Ziofascist Israel versus The Axis of Resistance, Part 7: ‘Ceasefire’ with Hezbollah, ‘Moderate Rebel’ Attacks in Syria and the Fall of Assad— November 26 to December 9, 2024
Excerpts from the post-October 7, 2023 action between Israel (member of the ‘Axis of Genocide’) and Lebanon and Syria (members of the ‘Axis of Resistance’) from November 26 to December 9, 2024, with a focus on the fall of Syria’s Bashar Assad. (Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6)
Some impressions from before the Israeli ‘ceasefire’ with Lebanon:
November 14:
November 17:
November 23:
November 26, 2024: A Ziofascist Israeli ‘Ceasefire’ with Lebanon
November 27
November 29: ‘Moderate Rebel’ Attacks in Syria
Lebanon-related:
Syria-related:
A reminder from a 2012 US cable by Jacob ‘Jake’ Sullivan: “AQ [i.e. Al Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.”
November 30: Aleppo
Back in 2016:
Syrian Arab Army (SAA) responses:
Several analyses:
Israeli support for Al Qaeda admitted by former Mossad director in a past interview:
It has repeatedly been proposed that a number of ISIS aka ‘Israeli Secret Intelligence Service’ fighters are, as a matter of fact, Ziofascist Israelis:
USA:
A still relevant analysis from 2022:
December 1
USA:
The bigger picture:
The great Jeffrey Sachs’ past analyses on Syria:
A related 2015 speech by Putin:
Hilary Clinton in 2011 about US support for Muslim extremist fighters:
Hilary Clinton: “The people we are fighting today, we funded 20 years ago. And we did it because we were locked in this struggle with the Soviet Union. They invaded Afghanistan, and we did not want to see them control Central Asia. […] Let’s get some to come from Saudi Arabia and other places, import their Wahabi brand of Islam […].”
Mind the oil pipelines which were a major factor in the attempted overthrow of Syria’s Assad:
From this 2016 article by RFK Jr.:
During the 1950’s, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers rebuffed Soviet treaty proposals to leave the Middle East a cold war neutral zone and let Arabs rule Arabia. Instead, they mounted a clandestine war against Arab Nationalism — which CIA Director Allan Dulles equated with communism — particularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets with conservative Jihadist ideologies which they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism. At a White House meeting between the CIA’s Director of Plans, Frank Wisner, and Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, in September of 1957, Eisenhower advised the agency, “We should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect.”
The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949 — barely a year after the agency’s creation. Syrian patriots had declared war on the Nazis, expelled their Vichy French colonial rulers and crafted a fragile secularist democracy based on the American model. But in March of 1949, Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Kuwaiti, hesitated to approve the Trans Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. In his book, Legacy of Ashes, CIA historian Tim Weiner recounts that in retaliation, the CIA engineered a coup, replacing al-Kuwaiti with the CIA’s handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za’im. Al-Za’im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, 14 weeks into his regime.
[…]
Following several counter coups in the newly destabilized country, the Syrian people again tried democracy in 1955, re-electing al-Kuwaiti and his Ba’ath Party. Al-Kuwaiti was still a Cold War neutralist but, stung by American involvement in his ouster, he now leaned toward the Soviet camp. That posture caused Dulles to declare that “Syria is ripe for a coup” and send his two coup wizards, Kim Roosevelt and Rocky Stone to Damascus.
Two years earlier, Roosevelt and Stone had orchestrated a coup in Iran against the democratically elected President Mohammed Mosaddegh after Mosaddegh tried to renegotiate the terms of Iran’s lopsided contracts with the oil giant BP. Mosaddegh was the first elected leader in Iran’s 4,000 year history, and a popular champion for democracy across the developing world. Mosaddegh expelled all British diplomats after uncovering a coup attempt by UK intelligence officers working in cahoots with BP.
Mosaddegh, however, made the fatal mistake of resisting his advisors’ pleas to also expel the CIA, which they correctly suspected, and was complicit in the British plot. Mosaddegh idealized the U.S. as a role model for Iran’s new democracy and incapable of such perfidies. Despite Dulles’ needling, President Truman had forbidden the CIA from actively joining the British caper to topple Mosaddegh.
When Eisenhower took office in January 1953, he immediately unleashed Dulles. After ousting Mosaddegh in “Operation Ajax,” Stone and Roosevelt installed Shah Reza Pahlavi, who favored U.S. oil companies, but whose two decades of CIA sponsored savagery toward his own people from the Peacock throne would finally ignite the 1979 Islamic revolution that has bedeviled our foreign policy for 35 years.
Flush from his Operation Ajax “success” in Iran, Stone arrived in Damascus in April 1956 with $3 million in Syrian pounds to arm and incite Islamic militants and to bribe Syrian military officers and politicians to overthrow al-Kuwaiti’s democratically elected secularist regime. Working with the Muslim Brotherhood, Stone schemed to assassinate Syria’s Chief of Intelligence, its Chief of the General Staff and the Chief of the Communist Party and to engineer “national conspiracies and various strong arm” provocations in Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan that could be blamed on the Syrian Ba’athists.
The CIA’s plan was to destabilize the Syrian government, and create a pretext for an invasion by Iraq and Jordan, whose governments were already under CIA control. Roosevelt forecasted that the CIA’s newly installed puppet government would “rely first upon repressive measures and arbitrary exercise of power.”
But all that CIA money failed to corrupt the Syrian military officers. The soldiers reported the CIA’s bribery attempts to the Ba’athist regime. In response, the Syrian army invaded the American Embassy taking Stone prisoner. Following harsh interrogation, Stone made a televised confession to his roles in the Iranian coup and the CIA’s aborted attempt to overthrow Syria’s legitimate government.
The Syrian’s ejected Stone and two U.S. Embassy staffers — the first time any American State Department diplomat was barred from an Arab country. The Eisenhower White House hollowly dismissed Stone’s confession as “fabrications and slanders,” a denial swallowed whole by the American press, led by the New York Times and believed by the American people, who shared Mosaddegh’s idealistic view of their government.
Syria purged all politicians sympathetic to the U.S. and executed them for treason. In retaliation, the U.S. moved the Sixth Fleet to the Mediterranean, threatened war and goaded Turkey to invade Syria. The Turks assembled 50,000 troops on Syria’s borders and only backed down in the face of unified opposition from the Arab League whose leaders were furious at the U.S. intervention.
Even after its expulsion, the CIA continued its secret efforts to topple Syria’s democratically elected Ba’athist government. The CIA plotted with Britain’s MI6 to form a “Free Syria Committee” and armed the Muslim Brotherhood to assassinate three Syrian government officials, who had helped expose “the American plot.” (Matthew Jones in The ‘Preferred Plan’: The Anglo-American Working Group Report on Covert Action in Syria, 1957). The CIA’s mischief pushed Syria even further away from the U.S. and into prolonged alliances with Russia and Egypt.
Following the second Syrian coup attempt, anti-American riots rocked the Mid-East from Lebanon to Algeria. Among the reverberations was the July 14, 1958 coup, led by the new wave of anti-American Army officers who overthrew Iraq’s pro-American monarch, Nuri al-Said. The coup leaders published secret government documents, exposing Nuri al-Said as a highly paid CIA puppet. In response to American treachery, the new Iraqi government invited Soviet diplomats and economic advisers to Iraq and turned its back on the West.
[…]
A Pipeline War
In their view, our war against Bashar Assad did not begin with the peaceful civil protests of the Arab Spring in 2011. Instead it began in 2000 when Qatar proposed to construct a $10 billion, 1,500km pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey.
Note the purple line which traces the proposed Qatar-Turkey natural gas pipeline and note that all of the countries highlighted in red are part of a new coalition hastily put together after Turkey finally (in exchange for NATO’s acquiescence on Erdogan’s politically-motivated war with the PKK) agreed to allow the US to fly combat missions against ISIS targets from Incirlik. Now note which country along the purple line is not highlighted in red. That’s because Bashar al-Assad didn’t support the pipeline and now we’re seeing what happens when you’re a Mid-East strongman and you decide not to support something the US and Saudi Arabia want to get done. (Map: ZeroHedge.com via MintPress News)
Qatar shares with Iran, the South Pars/North Dome gas field, the world’s richest natural gas repository. The international trade embargo, until recently, prohibited Iran from selling gas abroad and ensured that Qatar’s gas could only reach European markets if it is liquefied and shipped by sea, a route that restricts volume and dramatically raises costs.
The proposed pipeline would have linked Qatar directly to European energy markets via distribution terminals in Turkey which would pocket rich transit fees. The Qatar/Turkey pipeline would have given the Sunni Kingdoms of the Persian Gulf decisive domination of world natural gas markets and strengthen Qatar, America’s closest ally in the Arab world. Qatar hosts two massive American military bases and the U.S. Central Command’s Mid-East headquarters.
The EU, which gets 30 percent of its gas from Russia, was equally hungry for the pipeline which would have given its members cheap energy and relief from Vladimir Putin’s stifling economic and political leverage. Turkey, Russia’s second largest gas customer, was particularly anxious to end its reliance on its ancient rival and to position itself as the lucrative transect hub for Asian fuels to EU markets. The Qatari pipeline would have benefited Saudi Arabia’s conservative Sunni Monarchy by giving them a foothold in Shia dominated Syria.
The Saudi’s geopolitical goal is to contain the economic and political power of the Kingdom’s principal rival, Iran, a Shiite state, and close ally of Bashar Assad. The Saudi monarchy viewed the U.S. sponsored Shia takeover in Iraq as a demotion to its regional power and was already engaged in a proxy war against Tehran in Yemen, highlighted by the Saudi genocide against the Iranian backed Houthi tribe.
Of course, the Russians, who sell 70 percent of their gas exports to Europe, viewed the Qatar/Turkey pipeline as an existential threat. In Putin’s view, the Qatar pipeline is a NATO plot to change the status quo, deprive Russia of its only foothold in the Middle East, strangle the Russian economy and end Russian leverage in the European energy market. In 2009, Assad announced that he would refuse to sign the agreement to allow the pipeline to run through Syria “to protect the interests of our Russian ally.”
Assad further enraged the Gulf’s Sunni monarchs by endorsing a Russian approved “Islamic pipeline” running from Iran’s side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon. The Islamic pipeline would make Shia Iran instead of Sunni Qatar, the principal supplier to the European energy market and dramatically increase Tehran’s influence in the Mid-East and the world. Israel also was understandably determined to derail the Islamic pipeline which would enrich Iran and Syria and presumably strengthen their proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas.
Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria.
Bashar Assad’s family is Alawite, a Muslim sect widely perceived as aligned with the Shia camp. “Bashar Assad was never supposed to be president,” says journalist Sy Hersh. “His father brought him back from medical school in London when his elder brother, the heir apparent, was killed in a car crash.”
[…]
No one believed that the regime was vulnerable to the anarchy that had riven Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia. By the spring of 2011, there were small, peaceful demonstrations in Damascus against repression by Assad’s regime. These were mainly the effluvia of the Arab Spring which spread virally across the Arab League states the previous summer. However, Huffington Post UK reported that in Syria the protests were, at least in part, orchestrated by the CIA. WikiLeaks cables indicate that the CIA was already on the ground in Syria.
But the Sunni Kingdoms wanted a much deeper involvement from America. On Sept. 4, 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry told a congressional hearing that the Sunni kingdoms had offered to foot the bill for a US. invasion of Syria to oust Bashar al-Assad. “In fact, some of them have said that if the United States is prepared to go do the whole thing, the way we’ve done it previously in other places [Iraq], they’ll carry the cost,” he stated. Kerry reiterated the offer to Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL27): “With respect to Arab countries offering to bear the costs of [an American invasion] to topple Assad, the answer is profoundly Yes, they have. The offer is on the table.”
Despite pressure from Republicans, Barrack Obama balked at hiring out young Americans to die as mercenaries for a pipeline conglomerate. Obama wisely ignored Republican clamoring to put ground troops in Syria or to funnel more funding to “moderate insurgents.” But by late 2011, Republican pressure and our Sunni allies had pushed the American government into the fray.
In 2011, the U.S. joined France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and England to form the “Friends of Syria Coalition,” which formally demanded the removal of Assad. The CIA provided $6 million to Barada, a British T.V. channel, to produce pieces entreating Assad’s ouster. Saudi intelligence documents, published by WikiLeaks, show that by 2012, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia were arming, training and funding radical Jihadist Sunni fighters from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere to overthrow the Assad’s Shia allied regime. Qatar, which had the most to gain, invested $3 billion in building the insurgency and invited the Pentagon to train insurgents at U.S. bases in Qatar. U.S. personnel also provided logistical support and intelligence to the rebels on the ground. The Times of London reported on Sept. 14, 2012, that the CIA also armed Jihadists with anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles and other weapons from Libyan armories that the agency smuggled by ratlines to Syria via Turkey. According to an April 2014 article by Seymour Hersh, the CIA weapons ratlines were financed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
The idea of fomenting a Sunni-Shia civil war to weaken the Syrian and Iranian regimes so as to maintain control of the region’s petro-chemical supplies was not a novel notion in the Pentagon’s lexicon. A damning 2008 Pentagon funded Rand report proposed a precise blueprint for what was about to happen. That report observes that control of the Persian Gulf oil and gas deposits will remain, for the U.S., “a strategic priority” that “will interact strongly with that of prosecuting the long war.”
December 2: Support for Syria Kicks In
Iranian support for Syria:
Iraqi support for Syria:
Russian support for Syria:
Israel:
India:
A great 13-minute video about how Islamophobia and right-wing extremism unites India and Modi with Israel and Netanyahu:
USA:
Meet the US ‘rules based order’:
The US ‘rules based order’ in Syria:
Ziofascist Donald Trump, the incoming US President:
Ziofascist ghoul Lindsey Graham also joined:
CIA propaganda:
December 3
Meanwhile, the Ziofascist Israeli genocide of Palestinians continues:
Palestinian detainee abuse and torture:
Ziofascist Israeli night raids:
Canada:
Protests by Jews with a conscience against Ziofascist Israel and its genocide of Palestinians:
USA:
US propagandist Patel lying about Lebanon:
A Yemen and Ansar Allah Update:
For earlier reporting on Yemen and Ansar Allah, see part 4 of this subseries:
Two U.S. Navy destroyers fought back this weekend against missile attacks aimed at American ships in the Red Sea.
“U.S. Navy destroyers USS Stockdale (DDG 106) and the USS O’Kane (DDG 77) successfully defeated a range of Houthi-launched weapons while transiting the Gulf of Aden, Nov. 30 — Dec. 1,” U.S. Central Command reported in a news release on its website.
“The destroyers were escorting three U.S. owned, operated, flagged merchant vessels, and the reckless attacks resulted in no injuries and no damage to any vessels, civilian or U.S. Naval,” the release said.
“The destroyers successfully engaged and defeated three anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBMs), three one-way attack uncrewed aerial systems (OWA UAS), and one anti-ship cruise missile (ASCM), ensuring the safety of the ships and their personnel, as well as civilian vessels and their crews.”
