How does a man who was once the emir of al-Qaeda in Syria, a co-founder of ISIS by any reasonable historical reading of his trajectory, become Washington's chosen man in Damascus?

For me, the answer is not a mystery. It is the logical end of a dirty war that began not with Syrian protesters in 2011, but in an American-run prison camp in Iraq years earlier.

And if anyone still suspected this was "just a conspiracy theory," a former CIA officer – John Kiriakou, who went to prison for exposing CIA torture – has now said publicly what many of us have long argued: Jolani is, in all likelihood, a CIA asset.

Let's start with the timeline, because the timeline alone already screams "intelligence operation."

Abu Mohammed al-Jolani was in a CIA-run prison in Iraq – Camp Bucca – alongside another familiar name: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Both men were released in early 2011. "Coincidentally," that is exactly when the regime-change war in Syria begins. Within weeks, Baghdadi goes on to lead what becomes ISIS, and Jolani crosses into Syria to found Jabhat al-Nusra – officially al-Qaeda's franchise in my country.

Washington designates Nusra a terrorist organization. The UN follows suit. On paper, Jolani is the enemy. The State Department even slaps a $10 million bounty on his head.

But bounties are cheap. Cruise missiles are expensive. And for over a decade, while the US flattened cities in Iraq and Syria allegedly to fight "terrorism," it somehow never found the time, or the coordinates, to seriously target Jolani or his core command structure, even though he controlled large swaths of Syrian territory from Aleppo countryside all the way to Idlib.

Why? Because Jolani and his men were fighting the one government Washington had already decided must go: the Syrian state under Bashar al-Assad.

This is where Operation Timber Sycamore comes in: a multi-billion-dollar CIA covert program that funneled weapons, money, and training to so-called "rebels" in Syria. They were sold to Western audiences as "moderate opposition." On the ground, those moderates were a disappearing species. What existed in reality were hardline Salafi-jihadist factions, with Nusra at the top of the food chain.