In Syria dirty war, “our side” has won

The overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and his replacement by the leader of an "Al Qaeda spin-off", fulfills a more than decade-long, US-led regime change campaign.

(Photo by AAREF WATAD/AFP via Getty Images)

In his first remarks on the ouster of Syrian president Basher al-Assad, President Biden made the case that he deserves a share of the credit.

Assad’s “main allies” -- Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia -- “are far weaker today than they were when I took office,” Biden said. Therefore, their inability to save Assad from the Turkish-backed insurgents’ sweeping advance was “a direct result of the blows that Ukraine, Israel have delivered upon their own self-defense, with unflagging support of the United States.” Beyond the blows inflicted by US client states, Biden also noted that he had maintained crushing US sanctions; kept US troops in Syria’s northeast; “ordered the use of military force against Iranian networks” in Syria; and supported Israel’s “freedom of action” to carry out even more military strikes against similar targets.

Hailing what he called “a historic day” – and using the same language as Biden -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu likewise argued that the regime change in Damascus “is a direct result of the blows we have inflicted on Iran and Hezbollah, the main supporters of the Assad regime.” (emphasis added to note the Biden overlap).

Biden and Netanyahu indeed have ample grounds to share in the celebration. Yet neither of them mentioned their most critical blow to Assad’s government: the US-led dirty war against Syria that began in 2011.

Capitalizing on anti-government protests that erupted as part of the Arab Spring, the US partnered with Israel, Gulf monarchies, Turkey, and other NATO states to wage a regime change campaign targeting Assad. The CIA-led operation, codenamed Timber Sycamore, proved to be “one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the C.I.A.,” the New York Times reported in 2017. Leaked NSA documents revealed a budget of nearly $1 billion per year, or around $1 of every $15 in CIA spending. The CIA armed and trained nearly 10,000 insurgents, spending “roughly $100,000 per year for every anti-Assad rebel who has gone through the program,” U.S. officials told the Washington Post in 2015. Two years later, one U.S. official estimated that CIA-funded militias “may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies.”

The roots of this campaign date back to the Bush administration. According to former NATO commander Wesley Clark, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the Bush team marked Syria for regime change alongside Iraq. A leaked 2006 U.S. Embassy in Damascus cable assessed that Assad's “vulnerabilities” included “the potential threat to the regime from the increasing presence of transiting Islamist extremists,” and detailed how the U.S. could “improve the likelihood of such opportunities arising.” The following year, Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker that the US and Saudi Arabia had agreed to “provide funds and logistical aid to weaken” Assad’s government in Syria.

As a member of the “Axis of Resistance” located between Iran and Lebanon, Syria provided a land bridge through which Tehran could arm Hezbollah. For this reason, in US eyes, Damascus needed to be severed from its allies. “The best way to help Israel deal with Iran's growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad,” a State Department email to Hillary Clinton stated in 2012. “It is the strategic relationship between Iran and the regime of Bashar Assad in Syria that makes it possible for Iran to undermine Israel’s security […] The end of the Assad regime would end this dangerous alliance.”

The year after Syria’s conflict broke out in 2011, then-Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak concurred. “The toppling down of Assad will be a major blow to the radical axis, major blow to Iran,” Barak said. “It's the only kind of outpost of the Iranian influence in the Arab world...and it will weaken dramatically both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza.”

While the Obama administration claimed to be arming the “moderate opposition” fighting Assad, Joe Biden accidentally revealed the true story. In Syria, the then-Vice President told a Harvard audience in September 2014, “there was no moderate middle” fighting Assad’s government. Instead, “hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons” were supplied to an insurgency dominated by “Al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”

Biden’s public slip -- for which he quickly apologized – that the US and its allies supported an Al Qaeda-dominated insurgency came more than two years after another critical admission was made in private. In a February 2012 email to Hillary Clinton, Jake Sullivan, who now serves as Biden’s national security adviser, wrote: “Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria.”

