Alessandro Bruno
When Ahmed al-Sharaa, better known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Julani, walked into the Oval Office this past November, the symbolism was impossible to miss. It marked the first time since 1946 that a Syrian head of state had been welcomed to the White House. Yet this president began his public career not as a diplomat or reformer, but as the emir of al-Nusra Front—al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch—and later as leader of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).
Julani’s trajectory from Camp Bucca detainee alongside Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to rebel commander, to de facto leader after Assad’s flight in December 2024, and finally to President of Syria’s interim government in January 2025 is often presented as an astonishing twist of Middle Eastern fate.
It is nothing of the sort.
It is the predictable outcome of a decade-long policy architecture that many analysts, including this author, warned about in real time: a regime-change strategy that leveraged jihadist networks, hollowed out the Syrian state, and made balkanization a feature rather than a bug of Western policy. When I wrote on the day Damascus fell that “the collapse has come as part of a long-term Western project that pursued this goal at all costs, even that of supporting organizations formally recognized as terrorist groups,” I was not engaging in hyperbole.
The Long War: Fourteen Years of Methodical Destruction
No comments:
Post a Comment