Thread by @KevorkAlmassian

1/ In 1979, Washington, Riyadh & Islamabad lit a fire which birthed the world’s first "global jihad".

From CIA cash to Saudi sermons to Pakistani training camps, the machine was built.

One man’s journey through it all: Ahmad Zidan, the new advisor of Abu Mohammad al-Julani🧵

2/ In the shadows of the Cold War, far from the marble halls of Washington, Riyadh, and Islamabad, a quiet plan was being drawn—a plan that would outlive its creators and morph into something far more dangerous than anyone imagined.

3/ It was 1979. The U.S. had a “brilliant idea”, in the words of Hillary Clinton: Operation Cyclone—the careful orchestration of what would become the world’s first modern “global jihad.”

4/ The main architects were three powerful actors with very different agendas: the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.

5/ For 🇺🇸, this was an opportunity to draw the Soviets into a quagmire, much like Vietnam.

For 🇵🇰, particularly under the military dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq, it was a golden chance to deepen strategic depth in Afghanistan and Islamize its military doctrine.

6/ Saudi Arabia, for its part, saw a chance to export its brand of puritanical Wahhabism and simultaneously position itself as the defender of Sunni Islam.

7/ But the plan wasn’t just military—it was ideological. It wasn’t about defending Kabul or punishing Moscow; it was about weaponizing religion.

The CIA funded it. The ISI ran it. And the Saudi religious establishment gave it legitimacy.

8/ Through madrassas, Friday sermons, Arabic-language media, and well-funded charities, jihad was rebranded. It wasn’t simply resistance anymore. It became a divine obligation.

9/ Thousands of young men from Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Syria, and beyond were mobilized. Many had never even heard of Afghanistan before.

They were called the Afghan Arabs. And among them was a wealthy young Saudi named Osama bin Laden.

10/ Bin Laden would later build the infrastructure—training camps, financial pipelines, recruitment networks—that eventually became al-Qaeda. At the time, however, Western intelligence saw him as an asset, just like Abu Mohammad al-Julani.

11/ The Soviets finally left in 1989. The Americans declared victory and walked away. But the jihad machine they helped build did not stop. It had taken on a life of its own.

12/ Foreign fighters returned home, radicalized and emboldened. Some stayed in the region. Others turned on their creators.

13/ By 1996, bin Laden had allegedly declared war on the United States. Five years later, 9/11 changed the world. But given bin Laden’s connections to the U.S.-backed jihad in Afghanistan, some have questioned whether his later role as America’s arch enemy was entirely organic.

14/ Could it be that his transformation into the face of global terrorism—the so-called “Islamic Frankenstein”—served a deeper strategic purpose? After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the American empire found itself without a clear external enemy.

15/ Was bin Laden’s rise as a global threat merely a coincidence, or part of a post-Cold War script to manufacture a new perpetual adversary?

16/ Whatever the truth was, the jihadi template was set—and it would be used again. Fast forward to Syria, 2011. The foreign fighter pipelines reopened. The battlefields were now in Idlib and Aleppo instead of Kandahar and Jalalabad.

17/ The tools—external funding, religious framing, jihadi propaganda, and global recruitment—were all copied from the 1980s playbook.

And from within this complex historical web emerges a name: Ahmad Zidan.

18/ Imagine someone who started his journey in the austere study halls of Islamabad, studying theology and Islamic outreach, only to evolve into a high-profile media figure navigating some of the most dangerous ideological spaces of modern times.

That’s Ahmad Zidan’s story.

19/ Born in Damascus in 1963, Zidan left Syria at a young age and traveled to Pakistan to attend the International Islamic University in Islamabad, where he studied Islamic theology and Da’wah.

20/ It was there, amid the ideological whirlwind of the Afghan-Soviet war, that he became immersed in Afghan and Pakistani affairs.

He wasn’t just watching history unfold—he was right in the middle of it.

21/ His journalistic career began in the 1980s. He worked for Asharq Al-Awsat, then headed Al-Hayat’s Islamabad bureau. By 2000, he was hired by Al Jazeera to lead its Pakistan office, a position he held until 2015.

22/ During that time, he covered every major milestone in the so-called “War on Terror,” from the fall of the Taliban to the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.

But Zidan wasn’t just reporting. He had access.

23/ He met Osama bin Laden during the Soviet-Afghan war and would later describe him as a “brave mujahid.” He was embedded not only in the geography of the conflict but in the ideological and human networks that powered it.

24/ It’s no surprise then, that when Edward Snowden leaked highly classified NSA documents, Zidan’s name appeared—listed by U.S. intelligence as a suspected member of both al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.

25/ These weren’t mere accusations from random tabloids. This was high-level surveillance data gathered by the NSA, and it marked Zidan as a man with deep proximity to extremist networks.

26/ After his years in journalism, Zidan shifted to documentary filmmaking. One of his most talked-about projects was titled: “Osama bin Laden Without a Mask.” The film was seen by many as an attempt to humanize or at least demystify the figure of bin Laden.

27/ He later taught media studies in Pakistan and eventually moved to Istanbul, where he lived until his name reemerged in Syrian media in mid-2025.

28/ Reports began surfacing that Ahmad Zidan was being considered for a key advisory role in the regime of Abu Mohammad al-Julani, Syria’s new dictator and asset for the US.

29/ Observers say his appointment reflects the Julani regime’s increasing reliance on ideologically rooted figures and may signal a reaffirmation of what many describe as a "one-color policy"—a reliance on individuals from a single ideological mold.

30/ Whether you view him as a seasoned analyst or a relic of the jihadi media complex, Ahmad Zidan’s reemergence forces us to confront a difficult truth: the war that began in 1979 never really ended. It simply evolved.

31/ The U.S., Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia didn’t invent extremism—but they engineered the conditions for its internationalization.

32/ The system they built—the alliances, the language, the funding mechanisms, the foreign fighter routes—has proven far more durable than any one war or generation.

Zidan is not just a man. He is a product of that system.

34/ His path—from the Afghan frontier to the halls of Al Jazeera, and now potentially into the Syrian presidency—is not just a personal journey. It is a symbol of how deeply intertwined media, ideology, and geopolitics have become in the modern Middle East.

35/ From Kandahar to Kabul, from Islamabad to Istanbul, and now from Damascus to the palace—the story continues.

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