What al-Jolani’s past can reveal about Syria’s future

In late February 2012 I was travelling through Syria’s Idleb province. I stayed for a few days in a town called Binnish, not far from the province’s capital. It was, at that time, under the tentative control of the newly hatched insurgency against the regime of Bashar Assad.  

The young host of the place I was staying – I’ll call him ‘D’ – was connected to the fledgling structures of what at that time was widely known as the ‘Free Syrian Army’. But through a cousin of his he also had links to another group of fighters just getting organised in the town. These men were a little older than the FSA members, and were more obviously Sunni Islamist in their appearance and their orientation. D told me at the time that ‘this thing [the civil war] started in Idleb, and it will end in Idleb too’. It seemed an absurdly self important statement at the time.