There has been a flurry of “What next for Syria?” articles in the wake of dictator Bashar al-Assad’s hurried exit from Syria and the takeover of much of the country by al-Qaeda’s rebranded local forces.
Western governments and media have been quick to celebrate the success of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), even though the group is designated a terrorist organization in the United States, Britain and much of Europe.
Back in 2013, the US even placed a £10 million bounty on its leader, Abu Muhammad al-Julani, for his involvement with al-Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS) and for carrying out a series of brutal attacks on civilians.
Once upon a time, he might have expected to end up in an orange jumpsuit in the notorious, off-the-grid detention and torture facility run by the Americans at Guantanamo Bay. Now he is positioning himself as Syria’s heir apparent, seemingly with Washington’s blessing.
Surprisingly, before either HTS or al-Julani can be tested in their new roles overseeing Syria, the West is hurrying to rehabilitate them. The US and UK are both moving to overturn HTS’s status as a proscribed organization.
To put the extraordinary speed of this absolution in perspective, recall that Nelson Mandela, feted internationally for helping to liberate South Africa from apartheid rule, was removed from Washington’s terrorist watch list only in 2008 – 18 years after his release from prison.
Similarly, western media are helping al-Julani to rebrand himself as a statesman-in-the-making, airbrushing his past atrocities, by transitioning from using his nom de guerre to his birth name, Ahmed al-Sharaa.
Stories of prisoners being freed from Assad’s dungeons and of families pouring on to the streets in celebration have helped to drive an upbeat news agenda and obscure a more likely dismal future for newly “liberated” Syria – as the US, UK, Israel, Turkey and Gulf states jostle for a share of the pie.
Syria’s status looks sealed as a permanently failed state.
Israel’s bombing raids – destroying hundreds of critical infrastructure sites across Syria – are designed precisely towards that end.
Within days, the Israeli military was boasting it had destroyed 80 per cent of Syria’s military installations. More have gone since.
On Monday, Israel unleashed 16 strikes on Tartus, a strategically important port where Russia has a naval fleet. The blasts were so powerful, they registered 3.5 on the Richter scale.
During Assad’s rule, Israel chiefly rationalized its attacks on Syria – coordinating them with Russian forces supporting Damascus – as necessary to prevent the flow of weapons overland from Iran to its Lebanese ally, Hezbollah.
But that is not the goal currently. HTS’s Sunni fighters have vowed to keep Iran and Hezbollah – the Shiite “axis of resistance” against Israel – out of Syrian territory.
Israel has prioritized instead targeting Syria’s already beleaguered military – its planes, naval ships, radars, anti-aircraft batteries and missile stockpiles – to strip the country of any offensive or defensive capability. Any hope of Syria maintaining a semblance of sovereignty is crumbling before our eyes.
These latest strikes come on top of years of western efforts to undermine Syria’s integrity and economy. The US military controls Syria’s oil and wheat production areas, plundering these key resources with the help of a Kurdish minority. More generally, the West has imposed punitive sanctions on Syria’s economy.
It was precisely these pressures that hollowed out Assad’s government and led to its collapse. Now Israel is piling on more pressure to make sure any newcomer faces an even harder task.
Maps of post-Assad Syria, like those during the latter part of his beleaguered presidency, are a patchwork of different colors, with Turkey and its local allies seizing territory in the north, the Kurds clinging on to the east, US forces in the south, and the Israeli military encroaching from the west.
This is the proper context for answering the question of what comes next.
Syria is now the plaything of a complex of vaguely aligned state interests. None have Syria’s interests as a strong, unified state high on their list.
In such circumstances, Israel’s priority will be to promote sectarian divisions and stop a central authority from emerging to replace Assad.
This has been Israel’s plan stretching back decades, and has shaped the thinking of the dominant foreign policy elite in Washington since the rise of the so-called neoconservatives under President George W Bush in the early 2000s. The aim has been to Balkanize any state in the Middle East that refuses to submit to Israeli and US hegemony.
Israel cares only that Syria is riven by internal feuding and power-plays. Beginning in 2013, Israel ran a covert program to arm and fund at least 12 different rebel factions, according to a 2018 article in Foreign Policy magazine.
In this regard, Syria’s fate is being modeled on that of the Palestinians.
There may be a choice but it will come in no more than two flavors. Syria can become the West Bank, or it can become Gaza.
So far, the indications are that Israel is gunning for the Gaza option. Washington and Europe appear to prefer the West Bank route, which is why they have been focusing on the rehabilitation of HTS.
In the Gaza scenario, Israel keeps pounding Syria, depriving the rebranded al-Qaeda faction or any other group of the ability to run the country’s affairs. Instability and chaos reign.
With Assad’s legacy of secular rule destroyed, bitter sectarian rivalries dominate, cementing Syria into separate regions. Feuding warlords, militias and crime families battle it out for local dominance.
Their attention is directed inwards, towards strengthening their rule against rivals, not outwards towards Israel.
There would be nothing new about this outcome for Syria in the worldview shared by Israel and the neocons. It draws on lessons Israel believes it learnt in both Gaza and Lebanon.
Israeli generals spoke of returning Gaza “to the Stone Age” long before they were in a position to realize that goal with the current genocide there. Those same generals first tested their ideas on a more limited scale in Lebanon, pummeling the country’s infrastructure under the so-called “Dahiya” doctrine.
Israel believed such indiscriminate wrecking sprees offered a double benefit. Overwhelming destruction forced the local population to concentrate on basic survival rather than organize resistance. And longer term, the targeted population would understand that, given the severity of the punishment, any future resistance to Israel should be avoided at all costs.
Back in 2007, four years before the uprising in Syria erupted, a leading articulator of the neocon agenda, Caroline Glick, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post, set out Syria’s imminent fate.
She explained that any central authority in Damascus had to be destroyed. The reasoning: “Centralized governments throughout the Arab world are the primary fulminators of Arab hatred of Israel.”
She added: “How well would Syria contend with the IDF [Israeli military] if it were simultaneously trying to put down a popular rebellion?”
Or, better still, Syria could be turned into another failed state like Libya after Muammar Gaddafi’s ousting and killing in 2011 with the help of NATO. Libya has been run by warlords ever since.
Notably, both Syria and Libya – along with Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon and Iran – were on a hit list drawn up in Washington in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 by US officials close to Israel.
All but Iran are now failed or failing states.
The other possible outcome is that Syria becomes a larger version of the West Bank.
In that scenario, HTS and al-Julani are able to convince the US and Europe that they are so supine, so ready to do whatever they are told, that Israel has nothing to fear from them.
Their rule would be modeled on that of Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the much-reviled Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. His powers are little greater than those of the head of a municipal council, overseeing schools and collecting the rubbish.
His security forces are lightly armed – effectively a police force – used for internal repression and incapable of challenging Israel’s illegal occupation. Abbas has described as “sacred” his service to Israel in preventing Palestinians from resisting their decades-long oppression.
The Palestinian Authority’s active collusion was on show again at the weekend when its security forces killed a resistance leader in Jenin wanted by Israel.
Al-Julani could similarly be cultivated as a security contractor. Largely thanks to Israel, Syria now has no army, navy or air force. It has only lightly armed factions such as HTS, other rebel militias like the misnamed Syrian National Army, and Kurdish groups.
Under CIA and Turkish tutelage, HTS could be strengthened, but only enough to repress dissent in Syria.
HTS would have powers but on license. Its survival would depend on keeping things quiet for Israel, both through a reign of intimidation against other Syrian groups, including the Palestinian refugee population, who threaten to fight Israel, and by keeping out other regional actors resisting Israel, such as Iran and Hezbollah.
And as with Abbas, al-Julani’s rule in Syria would be territorially limited.
The Palestinian leader has to contend with the fact that large swaths of the West Bank have been carved out as Jewish settlements under Israeli rule, and that he has no access to critical resources, including aquifers, agricultural land and quarries.
Off-limits to HTS would likely be Kurdish areas policed by Turkey and the US, where much of the country’s oil is located, as well as a swath of territory in Syria’s south-west that Israel has invaded over the past two weeks.
It is widely assumed Israel will annex these Syrian lands to extend its illegal occupation of the Golan, which it took from Syria in 1967.
Al-Julani understands only too well the options ahead of him. Perhaps not surprisingly, he appears far keener to become a Syrian Abbas than a Syrian Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader killed by Israel in October.
Given his clean-cut military makeover, al-Julani may imagine that he can eventually upgrade himself to the Syrian equivalent of the US-backed leader of Ukraine, Volodmyr Zelensky.
However, Zelensky’s role has been to fight a proxy war against Russia, on behalf of Nato. Israel would never countenance a leader of a country on its border being given that kind of military muscle.
Al-Julani’s commanders have lost no time explaining that they have no beef with Israel and do not want to provoke hostilities with it.
The heady first days of HTS’s rule were marked by its leaders thanking Israel for helping it to take Syria by neutralizing Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon. There were even declarations of “love” for Israel.
Such sentiments have not been dented by the Israeli army invading the large demilitarized zone inside Syria next to the Golan, in violation of the 1974 armistice agreement.
Nor have they been damaged by Israel’s relentless bombing of Syria’s infrastructure – a violation of sovereignty that the Nuremberg tribunal at the end of the Second World War decried as the supreme international crime.
This week al-Julani meekly suggested that Israel had secured its interests in Syria through air strikes and invasion and could now leave the country in peace.
“We do not want any conflict, whether with Israel or anyone else, and we will not let Syria be used as a launchpad for attacks [against Israel],” he told the London Times.
A Channel 4 reporter who tried last week to press an HTS spokesman into addressing Israel’s attacks on Syria was startled by the response.
Obeida Arnaout sounded as though he was following a carefully rehearsed script, reassuring Washington and Israeli officials that HTS had no bigger ambitions than emptying the bins regularly.
Asked how HTS viewed the attacks on its sovereignty by Israel, Arnaout would only reply: “Our priority is to restore security and services, revive civilian life and institutions and care for newly liberated cities. There are many urgent parts of day-to-day life to restore: bakeries, electricity, water, communications, so our priority is to provide those services to the people.”
It seems HTS is unwilling even to offer rhetorical opposition to Israeli war crimes on Syrian soil.
All of this leaves Israel in a strong position to entrench its gains and widen its regional ambitions.
Israel has announced plans to double the number of Jewish settlers living illegally on occupied Syrian territory in the Golan.
Meanwhile, Syrian communities newly under Israeli military rule – in areas Israel has invaded since Assad’s fall – have appealed to their nominal government in Damascus and other Arab states to persuade Israel to withdraw. With good reason, they fear they face permanent occupation.
Predictably, the same western elites so incensed by Russia’s violations of Ukraine’s territorial integrity that they have spent three years arming Kyiv in a proxy war against Moscow – risking a potential nuclear confrontation – have raised not a peep of concern at Israel’s ever deepening violations of Syria’s territorial integrity.
Once again, it is one rule for Israel, another for anyone Washington views as an enemy.
With Syria’s air defenses out of the way, Israel now has a free run to Iran – either by itself or with US assistance – to attack the last target on the neocons’ seven-country hit list from 2001.
The Israeli media have excitedly reported on preparations for a strike, while the transition team working for incoming US president Donald Trump are said to be seriously considering joining such an operation.
And to top it all, Israel looks like it may finally be in sight of signing off on “normal” relations with Washington’s other major client state in the region, Saudi Arabia – a drive that had to be put on hold following Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Renewed ties between Israel and Riyadh are possible again in large part because coverage of Syria has further disappeared the Gaza genocide from the West’s news agenda, despite Palestinians there – starved and bombed by Israel for 14 months – likely dying in larger numbers than ever.
The narrative of Syria’s “liberation” currently dominates western coverage. But so far the takeover of Damascus by HTS appears only to have liberated Israel, leaving it freer to bully and terrorize its neighbors into submission.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net. This originally appeared on Jonathan Cook’s Blog.
Officials in the Biden administration are taking credit for creating conditions in Syria that enabled opposition forces to overthrow the Syrian government.
Now that opposition forces have ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, administration officials are insisting that longstanding U.S. policies, including actions taken by the Biden administration against Assad’s supporters, made the overthrow of the Syrian government possible. Administration officials deny that they aided Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the U.S.-designated terrorist organization that led the drive to overthrow Assad, but they insist that they facilitated the opposition’s victory, citing years of U.S. efforts to empower the opposition and weaken the Syrian government.
U.S. policy “has led to the situation we’re in today,” State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a December 9 press briefing, the day after Assad fled the country. It “was developed during the latter stages of the Obama administration” and “has largely carried through to this day.”
White House Spokesperson John Kirby agreed, giving credit to the president. “We believe that developments in Syria very much prove the case of President Biden’s assertive foreign policy,” Kirby said in remarks to the press on December 10.
U.S. Policy
For over a decade, the United States has sought regime change in Syria. Officials in Washington have openly called for an end to the rule of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the repressive and authoritarian leader who first began ruling Syria in 2000, following decades of rule by his father, Hafez al-Assad.
U.S. efforts to oust Assad date back to 2011, when Syria descended into a civil war. As Assad responded to popular uprisings with violent crackdowns, the United States began supporting multiple armed groups, several of which were seeking the overthrow of the Syrian government.
The Obama administration designed the initial U.S. strategy to oust Assad. Hoping to avoid “catastrophic success,” or a situation in which extremists ousted Assad and seized power, the administration decided on a stalemate strategy. The United States provided opposition forces with enough support to keep pressure on Assad but not enough to overthrow him.
The administration’s goal was “a political settlement, a scenario that relies on an eventual stalemate among the warring factions rather than a clear victor,” U.S. officials explained at the time, as reported by The Washington Post.
The Obama administration came close to achieving its objectives in 2015, when opposition forces began moving into areas around Damascus. With Assad under growing pressure, it appeared that he might lose his grip on power and be forced to negotiate or surrender.
As opposition forces gained momentum, however, Assad received a lifeline from Russia, which intervened to save him. By coming to Assad’s assistance with airstrikes and military support, Russia enabled Assad to turn the tide against the rebels and remain in power.
Following Russia’s intervention, the civil war largely settled into stalemate, which left Syria divided into different areas of control. Assad consolidated his control of Damascus and the surrounding areas with support from Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah. Many opposition forces regrouped in northwestern Syria, where they received support from Turkey. Kurdish-led forces, which were separate from the opposition, carved out an autonomous region in northeastern Syria, keeping another part of the country outside of Assad’s control.
Keeping Pressure on Assad
As the civil war cooled, U.S. officials maintained its strategy of stalemate. Although they believed that Assad had secured his position in Damascus, they remained convinced that they could still pressure him into resigning, primarily by keeping him weakened and denying him a victory.
U.S. policies to keep Assad weakened spanned the administrations of Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. These policies included the diplomatic isolation of Assad, severe economic sanctions on Syria, ongoing military strikes inside Syria, and additional support to opposition groups.
With Syria becoming a “cadaver state,” as an official in the Trump administration described it, U.S. policies also kept the country dismembered. By preventing Assad from regaining control of areas that he had lost in the war, U.S. officials hoped to pressure him into accepting a political transition.
U.S. officials focused much of their efforts on the Kurdish-led forces in the northeast, an area that includes strategically important wheat fields and oil reserves. Although the Kurds did not seek to overthrow Assad, wanting instead official recognition for their autonomous region inside Syria, U.S. officials knew they could undermine Assad by keeping northeastern Syria outside his control.
At the same time, U.S. officials worked to ensure that opposition forces remained in control of northwestern Syria. Even with the region controlled by HTS, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, U.S. officials abetted the group’s operations, viewing HTS as “an asset” and believing it was critical to keeping Syria dismembered.
“I just did everything I could to be able to monitor what they were doing and ensuring that those people who spoke to them knew what our policy was, which was to leave HTS alone,” former U.S. diplomat James Jeffrey acknowledged in a 2021 interview with the PBS program Frontline.
Questions about the Biden Administration’s Approach
Since the Biden administration entered office in 2021, however, it has been largely quiet about its intentions for Syria. Although the administration appeared to continue the strategy of stalemate, mainly by keeping Assad weakened and Syria dismembered, administration officials rarely expressed a great deal of interest in the country.
As administration officials grew quiet, some lawmakers grew suspicious, wondering whether the Biden administration was abandoning the project of ousting Assad. During a 2022 congressional hearing, congressional leaders criticized the administration for creating an impression that it had accepted Assad’s rule.
“I remain concerned this administration has accepted Assad’s rule as a foregone conclusion,” U.S. Senator James Risch (R-ID) remarked.
From 2022 to 2023, a number of U.S. allies in the Middle East began moving to restore relations with Assad. In May 2023, Arab leaders welcomed Syria back into the Arab League, ending its suspension from the organization. Officials in the Biden administration criticized the moves, but they did not express any interest in returning to the more volatile dynamics of the civil war.
In fact, recent news reports indicate that the Biden administration was working to forge a deal in which Assad cut ties to Iran in exchange for reductions in pressure on his government. This major diplomatic push, which involved the United States and its Gulf allies, preceded the recent armed uprising that ousted Assad, leading to speculation that the Biden administration had been anticipating a future in which the Syrian leader remained in power.
Revivals and Surprises
After HTS began its offensive in late November 2024, the Biden administration revived a familiar playbook. Resorting to the ideas and tactics of its predecessors, the administration presented HTS’s maneuvers in a manner that fit with a policy of stalemate.
In a December 1 interview with CNN, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan pointed to the stalemate framework by making two basic points. The first was that the Biden administration had concerns about HTS, which Sullivan placed “at the vanguard” of the uprising. “We have real concerns about the designs and objectives of that organization,” he said, acknowledging it is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.
His second point was that the Biden administration did not see the actions taken by HTS as particularly worrisome, as they could potentially weaken the Syrian government. “We don’t cry over the fact that the Assad government, backed by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, [is] facing certain kinds of pressure,” Sullivan said.
Even as administration officials saw advantages to be gained from the stalemate strategy, however, it remained unclear just how much pressure the Biden administration wanted HTS to put on Assad. Once HTS began making rapid gains, officials appeared to grow concerned.
“These are not good folks,” White House Spokesperson John Kirby said on December 2, referring to HTS.
Still, some observers indicated that there was a strategic logic to HTS’s moves. Former U.S. official Andrew Tabler, who worked on U.S. policy toward Syria in the Trump administration, suggested at a policy forum hosted by The Washington Institute that the uprising could test Assad’s capabilities.
“They just decided to sort of poke the front lines, so to speak, in a very dramatic way,” Tabler said.
Tabler acknowledged that HTS’s uprising revealed significant weaknesses in Assad’s capabilities, but he anticipated that it would take several years to pressure Assad into leaving office. Like many officials in Washington, he saw the offensive as a way to increase pressure on the Syrian government rather than the beginning of the end to Assad’s rule.
“This is a challenge to the regime, but it’s not going to lead to its immediate collapse,” Tabler said.
In fact, many U.S. officials did not anticipate that the offensive would lead to a sudden collapse of the Syrian government. Given that Assad had previously survived a comparable challenge in 2015, there were strong beliefs both inside and outside of Washington that Assad and his supporters would continue to repel opposition forces.
“I think the entire international community was surprised to see that the opposition forces moved as quickly as they did,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin later noted. “Everybody expected to see a much more stiff resistance from Assad’s forces.”
It was only once opposition forces began to take control of Aleppo in early December, about a week before Assad fled the country, that the Biden administration began planning for the possibility of Assad’s downfall, according to U.S. officials.
When “we saw the fall of Aleppo, we started to prepare for all possible contingencies,” a senior official in the Biden administration explained.
Indeed, the speed of the opposition’s movement caught many of the highest-level officials in the Biden administration by surprise, as they had been working on the assumption that Assad would remain in power for the immediate future.
“We didn’t directly see the fall of Assad,” State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller acknowledged.
Shifting Balance of Power
Regardless of the ebb and flow of the Biden administration’s Syria policy, years of U.S. actions have clearly taken a toll on Syria. Just as U.S. officials have claimed, the United States played a central role in creating the conditions that led to Assad’s ouster.
Since the Obama administration first devised the strategy of stalemate, which helped transform Syria into a dismembered cadaver state, Assad ruled over a devastated country, one that may never recover.
The Biden administration’s resurgent American empire has also had major consequences for Syria. By spending the past two years supporting Ukraine against Russia and the past year backing Israel’s military offensives across the Middle East, the Biden administration has implemented policies that have imposed major costs on Assad’s supporters, especially Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah. Without external support, the longtime Syrian leader could no longer withstand violent challenges to his rule.
Shortly after the fall of Assad, President Biden recognized the implications of his administration’s actions, claiming in a major address that U.S. policies set the stage for Assad’s downfall. Even while acknowledging that “some of the rebel groups that took down Assad have their own grim record of terrorism and human right abuses,” he proudly insisted that his administration’s actions had made regime change possible.
Indeed, President Biden has been quick to take credit for the overthrow of another government in the Middle East. Rather than being open about the implications of “catastrophic success,” Biden has taken pride in how he and his predecessors have implemented policies that enabled a U.S.-designated terrorist organization to force Assad from the country.
“Our approach has shifted the balance of power in the Middle East,” Biden said. Through a “combination of support for our partners, sanctions, and diplomacy and targeted military force when necessary, we now see new opportunities opening up for the people of Syria and for the entire region.”
This article has been republished with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus.
Edward Hunt writes about war and empire. He has a PhD in American Studies from the College of William & Mary.
If there was ever a moment that laid bare the utter stupidity and futility of Washington’s Empire First policy it surely is the smoking ruins of Syria that emerged last week. The latter was the desultory culmination of Washington’s 13-years-long effort to destroy the legitimate government of Syria on the grounds that Assad was a brutal tyrant and plunderer of the country’s paltry wealth.
The fact is, he probably was just that, and might well have been among the worst of the dozens of tyrants who oppress their citizens in nations large and small around the world. But then again, did God Almighty anoint Washington as some kind of planetary Good Shepard charged with bringing just and kind rule to all the peoples of the planet?
We think not. Indeed, maintenance of a sustainable, prosperous, free constitutional Republic requires fidelity to the opposite – a regime of small, solvent government including on the Pentagon side of the Potomac. Accordingly, the sole end of foreign policy should be safeguarding the security and liberty of the homeland, not proctoring the governing etiquette of rulers halfway way around the globe that pose no military threat whatsoever to homeland security.
Yet Washington has seen fit during the last decade and one-half to pump-in upwards of $40 billion of overt and covert military aid, economic support and humanitarian assistance to a plethora of opposition Syrian forces for no discernible purpose of homeland security. To the contrary, the expenditure of all this treasure and political capital was designed for no purpose other than to effect Regime Change in Damascus and to eject the Assad government from its control over the what were the remaining white areas of the Syria map below as of just a few weeks back.
Yet the color coded regions all around what is now the vacuum of Assad’s fall tell you all you need to know about the sheer folly of this enterprise and why in truth Washington has mid-wifed yet another failed state; and has done so once again on the pretext of fighting terrorism – this time the ragged band of ISIS jihadists who briefly planted their black flags and brutal rule on the dusty towns of the Upper Euphrates centered in Raqqah, as roughly depicted by the purple area of the map.
The truth, however, is that the white areas including the Damascus region previously controlled by the Assad government were the true bulwark against a resurgence of the ISIS head-choppers, who had emerged in 2014 from the ashes of Washington’s failed regime change intervention in Iraq. So even if the choice was between the lesser of two evils, anyone with his head-screwed on straight could see that bolstering, or at least tacitly tolerating, the secularist, pluralist Alawite regime in Damascus was far preferable to the ISIS Caliphate fanatics.
Stated differently, one failed Regime Change fiasco in Iraq surely warranted second thoughts about continued pursuit of a second attempt at Regime Change next door in Syria. After all, the menace of ISIS which had afflicted Eastern Syria was the spawn of Washington’s disastrous intervention against Saddam Hussein. Yet like in the case of Assad, Hussein had posed no threat to America’s homeland security whatsoever but was nevertheless treated to the “shock and awe” of massive military attack and the gallows because he was alleged to be a plundering tyrant who wouldn’t play nice with the greedy Emirs who ruled the shared deserts and oilfields next door.
Alas, the Empire First geniuses on the banks of the Potomac didn’t get any of this. Their swell plan was to get rid of both the ISIS jihadists and the Assad regime at the same time. But in attempting to do so they ended up creating two new militarized monsters out of the economic dislocations and tribal clashes that resulted from the very civil war they had unleashed.
The previous ISIS controlled territory in purple is now controlled by the US funded Kurdish SDF militias (Syrian Democratic Forces). The latter, of course, are the mortal enemy of Washington’s ostensible NATO ally next door in Turkey, which had been fighting its own Kurdish insurgents for decades.
Indeed, owing to that threat, Turkey has supported and funded the anti-Kurd SNA (Syrian National Army), which occupies the border lands in yellow. A few years ago, however, the SNA was called the FSA (Free Syrian Army), which was a CIA-supported and operated brainchild of the late Senator John McCain, who never met a country in the middle east that he didn’t wish to invade and occupy.
Meanwhile, the jihadist hadn’t been eliminated, either, as had been triumphally claimed by Trump when Washington bombed Raqqah and surrounding areas to smithereens in 2017, and also finished off its terrorist leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in 2019. Like the SNA, the jihadist contingent had simply morphed. Twice.
What is today HTS (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham), which is ostensibly in control of the red-colored corridor from Aleppo down to Damascus, was previously known as the Nusra Front. That’s back when its current leader, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, was a strict jihadist. In 2011 he had been sent to eastern Syria to foment an uprising by his mentor and terrorist, the aforementioned al-Baghdadi. Both had been graduates of what amounted to the massive prison-based training school for Sunni jihadists at Camp Bucca in Iraq, later dubbed as “Washington’s Jihadi University”. The latter 20,000-prisoner monstrosity had been established by Washington’s proconsuls after Saddam’s demise as part of the foolish de-bathification campaign in 2003.
As it happened, by the end of the decade Washington had soured on its Iraq liberation campaign and was attempting to extricate itself from its failed multi-trillion misadventure. In conjunction with this wind-down it undertook to substantially empty this bulging prison in what became known as the “Great Prison Release of 2009,” freeing 5,700 high-security detainees from Bucca Prison. Among these was Baghdadi and Julani.
While the former organized and led the Sunni uprising in Mosul and Anbar province of Western Iraq, the Nusra Front was established as a separate entity in Syria by al-Julani. Initially, it was an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq, but in April 2013 al-Baghdadi announced that the Nusra Front had merged with ISIS to form the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
However, al-Julani and the Nusra Front rejected this merger and went their separate way, taking on a role as an independent jihadist force based in western Syria with strongholds in Idlib and Aleppo. Thereafter his Nusra Front spearheaded the 2015 conquest of this region under the banner of Jaish al-Fatah (the Army of Conquest). The latter was, in turn, described at the time by Foreign Policy magazine as a wonderful “synergy” of jihadists and western arms.
Years later, US official Brett McGurk didn’t hesitate to label al-Julani’s Idlib base as “the largest Al-Qaeda safe haven since 9/11.” Of course, the crucial role of US weapons and strategic aid in fostering this jihadist success went unmentioned.
So why did the US provide what one analyst called a “cataract of weaponry” to Nusra Front, just the same? An August 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report, infamously written under the auspices of General Michael Flynn, let the cat out of the bag quite dramatically. It revealed, in fact, that the Washington neocons and hegemonists had determined to support the establishment of a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria and western Iraq as part of the effort to depose president Bashar al-Assad and divide the country.
The DIA report said a radical religious mini-state exactly of the sort later established by ISIS as its “caliphate” was the US goal, even while admitting that the so-called Syrian revolution seeking to topple Assad’s government was being driven by “Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al-Qaeda.”
Indeed, as indicated above, the seeds of this Salafist principality had been planted when the then ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had dispatched Julani to Syria in August 2011. Prominent Lebanese journalist Radwan Mortada, who was embedded with Al-Qaeda fighters from Lebanon in Syria, met Julani in the central Syrian city of Homs at this time. Mortada informed his readers that Julani was being hosted by the Farouq Brigades, an FSA faction based in the city, which was a sectarian Salafist group that included fighters who had fought for Zarqawi’s brutal Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) after the 2003 US invasion.
A few months later, Julani and his fighters entered the war against the Syrian government by carrying out multiple terror attacks. In Damascus during December 2011 Julani sent suicide bombers to target the Syrian government’s General Security Directorate in Damascus, killing 44, including civilians and security personnel. Two weeks later, in January 2012, Julani sent another suicide bomber to detonate explosives near a bus in the Midan district of Damascus, killing some 26 people.
These bloody doings coincident with the establishment of the “Support Front for the People of the Levant,” or the Nusra Front, was revealed after a videotape was provided to journalist Mortada showing Julani and other masked men announcing the group’s existence and claiming responsibility for the attacks. So such is the lineage of the leader and group which purportedly “liberated” Syria from the clutches of the Assad family last week.
In any event, when the Raqqah-based epicenter of ISIL was demolished after 2017, the Nusra Front hung on, changing its name to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in October 2017. This rebranding was part of an effort to distance itself from al-Qaeda and to restructure the group by merging with several other jihadist factions.
For several years HTS remained contained in its narrow Idlib territorial base, even as it was assaulted by constant attacks from the forces of Assad and his Russian allies in the area. In effect, they were doing god’s work taking on the real enemy of civilization.
Nevertheless, al-Julani preserved, recently reinventing himself as Ahmed al-Sharaa – which is his real name. He now wears an even shorter beard than in the second picture below and sometimes even dons a tie, while claiming to be a “diversity friendly” pluralist friend of all Syrians – Christians, Alawites, Druze etc. That is, the very former infidel enemies of the Caliphate who al-Julani had previously decreed were to be put to death on the ancient orders of the Prophet himself.
In short, Syria is now destined to become even a worse mess than Libya became after it was liberated by Hilary Clinton in 2011. As is evident from the above, you actually need a roster-sheet to even begin to grasp the madness now unfolding there, but the always astute Moon of Alabama has summarized the state of play as well as can be done:
It is now highly likely that the country will fall apart. Outside and inside actors will try to capture and/or control as many parts of the cadaver as each of them can.
Years of chaos and strife will follow from that.
Israel is grabbing another large amount of Syrian land. It has taken control of the Syrian city of Quneitra, along with the towns of Al-Qahtaniyah and Al-Hamidiyah in the Quneitra region. It has also advanced into the Syrian Mount Hermon and is now positioned just 30 kilometers from (and above) the Syrian capital.
It is also further demilitarizing Syria by bombing every Syria military storage site in its reach. Air defense positions and heave equipment are its primary targets. For years to come Syria, or whatever may evolve from it, will be completely defenseless against outside attacks.
Israel is for now the big winner in Syria. But with restless Jihadists now right on its border it remains to be seen for how long that will hold.
The U.S. is bombing the central desert of Syria. It claims to strike ISIS but the real target is any local (Arab) resistance which could prevent a connection between the U.S. controlled east of Syria with the Israel controlled south-west. There may well be plans to further build this connection into an Eretz Israel, a Zionist controlled state “from the river to the sea”.
Turkey has had and has a big role in the attack on Syria. It is financing and controlling the ‘Syrian National Army’ (previously the Free Syrian Army), which it is mainly using to fight Kurdish separatists in Syria.
There are some 3 to 5 million Syrian refugees in Turkey which the wannabe-Sultan Erdogan wants, for domestic political reasons, to return to Syria. The evolving chaos will not permit that.
Turkey had nurtured and pushed the al-Qaeda derived Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to take Aleppo. It did not expect it to go any further. The fall of Syria is now becoming a problem for Turkey as the U.S. is taking control of it. Washington will try to use HTS for its own interests which are, said mildly, not necessary compatible with whatever Turkey may want to do.
A primary target for Turkey are the Kurdish insurgents within Turkey and their support from the Kurds in Syria. Organized as the Syrian Democratic Forces the Kurds are sponsored and controlled by the United States. The SDF are already fighting Erdogan’s SNA and any further Turkish intrusion into Syria will be confronted by them.
The SDF, supported by the U.S. occupation of east-Syria, is in control of the major oil, gas and wheat fields in the east of the country. Anyone who wants to rule in Damascus will need access to those resources to be able to finance the state.
Despite having a $10 million award on its head HTS leader Abu Mohammad al-Golani is currently played up by western media as the unifying and tolerant new leader of Syria. But his HTS is itself a coalition of hard-line Jihadists from various countries. There is little left to loot in Syria and as soon as those resources run out the fighting within HTS will begin. Will al-Golani be able to control the sectarian urges of the comrades when these start to plunder the Shia and Christian shrines of Damascus?
During the last years Russia was less invested in the Assad government than it seemed. It knew that Assad had become a mostly useless partner. The Russia Mediterranean base in Khmeimim in Latakia province is its springboard into Africa. There will be U.S. pressure on any new leadership in Syria to kick the Russians out. However any new leadership in Syria, if it is smart, will want to keep the Russians in. It is never bad to have an alternative choice should one eventually need one. Russia may well stay in Latakia for years to come.
With the fall of Syria Iran has lost the major link in its axis of resistance against Israel. Its forward defenses, provided by Hizbullah in Lebanon, are now in ruins.
Then again, the question recurs. What exactly was the point of wrecking another tiny, mostly land-locked country in the middle east with a population of just 20 million people, a GDP of only $40 billion, a per capita income of barely $2,000, no significant natural resources beyond a 2.5 billion barrel pittance of oil reserves (equal to about 30 days of global oil production), no significant steel or other industrial capacity, no tech sector, no capability to project any military power whatsoever beyond its own borders and a consumer sector so devastated by the Washington-instigated civil wars that total auto sales in 2022 were 478 units?
That’s right. No zeros missing!
At the end of the day, not even Washington is stupid enough to waste $40 billion on that. What has really been going on here is that by the lights of the Empire Firsters, Assad had to be removed because he had the wrong allies and the wrong neighbors. The demonization about his tyranny and plunder was just a cover story for the real objective, which was undermining his Iranian ally.
As a minority Alawite, which is a branch of Shiite Islam, Assad had aligned with his Shiite kin in Tehran and permitted Syrian territory to be used by the latter to transport arms and materiale to Iran’s Hezbollah allies in southern Lebanon, which was fully within its sovereign rights – especially since Hezbollah played a leading role in the coalition government of Lebanon. So destroying that Shiite nexus was the real reason for the relentless Washington war on Assad, and its incessant embrace and financing of all of the unsavory flotsam and jetsam which percolated up from Syria’s devastating civil war.
Still again, however, there is no way that the homeland security of America was imperiled either by the Shiite-based Iran-Syria-Hezbollah alliance or the fact that one sovereign state member of that alliance (Syria) permitted its territory to used to transport weaponry and materiale. The only possible reason for Washington’s two decade folly in Syria, therefore, is the proposition that Iran is an existential threat to the liberty and security of the American homeland, way over here 6,400 miles from Tehran.
That’s a ludicrous joke, to say the least. Iran’s GDP of $400 billion is equal to just 1.5% or five days worth of US GDP. Likewise, its $25 billion military budget is just 2.5% of the the $1 trillion monster domiciled in the Pentagon.
Even more to the point, Iran’s tiny Navy consists of 67 mostly coastal patrol boats and fast attack crafts, none of which can operate much outside of the Persian Gulf. Also, it has no long-range aircraft and its longest range missile, the Soumar cruise missile, is non-nuclear and has a maximum range of 1850 miles. That is to say, it can barely reach the Mediterranean basin, and can’t even reach European cities like Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, London, Stockholm or Oslo – to say nothing even remotely on our side of the Atlantic moat.
Finally, Iran is not a rogue nuclear power or wanna be nuclear threat – even according to the 17 Deep State intelligence agencies which write the so-called NIEs or National Intelligence Estimates. These NIEs have said time and again that Iran abandoned even its nuclear research program in 2003, abided by the Obama nuke deal to the letter prior to Trump’s unilaterally shit-canning it in 2018, and even now is only enriching modest amounts of uranium to legal levels as is its prerogative as a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
In short, Iran is Bibi Netanyahu’s political pinata, not an enemy of America’s liberty and security.
If Washington were not in the Empire First business and, most especially, not in the entangling alliance business in which allies and clients drag America into conflicts that have no direct bearing on its homeland security, Washington would have all along been following Thomas Jefferson’s advice: That is, it would have pursued peaceful commerce with Iran and Syria, not punished them with crippling sanctions and endless attacks on their own sovereignty and right to pursue foreign policy arrangements by their own best lights.
Finally, what would a legitimate America First foreign policy now do?
Simple. It would close the middle east bases, send the Fifth Fleet back to homeport in America, lift the sanctions on Iran and Syria and resume peaceful commerce with one and all willing nations in the region.
David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.
The collapse of Bashar Al-Assad’s Syrian government in late November and early December 2024 occurred with stunning speed. There was little question that Joe Biden’s administration and several U.S. allies, especially Turkey, were pleased with the outcome. Washington had worked diligently to force Assad from power since 2011, even though the effort triggered a civil war that had produced more than 600,000 fatalities and over 13 million people displaced. Russia’s military intervention in 2015, though, gave the Assad regime and the Syrian military a new lease on life. Until the latest offensive, rebel control of Syrian territory had shrunk markedly.
The Biden administration, as well as the always reliable pro-imperial mouthpieces in the establishment news media, predictably have portrayed the dramatic rebel victory as the “liberation” of the oppressed Syrian people. The lead segment on the December 15 edition of the CBS program “60 Minutes” was typical. Such propaganda continues a long, dishonorable tradition of portraying even Washington’s most corrupt, authoritarian clients as proponents of freedom and democracy. The whitewashing of Volodymyr Zelensky’s autocratic rule in Ukraine is another ongoing example.
No one seriously disputes that the Assad family, which had ruled Syria with an iron fist for decades, was a nasty governing elite. However, the abusive nature of the entrenched regime did not automatically mean that its opponents were better. U.S. officials, though, have behaved with utter certainty that the anti-Assad factions would be a major upgrade to Syria’s governance, as well as improve overall prospects for peace in the Middle East. Especially with respect to Syria, Washington has conducted a shameless flirtation with Islamic radicals. U.S. policymakers should act with less arrogance and much greater caution. The leading faction in the coalition that overthrew Assad is Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which until very recently had close ties to Al Qaeda and the United States officially considers it a terrorist organization. During the earlier phase in Syria’s civil war, the strongest insurgent military faction (by far) was the Nusra Front – Al Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria.
Syria was and is a fragile ethnoreligious tapestry. The predominant Arab ethnic population is subdivided among Sunnis (about 60 percent of the Arab population); Christians (10-12 percent); Alawites, a Shiite offshoot (also 10-12 percent); and Druze, a sect combining elements of Shia Islam, Christianity, and Judaism (about 5 percent).The remainder of the population comprises various (mostly Sunni) ethnic minorities, primarily Kurds (about 10 percent) of the total Syrian population.
For more than four decades, the Assad family – which is Alawite – remained in power because of the loyalty of its Alawite bloc and its loose alliance with Christians, Druze, and other smaller ethnic groups. What erupted in 2011 quickly became a largely Sunni Arab bid backed by Turkey and Saudi Arabia to overthrow Assad’s “coalition of religious minorities” government. Assad’s ouster may well open the door to tyranny and persecution of minorities by a new Sunni-dominated regime.
Nevertheless, some U.S. officials and opinion leaders, especially during Barack Obama’s administration, openly advocated cooperation with Al Qaeda and its allies. Former CIA director David Petraeus, for example, insisted that some of the organization’s “more moderate” elements could be useful allies for the United States, and therefore should be courted. Jake Sullivan, who would later become President Joe Biden’s national security advisor, embraced similar reasoning.
It is a troubling, persistent policy blindness. Just a few weeks ago, Sullivan sneered that the United States was not shedding any tears that Syrian government forces were coming under growing pressure from HTS fighters. Given the subsequent developments in Syria, one has to wonder whether the Biden administration had already decided to help HTS and its ideological cohorts launch a new offensive to oust Assad.
The belief that the revolution in Syria might well produce a stable, tolerant democratic system over the long term seems exceedingly naïve. The country’s religious schisms alone are sufficient to generate dangerous, potentially very violent, outcomes. Add various economic, geographical, and religious factors to the volatile mix, and a new, catastrophic civil war becomes all too likely.
There is also the ongoing geostrategic struggle between the West and Russia, in which Moscow’s naval base in Syria could become a possible key prize. Moscow seems close to achieving an agreement with Syria’s new government that the status quo regarding its naval base will be preserved, but the reliability of that promise remains uncertain. It could become another flashpoint between Moscow and Washington – about the last development Donald Trump’s incoming administration should desire.
Syria is a bloody mess, and U.S. leaders bear extensive guilt for helping to create that situation. The best option now is to end Washington’s incessant meddling and not make matters even worse. Let Syria be the last tragic armed U.S. crusade in the Middle East – or anywhere else.
Ted Galen Carpenter is a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute and a senior fellow at the Libertarian Institute. He also served in several senior positions during a 37-year career at the Cato Institute. Dr. Carpenter is the author of 13 books and more than 1,300 articles on foreign policy, national security, and civil liberties topics. His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).
