• My life as al-Sharaa’s prisoner
• Syria’s president is warmly welcomed in western capitals. But on his watch, blood continued to spill.
• As I was frequently subjected to fake executions, I spent most of my first year in a state of shock and awe.
• An al-Qaeda official in Syria who I remember lecturing a roomful of prisoners he was about to execute on charges of apostasy is now a senior minister | The Spectator World / Theo Padnos | Nov 10, 2025
• US legalizes terrorism: Washington lifts sanctions on al-Qaeda* in Syria | Asia Today, 2025-07-10
• From terrorists to partners.
• The United States increased the reward for the new leader of Al-Qaeda to $10 million-as it once did for Julani | Asia Today, 2025-07-30
• Al-Qaeda Goes to Washington | The UNZ Review, November 12, 2025
• What happened at Syrian president’s historic White House visit - Video.
• Syria’s interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa has become the first Syrian leader to visit the White House. Sharaa and US President Donald Trump reached agreements on sanctions and the fight against ISIL | Al Jazeera, 11 Nov 2025 

T=1763519683 / Human Date and time (GMT): Wed, 19th Nov. 2025, 02.34.
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Theo Padnos

The jihadist I knew: my life as al-Sharaa’s prisoner

Syria’s president is warmly welcomed in western capitals. But on his watch, blood continued to spill

Monday, November 10, 2025 

 
Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa (Getty Images)

As Washington rolls out the red carpet today for the former al-Qaeda chieftain and now Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s minorities continue to live in terror. An army of destruction, half Mad Max, half Lollapalooza is rolling through the desert somewhere south of the country’s capital, Damascus. Who has ordered these militants into action? No one knows. What do they want? It isn’t clear. But, as a former prisoner of al-Sharaa’s band of jihadists, I can’t say I’m surprised by what is unfolding in Syria.

Whatever else might be said about the old regime of Bashar al-Assad, no one was ever in doubt as to who was in charge. There were statues of al-Assad on roundabouts, billboards plastered with his face on the highways and pop hits on the radio (“O Bashar, the lofty brow, but who is like you?”). These weren’t masterpieces by any means, but they had a certain catchiness to them, and so, over time, they settled into everyone’s mental jukebox. The old power wished to govern a particular place, namely Syria, and to preside over a particular people, namely Arabs, as the national anthem, Protectors of the Realm, was at such pains to point out.

The power looming over the nation’s minorities at the moment has no such properties. Many of the foreign fighters still in Syria drifted in at the beginning of the civil war, 14 years ago. Often enough, those fighters burned their passports on arrival. It is hard to know who they are.

Whoever the culprits, the violence is unmistakable. The powers that have been coming for the Druze over the past few months have also been targeting the Christian community in Syria, which is living through a period of danger unlike anything that has befallen eastern Christianity for over a century. The worst of the anti-Christian violence occurred last June at the Mar Elias Church in Damascus, when an attacker opened fire on the congregation. He killed 25 people before killing himself.

As I was frequently subjected to fake executions, I spent most of my first year in a state of shock and awe

The Alawites are also in jeopardy. A mixture of government and civilian forces, amounting to some 200,000 fighters, descended on the Alawite homeland, along the Syrian coast, in March and April. The massacres there appear to have left at least 1,500 people dead. In July, when a similar mixture of government and irregular forces attacked the Druze capital, Sweyda, they killed some 1,400 people, of whom 765, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, were civilians “summarily executed by defense and interior ministry personnel.”

Anyone who visited Syria before the war will be familiar with the spirit that animates this violence. In the time of al-Assad, whenever the propaganda division wanted to haunt the national imagination, it depicted sectarian strife as a big-bellied gourmand sitting down for a feast. The nation of Syria was laid out before this creature like a meat pie. The cartoons depicted him, bloody knife in hand, about to carve the country into bits. That dark prophecy is alive in al-Sharaa’s Syria.

I happen to know something about what it’s like to live under the power of Islamist extremist rule. In the autumn of 2012, during an ill-fated reporting trip in Syria, a band of jihadis, led by Syria’s then al-Qaeda chief, Mohammed Jolani, now better known as al-Sharaa, took me prisoner. In those days, he and his deputy, Mohammed Adnani, presided over a caliphate-in-miniature which operated out of the basement of the Aleppo eye hospital. Adnani subsequently became famous for his behead-the-journalists-in-the-desert videos, and for directing the November 2015 attacks in Paris.

Almost right away, during the first hours after my arrest, I was told that Islam holds creation to be divided between the realm of the seen and that of the unseen. As Adnani was my first interrogator, I happened to hear his rantings about this important topic most often. In his view, ever since the arrival of the very first Alawite in Syria in the ninth century, the members of this only-in-Syria sect had been inflicting their barbarism and ignorance on the nation. Through the centuries, according to him, the Alawites had lied so subtly, sabotaged Islam so relentlessly and when all else failed, simply terrorized the people, that, eventually, those who truly loved Islam had been forced into hiding. Adnani and al-Sharaa were going to escort all of Syria out of its thousand years of darkness, into the light.

As I was often held by myself in a windowless cell, I was never permitted out of it without a blindfold. And as I was frequently subjected to fake executions, I spent most of my first year in a state of shock and awe. After about 500 days, however, the effect wore off. By that point, I had been transferred to a prison somewhere on the banks of the Euphrates, in eastern Syria. By then, the little family of terrorists I had encountered at first in a warren of rooms beneath a ruined Aleppo hospital was no longer so little. Thanks to an ingenious social media footprint and a “cataract” of American weaponry, as this New York Times article (which I did not have occasion to read at the time) put it, the family now controlled an area the size of Texas.

What does life inside an international terrorist organization feel like during its rapid growth phase? It feels like young men who’ve been shunted to the side since childhood – who’ve been poor and rootless and frightened of the police – are coming into their own at last. They are up to their ears in guns, combat vests, grenades, and two-way radios. Each one of these young men dreams of a little Playboy mansion in the desert: the four wives, the children underfoot, the loving community all around. In Syria, especially for the fighters who have access to money from Europe, it’s not so hard to make this particular dream come true.

In a contemporary caliphate, among the fighters at least, much feasting goes on. There is singing. The happiness in the air, the resolve to do away with Syria’s three million Alawites once and for all, the high-tech western weapons, the half-suicidal, half-homicidal foreign fighters: when you live within these phenomena long enough, you will eventually feel that you have drifted away into a country which is just being born, which the outside world has never seen and cannot fathom. You will note how often the citizens here call up the old world on the phone, how they miss it and how much time everyone spends assembling improvised explosive devices.

An al-Qaeda official in Syria who I remember lecturing a roomful of prisoners he was about to execute on charges of apostasy is now a senior minister

Eventually, you will feel about this parallel world as you might feel about a novel in which a high school student – a clairvoyant, let’s say – is laughed at for some essential element of herself, and so withdraws into a netherworld of spirits and spells. The reader of a novel like this might not know how exactly the climactic scene will unfold but long before the spectacular bloodbath arrives, he will feel it coming. Life inside the growth phase of an international terrorist organization is like waking up to find that everyone you know is the lead character in such a novel.

One night in July of 2014, I was let out of my cell. A kerfuffle over who was entitled to the revenue from Syria’s oil fields had broken out. During the subsequent forced march out of eastern Syria, we drove through the desert, always at night, and always without lights. Just before dawn, we would stop at the mouth of a cave or at the base of a sand dune in order to drink tea and catch a few hours of kip.

At least a few of the pick-up drivers who escorted us have since become generals occupying plush offices in downtown Damascus. An al-Qaeda official in Syria who I remember lecturing a roomful of prisoners he was about to execute on charges of apostasy is now a senior minister. On the surface of things, it would appear that the revolution has turned everything in Syria on its head. But have things really changed all that much? I, for one, am skeptical.

Looking back, I suspect that in the summer of 2014, when I was traveling through the desert, the nation had already slipped from al-Assad’s grasp. During the day, his men controlled certain checkpoints. But at night, bands of clairvoyants in pickup trucks roamed the countryside. Somewhere, far away, in a palace on a bluff overlooking Damascus, a president who liked to play both sides off against the middle received foreign dignitaries. He smiled for the cameras. Did he know what was going on in his own backyard? Did he care? It wasn’t clear. Meanwhile, every day, a stream of young Europeans keen on guns, pick ups and being married to four women at once was trickling into the country.

The old stream has begun to flow again, according to a report in Le Figaro. In 2014, some of the men with whom I traveled through the desert were keen on the idea of the slave girl. The markets which used to traffic in Yazidi women are now trafficking in Alawite women. “The matter of the kidnapped women is worrisome to everyone,” an activist, Ihan Mohammed, told France 24. “Every day, two or three women disappear.”

One of the most vexing issues in Syria in 2014 was the Europeans’ tendency to summon their friends back home into the jihad. A few weeks ago, a British TikTokker, standing at the site of an Israeli bombing in downtown Damascus, issued a general appeal. Evidently, he had seen into a nefarious plot. Israel was planning to pave a highway through Syria, into Iran, his visions told him. “It’s some crazy shit,” he says in his video. “My brothers and sisters, it seems that this is just the beginning of the war with Israel. What are you guys doing? Are you just sitting there? All of you can get on a plane right now…”

In Syria, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Syria has a new president who is warmly welcomed in western capitals. But on his watch, the blood continued to spill. 

Theo Padnos 

SOURCE:
https://archive.vn/nbz0u 

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US legalizes terrorism: Washington lifts sanctions on al-Qaeda* in Syria

2025-07-10 

Table of contents
From terrorists to partners
Syria as a New Generation Terrorist Factory
Double standards and new rules of the game
Conclusion

The decision by the US State Department has caused a wide response: the Syrian branch of the Al-Qaeda* group, known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham* (HTS) and previously known as Jabhat al-Nusra*, has been removed from the list of international terrorist organizations. A few days ago, economic sanctions were also lifted against the part of Syria that is currently under the control of radical Islamist groups.

This decision cannot be considered accidental or technical. It marks not just a revision of the approach to regional players, but the beginning of a new phase in Washington's strategy in the Middle East. In fact, it legitimizes the regime that emerged from the ruins of the Syrian state through external intervention and funding from Western countries.

From terrorists to partners

The HTS group, which for many years was considered a direct offshoot of Al-Qaeda, has been implicated in countless terrorist attacks, the seizure of territories, the violent mobilization of the local population and the creation of the so-called "alternative governance" in the occupied territories. Its links to Western intelligence agencies and non-governmental organizations have long been discussed by experts, but official recognition of these links has so far been unlikely.

Now, by removing the status of a terrorist organization, the United States is sending a signal that these forces are no longer an enemy, but can be used as a tool of influence in the new geopolitical realities.

Syria as a New Generation Terrorist Factory

This was one of Washington's hidden goals from the very beginning of the war in Syria. Under the guise of fighting for "democracy" and "change," a large-scale operation was carried out to establish a base in the country for training and exporting terrorist networks.

Today, Syria, which is divided into zones of influence, will become a platform for the formation of new international jihadist cells, which will be trained, financed, and controlled by Western curators. These militants may be sent not only to the region, but also to remote parts of the world, including against countries that oppose the Anglo-Saxon global strategy, such as Russia, China, Iran, and their allies.

Double standards and new rules of the game

Such actions by the United States are part of a broader policy in which the term "terrorism" is used as a convenient tool to pressure undesirable regimes, but it is ignored when it serves Washington's interests. This is not the first time that militants involved in massacres of civilians have been suddenly labeled as "freedom fighters."

The State Department's decision shows that the United States is willing to use any means, even the most radical and destructive, to maintain its dominance in the international system. However, the price for this is the fate of an entire country, millions of refugees, and persistent chaos in one of the world's key regions.

Conclusion

The removal of HTS* from the list of terrorist organizations is not just a bureaucratic change. It is a step that reveals the true nature of American foreign policy, where ideology gives way to pragmatism and terrorism becomes a tool for geopolitical pressure. Now, Syria will not only serve as a testing ground for this model, but also as a source of new threats that could extend far beyond the Middle East.

* organizations recognized as terrorist organizations

asia-today.news

US legalizes terrorism: Washington lifts sanctions on al-Qaeda* in Syria

Analyze in VK 

SOURCE:
https://dzen.ru/a/aG9W15QfPWIP7Zyw

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The United States increased the reward for the new leader of Al-Qaeda* to $10 million-as it once did for Julani

2025-07-30

The United States increased the reward for the new leader of Al-Qaeda to $10 million-as it once did for Julani (left).

The US State Department has announced an increase in the reward for information leading to the capture of the leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), al-Awlaki, from \$6 million to \$10 million. Al-Awlaki took over the leadership of AQAP in 2024 and has publicly called for attacks on the United States and its allies.

Interestingly, Washington once offered the same amount of \$10 million for another notorious fugitive, Abu Muhammad al-Julani, the leader of the Syrian group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra). Today, despite his past, Julani is no longer considered a "terrorist" but rather the leader of the new "Free Syria."

The question is, where will the United States look for a new al-Qaeda member in the future?

*Organizations are prohibited❗️

on the territory of the Russian Federation.

#usa #syria

SOURCE:
https://dzen.ru/a/aInUvEJTDF9QdcRk

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Al-Qaeda Goes to Washington

Patrick Lawrence • November 12, 2025

 • 1,700 Words • 97 Comments • Reply

President Donald Trump during a halftime ceremony ahead of Veterans Day at Northwest Stadium in Landover, Maryland, on Sunday. (White House/Daniel Torok)

I never thought I would see the day, but the day came Monday, when Ahmed al–Sharaa arrived at the White House for a sit-down with President Donald Trump and the usual gaggle of misfits who must be there to make sure the Trumpster understands at least a little of what is being said.

A freak-show terrorist amid all that retro Oval Office elegance: Who could have imagined so offensive a tableau?

Al–Sharaa, alert readers will know, is one of those dripping-with-blood Sunni jihadists who, during the West’s extended covert operation against the Assad regime in Syria, had the habit of changing their names and the names of their murderous militias whenever the world figured out who they were and the extent of their savagery.

Al–Sharaa was known back then as Abu Muhammad al–Jolani, the surname translating as “He of the Golan.” Past beneficiary of C.I.A.–MI6 profligacy during those years when American and British intel financed, armed and trained primitive killers of al–Sharaa’s kind, he is now the president of Syria — the result of a final Anglo-American push that put him in Damascus a year ago next month.

Al–Sharaa–al–Jolani began his brilliant career in 2003, when, at 21, he joined al–Qaeda in Iraq to fight against the American occupation (which, one has to say, was a creditable thing to do in and of itself). Then he hooked up with the Islamic State, via the infamous Abu Bakr al–Baghdadi, to get the Sunni barbarism going back in his native Syria.

After the C.I.A. and MI6 turned “Arab Spring” protests in Syria into a bloody armed conflict in 2011 (early 2012 at the latest), al–Jolani (as he was by this time) helped form Jabhat al–Nusra, al–Qaeda’s front organization in Syria.

But by 2017 al–Nusra was getting an other-than-brilliant press, and al–Jolani changed its name to Hay`at Tahrir al–Sham, HTS, via a merger with… let’s see… by my count, six other not very nice Salafist militias.

HTS was designated a year later as a terrorist organization by the United States and the U.N.; al–Jolani, with the same designation, had a $10 million price on his head.

The world is run in secrecy, I long ago concluded. And it is hard to tell when the invisible powers that determine global events decided to buy al–Jolani some suits, tell him to change his name back to what it was and make him legit.

Rehab Operation

I first clocked that some kind of rehab operation was afoot when, in April 2021, PBS broadcast the first interview with al–Jolani ever to appear in a Western medium. In it, the specially designated terrorist in a blue blazer and a buttoned-down shirt promised to found a “salvation government” in Syria. Martin Smith, a correspondent with a good reputation (at least until April 2021) nods credulously.

Three years and change later, al–Jolani leads his expensively armed forces in a lightning march toward Damascus, backed, as it was all along, by the Western powers, this time by the Turks and probably but not demonstrably the Israelis.

HTS had not even got to Damascus before you read of how terrific it was all going to be. Headline in the Dec. 3 editions of The Telegraph: “How Syria’s ‘diversity-friendly’ jihadists plan on building a state.”

The sectarian violence for which al–Sharaa has lived and breathed all these years has not stopped since he declared himself president for the next five years — violence against the Druze, violence against Christians, violence against Alawites.

The place is a riot of Sunni-driven brutality, so far as one can make out from the spotty reporting. Some of this is reportedly the work of foreign Salafists who have continued to operate — under al–Sharaa’s direction? with his tacit approval? — since the Assad regime fell.

The American edition of The Spectator ran an interesting piece in its Monday edition by Theo Padnos, who spent a year as a prisoner of HTS, under the headline, “The jihadist I knew: my life as al–Sharaa’s prisoner.”

Here is Padnos’s lead:

“As Washington rolls out the red carpet today for the former al–Qaeda chieftain and now Syrian president, Ahmed al–Sharaa, Syria’s minorities continue to live in terror. An army of destruction, half Mad Max, half Lollapalooza is rolling through the desert somewhere south of the country’s capital, Damascus.

Who has ordered these militants into action? No one knows. What do they want? It isn’t clear. But, as a former prisoner of al–Sharaa’s band of jihadists, I can’t say I’m surprised by what is unfolding in Syria.”

You don’t read much about what is unfolding in Syria in the mainstream American press. Instead, you read about “Mr. Sharaa’s journey from a jihadist intent on killing American soldiers to today’s suave, impeccably dressed, conciliatory leader wooing nations across the globe” — this from Roger Cohen in Monday’s New York Times under the headline, “A Syrian Village and the Long Road to the White House.”

Slather on the uplift, Roger.