Twelve years later, “our side” has finally won. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the insurgent group that ousted Assad, is led by the Syria-born Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. While now presenting himself as a moderate, al-Jolani is the founding leader of Al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra (Al-Nusra Front). In 2016, Jolani formally split from Al Qaeda and changed the group’s name to Jabhat Fatah al Sham. The following year saw a final name change to HTS.

As the Pentagon’s press secretary, Major Gen. Pat Ryder, put it last week: “This group is essentially a spin-off of al-Nusra front, which was an al Qaeda spin-off.”

Jolani – who now goes by his given name, Ahmed al-Shara -- insists that he has outgrown his time with Al Qaeda and ISIS. “I believe that everyone in life goes through phases and experiences,” Jolani told CNN last week. “As you grow, you learn, and you continue to learn until the very last day of your life.”

Despite the appeal to newfound self-awareness, Jolani has not apologized for the atrocities committed by forces under his command. These include an August 2013 killing spree in scores of villages in Latakia, the heartland of Syria’s Alawite minority. According to Human Rights Watch, Nusra and other insurgent groups, including ISIS and the CIA-armed Free Syrian Army, engaged in “the systematic killing of entire families.”

When Jolani’s forces, again in cooperation with CIA-armed groups, seized the Syrian province of Idlib in May 2015, more killings occurred. Al-Nusra fighters murdered at least 20 members of the Druze faith, and forced hundreds to convert to Sunni Islam. Facing the same threats, nearly all of Idlib's remaining 1,200 Christians fled the province. “Idlib Province,” Brett McGurk, currently Biden's top official for the Middle East, said in 2017, “is the largest Al Qaeda safe haven since 9/11.” In a recent report, the State Department notes that “HTS committed abuses against members of religious and ethnic minority groups, including the seizure of properties belonging to displaced Christians.”

In his friendly interview with CNN, Jolani downplayed his group’s sectarian crimes. “There were some violations against them [minorities] by certain individuals during periods of chaos, but we addressed these issues,” he said. He also vowed to protect Syria’s minority groups going forward. To show that he has turned over a new leaf, Jolani has announced an amnesty for all low-level Syrian soldiers, ordered his forces to protect minority groups, and vowed not to force women into wearing Islamic clothing.

Jolani’s messaging is aimed not only at reassuring Syrians, but officials in Washington. The US has listed Nusra/HTS as a terror organization since December 2012, and has offered a $10 million reward for his capture. When Jolani publicly cut ties to Al Qaeda and changed his group’s name in 2016, James Clapper, Obama’s then-national intelligence director, dismissed what he called “a PR move.” Al-Nusra, Clapper said, “would like to create the image of being more moderate,” because “they are concerned at being singled out as a target” by Russian strikes. Indeed, even as he announced his split from Al Qaeda, Jolani said that he would separate “without compromising or sacrificing our solid beliefs.”

Now that Jolani’s forces have finally overthrown Assad, some in Washington are keen to reward him for a mission accomplished. “There is a huge scramble to see if, and how, and when we can delist HTS,” a US official tells Politico. According to the New York Times, US officials now “believe the group’s turn to a more pragmatic approach was genuine,” as “its leaders know they cannot realize aspirations to join or lead the Syrian government if the group is seen as a jihadist organization.” The US is already communicating with HTS via intermediaries. “We can’t wait till everyone is Mother Teresa and then talk to them,” Elizabeth Richard, the top State Department official for counterterrorism, explained.

As the torture victims in his emptied prisons illustrate, Assad was not Mother Teresa either. Yet had he not been part of a bloc that resists US-Israeli hegemony, the US would not have led an unrelenting effort to overthrow his government. This campaign continued even after the conflict effectively froze in 2018, when Assad’s forces had recaptured territory with Russian, Iranian, and Hezbollah help.