The Houthis began attacking Red Sea shipping last October as a show of support for Hamas as Israel began its attacks into Gaza. Since January, the Biden administration has launched multiple bombing strikes in areas of Yemen held by the Iran-backed Houthi rebels, but it has not been able to halt the attacks. […]
December 4
Britain:
December 5
The Syrian opposition forces have penetrated the city of Hama, following a strategy of encirclement and isolation. Targeting the defensive frontlines and entering the city from the eastern and western axes forced government defenders to retreat towards Homs — a key stronghold and strategic centre for any future defensive operations. Militarily, Hama has effectively fallen. The attackers appear intent on advancing rapidly, leaving behind forces to deal with residual pockets of resistance, regardless of size. Rather than engaging in confrontations, they have adopted a calculated strategy of isolating critical areas such as Jabal Zain al-Abidin and Qamhana without fully committing to battles.
Interestingly, the ideological forces leading the offensive have shifted their tactics. Unlike the widespread brutality and systematic use of knives and slaughter that characterised their actions in previous years, these groups now leverage negotiations to achieve swift and strategic gains. Their focus is on controlling territory by facilitating the withdrawal of Syrian army forces without prolonged fighting, a pragmatic approach that enables them to expand their influence with minimal resistance. This shift has rapidly reshaped the map of control, raising pressing questions about the future of Syria and the Levant. How might Syria’s partition evolve, and what role will various players, including Israel, play in shaping this new geopolitical reality?
Homs: The Strategic Fulcrum of Syria
Homs is emerging as the defining axis in Syria’s ongoing conflict, shaping not only the map of the country’s internal divisions but also the future of the Levant. The likelihood of Syria returning to its pre-2011 state appears increasingly remote. As opposition forces advance southward towards Homs with their ultimate sights set on Damascus, the capital, the battle for Homs could prove decisive. Should the attackers fail to sustain their momentum and find themselves halted at Homs, new de facto borders may be drawn there, marking a critical juncture in Syria’s fragmentation.
[…]
Turkey:
USA:
December 7
Comparisons of Syria to Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan:
USA:
About ‘do not get involved’:
December 8: The Fall of Syria and the Assad Regime
Israeli attacks on and invasion of Syria, including to create Greater Israel and “Lebensraum” for the “chosen” master race just like the German Nazis did back during World War 2:
Israeli occupation of Syria:
Israeli destruction in Syria:
Syrian Central Bank and Assad’s car park raided:
Al Jawlani and the ‘Syrian’ rebel group are tool used by the US, Israelis and whoever else wanted to topple Assad and take control of Syrian territory:
A history of Israeli support for Al Qaeda and HTS:
Iran, Russia and Their Lack of Military Support
Several analyses into why Iran and Russia probably did not lend military support to Syria and Assad in the end:
Hardly did the last phase of the Syrian war begin, and it was over. Within one week, Assad’s regime was gone. No serious, major fighting took place almost anywhere and, most decisively, the Russians and Iranians did not come to rescue Assad’s forces.
The initial response, at least from people who see things mainly from an anti-imperialist perspective, was an understandable mix of disappointment and fear: were Russia and Iran too weak or too afraid to act and save Syria’s integrity? And if that was the case, what does it say about the wider conflict between the West and the Global South? Could Iran withstand a concentrated Israel-American onslaught? Does Russia have the power to counter the US’s expansionist ambitions?
Those are all legitimate questions. But I want to lay out here what I see as clear benefits of Iran and Russia deciding not to partake any longer in the Syrian war of independence (the opposite of what was presented to us, obviously) against the best efforts of Israel, Turkey, and the US.
What may have clouded our judgment, reading the last developments in Syria, could be an expectation, or even a desire, for military wins. We want the world to be free from external intervention and subversion, and we hate the violence those inflict on countries and communities that we love and care deeply about.
This eagerness for military demonstrations of strength could make us forget that power, politics, or geopolitics, are far from just a story of military might. There are economic, diplomatic, and cultural aspects to all of this, and, most importantly, there is the narrative, or what people believe is happening, and why.
I can’t properly cover the military or economic importance of Syria’s fall; it’s not my expertise. We do know with sufficient certainty that Assad’s Syria was not a military or economic powerhouse, but rather a weak, struggling country. So Russia and Iran did not lose a major ally, in this regard; Syria could not be trusted as a pillar of the Axis of Resistance in case of a major war. We’ll leave it at that.
The importance of narrative
But there is the narrative, and in terms of the narrative, this retreat from Syria is a thing of anticolonial beauty. In terms of narrative, until yesterday Russia and Iran had no control over Syria. But now they almost fully do. Let me explain.
Simply put, until last week, who was seen as the responsible party for Syria’s situation? Who was to blame for all its sorrows, instability, poverty, and general mess? It was Assad, and by extension, his main backers: Russia and Iran.
Who is responsible and accountable for Syria as of today? Well, it’s the West’s ‘rebels‘, the US Erdogan and Israel. In one fell swoop, one mostly failed state went from being under Russia’s list of headaches and liabilities to being on America’s.
Who’s going to bear the blame when things go south, as they most probably will? The lack of democracy, the political arrests, the totalitarian laws, the civil strife, corruption, dysfunction, and so on? Well, not Putin, Khamenei, and Assad. They will be in the ‘but we told you so‘ ranks.
[…]
Turkey, Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood:
Libya and Its History
An unheeded warning by Libya’s Muamar Gaddafi after the US had toppled and killed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein:
Parallels to Libyan regime change ops:
Libyan man: “America is the reason for chaos in Libya. They toppled Gaddafi but didn’t consider an alternative. It left behind chaos and an internal war. Gaddafi was anti-America. All of them now submit to America.”
female interviewer: “Now you would take Gaddafi back?”
Libyan man: “I fought against Gaddafi with the Zintan and Bani Walid fronts. Now, if Gaddafi were alive, I’d be fighting for him.”
Iraq and Its History
There is also some regime change ‘buyer’s regret’ from Iraq:
USA:
On the Syrian Al Qaeda and HTS terrorist leader Muhammad Al-Jawlani:
Also the US:
CNN hypocrisy, propaganda and whitewashing of Al-Jawlani:
December 9
…
Benjamin Netanyahu: “… we will do whatever it takes to ‘defend’ [i.e. enlarge!] the State of [Greater!] Israel and the border of [Greater!] Israel.”
More Israeli attacks on Syria:
Israel occupies more and more parts of Syria, as per its Greater Israel project:
Aside from parallels to Iraq and Afghanistan, parallels to Egypt also beckon:
Withdrawals of diplomatic missions:
Possible blowback for Israel:
Like Al Jawlani, the new interim Syrian prime minister Mohammad al-Bashir also has a HTS/Al Qaeda past:
Mohammed al-Bashir (Arabic: محمد البشير, romanized: Muḥammad al-Bashīr; born 1983) is a Syrian politician and engineer who currently serves as the 70th prime minister of Syria. He has led the Syrian Transitional Government since 10 December 2024, which was formed after the fall of the Assad regime, and succeeded Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali in his role.[1] Al-Bashir also served as the fifth prime minister of the Syrian Salvation Government, the civilian administration of the Sunni Islamist organisation Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), between his election on 13 January 2024 and appointment as transitional prime minister.
What the Syria conflict has been about from the very beginning: two competing oil pipeline projects:
Another male voice: “When you pump more weapons into a situation like Syria, it doesn’t end well for Syrians.”
[…]
John Kerry: “So you think the only solution is for somebody to come in and get rid of Assad?”
female voice [tentative]: “Yes.”
John Kerry: “It’s the only solution?”
female voice: “Yes.”
John Kerry: “Who’s that gonna be? Who’s gonna do that?”
female voice: “Three years ago, I would say you[!], but right now I don’t know.”
Britain:
BBC propaganda:
Syrian rebel leader Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani has dropped that nom de guerre associated with his jihadist past, and been using his real name, Ahmed al-Sharaa, in official communiques issued since Thursday, ahead of the fall of President Bashar al-Assad.
This move is part of Jawlani’s effort to bolster his legitimacy in a new context, as his Islamist militant group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), leading other rebel factions, announces the capture of the Syrian capital, Damascus, solidifying its control over much of the country.
