Leadership change, odd media coverage: The rebel group that overthrew longtime Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, has received some strange press as the Western media attempts to make sense of it all. HTS's leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani "joined other foreign fighters in Iraq [after the 2003 invasion by the U.S.] and, in 2005, was imprisoned at Camp Bucca, where he…was introduced to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi," who would later lead the first caliphate of the Islamic State (IS), per the BBC. "In 2011, Baghdadi sent Jolani to Syria with funding to establish al-Nusra Front, a covert faction tied to ISI. By 2012, Nusra had become a prominent Syrian fighting force, hiding its IS and al-Qaeda ties."
Here's how the BBC describes Jolani's transformation:
