Is Syria’s New De Facto Leader a CIA Asset?

March 2021 marked the tenth anniversary of the Western-backed regime-change war in Syria. Despite the gruelling decade-long conflict, Washington continued to align itself with Salafi-jihadist factions fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The northwestern province of Idlib, at the time, remained under the control of the so-called “Syrian Salvation Government,” led by a ‘rebranded’ version of Syria’s al-Qaeda. Protected militarily by NATO-member Turkey, efforts from Washington to Brussels have since then engaged a sophisticated operation to legitimize the group’s leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani.

In June 2021, PBS Frontline aired a special titled “The Jihadist”, featuring an unprecedented interview with Jolani, the founder of Syria’s al-Qaeda branch, originally known as Jabhat al-Nusra and now rebranded as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

Trading his battlefield fatigues for an immaculately tailored suit, Jolani was offered a platform to present himself to a Western audience, pledging that his forces posed no threat to the United States. Instead, he claimed their focus was solely on opposing Syria’s government and its supporters.

In it, al-Jolani, referred to the US designation of him as a terrorist as “unfair”, choosing his words carefully and stating, that his organization “hasn’t posed any threat to Western or European Society. When rationalized his joining al Qaeda as a response to the tyrants who ruled the Middle East, images of Saddam Hussein shooting a gun were aired, subliminally messaging to the viewer that al Jolani, rather than being associated with Osama bin Laden, the emir of Al Qaedaand Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of ISIS (which he was) portrays him as an anti-despotic insurgent. Joseph Geobbels, Hitler’s infamous propagandist, would have been proud.

This media rehabilitation effort recalls journalist Robert Fisk’s infamous 1993 interview with Osama bin Laden, where bin Laden was portrayed as an “anti-Soviet warrior” leading a peaceful initiative. At the time, bin Laden dismissed allegations of global jihad ambitions, claiming such reports were fabricated. The world took him at his word—a mistake that would later have catastrophic consequences.

Martin Smith, the PBS correspondent behind the interview, had previously reported on life in government-controlled Syria in his 2015 special “Inside Assad’s Syria,” which provided a rare, relatively balanced depiction of Syrian civilians besieged by NATO- and Gulf-backed insurgents. However, Smith’s return to Syria in March 2021 to meet a;-Jolani was more than a journalistic endeavour—it aligned with a broader political agenda of the United States intelligence services and their public policy allies.

Behind the scenes, a network of think tanks and foreign policy operatives was pushing to remove Jolani and HTS from the U.S. State Department’s list of designated terrorist organizations. Such a move would pave the way for international recognition of Jolani’s “government” in Idlib, which proponents of regime change see as both leverage against Damascus and a means of managing millions of displaced Syrians in the region.

More disturbingly, normalizing Jolani would transform a faction of al-Qaeda—the group responsible for the September 11 attacks—into a de facto U.S. asset.

The campaign to rehabilitate Jolani was spearheaded by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank closely tied to NATO (and which has murky ties to US Intelligence) and the Biden administration. Over the years, Gulf-funded, pro-Israel think tanks quietly lobbied Washington to support al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, resulting in CIA-approved weapons deliveries to some of its battlefield allies.

James Franklin Jeffrey, a former U.S. diplomat overseeing Syria policy, revealed in the PBS special that Washington maintained indirect communication with al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch through intermediaries. These intermediaries included journalists, NGO staff, and think tank operatives who acted as liaisons between the U.S. government and Jabhat al-Nusra.

“We opened indirect channels to them [Jabhat al-Nusra] as soon as we could and kept Secretary [Mike] Pompeo advised of it,” Jeffrey admitted. “These channels were through people in the media, people in the NGO world who had direct contacts with them and would share their views with us—or relay our messages.”

Jeffreys had been special advisor to National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice during the Bush Administration on Iraq. He rose to the level of Deputy National Security Advisor at a time when the neocons were at their zenith in Washington. He had also been the United States’ Special Envoy to Turkey.

