As a war on terror veteran, if you’d told me a few years ago that Al-Qaeda would be invited to the White House in my lifetime I’d have laughed in your face.

Yet that is what has just happened… sort of. And it’s not that I don’t agree with the assertion that the West was central to the rise of these kinds of terror groups. I’m familiar with that history. I just didn’t think there would be such a public reconciliation.

Why? Well, for 25 years international terror group Al-Qaeda enacted a murderous western counter-terrorism and foreign policy. Entire countries were destroyed, with millions killed, injured and displaced in the process. Unknown and unnamed thousands were imprisoned and tortured. All in the name, as global audiences were told, of defeating this sinister network of death. Never mind that. We created and turbocharged one of our own, on a far bigger scale, to attempt the task.

Or at least, that is how narrative goes. In the end, I’ve learned that the truth is usually much less edifying than what the most hardened cynics believe.

And clearly, these narratives still hold a singular power. Al-Qaeda and 9/11 are still cited to justify officially sanctioned use of violence — from bombing Venezuela to repressing the American left in recent months.

But the undeniable fact is that yesterday a former Al-Qaeda leader — until very recently — was in the White House smiling.

Once a prisoner of the US, now standing at the centre of imperial power. Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, his former nom de guerre, now known as Ahmed al-Sharaa, president of Syria, posed shoulder to shoulder with the US leadership during the landmark visit.

وصل السيد الرئيس أحمد الشرع إلى البيت الأبيض في زيارةٍ رسميةٍ إلى الولايات المتحدة الأمريكية، حيث كان في استقباله الرئيس الأمريكي السيد دونالد ترامب.

وعقد الرئيسان جلسة مباحثات، pic.twitter.com/45YGVGgM2F

— رئاسة الجمهورية العربية السورية (@SyPresidency) November 10, 2025

The full cast of US leaders were in attendance — Trump, JD Vance, Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio. Quite a welcome for a man who was still on a terror list a week ago.

Donald Trump and @JDVance just welcomed the former leader of al-Qa’ida in Syria – Abu Mohammad al-Jolani – into the White House.

Can you imagine the right-wing media outrage if President Obama did this? pic.twitter.com/af6XUyBUr6

— Matt Castelli (@CastelliMatt) November 10, 2025

Fox hole to Fox News

Al-Sharaa even made it onto Fox News. Challenged on his connections to 9/11 by news anchor Gillian Turner, he said he wasn’t even in Al-Qaeda at the time. Which, to be honest, is sort of a fair point:

Syrian President al-jolani on the 9/11 attacks:

I was only 19 years old, I was a very young person. And I didn’t have any decision-making power at that time.

And al-Qaeda was not present right then in my area. So, you’re speaking to the wrong person about this subject.

We… pic.twitter.com/jpqOP8wtgM

— S2FUncensored (@S2FUncensored) November 11, 2025

It is amazing to think that only days ago, US conservatives were melting down about Muslim ‘communist’ Zohran Mamdani being elected mayor of New York. And now ‘The Donald’ is schmoozing with a former member of the terror group which America massacred large swathes of the world to take revenge upon.

The story gets wilder. As US writer Spencer Ackerman points out:

[this means a] former commander of al-Qaeda in Syria is unambiguously joining the war on terror – which is to say: entering the American sphere of influence.

It’s a mere formality

In some ways a White House visit, reportedly the first by a sitting Syrian leader, was written in the stars. Al-Monitor’s chief correspondent Amberin Zaman writes:

For Sharaa, joining the US-led coalition against ISIS is in many ways a formality. Sharaa has been discreetly cooperating for almost a decade with the United States against the jihadis, sharing intelligence on the whereabouts of key ISIS and al-Qaeda leaders in and around the northern region of Idlib.

The implications of this new relationship are varied. Some in Syria insist the new president long ago made “some sort of accommodation with Israel” and that Syria could end up hosting both US and Russian airbases.

Responsible Statecraft reported:

The only concrete change expected to emerge from the meeting will be Syria’s joining the Western coalition to fight ISIS. In a statement, Sharaa’s office said simply that he and Trump discussed ways to bolster U.S.-Syria relations and deal with regional and international problems.

Rapid turnaround

Others marvelled at the speed with which Al-Sharaa was brought in from the cold. Such as Adam Weinstein, deputy director of the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute, who said:

This is the fastest normalization process that I’ve ever seen. The embrace of Sharaa by the U.S. and the Europeans is sort of unprecedented, especially given his personal history.

Last week, Trump officially removed Sharaa from a list of designated terrorists, and the U.S. led an effort at the United Nations Security Council to lift U.N. sanctions on Sharaa, effectively rehabilitating and legitimising his presidency in the eyes of the West.

The shock of a former Al-Qaeda commander shaking hands with a US president in the Oval Office evokes a sense of cognitive injury, similar to what Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik describes in the context of Gaza. As she asserts, the sheer violence of the genocide is difficult to reconcile with sanitised narratives promoted by the media and political establishment.

Many of us millennials have spent our adults lives with the war on terror as a backdrop. Some of us witnessed it firsthand. It is hard to escape the sense that the old order which produced the global war on terror (GWOT) is being challenged in ways few could have foreseen. Whatever the failures and successes of the the last 25 years, arguably of western hegemony, itself, we are now entering a radically different era. For now at least, Sharaa, a former Al-Qaeda commander is no longer a GWOT target but rather a US partner who will be key in shaping new regional alliances.

Featured image via the Canary

By Joe Glenton

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