Former US envoy to Syria boasts of role in rebranding Jolani
Former United States ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, has boasted about his role in rebranding Daesh-linked terrorist Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the head of the HTS-led administration in Syria, but hid his role in Syria death squads, a political commentator says.
On his X account, Tim Anderson, the director of the Center for Counter Hegemonic Studies (CCHS) in Australia, posted a short video of Ford, in which he is speaking at a gathering and revealing how he managed to rebrand the former Daesh terrorist.
“Former US diplomat Robert Ford boasts about his role in rebranding ISIS (Daesh) terrorist Jolani. But Ford is dissembling. He was a key patron of the death squads in Syria, from 2011 onwards,” Anderson said on X.
Ford, who was the US ambassador to Syria from 2011 until 2014, said that in 2023, a UK-based conflict resolution NGO, called on him to help transition former Takfiri terrorist leader Ahmad Sharaa (aka Jolani) into mainstream politics.
“Starting in 2023, a British non-government organization, which specializes in conflict resolution, invited me to help them bring this guy (= Jolani) out of the terrorist world and into regular politics,” the former American ambassador to Syria said.
Initially hesitant due to Jolani’s terrorist past, Ford eventually met him and described their conversation as surprisingly civil, with Jolani, then governing opposition-held northwest Syria, admitting that the terrorist tactics he used in Iraq no longer work when leading a population of four million—though he offered no apology whatsoever for his past terror attacks.
“I share this because he said something which really piqued my interest. He never apologized, never apologized for the terrorist attacks in Iraq or in Syria, although there were many fewer in Syria, never apologized. But he also said, now I am governing an opposition-led area of northwest Syria and I am learning that the tactics and the principles that I was following in Iraq do not apply when you actually have to govern four million people,” Ford added.
Jolani has recently expressed readiness to normalize ties between Syria and Israel amid Washington’s plans to revoke anti-Damascus sanctions and Israel’s occupation of more Syrian land.
The HTS, the Takfiri terrorist group of al-Qaeda’s former branch in Syria, seized control of Damascus in December 2024, forcing the then Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause, to leave the country amid intense Israeli airstrikes against the nation’s civilian and military infrastructures.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently described how the Israeli military helped the HTS takeover of Syria in December.