Remarkably, some of the individuals involved who were part of the operation to rehabilitate al-Jolani appeared in Smith’s PBS report. However, instead of referring to them as lobbyists for this cause, they were portrayed as neutral analysts or former officials, obscuring their vested interests.

Falsely framed as objective journalism, the PBS doc ultimately served as a propaganda vehicle for one of the most audacious PR campaigns in modern istory: the sanitization of a jihadist leader. By presenting Jolani as a viable political figure, the program perpetuated the decades-long covert war on Syria while attempting to legitimize al-Qaeda’s enduring presence in the region

How the US Whitewashed a Brutal Terrorist Thug into a Heroic Rebel and Statesman

In 2012, when Muhammad al-Jolani crossed the Syrian-Iraqi border with a small group of fighters, he was officially a member of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a militant group notorious for its attacks on US forces and Shia civilians in Iraq. His involvement in Syria soon facilitated the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in the city of Raqqa. However, a rift over strategy and finances led Jolani to break away from ISIS and create Jabhat al-Nusra, a branch of al-Qaeda in Syria, with the approval of then al-Qaeda’s global leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

In his PBS Frontline report, Martin Smith briefly covered this history but omitted crucial details, such as the covert US operations that enabled al-Nusra’s growth. For example, the 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report had already warned that the insurgency in Syria was being driven by Salafist and jihadist groups, including al-Qaeda in Iraq. The report predicted that arming Islamist rebels would lead to the formation of a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria. Despite this warning, the

The CIA’s Timber Sycamore Operation began in 2013, a covert operation that provided up to $1 billion annually in support of rebel groups dominated by Islamist extremists. This program, one of the CIA’s largest since the 1980s Afghan operation, contributed to the rise of extremist factions in Syria.

As predicted, a Salafist stronghold emerged in northeastern Syria, with al-Qaeda’s local branch soon dominating the opposition forces. In brutal acts filmed by militants, Nusra fighters, including former members of the CIA-backed “Free Syrian Army,” carried out horrific executions. The group continued to grow in power, earning a reputation for violent tactics, including suicide bombings and executions, as well as imposing a strict theocratic regime in territories under their control. In 2017, an undercover documentary revealed the dystopian conditions in Idlib, where Nusra ruled, banning music and public celebrations and forcibly converting or killing religious minorities.

Rather than being dismantled, Nusra, now under the name Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (2016) and later Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), was rebranded and supported by NATO-aligned forces to survive. With backing from Turkey, HTS established the “Syrian Salvation Government” and launched a public relations campaign to legitimize its control, even organizing tours for Western journalists to present a sanitized image of its rule.

In a 2021 PBS Frontline special, Martin Smith portrayed Jolani as a pragmatic leader of a popular local movement, downplaying the group’s brutal record and claiming that HTS no longer posed a threat to the West. Smith’s report focused on whether Jolani would target Western countries, ignoring the millions of Syrians suffering under his group’s authoritarian rule. Meanwhile, HTS continued to carry out public executions, such as stoning women to death for alleged adultery, an act that Smith failed to mention.

The effort to rehabilitate HTS was supported by influential Western think tanks, including the International Crisis Group, which published interviews with Jolani promoting his rebranding as a local, independent force, no longer tied to al-Qaeda’s global agenda. These efforts were championed by figures such as Elizabeth Tsurkov and Ken Roth, who ignored HTS’s crimes in favor of advocating for more engagement with the group.

Despite these efforts to normalize HTS, independent observers, including journalist Lindsey Snell, have criticized the rebranding as superficial, noting that HTS still adheres to the same radical ideology and continues to impose strict Sharia law on its territories.

In summary, the US and its allies have supported HTS through covert operations, political backing, and strategic alliances, with the group’s image being increasingly polished in Western media and think tanks, despite its ongoing violent and sectarian practices. The portrayal of Jolani as a moderate leader is part of a broader strategy to align with groups that share common goals, even at the cost of turning a blind eye to their brutality.