Syria’s sectarian massacres are blowback for foreign-led dirty war
By arming the sectarian insurgency that now rules Syria, the US and its allies bear responsibility for the current slaughter of Alawite civilians and other minority groups.
Since Friday, fighters loyal to Syria’s new Al Qaeda offshoot government have massacred hundreds of people in the coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus, the heartland of Syria’s Alawite population. Contacts in Syria have shared stories, corroborated by gruesome videos circulating on social media, of outright pogroms: entire families murdered in their homes; residents rounded up and executed in the streets; shops looted and burned to the ground; and thousands hiding in mountains and farmland from the marauding killers, many of them foreign fighters. According to the Washington Post, “witnesses said the gunmen who wrought carnage were indistinguishable from government forces.” This has resulted in massive displacement, with thousands of civilians seeking refuge anywhere they can, including a Russian military base, churches, and neighboring Lebanon.
The slaughter followed a deadly ambush against government troops near the coastal city of Jableh, which then sparked similar attacks in Syria’s northwest. Yet rather than target their armed foes, Sunni militants under the control of Syria’s new government unleashed a wave of sectarian violence against civilians belonging to minority groups, namely Alawites and Christians. The violence directed at ordinary Syrians stands in stark contrast to the new government’s response to invading Israeli forces, who have conquered large swaths of Syrian territory since Assad’s ouster in December. On that front, the new government has not fired a single shot.
In a statement, Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote that the US “condemns the radical Islamist terrorists, including foreign jihadis” for the current killings, and “stands with Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities.” He also called on Syria’s interim government to “hold the perpetrators of these massacres against Syria’s minority communities accountable.” Rubio’s censure offered a stark contrast to the European Union, which offered only a vague condemnation of “all violence against civilians”, without identifying the perpetrators.
Yet if Washington were serious about accountability, that would include acknowledging its own role in empowering the radicals it now condemns.
The gunmen now terrorizing Alawites, Christians, and other minority populations could not have taken power without the backing of the US and its allies in arguably the most expensive, and catastrophic, dirty war in modern history.
Capitalizing on the 2011 protests against the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, the US partnered with Israel, Gulf monarchies, Turkey, and other NATO states to fuel a sectarian insurgency that sought regime change. Although many Syrians took to the streets to protest state corruption and repression, those with the guns had other goals. As one early protest slogan put it: “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the Grave.” Before he was murdered by insurgent forces in 2014, Father Frans van der Lugt, a Dutch Jesuit priest who witnessed the war’s early years, recalled:
From the start, the protest movements were not purely peaceful. From the start I saw armed demonstrators marching along in the protests, who began to shoot at the police first. Very often the violence of the security forces has been a reaction to the brutal violence of the armed rebels.
...The opposition of the street is much stronger than any other opposition. And this opposition is armed and frequently employs brutality and violence, only in order to then blame the government.
By early 2012, the insurgency had become dominated by Al Qaeda, then known as Al-Nusra, under the leadership of Abu Mohammad al-Jolani – who is now the ruler of Syria.
Despite claiming to support the “moderate opposition”, the US understood who was in charge. An August 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report noted that “Salafi[s], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency.” Al Qaeda, the report stressed, “supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning.” Al Qaeda’s role did not dissuade Washington from supporting the insurgency as well. As Jake Sullivan, who went on to serve as Biden’s national security adviser, wrote to Hillary Clinton six months earlier: “Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria.”
The CIA-led operation to arm the insurgents, 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 later reported. Drawing on a massive arsenal sourced from across the globe—including the looted stockpiles of the government it had helped overthrow in Libya—the CIA armed and trained nearly ten thousand insurgents, who formed a part of the broader al Qaeda-dominated rebellion.
In a rare acknowledgment by an establishment US publication, the New York Times reported in April 2017 that US-backed insurgents threatened “sectarian mass murder.” The most notorious case came four years earlier, when the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army joined an al-Nusra and ISIS offensive on Alawite areas of Latakia. A Human Rights Investigation found that the insurgents engaged in “the systematic killing of entire families.” In a video from the field, former Syrian army general Salim Idriss, head of the U.S.-backed Supreme Military Council (SMC), bragged that “we are cooperating to a great extent in this operation.” The Latakia massacres came four months after the U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, hailed Idriss and his fighters as “the moderate and responsible elements of the armed opposition.”
The following year, Joe Biden broke from his colleagues to accidentally reveal the truth. In Syria, “there was no moderate middle,” Biden blurted out to a Harvard audience. Instead, Biden explained, “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.” The following year, an Al Qaeda-led coalition, backed with CIA weaponry and intelligence, captured the Syrian province of Idlib, creating what senior Obama-Biden official Brett McGurk described as “the largest Al Qaeda safe haven since 9/11.”
Washington was willing to tolerate, and in fact help enlarge, an Al Qaeda safe haven in Syria because it served loftier goals. Assad’s Syria was a key member of the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance” to US and Israeli hegemony in the region. Situated between Iran and Lebanon, Syria provided a land bridge across which Tehran could funnel arms to its most potent military ally, Hezbollah. This strategic depth played a critical role in Israel’s failure to defeat the Lebanese movement in the 2006 war.
For architects of US policy, neutralizing Assad held out the prospect of dealing the resistance axis a crippling defeat. As a July 2012 email to Hillary Clinton noted, “Israeli counterparts are convinced that there is a positive side to the civil war in Syria; if the Assad regime topples, Iran would lose its only ally in the Middle East and would be isolated.” The same email recognized that Assad’s ouster “could well ignite a sectarian war between the Shiites and the majority Sunnis of the region drawing in Iran,” but even that prospect could not outweigh the “positive side”: in fact, “in the view of Israeli commanders,” such a sectarian war “would not be a bad thing for Israel and its Western allies,” as such a “turn of events may even prove to be a factor in the eventual fall of the current government of Iran.”
Although the CIA program was formally shut down in 2017, the US continued to find ways to support the Al Qaeda safe haven that it had helped create. Officially, Al Nusra remained on the terrorism list. But in practice, James Jeffrey, the State Department official responsible for Syria explained, the U.S. treated Al-Nusra as “an asset” to U.S. strategy in Syria. “They are the least bad option of the various options on Idlib, and Idlib is one of the most important places in Syria, which is one of the most important places right now in the Middle East,” Jeffrey said. Jeffrey also revealed that he had communicated with al-Nusra leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani via “indirect channels.”
Because Al Nusra was deemed a useful asset, the US looked the other way as other assets offered their support. This includes the government of Ukraine, which sent drones and intelligence operatives to Idlib in the months before the Nusra-led offensive that ousted Assad from power. According to Mouaz Mustafa, a US government-funded lobbyist for regime change in Syria with close contacts to Nusra and allied forces, last year’s successful offensive against Assad was in part motivated by “a desire to aid Ukraine... with the aim of striking a blow against Russia, a mutual enemy.”
When Nusra ultimately succeeded in toppling Assad late last year, it was not hard to predict that a war-torn, sanctions-decimated country flooded with heavily armed foreign extremists and ruled by an Al Qaeda offshoot would quickly descend into a spasm of sectarian bloodletting. Given that Israel and Turkey are already laying claim to conquered territory, this latest outbreak of sectarian violence makes permanent balkanization an even more likely possibility. And given that Washington and its dirty war partners have played an integral role in creating this catastrophe, it is also impossible to imagine a future that includes any accountability.
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