Robert Worth
Appearances
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
And he was more astute than Baghdadi. He saw that there was no future in this caliphate, that it was going to get destroyed by American bombs. And sure enough, it was. And then Sharaa moved on to Idlib in the far northwest corner of Syria. And he was a leader of a movement there that originally was a jihadist movement. But again, he read the political winds.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
He knew he had to keep in a good relationship with Turkey, which was the benefactor of everything that was going on in that part of it. It was the opposition, the one opposition part of Syria that was not controlled by the Assad regime. And what he did over the years was to moderate very successfully. He got rid of the most dangerous jihadist groups, either killed them or forced them out.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
He created an academy to train his own jihadists and impose some discipline on them. And he created a measure of law and order, even a measure of tolerance. People could, you know, by 2020 and a little bit after, people could actually criticize – and they did publicly – his regime in Idlib.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
And instead of killing them, he would listen to them and they had a hall of grievances for listening to criticisms and responding to them.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
Shara, first of all, tried very hard to avoid revenge killings, reprisals, as his forces were moving from Idlib down towards the capital.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
That's right. This was back in late November when his forces moved from Idlib first into Aleppo, the second city of Syria, which is up in the north. And I have friends there. And I was worried. I was thinking, you know, these are... dangerous, radical characters. I have friends who are Christians and Alawites and Druze, and I was getting in touch with them.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
And they were saying, nope, nope, it's quiet. These guys have been told not to mess with us. At the time, it wasn't clear, is this because the Turks have told them so? I think now it's pretty clear that Shara himself does not want to be under the thumb of Turkey.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
I think it was his decision to say, if we start killing people in revenge, this is going to devolve very quickly into a mess and I'm going to lose control. So he knew that it would send a good signal to the West, which he knew he was going to need for economic reasons to exercise maximum discipline on these guys. And it worked up to a point.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
First of all, he conquered Syria without letting that devolve into a bloody mess, at least at the very start. And he did that because he's got very strong discipline on the core of his movement. He came into Syria... with a coalition of armed fighters. And it's kind of a concentric, widening circles of discipline. The ones that are closest to him, I think, are very loyal and very disciplined.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
But he needed more than that to win. And so he had these other fighters who were allied with him, but some of them were a little better than criminals, and they did want revenge. And it was very difficult to prevent that. And especially after he came in, you know, eventually you did start to see revenge killings. He did try to stop that up to a point. It worked.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
The trouble is that he cannot crack down too hard on these guys because they are his supporters. They're his base and he needs them to stay in power. Nonetheless, I think he did a pretty good job. He reached out to serious minorities who were obviously the people who were most anxious about their status and in this new Islamic Syria.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
Well, it was staggering. I mean, journalists like me use Signal all the time to communicate with our sources and, for that matter, with friends. But I never imagined that a group of top government officials in the United States would just put together a chat like this in the same way that I do with friends and communicate the most sensitive.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
He's been talking to the Christian community, the Alawite community, the Druze and others. And he has tried hard to send the right signals to the West. He has made clear he wants to get rid of the economic sanctions, to get rid of the designation of his former group as a terrorist group. he's sending the right message. The trouble is, what are his capacities?
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
He doesn't have that many people who are capable of administering a large country like Syria. I mean, remember, he was administering, with a lot of success, a single province. And now he's got to run the whole country. And it's a much more complicated country than what he was used to in that little province. It's got Israel next door. And again, I think that was one of his successes. He was...
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
Even with Israel maintaining a pretty moderate message, he was saying, without singling Israel out, saying, we don't want trouble. Things got more turbulent after he'd been in power for a couple of months, but I still think he's doing an awfully good job.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
Yeah. This is Sharad's big problem is that he needed these guys to capture Syria and he still needs them to some extent in order to maintain security. One of the things I think Sharad did wrong was that he abolished the entire Syrian police force right after he took power in December.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
Yeah. The pretext was either they have blood on their hands or they're totally corrupt. That was the reason given to me by a bunch of lower-down people in HTS. HTS is the core force that Shahraa led. Those are his most loyal people. That's what they told me. And that may be true, but I think it left this terrible security vacuum.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
And when you have a crisis, as he did when, you know, in early March, you had a group of Assad people attacking the HTS forces, things devolved very quickly.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
They're not really fighting each other. The biggest problem he faces is in the east where you have this Kurdish-led militia known as the SDF, the Syrian Democratic Forces. And they had carved out really their own statelet. They had gotten American weapons and training, and that means they can defend themselves. And they even have their own left-wing ideology that's very different from Shahraz.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
So the question he faced was how to deal with these people. And that's another thing where I think he's been very successful. He made certain concessions, and they agreed to join Syria to become part of the state. That just happened earlier in March.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
I mean, they, you know, the administration has denied that it was classified, but that's a term of art that's subject to manipulation. The president can classify and declassify communiques as he likes. And the notion that they would put this incredibly sensitive information before the actual attack onto a chat like this and not even notice that someone else was on there was just beyond belief.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
Sure. Ever since Assad fell, people have been digging through. They've been opening the prisons. They've been looking through the security centers. All of these sort of monstrous secrets of the Assad regime have come to light. But to me, this is one of the most revealing because everybody knew that this was a police state. Everybody knew that everyone was spying on everybody else.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
You know, there's a kind of a parallel with East Germany where everybody was encouraged to spy and other police states, you know, to spy on each other. In fact, the Syrians got direct help from the East Germans. And so some of that is a direct transfer. But what you didn't see was behind the scenes. And so this guy who I spent time with in Syria and write about, Rami Al-Sayed,
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
He went into one of the security centers and suddenly he was in a room that he said looked to him like a barber shop because it had these chairs with mirrors and this whole array of – I mean it sounds almost like the back of a theater. Fake beards, adhesives, all kinds of clothing, makeup. It was all designed to –
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
help people who had been recruited to be informers to get away with it, to sort of pose as a homeless person, as a Bedouin, as a foreign tourist, you name it. They had everything in this place. And then adjoining it were – All kinds of technical equipment for surveilling phones, for surveilling the mail. It was just this whole enormous apparatus for spying on people.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
And by the way, this apparatus was tens of thousands of people across Syria. You know, a lot of people are wondering how many names are we going to get people brought out and tried for these crimes. We haven't seen that yet.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
I think these things are especially frightening to – I mean, they're not entirely shocking because it was an Islamist-run enclave when Sharad was running it. And now they're in charge of the whole country. And if you're an Alawite, that, as you mentioned, is the sect to which the Assad family belonged. These people are terrified.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
Sometimes the only local security force is some jihadist guy who probably wants to kill you. And the only reason he's not doing it is because his boss has told him not to. But that kind of discipline has broken down a lot over the past couple of months. There have been so many people abducted and murdered even before the massacre that took place. in early March.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
So I think this is a big reason that many people do not trust Shara, that they fear that, you know, all of his talk about wanting to build a tolerant society is just a cover, and that once he has the power and the ability to step forth and be who he really wants to be, he'll just slaughter them all.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
A lot of them seem to be from these militias that are at the outer rings of Sharma's coalition, the people who are much less disciplined, the people who essentially were criminals probably before. And again, he needed a large force of people to conquer the country. And now the question is how do you bring these people in and discipline them?
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
If you crack down too hard, they may go off and form militias that fight you. It's a real problem because people know that they're there. They've just seen in the past month terrible massacres. Up to that point, there had been revenge killings that had been taking place in the Alawite areas of Syria. But what happened in early March, I think it really –
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
for a moment made people think this isn't going to work, that the worst has begun, that Syria is falling into a terrible cycle of sectarian killings. And for the moment, that seems to have been arrested, that they did put a stop to it, that Shara did respond well. But, you know, the death toll may end up being in the thousands and most of those civilians.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
And now, you know, the question is, are those perpetrators going to be punished? What is Shara going to do about that? He has appointed, committed to investigate, and we don't yet have the results of that investigation.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
Yeah, I ran into these guys in a couple of places. One of them was in Homs, which is a town north of Damascus, one of the major towns in one of the major cities in Syria. And you can say what you like as the leader of Syria. You can put out all kinds of civil messages. But if
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
The actual presence of the government that people see is a group of guys reciting the Quran and talking about how Islam is the solution and then playing these hymns. They're called nasheeds in Arabic, but these hymns over loudspeakers that include some pretty nasty sectarian language.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
The line that I noticed was, we will liberate Tartus, which is a town on the coast in Syria that's majority Alawite. We will slaughter the Majus. Now, Majus is a term that can be used to describe Shiites, but it can also apply to Alawites. I mean, it's a kind of a broad term that means like basically for an Islamist, it means like, you know, heretics.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
What are you supposed to conclude if you're a Alawite or Christian or another minority? I bumped into these guys, as I said, in the main square of the town. You could hear their loudspeaker for hundreds of yards away. And, you know, some of the people were happy to be hearing it. There was a young guy there who was reciting the Quran.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
But once they started playing the hymns, I got to say, it was pretty creepy to hear that. And I couldn't help thinking, Humps is a town that has a large Alawite population. And I'm sure some of them were there. What were they thinking?
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
It's an offshoot of Shiite Islam that goes back a long way. For many mainstream and especially hardline Muslims, they don't even think it's part of Islam. Bashar al-Assad's father, Hafez al-Assad, pressured a Sunni imam to make a public declaration, an edict, that Alawites were indeed Muslims. But that's been in dispute for a long, long time.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
And so, you know, irrespective of the fact that the Assad family is Alawite, you had Islamic theologians from the Middle Ages onward who were saying these people are heretics. These people are dangerous. These people are the enemies of real Muslims. It's been a point of tension in Syria and beyond for a long time.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
This thing happened completely by chance. So I happened to be in the middle of Damascus and suddenly these guys drive up in pickup trucks and the translator and fixer I were working with said, wait a minute, those guys are HTS. That's again, that's the main group, Shara's militia, as it were. And so we went up and said, what are you guys up to? Can we join? And they said, sure, why not?
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
The Houthis, ever since shortly after the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel, began launching attacks on shipping in the Red Sea that rose up to the Suez Canal, which is one of the most important shipping channels for global commerce in the world. And so they're a small group, relatively small group in a remote place, Yemen.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
So we jumped in. Actually, I rode with a Syrian journalist who had also found out about this last minute. And we followed the militia guys who were, you know, swerving and driving very fast outside of the capital. And they get to this military base of sorts that was run by Bashar al-Assad's brother, who was his real, you know, his hammer, his right-hand man in security matters.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
a feared character named Maher al-Assad. And on this base, he had warehouses that were used to manufacture and store drugs, especially Captagon. This was the main revenue source for the Assad regime.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
Yeah, Captagon is an amphetamine. And it's very common across the Arab world. It was taken actually by some Islamists to keep them going during the ISIS period. And it sold – a lot of Captagon is sold in the Gulf. Some of it makes it to Europe. And the Assad regime was so bankrupt in its final years with the economy really cut off by sanctions that drugs were its main source of revenue.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
So the regime itself was manufacturing these drugs and then smuggling them overseas and selling them.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
Yeah, we got to this base and there were a couple of warehouses and they invited us in. I mean, it was funny. At some point they said, oh, maybe we should be wearing masks because there's this sort of cloud of powder coming up from these drugs. You know, there were no safeguards. But they... I think, wanted me to see this.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
It was pretty clear that they could have sold these drugs and made a lot of money. And they were saying, no, that's not what we're going to do. This is what the Assad regime did, right? They were merchants of death. That's the phrase they actually used when they talked about it with me. They profited from death from drugs. And we're going to do the opposite. We're going to get rid of it.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
But they have this incredible lever to damage the entire global economy that way. And they started doing it, I think, in October or November, shortly after October 7th, in the name of defending the Palestinians or defending Gaza. But it inflicted incredibly disproportionate damage. Now, the Biden administration did a lot of attacks on the Houthis to try to stop them. It didn't entirely succeed.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to show you how to do it, how to do it. I'm going to show you how to do it. I'm sorry. Thank you. I'm going to show you how to do it. Here we go. Thank you.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
They still seem to have the ability to do some. But the Houthis had said, we're going to go back to doing these attacks. They hadn't done any attacks as far as I know for a while. And so the ostensible reason for this American relaunch of the war against the Houthis was to degrade their abilities to launch those attacks against global trade.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
But that text makes clear that the principals and the Trump administration see this as a kind of favor to other people whose trade is – affected in a larger way than American trade is by these Houthi attacks. So it's a strange to me kind of prorating of a threat that's really a global threat. And they were saying, well, if anybody benefits more from this than we do, they need to pay us for that.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
Well, I think a greater proportion. Europe is closer to the Middle East. There's more that comes through into the Mediterranean, you know, that benefits Europe from that trade. But certainly the United States, first of all, has some share of that global trade as well. And secondly, has always seen itself as a guarantor of growth.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
Freedom of the waterways that the British used to see themselves as the guarantors of that. And more or less after the empire ended, the United States tacitly took up that role. So it just seems pretty strange to be looking at that anew and saying, you want protection? You're going to pay for it.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
Well, it's a message that was already broadcast pretty vehemently by Vance at the Munich Security Conference not long ago that he's disappointed in them. He feels they're free riders. He also feels that they're censoring free speech and they're not behaving as they should. They ought to be much more open to hard right-wing parties like Alternative for Germany.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
So I think much of what was in that text has already been made clear, but it was kind of embarrassing to have their visceral dislike of Europe made so plain.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
I don't really think so. As I mentioned, the Biden administration had done a number of strikes on the Houthis. The Houthis are, by any definition, a radical, dangerous group that has, first of all, within Yemen behaves in all kinds of terrible ways. They jail people, they torture people, they get rid of all kinds of rivals in the nastiest possible ways.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
They're classified now, again, as a terrorist group that's gone back and forth. based mainly on efforts to get humanitarian aid into Yemen. That becomes more difficult once you classify a group like that, which has full control over most of the population of Yemen. They can be a barrier to aid.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
And the international community wants to get aid to Yemen, which is a desperately, desperately poor country where you have conditions of famine. But the Houthis have made clear that they intend to continue disrupting global trade.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
They've said they're going to exempt certain countries who they see as less harmful to their interests and less closely bonded to Israel, which they declare as their main enemy. Still, there's no question that for much of certainly the West, the Houthis are a legitimate target and a dangerous one.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
No, not really. The Biden administration did everything it could. And again, you know, this is using the intelligence they have. You know, the Pentagon, the Fifth Fleet was directly involved in this. I don't think Trump and his team have any better intelligence. They have been bombing the Houthis for the past, whatever it is. 10 days.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
We'll see what they succeed in doing, but it's very difficult to get good intelligence. I mean, you know, Israel did tremendous damage to Hezbollah, the Lebanese group, back in the fall, right? A tremendous campaign that succeeded in killing their top leader and many other top figures. The Houthis are in a much more remote area.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
The leader of the Houthis, Abd al-Malik al-Houthi, is this shadowy character who lives up in the mountainous northwest of Yemen. it's much harder to get good information about these people. And the missile units they have are mobile and hard to take out. So we'll see if Trump is any more successful. But as far as talking down the Biden administration, I think that's pure politics.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
Iran has backed the Houthis for a long time. They see them as a part of their axis of resistance, as they call it. Israel succeeded in seriously degrading and damaging Hezbollah, which is the most direct and the most powerful threat to Israel. Syria was another part of that axis. It has been pretty much completely taken out because Bashar al-Assad is gone.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
He was the one who allowed the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah to operate on his territory. The new regime in Syria run by Ahmed Asharah, loathes Iran, loathes Hezbollah. They were direct enemies of those groups. And it's already clear that they're not going to allow them access to Syria. So Iran has lost a very, very important piece of terrain there. Iran has lost a lot here.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
And Hamas, of course, is the other big, big part of their axis. And Hamas has been badly, badly damaged. So what you have left, you have the Houthis, which has been launching missiles everywhere. directly at Israel without really doing any damage so far, but more or less ever since the end of 2023.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
And they've also, the Houthis have been, you know, posing this serious threat to global trade, not just to Israel. So in a way, the Houthis are this last intact chunk of the Iranian axis of resistance. Now, Iran doesn't need to resupply them for the moment. Eventually, the Houthis will probably run out of weaponry supplied by Iran. But the Houthis have now
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
over time become pretty good at manufacturing their own missiles and weapons. So they don't need Iran quite as much as they did. And in terms of punishing Iran for what the Houthis are doing, it's not clear how effective that would be right now. Iran is already in a seriously weakened position vis-a-vis what they had a couple of years ago.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
