Any marketer will tell you that when you think you've got a good product but it's not selling, then it's time to change the marketing. With that in mind, we should lend little weight to yesterday's announcement by the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra (JAN), Muhammad al-Jawlani, that his jihadi group has broken with al Qaeda.
The move has been foreshadowed for several weeks; not for any ideological reasons but because of the military pressure JAN was under from Russian airstrikes and the increasing speculation about a Russia-US agreement that would allow for cooperation on the targeting of ISIS and JAN.
The group's name has been changed from JAN (Victory Front) to Jabhat Fatah ash-Sham (Levant/Syria Conquest Front) and the black shahada flag swapped for a brighter look in white, with a new logo. In reality though, little has changed. The announcement praises both al Qaeda and Usama bin Laden and states that the newly-branded organisation remains committed to jihad and indeed seeks to unify the jihadist groups in Syria (presumably under its own leadership). Its tactic of re-branding itself as a type of moderate Syrian resistance group is also undermined by Jowlani's previous assertion in a TV interview that JAN had about 30% foreign fighters, as well as the fact that one of the three people featured in the announcement was an Egyptian, Abu Faraj al-Masri.
The early reaction indicates that an appropriate degree of cynicism is being exercised. The State Department said that they judged groups by what they did, not what they called themselves, and US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said it was a PR move designed to avoid being targeted militarily.
Western countries and the UN should move quickly to include the group's new designation among the names used by JAN in their proscription legislation. There is nothing in the announcement that indicates they have changed their core ideological outlook, nor that they have given up armed jihad in Syria. As David Cameron once said, 'We should be intolerant of intolerance', and as we are seeing around the world there is nothing more intolerant than an armed jihadist group.