While Donald Trump shut down the CIA dirty war upon taking office in 2017, the military brass ignored his orders to withdraw US troops from Syria’s northeast. This allowed the US to pursue a strategy of plundering Syria’s most valuable oil and wheat reserves, thereby further impoverishing ordinary Syrians in government-controlled territory.

As Dana Stroul, a senior Pentagon official under Biden, explained in 2019, the enduring US military occupation meant that “one-third of Syrian territory” was now “owned” by the US government. According to Stroul, by owning the “resource-rich” region in Syria's northeast -- which contains the country's “hydrocarbons” and is its “agricultural powerhouse” -- the U.S. government had maintained “broader leverage” to influence “a political outcome in Syria” in line with US dictates. To Stroul, the US could not only “own” Syria's territory but leave the rest of it in ruins: government-controlled areas where most Syrians live “is rubble,” she said, and US sanctions could therefore “hold a line on preventing reconstruction aid and technical expertise from going back into Syria.”

Indeed, rather than let Syria rebuild from the devastating conflict, the US imposed sanctions that “crushed” Syria’s economy, and “exacerbated fuel and food shortages for everyday Syrians,” in the words of two other boastful US officials under Trump, James Jeffrey and Andrew Tabler. Upon ending his role as UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Syria last year, El-Mostafa Benlamlih, noted the obvious: “American and European sanctions, despite all claims to the contrary, punished the poor and vulnerable.”

Punished by the US-led dirty war, sanctions, and military occupation, while concurrently hollowed out by its rulers’ corruption, brutality, and inertia, the Syrian state as it has existed under Assad has finally collapsed.

While there is ample documentation of the Assad government’s repression, it is worth recognizing what else has been lost. On top of being a pluralistic state in which minorities were protected, Syria once enjoyed some of the highest medical, educational, and food production levels in the Middle East. Before the war, “Syria had one of the best-developed healthcare systems in the Arab world,” the World Health Organization noted in 2015. Offering “universal, free health care for all its citizens,” the UN Special Rapporteur on sanctions wrote three years later, “Syria enjoyed some of the highest levels of care in the region.” But the war “overwhelmed the system, and created extraordinarily high levels of need.”

Under government control of agriculture, the same report noted, “Syria was the only country in the Middle East region to be self-sufficient in food production.” This led to a "thriving agricultural sector" that provided Syrians with "affordable" food and a daily caloric intake "on par with many Western countries." The same could be said for Syria’s pharmaceutical industry, which met domestic and regional needs, as well as its education system, which had 97-percent school enrollment for primary-age children, and literacy rates for adults above 90 percent, according to UNICEF figures.

For many Syrians, the foreign-backed destruction of a repressive state apparatus that stifled dissent and tortured political prisoners will be well worth these losses in other areas of life. Those who suffered under Assad’s repression are undoubtedly welcoming his exit and hopeful for a better future. Yet there are also Syrians – particularly from the Shia, Allawite, Christian, Druze minority groups, but Sunni as well – now living in fear of the new rulers and the sectarian, sizably foreign insurgents newly empowered by the change in regime.

In the best-case scenario, Syria’s new Al Qaeda spin-off rulers will recognize that their sectarianism will be untenable if they wish to stay in power and give their country a chance at survival. But even if Jolani, the former Al Qaeda leader and ISIS deputy, turns out to be the long-sought “moderate rebel” that US officials sold to the public, Syria still remains a war-torn country that is flooded with weapons and sectarian militias with fighters from around the world. Both Israel and Turkey have already taken advantage of the chaos by seizing territory and, in Israel’s case, wiping out Syrian military infrastructure. To date, the new government has declined to condemn Israel’s rampage.

Biden and his team of Obama administration veterans, who began the CIA war against Syria in 2011, now find themselves leaving office just as their regime change project achieves its goal. After hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, and a country decimated – all so that a secular dictator could be replaced by a former leader of Al Qaeda -- it will not be a surprise if Biden and his aides soon stop taking credit for the fact that “our side” has won.