“The body language! There was the murderous Jolani – an erstwhile jihadi who bounced between the group that committed the 9/11 atrocities and the one that beheaded James Foley – swaggering along the cavernous corridors of Assad’s presidential palace. And beside him scurried the… pic.twitter.com/Z0dWcYdgtj
— Jake Wallis Simons (@JakeWSimons) March 9, 2025
For example: a late February BBC News article referred to the jihadist al-Jolani/al-Sharaa as the “Syrian leader,” and quoted him saying, in statesmanlike fashion, that “the country has a ‘historic’ opportunity to rebuild.” Al-Jolani added that the state should “have a monopoly on weapons,” for Syria’s “strength lies in its unity.”
Yeah, that monopoly on weapons has proven to be a great idea.
“Jeremy Bowen’s excruciating interview with the new ruler of Syria,” by Jake Wallis Simons, December 21, 2024:
It was while scrolling on X that I first encountered Jeremy Bowen’s excruciating interview with Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the new terror overlords of Syria. The video began playing automatically without sound. Even then it struck me as bizarre.
The body language! There was the murderous Jolani – an erstwhile jihadi who bounced between the group that committed the 9/11 atrocities and the one that beheaded James Foley – swaggering along the cavernous corridors of Assad’s presidential palace. And beside him scurried the BBC’s International Editor, all starry-eyed and smiley, like a little boy with his big brother.
I tapped the screen to turn on the sound. Not one of Bowen’s questions addressed Jolani’s bloodthirsty jihadi past; his apparent pivot to conservative Islamist authoritarianism; or the way in which his group celebrated on October 7 and eulogised Hamas leaders. In fact, the only time the BBC man pushed a point was when asking when alcohol would be available in Syria (to be fair, I know the feeling).
The other day, I asked a diplomat friend who had met Jolani recently whether he thought he had genuinely reformed. “Definitely not!” came the reply. Interestingly, however, he added that the warlord had spoken “more pragmatically about Israel than we had expected”, with none of the anti-Israel rhetoric one might have expected from the Muslim Brotherhood; the last thing Jolani wants is another war. The fact that the starstruck BBC man neglected such subjects as these made for a superficial interview….
Read the rest here.