Or, from Christina Goldbaum in the same paper, same day:

“Mr. al–Sharaa’s meeting in Washington is the latest turn in the transformation of the Islamist former rebel leader, who was once designated as a terrorist by the United States with a $10 million bounty on his head.”

Suave? Conciliatory? Impeccably dressed? No, no, and those suits look like cheap schmatta to me. The latest turn in the transformation?

You see what is happening here, I hope. Just take this criminal as the powers behind him present him and think no more about what was on that long road, or the beheadings, or who financed the journey.

Ms. Goldbaum informs us that al–Sharaa went to Washington this week “to sign an agreement to join 88 other countries in the global coalition to defeat the Islamic State, which remains active in Syria.” Say whaaa?

Al–Sharaa, no stranger to the Islamic State, was sanctioned as a terrorist until the Treasury Department removed him last Friday; Syria is still designated a state sponsor of terrorism. And al–Sharaa is in the Oval Office for some kind of enlistment ceremony?

Age of Comprehensive Secrecy

In our Age of Comprehensive Secrecy we may never know why Trump and his people had al–Sharaa into the Oval Office. My surmise: At issue Monday was how al–Sharaa is to manage — how he will be told to manage — his relations with Israel, given the Zionist state’s objective is to reduce what is still formally called the Syrian Arab Republic to a smashed mosaic mess as it proceeds with its “seven-front war.”

Al–Sharaa is, in short, now a fully certified instrument of the imperium and its appendages. He is to serve an assigned purpose.

As I considered the spectacle of this Salafist murderer sitting in one of those Empire armchairs opposite the Trumpster, it came me that I had seen many times in my somewhat lengthy life the day I thought I would never see.

I had simply forgotten for a moment the history of America’s crumbling republic since the 1945 victories brought it more power than it was ever to manage wisely.

No ground to claim “horrified,” this is to say. Al–Sharaa is an egregious case, brought to Washington by the most egregious man ever to occupy the White House, but he is one in a long line of dictators and assorted deplorables to be so honored.

He is possibly, dare I say this, the crudest of them but not otherwise the worst.

There is the shah of Iran, to take an early postwar case. President Harry Truman welcomed him at the White House in 1949, just two years into the Cold War that he, Truman, started, and fully four years before the C.I.A. and the Brits deposed the democratically-elected Mohammad Mossadegh in Teheran.

Four more presidents brought him back for five more visits — John F. Kennedy in 1962, Richard Nixon in 1969 and 1973, Gerald Ford in 1975 and Jimmy Carter in 1977.

In 1970 it was Suharto’s turn. Nixon had him for a state visit in 1970, five years after Indonesia’s rivers ran red with the blood of — latest estimate — a million people defending the pride the inimitable Sukarno had imparted to them at independence.

When Reagan had Suharto to the White House he hosted a state dinner and praised this vicious dictator for “your wise and steadfast leadership.”

Augusto Pinochet was Carter’s guest in 1977, four years after the coup that deposed Chile’s President Salvador Allende. Efraín Ríos Montt arrived at Reagan’s invitation in 1982, when, as the worst of Guatemala’s military dictators, he was well into the campaign of terror and genocide that has so scarred psyches of Guatemala’s Mayan population.

Etc., unfortunately.

All of these people and who can count how many others had a purpose, just as al–Sharaa has one. If we insist we are horrified by al–Sharaa’s presence in the Oval Office this week it behooves us to be horrified by the past eight decades of the imperium’s conduct abroad.

Let us take this occasion to come to terms with our purported leaders’ preference for all manner of mass-murders, tyrants, genocidists and dictators, and equally our policy cliques’ abhorrence of democracy and its processes and anyone — beyond the perimeter of the West and sometimes within it — who stands for them.

These people are not aberrations or wrong turns. They are the dramatis personae of American foreign policy. America created some of them. Certainly it created the man who now names himself Syria’s president.

No, Ahmed al–Sharaa ‘r’ us, and we ought finally to come to terms with the reality of which he is merely the latest manifestation.

(Republished from Consortium News by permission of author or representative)

SOURCE:
https://www.unz.com/plawrence/al-qaeda-goes-to-washington/

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NewsFeed

What happened at Syrian president’s historic White House visit 

https://www.aljazeera.com/video/newsfeed/2025/11/11/what-happened-at-syrian-presidents-historic-white-house-visit#flips-6384947037112:0


Syria’s interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa has become the first Syrian leader to visit the White House. Sharaa and US President Donald Trump reached agreements on sanctions and the fight against ISIL.

Published On 11 Nov 202511 Nov 2025

SOURCE: https://aje.io/hw5yof

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