DAMASCUS (Dispatches) -- Syria announced the arrest of two Daesh terrorists in Deir Ezzor, accusing them of carrying out a series of assassinations including the killing of a defense ministry official, as the country’s new authorities under Abu Muhammad al-Jolani struggle to contain persistent infighting among takfiri groups. 
The two individuals are accused of “carrying out a series of assassinations in the governorate, the latest of which was targeting ministry of defense member Ibrahim Al-Jassem” in the city of Mayadin. 
Weapons and ammunition were reportedly seized during the operation. Separate reports said the general intelligence directorate had thwarted a plot to bomb the Homs oil refinery and dismantled another Daesh cell in the east.
The announcement underscores the persistent challenge posed by Daesh sleeper cells, which continue to mount targeted attacks against security personnel and Jolani’s officials despite the group’s territorial defeat in 2019. 
According to a United Nations Security Council report, the group still maintains approximately 1,500 to 3,000 fighters in Syria and Iraq, most of them in Syria, operating in small cells supported by smuggling networks and sympathizers.
What that narrative omits is the identity of the man presiding over Syria’s transition. Jolani is himself a product of the very takfiri networks his regime now claims to be dismantling.
Jolani joined Al-Qaeda in Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion and was imprisoned at Abu Ghraib and other U.S. detention facilities. Upon his release, he rose through the ranks of the Daesh of Iraq under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In 2011, Baghdadi dispatched him to Syria to establish what would become the Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda’s official affiliate in the terrorist war on Syria.
For years, as commander of Nusra and later Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, Jolani presided over an organization that carried out suicide bombings, assassinations, and the imposition of harsh rule in the territories it controlled. 
Only after breaking with Al-Qaeda and rebranding himself as a suit-wearing prospective statesman did he begin the long project of public rehabilitation that culminated in his forces sweeping into Damascus in late 2024.
The consequence of that history is not abstract. United Nations estimates place the death toll from Syria’s civil war at approximately 618,000, with 113,000 missing and more than half the population displaced—including 7.2 million internally displaced and 6 million refugees abroad.
The takfiri networks that Jolani helped build and lead were among the most lethal actors in that carnage. The foreign fighters who flocked to Syria—many drawn by the very organizations he commanded—remain in the country today. 
A Jamestown Foundation analysis estimates that some foreign fighter factions have been integrated into the new Syrian army, including Uzbek, Chechen, and Uyghur militant groups, while others who refused integration have clashed with authorities.
With President Bashar al-Assad gone, the takfiri violence has not ended; it has fragmented. Daesh cells continue to assassinate security personnel and target infrastructure, as Monday’s arrests illustrate. 
Kurdish-led forces and the new government have clashed over control of territory in the northeast. And the same men who spent years waging takfiri war are now competing, sometimes violently, for power and legitimacy in a country whose fate remains profoundly uncertain.
Monday’s headlines from Damascus described arrests and thwarted attacks. They did not describe the deeper truth: that the war on terror in Syria is being waged by a government whose president was once one of its most effective operatives, and that the country’s descent into violence cannot be separated from the ideology and networks he helped build.