Who is the leader of Syria’s rebels and what does he want?

The US State Department is advertising an up to 10-million-dollar reward for information leading to the capture of Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, who the agency first designated as a terrorist more than a decade ago, saying his group had “carried out multiple terrorist attacks throughout Syria.” Yet, Jolani is also the leader of the rebel forces that just toppled the tyrannical regime of Syrian dictator Basher al-Assad in a fast-moving offensive that surprised the world.

The US State Department is advertising an up to $10 million reward for information leading to the capture of Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, who the agency first designated as a terrorist more than a decade ago, saying his group had “carried out multiple terrorist attacks throughout Syria.” Yet, Jolani is also the leader of the rebel forces that just toppled the tyrannical regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in a fast-moving offensive that surprised the world. As a result, Jolani is now the de facto leader of more than 23 million Syrians and the several million Syrian refugees who are outside of their country, many of whom will surely want to return home now that Assad is gone. So, who is Jolani, and what does he want? As a Syrian “foreign fighter” in his early 20s, Jolani crossed into Iraq to fight the Americans when they invaded the country in the spring of 2003. That eventually landed him in the notorious US-run Iraqi prison, Camp Bucca, which became a key recruiting ground for terrorist groups, including what would become ISIS. Freed from Camp Bucca, Jolani crossed back into Syria and started fighting against the Baathist Assad regime, doing so with the backing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who would later become the founder of ISIS. In Syria, Jolani founded a militant group known as Jabhat al-Nusra (“the Victory Front” in English), which pledged allegiance to al Qaeda, but in 2016, Jolani broke away from the terror group, according to the US Center for Naval Analyses. Since then – unlike al Qaeda, which promoted a quixotic global holy war – Jolani’s group, now known by the initials HTS (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham), has undertaken the more prosaic job of trying to govern millions of people in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib, providing basic services, according to the terrorism scholar Aaron Zalin who has written a book about HTS.