The Al Qaeda leader who took over Syria, Ahmed Al-Sharaa aka Mohammed Al-Jolani, aka Mr. President, paid a visit to the White House just in time for the anniversary of the Battle of Fallujah. He played meet and greet with various political notables and, after a pressure campaign by the Muslim Brotherhood, dismantled the sanctions on Syria.
And, in the best news of all, the Al Qaeda government will join the coalition against his former buddies in ISIS.
The Jolani visit was the culmination of 14 years of regime change efforts in Syria which claimed to be “democratic” and which skeptics, like me, called a Jihadist and Islamist trojan horse. Long after those efforts were politically discredited by the revelation that the “free” and “democratic” movements we were backing were really Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda took over.
And we’re partnering with moderate Al Qaeda against extremist Al Qaeda so that Al Qaeda doesn’t win.
Turkey’s Erdogan regime pulled off the original takeover under the Biden administration which withdrew the $10 million bounty on Al-Jolani, but the Trump administration didn’t have to ratify this abomination, let alone invite the leader of a terrorist group that murdered Americans to the White House. No agreement Al-Jolani will make amounts to anything more than the familiar “saying ‘nice doggie’ until you find a stick”. Negotiating with Islamic terrorists has never worked out for us, whether in Afghanistan or Gaza, it won’t work out for us in Syria either.
