The Assad regime released Abu Musab al-Suri, an highly influential terrorist, in early 2012 after years in captivity, the Daily Beast reports.
Al-Suri, a Syrian terrorist known as the inspiration for smaller, more individualized attacks like the Boston bombing and London attack last week, was originally captured by Pakistan in 2005. He had been in Syrian captivity for some period of years, after his rendition from Central Intelligence Agency detention.
The Assad regime, in the midst of two years of civil war, released the terrorist last year and his current location is unknown:
The Obama administration, after first hoping that Assad could maneuver himself into the position of a reformer, finally gave up and started calling for him to step down. But Assad continued with the global-war-on-terror mantra that had served his duplicitous ends with the Bush administration. Apparently to fulfill his own prophecy - and signal Washington he would no longer play ball, even in the shadows - in January 2012 Assad let Al-Suri and one of his top aides walk free. [...]
"It's a mystery where Al-Suri is, but I wonder if he could be trusted by his former comrades," says French scholar Gilles Kepel, author of Beyond Terror and Martyrdom. Al-Suri had been held for seven years in some of the cruelest prisons in the world: the Pakistanis', the CIA's and the Syrians'. Among their technicians are expert manipulators of fear and hope. Conceivably, Al Suri could have been sent back into the ranks of the jihadists the way the soldier-hero of the television series "Homeland" was sent back to America: programmed to betray. Indeed, Al-Suri may be more useful to Al Qaeda at this point as a legend than as a living ideologue. But there is no question that his ideas are gaining ground in places such as Indonesia, France, Britain and the United States.
Al-Suri is primarily known for promoting an approach to terror beyond suicide bombings, according to the Daily Beast:
Al-Suri, a continuing inspiration to terrorist far and wide, had a core strategy which was detailed in a 1,600 page treatise, The Call for an International Islamic Resistance. He encouraged opportunistic and improvised terrorist acts in the West, sapping the public's morale and undermining the ability of the American, British, French or other armies to fight on Muslim soil. But it is such a thorough guide to the philosophy and techniques of terror that crazies far outside the realm of Islam have adopted it. Anders Behring Breivik, the Muslim-hating "lone wolf" who murdered 69 people in Norway in July 2011, studied Al-Suri's lessons closely.