Islamic State of Iraq leader Abu Bakr al-Husseini al-Qurashi al-Baghdadi claimed that Jabhat al-Nusra was part of the his group's extended network. Now known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the new jihadist coalition was announced just one day after al Qaeda central leader Ayman al-Zawahiri called for Islamist rebels fighting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al Assad to establish an Islamic state, which could help eventually re-establish an Islamic caliphate. The importance of Jabhat al-Nusra is that its members are among the most effective fighters in the Syrian rebellion. The rebels and their sponsors cannot afford to isolate the group if they want to make real gains on the battlefield. We consider al-Zawahiri's statement largely propagandistic: The al Qaeda leader, who is somewhere in northwestern Pakistan, far from the battlefield, is merely trying to appropriate the jihadist insurgency in Syria.