Max Blumenthal· The Grayzone
As the US prepares to mark 25 years since Sept. 11, 2001, Donald Trump has removed top Al Qaeda figures from the US list of designated terrorists. Among those he delisted was Abdullah Muhaysini, a Saudi cleric who recruited child fighters and teen suicide bombers to wreak havoc across Syria.
The administration of President Donald Trump has removed the names of some of the world’s most notorious commanders, recruiters and financiers for the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda from its list of specially designated terrorists. Among those relieved of US sanctions this August was Abdullah Muhaysini, a Salafi-jihadi cleric from Saudi Arabia who participated in videotaped massacres of captive soldiers and recruited droves of foreign youth to carry out suicide bombings throughout Syria over the past decade.
The delisting of the jihadist recruiters came as part of the Trump administration’s removal of the government of Syrian President Ahmad Al-Sharaa as a State Sponsor of Terrorists. “These actions represent another historic step by President Trump to give the Syrian people a path to prosperity,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared on August 24, 2026.
Formerly known as Abu Mohammad Al-Jolani, Al-Sharaa is the co-founder of ISIS and founder of Jabhat Al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda. Under the guidance of Western advisors, Al-Sharaa rebranded Al-Nusra as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, before he toppled the government of President Bashar Al-Assad in December 2024.
By the time he seized power, Al-Sharaa had been groomed by his NATO handlers as a reliable local enforcer. When Trump hosted Al-Sharaa in the Oval Office in November 2025, playfully misting him with Trump Cologne and asking how many wives he had, it was clear the US was ready to lift the sanctions that had devastated Syria’s economy. Two months later, Trump pitched a half-baked plan for the Syrian military to attack Iran. Washington had finally found its man in Damascus.
This August, the Trump administration went a step further, lifting sanctions on Al Qaeda propagandists, funders and fighters responsible for gruesome atrocities during the dirty war on Syria. These figures include Abu Sulayman al-Muhajir, a top Al Qaeda recruiter in Australia who fled to Syria; Shafi Sultan Mohammed al-Ajmi, a major Kuwaiti financier of Al-Nusra; and Abdul Samrez Jashari, an Albanian foreign fighter who has taken on a senior role in Syria’s military under Al-Sharaa.
Perhaps none of the Al Qaeda bandits who received sanctions relief from the Trump administration oversaw as many acts of sadistic violence as the Saudi-born, Turkish-backed cleric Abdullah Muhaysini.
Prolific recruiter of teenage suicide bombers earns sanctions relief from Trump
In 2015, Muhaysini was filmed in camouflaged battle dress uniform, glowering over a group of blindfolded, exhausted Syrian army regulars taken captive at an airbase in Syria’s Idlib province. In a videotaped message, he justified massacring them in cold blood because, despite being Sunni Muslims, they had fought for Syria’s secular government.
“I don’t like to call them Sunni,” Muhaysini declared. “They were once Sunni but became apostatized once they enlisted in the Alawites’ regime.” Moments later, the 56 men were lined up and riddled with bullets.
Muhaysini studied under Sulayman Al-Alwan, the Wahhabi cleric who oversaw what his Muslim critics have called a “terrorist factory” in Saudi Arabia’s Al-Qassim Province. Al-Alwan also happened to be the instructor of the 9/11 hijacker Abdulaziz Alomari.
As The Grayzone reported, Muhaysini recruited thousands of young men as fighters and suicide bombers, promising them heavenly deliverance for sacrificing their lives in attacks on government targets. The foreign demagogue managed to find time for televised sermons counseling followers on when it was appropriate to beat their wives, while urging them to kill Shias and members of other minority groups wherever they found them across Syria.
After moving to Syria in 2014, Muhaysini embedded himself among the rebels’ most powerful factions and worked to unite them under a single banner. At first, he helped cobble together the coalition known as Jaish al-Fatah, or the Army of Conquest. (The Trump administration has lifted sanctions on a successor group to Jaish al-Fatah as part of its delisting of Al-Sharaa’s HTS).
Through his connections with wealthy Salafis in the Gulf states, Muhaysini organized the “wage jihad with your money” fundraising effort that raised some $5 million for the armed opposition’s push to take the northern Idlib governate from the Syrian army in 2015.
In an online interview, Muhaysini thanked “a group of brothers in Islam from Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), some from our brother Abu Ahmed from Kuwait, some from our brother Abu Joud from Qatar.”
In 2018, Muhaysini’s Jihad Caller’s Network recruited child fighters inside the Atmeh Refugee Camp on the Syrian-Turkish border, a squalid redoubt for some 30,000 war victims, handing the adolescent volunteers rifles before trucking them off to Idlib and elsewhere. (Video of the child soldier recruitment drive has been removed from the internet). Earlier programs on the cleric’s network featured small children training for combat.
On December 12, 2024, days after Al-Sharaa’s forces stormed into Damascus following the collapse of Assad’s government, Muhaysini materialized again in Damascus. From inside the Umayyad Mosque, the Al Qaeda propagandist proclaimed, “I truly believe that in Paradise there are entire villages for the people of the Levant.”
Almost two years later, Muhaysini received another blessing. One day after Trump announced plans to skip the ceremony memorializing the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks at New York City’s Ground Zero, his administration lifted sanctions on Muhaysini and his closest partners in crime.
They might have once been designated terrorists who joined the organization credited with bringing down the Twin Towers. But now, they’re officially our terrorists.
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