The leader of Jabhat al-Nusrah, al-Qaeda’s official offshoot in Syria, has ordered his network of Islamic militants not to use Syria as a base from which to launch attacks on the West.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Abu Mohammed al-Julani said al-Nusrah was entirely focused on toppling embattled Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and capturing Damascus.

Speaking to Ahmed Mansour, al-Julani said:

“We are only here to accomplish one mission, to fight the regime and its agents on the ground, including Hezbollah and others.

He continued:

“Al-Nusra Front doesn’t have any plans or directives to target the West. We received clear orders not to use Syria as a launching pad to attack the US or Europe in order to not sabotage the true mission against the regime. Maybe al-Qaeda does that, but not here in Syria.”

Al-Julani, who sat for the interview with his back to the camera, also promised to protect minority groups that have joined the uprising against the Assad regime.

The militant leader’s comments are a direct contradiction to stories from US intelligence, where they claim to have been tracking a shadowy organisation known as the “Khorasan Group”, has been tasked by al-Qaeda with plotting attacks on the West form its base in Syria. The US has targeted the group in air strikes, but details of any individuals involved the it have been sparse.

Al-Nusrah, which has been designated an official terrorist organisation by US authorities, hopes that the details of their plans within Syria will cause the West to rethink its strategy towards the group, and permit the flow of money and weapons to it and its allies in their fight against Assad.

Al-Nusrah have long been one of the strongest of the numerous rebel groups fighting Assad, in part due to their superior financial backing thanks to al-Qaeda’s well established fund-raising abilities, and in part because of their radical Islamist beliefs that approve of the use of suicide bombers to break enemy lines.

Despite many of the group’s followers holding similar radical Islamist beliefs as those of the Islamic State, the two groups split in 2013 and have since been bitter rivals with very different priorities. While the IS was quick to declare a Caliphate and declare its leader the Caliph of the whole Muslim world and has fought against other rebel groups as often as the regimes in Syria and Iraq, al-Nusrah has been more focused on building alliances with other rebel groups within Syria’s borders to oust Assad.