“In 2011, the majority of the current ISIS leadership was released from jail by Bashar Al Assad,”
“The situation in there was like the middle ages. There were too many people and not enough space. There wasn’t enough water to drink. There wasn’t enough food to eat and what there was would have been ignored by dogs in the street. Torture was an everyday reality. After years in there, all of those people became Salafists and in a bad, bad way.”
“From the first days of the revolution (in March 2011), Assad denounced the organisation as being the work of radical Salafists, so he released the Salafists he had created in his prisons to justify the claim ... If you do not have an enemy, you create an enemy.”
“The regime did not just open the door to the prisons and let these extremists out, it facilitated them in their work, in their creation of armed brigades,”
“In jail, you have leaders, then you have leaders of leaders. Things form their own structure,” Alghorani recalled. “When these guys were released they all became leaders. They all developed their own followers. My jail was an academy for radical Salafist fighters.”