Israel did airstrikes last year on Iran that so seriously degraded Iran's missile defenses that there's not much they can do. If Israel decides to take out Iran's nuclear sites or anything else, they're very vulnerable to that.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
Syria, first of all, is in the center of the Levant. So it has borders with Iraq, with Lebanon. and Israel and Turkey. So just as a kind of crossing point between these other countries, it's incredibly important.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
And that's why it was so crucial for decades and decades that under the Assads, Bashar al-Assad and his father, who was before him, Hafez al-Assad, that Syria was this part of this axis of resistance. It was a way for Iran to get directly at Israel. And that was fuel for the ongoing conflict. Syria has always been, you know, it used to define itself as the heart of Arabism.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
It was central to the discourse of Arab nationalism. It at various points has maintained or been the ground for all kinds of jihadist movements. It's been at the center of almost everything happening in the larger Arab world. And what's interesting right now is you have this, you know, toppling of the regime that's been there for five decades, more than five decades.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
And we don't know what's going to come next. To some people, it looks like a terrifying moment when the jihadis finally win, a bit like the Taliban taking over in Afghanistan or, you know, when ISIS took over big chunks of Iraq and Syria back in 2014. But Shara is not. the kind of figure he used to be. And a lot of people are so mesmerized by him.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
And they talk about him as if he were this kind of mystical figure. He, I think, ultimately is about power. It's true that he's an Islamist. But I think what really guides this guy is wanting to stay in power. And he's a pragmatist. He has been adapting for years. I mean, he was allied with ISIS at a time when that was politically convenient for him.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
That was the way to survive in Syria at that time. He then detached himself from ISIS just at the right point. Then he was with al-Qaeda. Then he detached himself from them. I think he's been reading the politics of the region. He's very, very politically astute. I think it's pretty certain that he does not want to lead this country in a jihadist direction. He does not want Syria to be
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
a new Taliban. He has said, and I think he means it, that he wants good relations with all his neighbors. And that was a striking thing to say because one of his neighbors is Israel and he doesn't want a war. I think that's because he knows the country now is so weak. After the civil war in Syria and then the sanctions, which really brought the Assad regime to the
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
total bankruptcy and starvation for many of its people Syria is still under American and to some degree European sanctions it's got nothing I mean the people in Syria are too exhausted for another war and I think what Shara understands is that he has to rebuild the country no matter what he wants to do in the future he may well take a stronger stance against Israel at some point but
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
But for the moment, he has to keep the country together just in order to get the economy going again.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
Yeah, he became radicalized at a time when those are the winds blowing through the region. It was around the time of the second intifada in Palestine. It was a time of the American invasion of Iraq. There were lots of radical preachers in Syria. One of the strange things about Syria at that time was that the Assad regime was ostensibly secular and very much against political Islam.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
But once it became clear the United States was going to invade, the Syrian regime under the table was making use of these radical figures, encouraging them so that they could then take these young jihadists and send them over the border to destroy the American project.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
And Ahmad al-Sharah did hear some of these preachers, and it seems he, like many other young men, was excited by the possibility of going and fighting the imperialist invader next door. It seems the first time he went, he had a bad experience, ended up back home. But he went back again and joined the resistance.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
He ended up in an American prison, which these American prisons in Iraq function in a way as sort of training academies for young jihadists. They got to know each other. They learned what you learn in prison, which is how to be patient. and build networks. And he did that. And not long after he got out, he joined Al-Qaeda.
Fresh Air
The Former Jihadist Trying To Remake Syria
He became the leader of Nusra, which was the Al-Qaeda-linked group in Syria. He moved with the help of Baghdadi, the head of ISIS, from Iraq to Syria. And he built up the group in Syria, eventually detached himself from Baghdadi, who wanted very much for Shahra to be under Baghdadi's thumb. But as I mentioned earlier, Shah was an ambitious guy, wanted to run his own show.