[…]
A 2021 PBS interview with Jawlani revealed that he was born in 1982 in Saudi Arabia, where his father worked as an oil engineer until 1989.
In that year, the Jawlani family returned to Syria, where he grew up and lived in the Mezzeh neighbourhood of Damascus.
Jawlani’s journey as a jihadist began in Iraq, linked to al-Qaeda through the Islamic State (IS) group’s precursor — al-Qaeda in Iraq and, later, the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI).
After the 2003 US-led invasion, he joined other foreign fighters in Iraq and, in 2005, was imprisoned at Camp Bucca, where he enhanced his jihadist affiliations and later on was introduced to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the quiet scholar who would later go on to lead IS.
In 2011, Baghdadi sent Jawlani to Syria with funding to establish al-Nusra Front, a covert faction tied to ISI. By 2012, Nusra had become a prominent Syrian fighting force, hiding its IS and al-Qaeda ties.
[…]
In 2016, Jawlani severed ties with al-Qaeda, rebranding the group as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham and later as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in 2017.
From that May 2017 FBI warrant:
The FBI is seeking information on the leadership of the al Nusrah Front (ANF), a foreign terrorist organization, to include information on Muhammad al-Jawlani. Today, the U.S. Department of State’s Rewards for Justice program announced a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the identification or location of Muhammad al-Jawlani.
In 2011 al-Jawlani, also known as Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, Abu Mohammed al-Julani, and Abu Muhammad al-Golani, established ANF. In 2013, al-Jawlani, as a leader of ANF, pledged the organization’s allegiance to al Qaeda and its leadership. In 2016, al-Jawlani claimed that the ANF was changing its name to Jabhat Fath Al Sham, or “Conquest of the Levant Front,” which has also been known as Jabhat al-Nusrah, Jabhet al-Nusra, The Victory Front, and al-Nusrah Front for the People of the Levant.
The U.S. State Department designated ANF as a foreign terrorist organization under the Immigration and Nationality Act and a specially designated global terrorist entity. In May 2013, al-Jawlani was named a specially designated global terrorist, by the U.S. State Department, blocking all his property and interests in property subject to U.S. jurisdiction and prohibiting U.S. persons from dealing with him.
On July 24, 2013, the UN Security Council ISIL (Da’esh) and al Qaeda Sanctions Committee placed al-Jawlani on its list of sanctioned terrorists, making him subject to an international asset freeze, travel ban, and arms embargo.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer says no decision has been made yet on whether the UK government could remove Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) from a list of banned terrorist groups after the rebels led the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
HTS was proscribed as a terror organisation in the UK after being added as an alias of al-Qaeda in 2017, meaning the UK cannot have any communication with the group.
Cabinet minister Pat McFadden earlier told the BBC that the UK could remove HTS from the list.
But Sir Keir said it was still “far too early” to consider a change of policy.
Speaking in Saudi Arabia, the prime minister said “we have to work to make sure that this is a peaceful opportunity” for Syria.
“We have all seen in other parts of history where we think there is a turning point — it turns out not necessarily to be the better future that we hope for,” Sir Keir added.
“We’ve got to make sure this is different.”
Separately, Foreign Secretary David Lammy told the Commons that the UK “will judge HTS by their actions, monitoring closely how they and other parties to this conflict treat all civilians in areas they control”.
HTS and allied rebel factions seized control of the Syrian capital Damascus on Sunday after years of civil war.
Under the Terrorism Act 2000, the home secretary may proscribe an organisation if they believe it commits or participates in, prepares for, promotes or encourages, or is otherwise concerned in terrorism, and if it is proportionate to do so.
It is a criminal offence to join a group on the list. It is also against the law to arrange a meeting if it is to support the activities of a proscribed organisation.
HTS also faces sanctions from the US and UN due to its terror designation.
[…]
Zionist minister McFadden on Sky News:
USA:
