for almost a decade with the United States against the jihadis, sharing intelligence on the whereabouts of key ISIS and al-Qaeda leaders in and around the northern region of Idlib," she wrote earlier this month. And al-Qaeda leaders. 

We're 12 years since ISIS split off from and sought to replace the al-Qaeda movement that spawned it. Anyone who's interested in the internal dynamics of that split or wants a primer on it should check out this very long piece I co-reported for the Guardian in 2015. (Or, for that matter, chapter seven of REIGN OF TERROR.) The bad blood and will to dominance between these two jihadist factions is very familiar at this point. But al-Sharaa and HTS have gone beyond that. They're seeking not to fracture or replace Syria in pursuit of an jihadist enclave, as we wrote nearly a year ago, but to reunite it under what they're portraying as a kind of "Islamist-plus" era. And they're willing to pay prices that no one once affiliated with al-Qaeda has ever been willing to pay. 

You can call the "anti-ISIS coalition" whatever you want, and as Zaman observes, al-Sharaa has informally been a part of it for a long time. But if Barrack is right, the former commander of al-Qaeda in Syria is unambiguously joining the War on Terror – which is to say: entering the American sphere of influence. Trump, in his first term, wanted to pull U.S. forces out of Syria before reversing himself. Now he'll be creating conditions for their indefinite presence in the east of the country. Eastern Syria, whatever else it is, is a collection of oil fields and city-sized prison camps. With al-Sharaa welcoming a U.S. presence there, we can no longer say that the U.S. military is in Syria illegally. There may even be an airbase in Damascus for the U.S. to use, Raya Jalabi reports for the FT.

Deals with U.S. oil companies to profit off the Syrian fields, and with other U.S. companies to finance and invest in the economic redevelopment of Syria, are sure to follow. When David Petraeus shared a stage with his former al-Qaeda in Iraq adversary at the United Nations General Assembly in September, the spectacle obscured questions about whether Petraeus was acting less as a retired general and more in his capacity as a senior leader in the private-equity giant KKR. Last week, the U.N. removed sanctions on al-Sharaa. It was hard not to see a page turning in the War on Terror. But more concretely, the end of Assad-era and War on Terror-era sanctions on Syria heralds the arrival of massive foreign investment, which is usually less beneficial to average people than advertised. 

Those people have lived through hell. On Friday I had coffee with a colleague-turned-friend who recently came back from Syria. She told me about driving on roads that were little more than dust to visit neighborhoods that are little more than ghostly husks of ruined buildings. Remnants of Assad's barrel bombs and other unexploded ordnance were visible. She shared the story of a man whose wife died in his arms, only for him to remarry, and for his second wife to die in a bomb raid. I heard that the rush to bury victims of Assad's chemical attack in Ghouta resulted in some people who were paralyzed by the nerve agent getting buried alive by mistake. 

The people of Syria need help beyond the material, but their material needs are overwhelming and urgent. My friend noted, with due bitterness, that what they're going to get is Saudi and Qatari investment and influence. Turkish investment and influence too, since Turkey sponsored HTS in Idlib before the fall of Damascus. Before arriving in Washington, al-Sharaa reached a rapprochement with Russia, the Assad family's longtime patron, that will likely see the Russian military retain access to its Mediterranean naval and air base. For more than a decade, the Syrian civil war was a proxy site for a dizzying array of foreign conflicts. al-Sharaa's victory makes it look like all of them will retain influence in Syria except for Iran. 

My friend also told me that there is widespread suspicion in Syria that al-Sharaa long ago made some sort of accommodation with Israel. His former nom de guerre, al-Jolani, described him as a son of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Now Israel is occupying Quneitra in southern Syria. Since al-Sharaa came to power, Israel has bombed Syria more than 1000 times, including a strike on the Syrian military headquarters in Damascus, predicated on the pretext of protecting the Druze minority but inevitably keeping Syria militarily weak, inclining it to foreign protection. al-Sharaa has done nothing but issue the occasional condemnation, a simply astonishing decision from a former al-Qaeda commander. Since May, indirect diplomacy between al-Sharaa and Israel has proceeded, and the post-Assad Israeli offensives appear like leverage plays to ensure a U.S.-guaranteed deescalation deal that will limit Syria's military reconstruction. According to my friend, there are many Syrians who think that Israel helped al-Sharaa and HTS survive its four years in Idlib, and Israel is now being rewarded for that help. 

The re-integration of the Kurdish northeast, where the U.S.-aligned Kurds have carved out an autonomous mini-state under U.S. protection, is a stalled proposition at best. Movement toward incorporating the Syrian Democratic Forces into the Syrian army, a U.S.-facilitated process, is bound to be slow, cautious and characterized by mistrust. The Kurds are sure to look at al-Sharaa's arrival in the White House and ask what the U.S. needs them for anymore—aside from being permanent jailers to tens of thousands of ISIS fighters and refugees from the Islamic State that the Kurds did the lion's share of the work of destroying.

Or, I suppose, another way you can look at it is this: Once Assad caged people on behalf of the Americans, and now al-Sharaa will.

