“System Update” host Glenn Greenwald talks about the rebranding of al-Qaeda terrorist Mohammed al-Jolani into a “blazer-wearing moderate” set to lead the new government in Syria (full episode below this segment of transcript):
I mean, the United States, famously or notoriously supported the predecessor of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the Mujahideen, in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan because we wanted to arm them, bring them from Saudi Arabia, to fight against the Russian invaders. And we did.
We brought them to the U.S., we brought them to the Oval Office, and we heralded them as freedom fighters, the same people who became Al Qaeda shortly thereafter. And now, when they turn against the United States, they suddenly become terrorists.
Now that’s happening in reverse. Now that we need these Al Qaeda and ISIS militants, this terrorist who’s leading the rebellion against Assad, we need to turn him into a glamorous or at least an acceptable figure, even though he’s on the terrorist list as well.
Here’s CNN doing its job, as always, helping the government. From December 6th on Friday:
“How Syria’s rebel leader went from radical jihadist to a blazer-wearing revolutionary.”
Ahmed al-Shara, an Islamist militant in his late twenties, moved back to Syria from Iraq in 2011 with six men and a monthly stipend of $50,000 from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who would go on to become the world’s most wanted terrorist as the head of ISIS. His mission was to establish Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra.
He’s better known by his nom de guerre, the war name “Abu Mohammed al-Jolani.” Born in the Saudi capital of Riyadh to Syrian parents from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and raised in Damascus, Jolani said in an interview with PBS in 2021 that he was galvanized by the Second Palestinian Intifada against Israel in the early 2000s and went on to become a jihadist in Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion.
His deep knowledge of Syria caught the attention of his commanders in Iraq as they were looking to expand their foothold in Syria during the country’s uprising. Over the years, his influence grew despite his identity being kept under wraps. During television interviews, he never faced the camera directly and always covered his face in public appearances. His public debut was in a 2016 video where he announced a split from Al Qaeda to create what he said was a Syria-focused anti-regime front and other local factions. Originally, it was the Front for the Conquest of the Levant and then changed its name to HTS, or the Organization for the Liberation of the Levant.
“This new formation has no relation to any external party,” he stated at the time. In the years that followed, Jolani replaced his Islamist camouflage attire with a Western-style blazer and shirt, established a semi-technocratic government, which his group held control over, and promoted himself as a viable partner in regional and Western efforts to curb Iran’s influence in the Middle East. He conducted operations against ISIS, including the 2023 high-profile killing of an ISIS leader.
“I believe that everyone in life goes through phases and experiences. As you grow, you learn, and you continue to learn until the very last day of your life,” he said when CNN asked about his transformation.
The transformation from an Al Qaeda and ISIS militant, the leader of Al Qaeda in Syria, to a blazer-wearing moderate who loves plurality and the right of dissent and who has been obviously trained to appeal to a Western audience, speaking to Western media.
Already the wheels are in motion to transform him officially.
From Sky News earlier today: Syrian rebel group HTS could be removed from UK’s banned terror organization list
“The Syrian rebel group HTS could be removed from the U.K.’s banned terrorist organization list. It is currently considered an alternative name for Al Qaeda under the U.K.’s list of proscribed terrorist organizations, but its leader has sought to distance itself from the Islamist militants.”
Right on the State Department page, you can go and look right now. They have a page, a section of their website for rewards for wanted terrorists, where they say if you give us any nonpublic information that leads to his discovery, we will give you, in this case, up to a $10 million reward. And there you see it: Mohammed al-Jolani in the Near East. Who knows where he is? North Africa and the Middle East. You can call the U.S. government if you know where he is and get a $10 million reward.
I think everyone now knows where he is because he’s now going to be the key Western partner governing Syria, and that’s why he’s been transformed — from a camouflage-wearing ISIS militant into a blazer-wearing moderate who promises to reform, who promises to love Israel, who doesn’t speak up when Israel invades Syrian territory.
We were told for 15 years that Al Qaeda and ISIS were the greatest threats in our history, the greatest existential threats, that we had to fundamentally transform our government, our foreign policy, dismantle our civil liberties in the name of combating them.
And yet there we are in Syria for a decade or longer, fighting alongside those very groups in an effort to achieve our shared goal of removing Bashar al-Assad. And now we’re about to embrace and formally validate one of those people who we were told was the greatest threat to our country because now he’s useful to us — just like the neo-Nazis in Ukraine were, and now they’re the Azov heroes.
You can go through the list. All of this is crucial to understanding the discourse in the United States about how propaganda works, about how the term “terrorist” is such a manipulated, empty term of propaganda that can mean or apply to any one person one day and not the next — not depending on whether they’ve changed, but based simply on who is useful to the United States and who isn’t.
Most of all, it is vital when talking about U.S. policy, and Western policy at least, and how we understand foreign countries to resist what very well may be propaganda based in truth. But it is nonetheless propaganda that constantly tries to stir our better emotions by showing us things they know we will respond to emotionally, keeping everything else away from us that prevents us from thinking clearly but instead reacting emotionally in exactly the way they want.
And then, once we start realizing that we’ve been misled again and deceived again into another war, into another conflict, by then, when our rational faculties return, as happened for most people with Ukraine and Russia—or with Iraq—it’s too late. The war is already underway. There’s no reversing it. They don’t need your public support anymore.
The narrative, the videos, everything we’re being shown in the wake of what happened in Syria is identical to what we were shown in the wake of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. People who now understand what was done then should have no problem applying those lessons to what’s taking place now.