James Jeffrey has been a top U.S. diplomat in the George W. Bush, Obama and Trump administrations. He served as the U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 2008 to 2010 and to Iraq from 2010 to 2012. More recently, he served as Special Representative for Syria Engagement.

The following interview was conducted on March 8, 2021, by FRONTLINE filmmaker Martin Smith. It has been edited for clarity and length.

I want to go back to the beginning of the Iraq War. This is a young man, living down — he is a 19-, 20-year-old. He was a young man, living in Damascus. He goes to fight in Iraq. Give me a sense of the role that Syria played in sending fighters to Iraq in 2003 and why.

One of the major problems we had in Iraq after 2003, already predictable from Afghanistan after 2001, predictable in some respects after Korea in 1950, Vietnam after 1965, is when you introduce a lot of American troops into a regional conflict or situation, the neighbors have a reaction. That reaction has repeatedly scrambled our specific efforts, our endeavor on the ground, and we keep missing this lesson.

When we went into Iraq in 2003, we were incredibly threatening to both Assad and to Iran. Iran did two things. First of all, we know now it stopped its weaponization program for nuclear weapons in 2003 right after we went in. Secondly, Syria started sponsoring jihadist elements, including Al Qaeda, flowing into Iraq from all over the Middle East and beyond to fight the American forces, eventually, after [Abu Musab al-]Zarqawi gained control of much of the Sunni opposition, to fight the Shia Arab plurality in Iraq. And that was a major problem for us. That took us years to cope with.

Why did Assad want to do that?

It’s an interesting question. Assad’s father, of course, was famous for going after the Muslim Brothers in the 1980s in Hama. It is a country that is extremely sensitive about Islamic radical movements. As we know, it is a secular movement led by a group of people who are an offshoot of a Shia brand of Islam. And thus, on the surface, you wouldn’t think he wanted it.

It was a secular country.

Exactly. But the point is, what he did not want was to be next on the chopping block for Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and George Bush’s axis of evil takedown list.

So he didn’t want to see an American invasion of Syria. So he sends these guys; he encourages. How does he do that?

It didn’t take a whole lot of encouragement. What they did was they set up networks, some by Syrian intelligence, who always had both a love-hate relationship with the jihadist elements in Syria, and there have always been plenty of them. That is, they pursued them, they threw them in jail, they killed them, but they also maintained liaison with them. Typical, by the way, all throughout the foreign — all throughout the Middle East.

And so they used these networks to set up essentially ratlines through Syria into these camps along the border, one of which we hit in late 2008, our only military effort against Syria during this whole campaign. And then they would flow across the border, and there they would be picked up, largely by Zarqawi and the Al Qaeda elements. They were the ones who exploited these folks.

So as far as we can deduce, if Jolani tells us that he went in there in 2003 — he actually said he went in there in anticipation of the U.S. invasion —

Mm-hmm.

… I mean, what can we know or deduce about who he would have linked up with when he got to Iraq?

Probably at that time he was not sponsored, if you will, by the Syrian government, but rather, from his background, he was looking for a chance to fight the Western oppressors, basically the general Al Qaeda and similar organizations’ view of the world. It was obvious that we were going in by the beginning of 2003, and he would have found sympathetic voices buried inside of Iraq, among extremist Islamic groups that he probably had one or another contact with.

So it wouldn’t have been hard for him to link up.

We’ve never seen it hard for anybody to make contact with anybody else in Iraq.

And so his ultimate boss at that point would have been Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, correct?

In 2003, Zarqawi was just emerging. Zarqawi had been, interestingly, a senior member of Ansar al-Islam, which was a jihadist Kurdish Sunni group, which is unusual, operating out of Iran, we think with some Iranian support — also not terribly unusual, but somewhat unusual — which was crushed by the United States on the request of Jalal Talabani after we went in 2003. Zarqawi, meanwhile, wound up in a hospital in Baghdad, leading people to think that he may have been sponsored by Saddam [Hussein]. But again, we’ve never been able to prove that.

Then he went back into, if you will, the resistance that was forming almost immediately between then, in 2003, and the first major assault, which was on the U.N. in Baghdad in the summer of 2004. The Al Qaeda element in Iraq began evolving. He became the leader of it, and it started taking a different position from the Al Qaeda Central in Pakistan; that is, with a distinctly anti-Shia tone to it.

There were attacks in August. There were three of them. There was the one you mentioned against the U.N.; there was the Jordanian Embassy; there was the one on the shrine in Najaf. All of these were Zarqawi?

The U.N. one was. We assume the one against the Jordanian Embassy was as well.

And in Najaf?

I’m not sure about that. That was interesting, though, because that was the first example of what we think was a Sunni extremist attack in a Shia area.

There’s no doubt that these attacks targeted civilians, right?

There’s no doubt that these attacks were classic terrorist attacks, where attacking symbolic targets with civilian casualties, either as a collateral but acceptable damage or as a deliberate goal, was taken into account.

You know, I raise that because Jolani likes to say that his strategy is to avoid killing civilians, but he would have been working in an organization that was targeting civilians intentionally.

Al Qaeda intentionally targeted civilians, everything from children at a USAID event to stewardesses in a van on the way to the airport one day, again in 2004.

So, disingenuous of him to say that he — well, he says he disagreed with that strategy.

Not everybody agreed with it. It’s perfectly — certainly the behavior of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham [HTS] since I’ve been observing them in 2018, is they don’t go after civilians.

So that’s perhaps a position that’s evolved over time. When was the first time that Jolani came on your radar?

In 2018, when I took on the Syria account.

I see. So even though he had formed and become the leader in 2011 of Jabhat al-Nusra, you were not paying attention at that point.

We knew the split-up of, if you will, Al Qaeda into Syria, three different groups. First of all was ISIS, which was the most obvious because it was the most threatening. Also, I had had the most to do with [Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi when I was in Iraq in 2010 to 2012, so that got most of the attention. And then there was al-Nusra, because it was the other large group that had territorial control. But we also knew that there was a third, if you will, a purist Al Qaeda element in Syria, the least powerful of the three. …

Right. But we’re jumping ahead, so I want to go back. So he goes into Iraq in 2003. He says he’s arrested in 2006. Goes into the prison system, the U.S. prison system. Is there anything we know about what would have happened? What can we surmise happened to him? He says he was in for five years. The records seem to support that.

That would be 2006 to 2011. He would have been one of the large group of people that was released by the Iraqis when we left.

So he goes into, and spends most of his time, although he initially went into Abu Ghraib, he says. But then he went to Bucca.

Yeah.

Spent a lot of time in Bucca. What can we deduce about that time in Bucca? What was happening in Bucca?

What was happening in Bucca was, it was a wholly owned subsidiary of Al Qaeda. The most extreme elements had total control of the camp. They basically had a, if you will, informal relationship with the captives; that is, the U.S. military. If the U.S. military didn’t really bother them, try to stop their indoctrination, their cell-like organization and such, they wouldn’t create a lot of trouble. There were several attempts to break out, but I think only one was fairly successful. So therefore, the U.S. military didn’t see Bucca as a big problem, whereas, in fact, it was the training ground for a whole new generation of Middle Eastern extremist terrorists.

Why did the U.S. miss that?

That can be 100 different socioeconomic, political, ideological, theological elements of the situation in Iraq from the period 2003 to 2011, if not beyond. The U.S. military, and the U.S. government generally, was woefully unprepared to deal with the reality on the ground in Iraq. We had few Arabists; we had few people who knew the Middle East deeply. We had even fewer who knew Iraq, because we’d had only a minimal presence there for many years. And there was both an ideological tilt, certainly to the Bush administration, that Iraq were the people that one had tea with in Washington, D.C. There wasn’t a whole lot of interest at the top of the government until things began going very badly in 2006 — maybe a little bit in 2004 or ’05, but certainly in 2006 — in what was really going on in Iraq, because we were listening to people who had been telling us what was going on in Iraq for 20 years.

But years were going by in which people, these young men were sitting in cells in Bucca, talking about how to promote jihad, what they’re going to do when they get out. And that goes on for years. And we entirely missed that?

Yeah, because they were the never-enders. We had created a fiction, a happy ending … “mission accomplished,” and worrying too much about these guys at the higher decision-making levels of the government would have called into question the entire philosophy of our going in in the first place. And that didn’t happen until two things.

First of all, the whole thing was at the teetering point of collapse in 2006, 2007, when you had a essentially civil war between the Sunnis, led by Zarqawi and Al Qaeda, and the Shia, and the whole country was melting down around us. Two, George W. Bush, under pressure from events in Iraq and pressure from events in the United States, the Iraq Study Group, then losing both houses of Congress in the midterm elections in 2006, decided to clean house, bring in new people and institute a new policy.

Then we started really focusing not just at the level of CIA officers in the field or captains in U.S. Army intelligence, but as a country, as an operation, on what was really going on in Iraq. But by that time, it was kind of too late for the whole Bucca thing. Bucca had become a —

People called it a jihad university.

Right. It had become a breeding ground for taking people who were interested in jihad to becoming professionals in jihad. And we had no way of getting in and dealing with these people.

Is there memo traffic in the U.S. government, do you expect, to show that there were people that were saying, “Look, we’ve got to pay attention to what’s happening in Bucca”?

Oh, absolutely. But — Iraq was a country, a state, a society; a zillion things were happening. When we went in there, the exact opposite of going into Kuwait in 1991, where we had only one job, which was to destroy or drive out every Iraqi military person or piece of equipment, we went into Iraq with every single thing under the sun supposedly under our purview to change, to reform, to make it look like Denmark.

I cannot begin to describe the idiocy of this whole endeavor. And it was needed not only because Americans kind of have been thinking that way ever since 1989: “Hey, we did it in Japan and Germany. Hey, we won the Cold War, so let’s just fix all of these societies, so we’ll live forever and ever in peace,” and the “end of history,” to quote [Francis] Fukuyama.

That mentality was there, but there was also the specific mentality, this was cursed from the beginning. It was cursed from the beginning because the administration did not tell the truth on why it wanted to go into Iraq. It wasn’t just about weapons of mass destruction, although they believed that they were there. It was all about overthrowing a system and changing the Middle East by making people realize we were not screwing around anymore after 9/11, and you’d better behave, or we’re coming after you. And there was that mentality, combined with some people, [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz, [National Security Adviser Condoleezza] Rice, Bush himself also thought: We’re going to change it into Denmark.

But the main thing was: “We’re coming after you. We’re going to go in; we’re going to totally scramble these countries.” And because of that, because we failed almost immediately so strongly, we then overdid it, overcompensated by saying: “We’re the little engine who can. We’re going to put people in from the Department of Labor. We’re going to put people in from Homeland Security. We’re going to put people in from the Border Patrol. Every single thing that needs to be changed in Iraq to make it look like us or look like Denmark, we’ve got a team that’s going to go in there and do it, with hundreds of billions of dollars to support it.”

We couldn’t focus on anything, because we were focusing on everything.

So a young man, Jolani, smart guy, he’s sitting in Bucca. During this period of time, as you started to talk about a little earlier, the Bush administration sort of puts new people in charge; we have what’s called the Sons of Iraq or the Awakening. So by the time he gets out in 2010, 2011, things were looking very differently. Tell me, what was the Iraq that Jolani came back out into?

The Iraq that Jolani came back out into was a relative success because of two things. One is the surge, which drew apart the Al Qaeda element around Zarqawi’s successor, ultimately al-Baghdadi, and the rest of the Sunni resistance, including the tribes in Anbar and elsewhere — thus, the Al Qaeda element degenerated into little more than a gang, particularly in the Mosul area and a few other places — and an Iranian-supported set of Shia militias that had been far weakened by two things. First of all, Muqtada al-Sadr’s distancing himself from Iran. That was an on-again, off-again thing. He was back with Iran in Basra in 2008. But the point is, he was the biggest and most powerful force, and the Iranians couldn’t count on him. And secondly, the [Nouri al-]Maliki government’s first ambassador, and then in Sadr City, Baghdad decided to go after these guys with a vengeance.

… [Jolani] went to Mosul after he got out of —

Yeah.

So that makes a lot of sense. So what kind of attacks were those? Were those attacks on civilians?

The high-visibility attacks — which were for, essentially, branding — were attacks on a regional parliament, attacks on a military headquarters, attacks on a barracks and such. And they would be well planned — attacks on a church in December of 2010. They would be well planned and carried out by essentially suicide commandos, who were themselves well trained. And they’re pretty effective, but they didn’t have enough people to do these very often. Most of what they were doing was low-level shakedowns of businesses: smuggling, trafficking, anything to maintain money to pay their dwindling cadre of personnel.

… So he goes down there [to Syria] in 2011; he announces the formation of Jabhat al-Nusra. And immediately, even before he makes a public announcement, there are some big attacks in Damascus. Do you recall those?

The ones that we thought Al Qaeda.

Yeah, Al Qaeda being Jabhat al-Nusra —

Right, mm-hmm. … The attacks got a lot of attention because at that time the U.S., the Turks, the Emiratis, the Saudis and Qataris were all finding groups to support, while Assad was saying — supposedly he was letting terrorists, or Sunni extremists, out of jail — that everybody was a terrorist. And so there was considerable concern, not only because of the normal reasons that you would be concerned about an Al Qaeda offshoot, but there were concerns that this would pollute the opposition against Assad.

And these were conversations in the U.S. government —

Yeah.

— about who we should support —

Right. That we had to support moderates against Assad, not extremists. And it was important that one of the reasons we did support the moderates, one of the many arguments made on that crazy policy of ours to overthrow Assad through supporting what turned out to be a major CIA operation, was we don’t want to clear the field for the extremists.

… So the executive order that declares that Nusra is a terrorist organization, and sometime later, like about a year later, Jolani is declared a terrorist, designated as a terrorist, how do those decisions get made at the State Department?

They get made for two reasons. First of all, the intelligence has to support it. That is, there has to be an Intelligence Committee not necessarily finding, but something pretty formal that declares that this group meets the criteria of a terrorist organization. And then the State Department takes a political decision. We have seen this with the Iranian-backed militias in Iraq most recently over the last year; we just saw it with the Houthis in Yemen. That is, there are all kinds of groups who use terror. There are pure terrorist groups. Al Qaeda was always a pure terrorist group. ISIS was predominantly a pure terrorist group, in certainly its behavior, because it was like the most terrorist group we ever saw. But then there are groups — Hezbollah, Quds Force, PKK — who are typically resistance forces, liberation movements or other things who use terror at times as a tactic.

Would Jabhat al-Nusra been one of those?

Yes. That is, they showed no interest from an early point in being yet another competitor to Al Qaeda. Even though they were an offshoot of Al Qaeda, they were very much focused on overthrowing the Assad regime, just like the PKK is very much interested in overthrowing the rule of the Turkish state in eastern Turkey and so forth. And just like the PKK, they at times will use — will do things that cross the line into what we would call terror: deliberate injuring of people who are noncombatants or soldiers on a bus without weapons, or tourists on a beach, or something in order to gain stature, in order to feed fears and other things. So, yeah, I would put them in that category. Same thing with the Houthis. So therefore it becomes a political decision at the State Department. The CIA or the rest of the intelligence community will sign off on, “Yes, this is a group that meets the criteria of a terrorist organization,” which is somewhat broad, but it always includes using terror as a weapon.

And then the State Department officially — but the interagency process, you know, in terms of policy — then passes judgment on whether you should move that thing to the terrorism list. And there’s several terrorism lists. There’s Treasury ones; there’s the State Department one. And then the gold standard is to get the U.N. to accept it, which the U.N. did do, in the case of al-Nusra.

And so what’s the point of such a designation? What does it accomplish? What’s it meant to accomplish?

Two things. First of all, it allows American direct action against this group. Whether we would take it or not, it becomes legally —

Under U.S. law?

Under U.S. law. Secondly, it allows sanctions to be imposed not just on the group, because they’re hard to get, but on people who otherwise might be supporting the group. That is, if we had a flow of money and arms from the Turkish government to al-Nusra — we don’t, by the way, but if we did — then we could sanction elements of the Turkish government, and supposedly that would then result in a cutoff of those arms and money.

I see. So it gives us a legal channel for taking action.

To take various action, to make life miserable for that organization.

Back to Baghdadi. So he announces in April of 2013 that he wants to merge what he sees as a growing and successful Jabhat al-Nusra with his Islamic State movement, and Jolani resists this; he rejects this. I don’t know what you can tell us about this turn of events.

Yeah. I was not following it that closely at the time. My impression was that — Al-Baghdadi brought much more into the ISIS organization, two core elements of Zarqawi’s philosophy. One is: “We’re an international movement. We want to do terror everywhere, just like Al Qaeda leadership taught us to do. And secondly, we want to have — well, secondly, we want to fight Shia and other apostate Muslims as much as we want to fight Westerners. Thirdly” — and this was unique to him — “we want to create a state.” Thus, the Islamic State, Daesh. Thus, they pick that little village in northwest Syria, supposedly where the great battle between East and West, between the Romans, the Orthodox and the early Muslims, took place and all of that, they put together their whole philosophy. I didn’t see, and I don’t think others saw, Jolani and al-Nusra really buying into this. And then it started bubbling up as an interesting organization, because we had two variants of Al Qaeda emerging at the same time in Syria, ISIS going in one direction towards an international terrorist organization on steroids to even have a state, and al-Nusra, which was not against owning terrain but mainly it was focused on fighting Assad.

And was not interested, as he said to his first-ever interview with Al Jazeera, where he said, “I’m not interested in external jihad.”

Right. And that was something right from the get-go that characterized al-Nusra and made people a little bit nervous or a little bit uncomfortable about making them a terrorist organization, because what you were doing is you were making them an international pariah. Even though they were fighting Assad, it began to sound like we were buying into Assad’s rhetoric about, “Everybody who’s fighting me is a terrorist.” …

So in a sense, we pegged them as a terrorist organization because they had an allegiance to Al Qaeda?

Right. I would say they pegged themselves as a terrorist organization by having that allegiance. …

I mean, Jolani says that he didn’t target civilians. I mean, what do we make of that?

We say we don’t target civilians, and most human rights organizations start in our fight against ISIS with 1,600 to 2,500 civilians killed. Some have larger figures. The Saudis say they don’t target civilians deliberately in Yemen, yet people will credibly say that 4,000 or 5,000 civilians have been targeted and have been killed by their bombing. And that’s one reason why Biden just pulled the plug on offensive arms. So it’s a complicated question. It’s not what your intentions are; it’s what the result is. And we would characterize terrorism as even inadvertent killing of civilians, if you don’t take care.

In October of 2015, Jolani called for indiscriminate attacks on Alawite villages. He said, “There is no choice but to escalate the battle and to target Alawite towns and villages in Latakia.” I talked to him about this. He said, “Well, they were military outposts.” Do we know?

That’s a complicated — if those are civilian targets, thus attacking them is terrorist. It also is what national liberation movements and resistance organizations do, what the IRA did in Northern Ireland: Go after strong supporters of the other side.

Right. I mean, Human Rights Watch in 2015 said, “Nusra is responsible for systemic widespread violations, including targeting civilians, kidnappings, executions and are no different than ISIS.”

They were different because ISIS’s brand was showy slaughter. ISIS launched terrorist attacks and encouraged, dramatically, terrorist attacks all through the world. And, of course, it also occupied a state. ISIS also had a systematic hatred of Shia Islam that it inherited from Zarqawi, from the decade before in Iraq. …

Is Jolani a jihadist?

I think that he has an extremist Islamic view of how society should be organized, I would say, a Salafist viewpoint, and he’s willing to use force to achieve that.

What does that mean, Salafist?

What that means is you run society by the Sharia, and that religious — it’s different with the Sunnis, because you don’t have the same leading, almost supernatural role of the clerics that you do in Shia Islam. But it is that those who are pure — those who embrace Islam in its most pure, original version and carry that out in the governance of the here and now — should rule.

He says that he guarantees — that he’s willing to guarantee rights to minorities, to women, Christians, other sects, that — he says that in the history of Islam, Christians and Muslims have lived together in peace for hundreds, if not — yeah, hundreds of years, and that he supports that.

That doesn’t surprise me that he would say it. It wouldn’t surprise me that he actually believes it. The problem is that close to these groups, there are people who nurse a true hatred of anybody who isn’t like them, and so Christians, Shia, Yazidis, they’re all — secular Muslim Sunnis — they’re all apostates; they’re all the enemy, and there is a hatred against them. And these are groups that are always close to violence, so therefore, there is a tendency to oppress those people or to use violence against them.

So what you’re saying is that Jolani can say that he guarantees the rights of minorities to coexist in peace, but that his base is of another nature.

Will contain people who will not think like him. And the question is how strong he is — he’s a pretty strong guy — how disciplined his people are and the pressure they’re under. Right now, they’re under a considerable amount of pressure. If they started slaughtering people, two things would happen. First of all, it would make the Turkish modus operandi with them more difficult. Secondly, something I have obsessively and closely studied is the decision chain of Russia, Assad and the Iranians on whether to maintain or to break the Idlib cease-fire. … What I’m trying to say is that his losing control of people, the more they look like ISIS, the more bad things are going to happen to him.

So he’s got this delicate balance, or difficult balance, between his base, which are far more Salafist and intolerant, and his ally in Turkey. OK, well, let’s get into this. You said he came — well, he begins a fight against his rival groups, against more radical groups, and he kills a lot of his fellow jihadists.

He still does.

And still does. So you watch this happen. What did you think? I mean, this is an interesting guy for that reason.

Yeah, no, I thought the thing was very, very interesting. … Al-Nusra was really interesting. We would have focused on it more, except that this was Syria, which was rich in high-octane problems, high-octane manifestations of the horrible conflict that it was. And you were pulled in a dozen directions by the Turks, by the Israelis, by the chemical weapons people, you name it. We had a full plate every day. So therefore, as long as we didn’t have to face decisions on al-Nusra — and nobody suggested we support them; nobody suggested we open channels to them directly. We opened indirect channels to them as soon as we could, and kept Secretary [Mike] Pompeo advised of it and what we were learning, but we never raised the subject of opening specific channels directly with them: in part because the Russians would exploit it, as would Assad; in part because we didn’t want to make the Turks nervous.

But so talk about those indirect channels that were opened.

They were through people in the media, people in the NGO world who did have direct contacts with them, and these people would share their views with us; they would ask us if we had messages. We would not send specific messages to them. We would basically tell them that we were very interested in this; that while they were on the terrorism list, we would repeat the obvious: “The United States is not targeting these people. The United States is focused on our policy in Syria, which is mainly to put pressure on the Assad regime. So go draw your own conclusions.”

… You come on the scene; you look at this situation. You’ve got this interesting character. He’s designated as a terrorist, running a designated terrorist operation, but we’re not going to go after him because he’s fighting our enemies. Fair?

We weren’t going after him until August of 2018, because he didn’t seem to be a threat to our interests that would rise to the level of getting him on a target list. But there was no particular warmth for him. Particularly, remember after 2016, other than in the southwest, we weren’t supporting — the CIA operation had dried up, and so we were out of that business.

And he had gone after the Free Syrian Army, too.

At times, yes. But in 2018, my focus was — at the very center of everything I was doing was Idlib. And in Idlib, he was the strongest force, because at the time, the Turks did not have a large military force in there. They just had a set of outposts, which they set up mainly after the September agreement, the cease-fire agreement with the Russians, and it was only later that they moved in significant combat power.

… Now, another thing we did — we did it for humanitarian reasons, but it was interesting — was also in the midst of all of this, in September of 2018, USAID said, “We can no longer deliver humanitarian aid into the Idlib area, because HTS is controlling checkpoints and other things, and we have this prohibition on our aid going to terrorists.”

And therefore we had to turn ourselves into like a pretzel to get Mike Pompeo to issue a waiver, just like the waiver that we had issued in the northeast, because it’s a PKK offshoot that is controlling the ground and thus having potential or real access to the monies we’re sending in for various projects. And we did that. It didn’t say you can give aid to the HTS. It essentially said that if aid winds up somehow in the hands of the HTS, you, the organization, be it USAID or NGOs who were providing the aid, could be blamed for it. …

And this all happened out of the view of the American public. I mean, I don’t think many people know or have heard of Idlib or understand the stakes that you describe. But you were communicating, you said, through various NGOs with HTS during this period of time?

I was receiving communications from them, and I was explaining carefully our position, which I knew would be passed on to them, but I was not asking them to tell them things.

Were you receiving messages from HTS?

Yep.

What were those messages?

Basically: “We want to be your friend. We’re not terrorists. We’re just fighting Assad.” They somehow had picked up the idea that we were now, really, once again, for the second time — initially with Obama, it was the whole “overthrow Assad through the Free Syrian Army” thing that then never had much juice behind it. Well, it had a lot of money behind it, but it didn’t have Obama’s juice behind it, and it eventually faded.

And now for the second time, not by supporting the armed opposition but by supporting indirectly the armed opposition — but it’s supporting the Israelis, supporting the Turks, supporting the SDF [Syrian Democratic Forces], keeping our troops on — we were re-engaging militarily, as well as diplomatically, and through sanctions and other economic tools in Syria, to try to stop a Russian-Assad-Iranian victory. And HTS picked up on that. …

But these messages from Jolani were what?

They were basically: “This is what we’re doing. These are our goals. We’re not a threat to you.”

What did you make of it?

I said: “I couldn’t agree more. … Keep me informed as often as possible.” I encouraged people to keep me informed. That was my job.

This guy worked for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; this guy worked with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi; this guy pledged allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri. And you’re saying that you could trust him?

I wouldn’t say I trusted him. I would say that I wanted to know what was going on in Idlib and that it was important to us that HTS not disintegrate or become a terrorist force. Therefore, the fact that they were talking to media people, talking to NGOs, talking to humanitarian organizations, dealing with humanitarian organizations, as opposed to beheading them, was a good thing, because that made it easier for me to ensure that nobody somewhere in the terrorist bureaucracy would decide to take a shot at him. And that would have been bad. …

Has your opinion of Jolani evolved, would you say?

Of all of the things I did in Syria, and this was maintaining a coalition of a very disparate, to some degree unbelieving U.S. bureaucracy, along with the European Union, key European states, the Arab League, the Turks, the Israelis, the Free Syrian Army, the political opposition, the SDF and the whole U.N. bureaucracy —

It’s quite a portfolio.

It’s quite a portfolio, with a dozen things from the al-Hawl [refugee] camp to the Rukban [refugee] camp. You name it. There were crises and problems every day with the U.S. military, Russian ambushes of U.S. vehicles back in October that led to us moving in Bradley fighting vehicles. It was very, very dramatic. But at the very center of it, from the get-go, was Idlib. And I had to be very careful that I was not seen as someone who was advocating support for HTS, which was why I was horrified when [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov fingered me, hoping that it wouldn’t be picked up by anybody else, because there was a lot of controversy about this Syria policy. Syria had been a disaster in the Obama administration. … So I didn’t want to give ammunition to the people who basically thought that this was a fool’s errand by saying, “This is going to include reaching out to HTS in any way.” So therefore I never reached out to them; I never gave them a message. I just did everything I could to be able to monitor what they were doing and ensuring that those people who spoke to them knew what our policy was, which was to leave HTS alone and would communicate — and I assumed would communicate that to them.

Because they’re a linchpin preventing the security arrangement that’s been in place for decades from shifting from the Americans to the Russians and the Iranians.

The linchpin is Syria. It’s not Yemen, it’s not Libya, it’s not — well, Iraq is important, but Iraq is more in play. Syria is the one that if it had gone belly-up and Assad had emerged, carried on one of those Roman golden litters by the Russians and the Iranians into the Arab League and back into the hearts and minds of the Europeans who would have coughed up $10 or $20 billion to rebuild the place, yes. …

It is complicated.

It is complicated on a daily basis. Like I said, I just gave you the military pillar. The economic and diplomatic ones were equally complicated, with equally as many. But the underlying thing that Syria, given its size, its strategic location, its historical importance, is the pivot point for whether an American-managed security system in the region, with now the — consider the Abraham Accords people, because that was, in a way, both encouraged by what we were doing in Syria and elsewhere, and a little bit afraid that what they were seeing Trump do wouldn’t be repeated by the next administration. And so you’ve got this general alliance that is locked in with us. But it is under pressure, and the stress point is greatest in Syria. You can lose Yemen; you have lost Lebanon.

The stress point is greatest in Idlib, Syria.

And in Syria, the stress point is greatest in Idlib.

You get these messages from Jolani. He says he wants to be dropped from the terrorism designation. What do you do in response to that?

Nothing.

You don’t bring it up? You don’t go to the secretary and say, “They’re calling us —”?

Why should I take the high-risk position of urging somebody to get dropped from the terrorist list?

So he’s on this charm offensive; he’s on this rebranding, is maybe better.

Sure.

My interview with him is an example of that. He’s using us to try to speak to the West.

And the fact that we haven’t targeted him ever, the fact that we have never raised our voice to the Turks about their cohabitation with them — in fact, I used this example the last time I was talking to very senior Turks, when they were bitching about this relationship we have with the SDF, which we renamed from the YPG [Kurdish People’s Protection Unit], which is a Syrian wing of the PKK. And I said to them, “Look, Turkey has always maintained you want us in northeast Syria,” which they do. “But you don’t understand. We can’t be in northeast Syria without the platform, because we only have hundreds of troops there of the SDF, which has 100,000 troops and is fighting ISIS, is containing Assad and the Russians and you.” It’s a big job, and we need these guys. And then it finally occurred to me, and I’d never thought of this, and this was this last year. I saidL “It’s just like you in Idlib. We want you to be in Idlib, but you can’t be in Idlib without having a platform, and that platform is largely HTS. Now, unlike the SDF, HTS is a U.N.-designated official terrorist organization. Have I ever or has any American official ever complained to you about what you’re doing there with HTS? No.” …

Why don’t they get rid of this guy?

Because HTS is an effective fighting force against the real terrorists and an effective fighting force against Assad, and the Turks need that. Secondly, the Turks are not bearing any burden of criticism, let alone action because of their — I will use the word “cohabitation”; that’s the word I would use with the HTS. So why should they do something like that? …

OK, interesting. What else do you have to tell me? I’ve run down my questions. …

No, the only final comment I’ll say is Jolani and the HTS are about as good an example as there is out there of the kind of complicated movements you have in the Middle East, where traditional nation-states, traditional international rules and norms and behavior do not obtain. There still has to be an effort at some kind of order. Individual populations and parts of populations and regional actors and frankly the international community, which is often analogous with the United States, need some degree of predictability and stability, and I won’t say control, but at least influence. And again, when there is not the normal setup of nation-states and of international norms and rules and behavior and international law, you wind up with groups like this, that do things you don’t like, that have a genealogy that is very troubling. But in the here-and-now are the folks you have to deal with to avoid even worse things.

I think you told me before on the phone that they were the least bad option.

Yeah. They are the least bad option of the various options on Idlib, and Idlib is one of the most important places in Syria, which is one of the most important places right now in the Middle East.

… Let me ask it as a full question. Is this sustainable, this patched-together arrangement?

Nobody knows, because what we’re saying is we have an end state, which would be a political solution under the relevant U.N. resolution, and the U.N. is beavering away at that. I don’t know. However, rather like our efforts against the Soviets in Afghanistan and against Iran in southern Iraq from 1982 to 1988, we have an end state we would like to see: In both of those cases, the bad guys out. But we were perfectly willing to go on in a questionably sustainable attrition situation, because the other side winning is the one thing, above all else, we wanted to avoid. To keep the other side from winning in Syria — that’s Assad, the Iranians and the Russians — is, or should be, it was a strategic concern of the Trump administration. It damn well should be of this administration.

Source: FrontLine