Ahmed al-Sharaa

Oh, and that's before you even go into the absolute craziness of the Trump, uh, uh, Kushner connection when you, like, zoom out from it, right? Because, uh, look, think about this for a second.

If this was North Korea, right, or if any other country outside of the West was sending the, the son-in-law of the president all over the world with a billionaire property developer who's in business with the president to mediate in every conflict that there is, there would be uproar.

It would be sneered at.

It would be ridiculous.

And while I know that they're not, you know, that they haven't gone to Albania to, um, you know, to solve a conflict or to negotiate anything, to me, it just says something about how the US government works and the sort of persistent allegations of corruption that we're seeing surrounding the administration and surrounding the wider Trump family and often surrounding Witkoff himself.

Like, effectively, you know, the US, the two main US envoys for foreign policy are property billionaires who are closely related to the president of the United States.

So there was a similar thing in Serbia, right, with Kushner, where Kushner was, uh, investing in, in a- again, some kind of a resort development.

Turned out that there was corruption involved in that.

Um, and, uh, you know, the Taliban knew that.

I mean, we had no leverage because it was like the guy going into the, you know, buy a car who said, "Yeah, I'll, I'll pay whatever you, you want," you know, didn't negotiate anything.

And the Taliban, you know, was supposed to, you know, kind of, you know, do a deal with the elected Afghan government and some sort, some, some, some sort of power-sharing agreement.

That didn't happen.

It, it was it because it was in Iraq that we started to learn new words like waterboarding and enhanced interrogation and all these euphemisms for torture and, uh, black sites and, and, um, uh, fancy words for what i-in essence were abduction.

Uh, and can I suggest therefore that one of the prices America has paid for the war on terror and the way it conducted it is its reputation.

You know, th-those of us who were-- that grew up after the Second World War, the, the Americans were the good guys.

They were on our side fighting the evil Nazis, fighting the evil imperial regime in Japan.

The idea is that the tsunami did not materialize in the way that they wanted.

And in fact, now even their global jihad has been tamed by one of their own insiders, you know, Ahmed Al-Sharra, Abu Muhammad Al-Julani, who actually you know, switch to being an asset, an active asset for the West in its fight against global jihadism.

Well, next week, we'll be releasing a conversation I recorded yesterday with Philip Cunliffe, professor of international relations at UCL.

And he argues that it's very helpful to see the war on terror era as representing something like a strange change symbiosis between the world of global Islamism, including its global jihadist form, and the United States and its world of unipolar globalization.

Yeah

... and Al-Julani, who, by the way, had a $10 million bounty on his head, uh, just a few years ago.

And so here we are, uh, Erin, and we're in Dru- the Druze area.

We're above, uh, the, uh, the north of, of Sea of Galilee at the Lebanon border up there and not far from Syria.

Over time, the Turkish-backed faction al-Nusra Front, now called HTS, prevailed.

The leader of the group, Abu Muhammad al-Julani, worked with Abu Bakhtar al-Baghdadi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, to expand al-Qaeda's Syrian branch.

The Zionist media is having quite the time trying to rebrand Julani as a moderate rebel.

Of course, there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq until the U.S. went into Iraq.

Yeah, he really misread the situation.

Ahmed Zeydan, who's an Al Jazeera reporter, who's now, interestingly... senior aide to al-Shara, the new president in Syria.

He wrote a very interesting unpublished biography of bin Laden.

Zidane had a lot of access to bin Laden and also the real number two in al-Qaeda, which was a guy called Abu Hafs.

One is we're seeing thousands upon thousands of death squads that were in Syria being shipped to Yemen to confront Ansarullah.

And this may look like something that we should be worried about for Yemen, but I personally don't think so, especially that the removal of these death squads from Syria is now going to weaken al-Julani's regime.

and uh these forces uh haven't been able to do much in syria and iraq without the help of the of the west they're not going to achieve better any results in yemen and they're most probably going to get minced there the other thing that just happened in yemen a few hours ago the south yemen minister of defense or what they're calling the government of Yemen's Minister of Defense, what the Saudis call, has fell under an ambush by militias backed by the United Arab Emirates.

Oh, wow.

And then they're kind of stirring this thing up with Yemen as well.

So do you think that there's a possibility that this could backfire on Jilani?

Yeah, these actions of al-Julani's regime are another indicator of how disassociated from reality the whole imperial order is.

I mean, you know, let's say if I was in charge of the empire and I just took over Syria, I would try to save that base.

And then they had a global alliance of like 60 countries that we led that successfully defeated ISIS.

So Bin Laden made a version of that problem, which is you can't You know, look at Al-Shara, who's the new president of Syria.

He ran an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria.

He was imprisoned by the Americans.