Lindsey Snell is an American journalist originally from Daytona, Florida, who specializes in reporting on conflicts and crises in the Middle East and North Africa. In July 2016, while on assignment, Snell was abducted by Jabhat al-Nusra, the former affiliate of al-Qaeda in Aleppo, Syria. After enduring over two weeks of captivity, she managed to escape from her captors. Upon her arrival at the Turkish border on August 6, she was detained by Turkish authorities and subsequently spent 67 days in high-security prisons in İskenderun and Hatay. During her imprisonment, Turkish media alleged that she was a CIA operative and charged her with breaching a military zone. Snell was released in October 2016. In 2018, while en route to Baghdad, Iraq, Turkey made an unsuccessful attempt to have her arrested through an Interpol diffusion notice.
Regardless of what any of Snell’s critics in Turkey or elsewhere might claim about supposed CIA connections, it’s very clear that her reporting on the Jolani-led extremist HTS terrorists army, Al-Nusra, and other Syrian ‘rebel’ factions – is factual, accurate, and very relevant to the events which are now unfolding in Syria.
In a recent video, journalist Lindsey Snell discusses the emergence of a group that kidnapped journalists and employed child soldiers, which has since become the ruling authority in Syria. She examines their violent methods, the dismantling of opposition factions, and the foreign entities that facilitated their ascent. Snell and her team travelled to Syria following the fall of Assad to gauge public opinion regarding ISIS/al-Qaeda/HTS terrorist leader al-Jolani, aka Ahmad al-Sharra, the new de facto leader of Syria. The findings were telling: many individuals were too intimidated to express their views. Watch: