US Still Prosecuting Former ISIS Members After Officially Embracing One In Damascus

This week a 49-year-old naturalized American citizen has been sentenced to a decade in federal prison, after confessing to traveling to Syria to join the Islamic State.

Lirim Sylejmani pled guilty to terrorism charges in December, and was sentenced by a federal court on Monday.  Sylejmani had attended an ISIS training camp beginning in November 2015, after moving from Kosovo to Syria with an intent to joint the terror group. ”The defendant will spend a decade in prison thinking about the betrayal to this country,” US Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro said in a statement.

UPI writes that “Prosecutors said he changed his name to Abu Sulayman al-Kosovi and trained alongside other recruits to be an ISIS soldier following his arrival in the Middle Eastern country. His training included instruction on using AK-47 rifles, PK machine guns, M-16 rifles and grenades.”

According to the Defense Post:

When the Kosovo-native was 23, he found refuge in the United States after fleeing a genocidal regime. Sixteen years later, he decided to join one.

Sulejmani is one of hundreds of American citizens believed to have joined Islamic State in Iraq and Syria since 2014. But as the Trump administration transfers dozens of high-priority ISIS suspects from makeshift prisons across northeast Syria as U.S. troops levels draw down…

But the unspoken irony and contraction here is that he had joined the Syrian battlefield at a time the West was “looking the other way” as thousands of international jihadists joined the fight to topple Assad (a fight that the CIA and Pentagon were supporting covertly). NATO member Turkey had essentially opened the border, a ‘jihadi highway’ into Syria as part of the covert effort to overthrow the Syrian government.

The other irony is that the US has just embraced Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa (Jolani), who himself was at one point early in the Syrian proxy war a personal emissary of ISIS terror chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Apparently some kinds of terrorism are OK, according to Washington’s regime change playbook…

Jolani is also well-known for being the founder of Syria’s initial al-Qaeda branch, Jabhat al Nusrah, which has since morphed into Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which rules from Damascus in the wake of Assad’s overthrow in December. HTS has even spent a long time on the US terrorism list, though the $10 million bounty which had been on Jolani’s head has recently been removed by the FBI and US Treasury.

As for Sulejmani, he had long been held in an prison near Hasakah run by the Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Thousands of suspected ISIS fighters were held there for years, amid efforts to send foreign fighters to their respective home countries for prosecution.

Sulejmani had actually asked to be deported to Kosovo, due to it being largely Islamic and a small country, but that didn’t happen. Kosovo was recognized as a nation by the Bush administration, after it was forcibly peeled away from Serbian control following years of war as well as NATO military intervention.

Meanwhile, Syrian AQ founder al-Sharaa is planning to travel to New York in December to address the United Nations…

“Moderated” Al Qaeda leader to address UN General Assembly in New York in September.

What a time to be alive.
https://t.co/uQOil90Mxl

— Jonathan Schanzer (@JSchanzer) June 3, 2025

Confused Americans might rightly be asking: what was 20 years of the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT) really all about? What was it all for?