Very often I hear that Osama bin Laden won the War on Terror. That's usually meant as a way of saying that the U.S. lost a war that was folly from the start. But bin Laden did not win, either; he lost control of his revolution and it ate its children. Bin Laden sought to rid the Middle East of American presence and influence. He absolutely did not seek for someone in his movement to welcome the presence of 2000 U.S. troops or shake hands with the president in the White House as a supplicant. The fullness of what's happening today will reveal itself in time. But for now, al-Sharaa's Oval Office summit looks like the War on Terror version of the last page of Animal Farm, with man and pig ready to do business, unencumbered by the weight of their history. 

ON WEDNESDAY AT 6:30 PM, come to the Francis Kite Club on Avenue C as we celebrate Luke O'Neil's new fiction collection We Had It Coming. It doesn't get more Catholic than that title! I'll be "in conversation" with Luke – to say this like a human being and not a marketer: we'll talk about his book – and there will be readings from Kylie Cheung, Edward Ongweso Jr. and Grace Robins-Somerville.  

THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION of University Professors and the Middle Eastern Studies Association track the explosion of post-Oct. 7 weaponization of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to conflate criticism of Israel for its genocide and apartheid with antisemitism. Among its findings is that these censorious and frivolous antisemitism probes overwhelmed campus civil rights enforcement in the tail end of the Biden administration: there were "more antisemitism probes against colleges and universities (65) than for all other types of racial harassment combined (38)." And how frivolous were those probes? 

All but one of the 102 antisemitism complaint letters we have analyzed focus on speech critical of Israel; of these, 79% contain allegations of antisemitism that simply describe criticisms of Israel or Zionism with no reference to Jews or Judaism; at least 50% of complaints consist solely of such criticism.

"A longstanding 'Palestine exception' to the First Amendment now threatens to give way to a new reality," write AAUP and MESA. "Palestine is less an exception to academic freedom than it is a pretext for erasing the norm altogether, as part of an authoritarian assault on the autonomy of higher education and on the very idea of racial and gender equity."

MOHAMMED R. MHAWISH AND ASEEL MOUSA have a heartbreaking story in Rest of World about the fate of Gaza Sky Geeks, a celebrated initiative in Gaza to teach coding, graphic design and business skills; access tech-sector jobs; and operate as a startup incubator. 

Abdulhameid Alfayoumi, who’d returned from Turkey to help support Gaza’s tech economy, is dead — he was killed by Israeli bombs about a month into the war alongside his wife, two children, and members of his extended family. "Just before he died, he was paying all displaced members of the team out of his own pocket to make sure they make ends meet during a hard time," his co-founder Muhammed Qumboz said. Ryan Sturgill, the former GSG director, wrote a LinkedIn post memorializing Alfayoumi. "It’s important to me to tell the world I admired him," he wrote. "I was proud of him. And, I will miss him."

It's sickening that Google threw a pittance into GSG while pursuing Project Maven to help Israel oppress and kill Palestinians. 

MEANWHILE, IN THE WEST BANK, Jasper Nathaniel is documenting the barbarism of the settlements. This weekend he wrote about the impending destruction of the Palestinian village of Umm al-Khair, near Hebron:

The children of Umm al-Khair peeked over the fence, where just meters away, men in kippahs with machine guns slung over their shoulders danced and sang. I recognized many of the songs and prayers from my own childhood going to synagogue. Hearing them in this context was disturbing in a way I cannot put into words. What it must do to a child’s understanding of Jews doesn’t need spelling out. …

The people are proud, strong-willed, determined to remain—but they know exactly what they’re up against, reminded of it every minute. In several directions, giant Stars of David jut from the ground or are mounted on rooftops, lit at night like flaming crosses.

Lit at night like flaming crosses. 

RECENT REPORTING FROM Erin Banco at Reuters—an exceptional reporter I was lucky to work with at the Daily Beast—and Akbar Shahid Ahmed at HuffPost adds new levels of detail confirming that the Biden team knew full well that Israel was engaging in ethnic cleansing and war crimes. Both pieces underscore how willfully the Biden administration ignored what we all saw, and continue to see, unfolding before our eyes. An anonymous ex-senior official tells Akbar, "Biden officials worried that attaching their names to a recommendation to limit American support for Tel Aviv would hinder their future career prospects, the former senior official said, 'which is in itself appalling.'" Yeah. 

As Harrison Mann, the former Army major and Mideast intelligence analyst, told FOREVER WARS in June 2024, "[E]verybody who followed this issue from inside the U.S. government—whether it's the military, the intel world, the State Department, USAID—was fully aware of not only everything that was happening in terms of destruction and civilian deaths in Gaza, but also the expected consequences and expected trajectory of the Israeli campaign in Gaza."

FINALLY, my former WIRED colleague Steven Levy interviews a deeply unpleasant and combative Alex Karp. I have The Technological Republic on my nightstand from the library and haven't brought myself to open it yet, but now I'm kind of looking forward to it?