The Western media has remade the leader of the Al-Qaeda offshoot HTS into a Middle Eastern George Washington. From A Cradle Correspondent at thecradle.co:
Julani’s rise from Al-Qaeda affiliate to a western-recognized ‘moderate’ leader exemplifies how geopolitics trumps ideology. For years, the west has pretended to fight terrorism while leveraging Julani and his vast Al-Qaeda and ISIS-linked terror network to destabilize Syria.
Just in time for the Al-Qaeda offshoot Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s (HTS) lightning conquest of Syria, a western PR campaign was launched to rebrand the terror group’s leader, Abu Mohammad al-Julani.
The BBC assured their readers that Julani, now commonly referred to as Ahmed al-Sharaa – which is his real name – had “reinvented himself,” while the Telegraph insisted that the former deputy to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is now “diversity friendly.”
On 6 December, just days before entering the capital Damascus, Julani sat down with CNN journalist Jomana Karadsheh for an exclusive interview to explain his past.
“Julani says he has gone through episodes of transformation through the years,” CNN wrote, after he assured Karadsheh “no one has the right to eliminate” Syria’s Alawites, Christians, and Druze.
But why was Julani so eager to convince the American public that he had no plans to exterminate Syria’s religious minorities? This question looms larger when recalling the massacre of 190 Alawites in Latakia on 4 August 2013, and the taking of hundreds more as captives.
Back then, militants from HTS (then the Nusra Front), ISIS, and the Free Syrian Army (FSA) attacked 10 villages, slaughtering civilians in ways documented by Human Rights Watch: gunshot wounds, stabbings, decapitations, and charred remains. “Some corpses were found in a state of complete charring, and others had their feet tied,” the report stated.
