En Route to Useful Syria: Al-Qaeda Back in the Game?

... crisis broke out. Manned mostly by Syrians, the organization was named Jabhat al-Nusra li-Ahli ash-Sham (the Support Front for the People of ash-Sham). Its leader al-Jilani frustrated the plans of ISI chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who wanted to dissolve Jabhat al-Nusra and amalgamate it with ISI into the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham, pledging allegiance to Aiman al-Zawahiri who replaced Osama bin Laden as the top man of al-Qaeda . After futile attempts to reconcile al-Jilani and al-Baghdadi, al-Zawahiri proclaimed Jabhat an-Nusra as the official representative of al-Qaeda in the lands of Sham. Although many an-Nusra combatants moved into ISIS, which has driven the former ...