"In August 2011, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Iraqi from Samarra, sent a scouting mission of seven or eight men from Iraq into Syria to assess how ripe the country was for his ambitions. Baghdadi was taking Zarqawi’s dream of establishing an Islamic state to another level. His men found a country much like Iraq in the years after the US invasion: outside the large cities, men with guns roamed freely, state institutions were weak, and—most conveniently—Assad had released scores of Islamists from his jails, just as Saddam Hussein had done before the US invasion of 2003. This was a classic move: the dictator appears to show magnanimity at a time of unrest and declares an amnesty for prisoners, but alongside the intellectuals and activists, he releases into the wild those who will inflict chaos, so he can be called upon as the best option to bring peace. In Syria, some of the men released had fought in Iraq, groomed by Assad himself to make life miserable for the Americans in Iraq. Assad would jail the fighters as soon as they returned, letting them rot in prison until he next needed them. As he set them loose in 2011, he deviously warned the international community that the protesters were religious extremists, making him the architect of his own self-fulfilling prophecy. Baghdadi’s men traveled west from Iraq into Syria, on desert highways and along rivers, a well-traveled road used by fighters who had gone in the opposite direction to join the insurgency in Iraq. In Syria, courtesy of Assad, they found a ready network of Salafist jihadists they could tap into to serve Baghdadi’s grand designs of a borderless Islamic state. But without a revolution for freedom, there would have been no such opportunity."