On December 8, 2024, the 24-year reign of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad came to an end after a rebel coalition of Al-Qaeda offshoots, Turkish proxies, and other Islamist militants overwhelmed the capital of Damascus. In effect, a Sunni Islamist saturnalia brought an end to the Middle East’s last secular Arab government.
The Assad family, starting with Hafez al-Assad in 1971, has held an iron grip on Syrian politics for over five decades. As committed members of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, the Assads aligned with rivals to the West and Israel such as the Soviet Union, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and later on the Russian Federation.
For it being a perennial thorn in the US‘s and Israel’s side, Syria was mentioned as a potential target for regime change by neoconservative policy advisors Richard Perle and Douglas Feith in their policy document A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. The neoconservative plan, authored in 1996, was directed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was serving his first term as Israeli prime minister. The proposals outlined in the document have guided the foreign policy grand strategies of the ultranationalist Likud coalition that has dominated Israeli politics in the last three decades in addition to American Zionists across the political aisle.
During the Global War on Terror, the Syrian regime and the then-administration of George W. Bush briefly became strange bedfellows on the issue of torture. Because the Bush administration could not torture suspected terrorists during interrogations on US soil, it turned to the controversial practice of extraordinary rendition to circumvent restrictions on torture. As former CIA agent Robert Baer candidly put it, “If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria.”
Whatever rapprochement took place between Syria and the US during the Bush year soon evaporated after the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011. After a series of protests, Syria spiraled into a state of civil war, where Sunni militants embedded themselves in the protests and soon mounted a full-fledged revolt against the Assad regime. These so-called “moderate rebels” received patronage from Gulf Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Even more radical Islamist sects such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) attempted to carve out their own statelet in eastern Syria.
Always looking for a new conflict to get its dirty paws in, the CIA under Barack Obama launched the clandestine operation Timber Sycamore with the aim of providing the “moderate rebels” with military aid. The name of the game here was regime change as the euphoria of the Arab Spring convinced DC elites democracy was an inevitability across the Middle East. Other Middle Eastern players were not so keen on jumping on the pro-democracy bandwagon. In the early stages of the Syrian Civil war, Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah came to the Assad regime’s defense, which raised further alarms in Tel Aviv and the pro-Zionist NGO consortium in Washington, D.C.
At the request of the Assad regime, Russia decisively intervened in 2015 to prop up the embattled Syrian government as the conflict began to spiral out of control. Turkey added further fuel to the fire by directly intervening in northern Syria in 2016 to back up its Islamist proxies while subsequently launching punitive campaigns against Kurdish elements in northeastern Syria it deemed as terrorist entities. What started out as a routine civil war, the Syrian Civil War became a magnet for external actors vying for influence in the Levant.
Although the threat of ISIS largely subsided during the presidency of Donald Trump due to the rare instance of the US, Iran, and Russia putting their differences aside and launching operations to crush the extremist group, the US maintained a firmly anti-Assad stance. On two occasions, Trump authorized airstrikes against the Syrian government for its alleged use of chemical weapons. Further, the Trump administration implemented the crushing Caesar sanctions in 2019 in another attempt to crush the Assad regime.
To Trump’s credit, he made a genuine attempt to withdraw the US’s 900 troops stationed in Syria in 2019. However, his orders were countermanded by Pentagon leaders who would re-deploy troops to the oil-laden Deir ez-Zor province in eastern Syria – another move designed to undermine the Assad regime.
For some time, the Syrian conflict appeared to enter a frozen state as a result of the Astana discussions held by Iran, Russia, and Turkey starting in 2017. These multi-year discussions would be focused on determining the fate of Syria after years of domestic upheavals and foreign interventions in its affairs. In the end, these discussions created a false peace.
After years of hard fighting that depleted the country’s resources, growing corruption, tightening sanctions, the US’s looting Syria of its wheat and oil, the Assad regime finally reached a breaking point in the final months of 2024. Syrian troop demoralization did not help matters, as evidenced by lackluster pay for soldiers ($7) and generals ($40). Syrian forces were exhausted and demoralized, which proved fatal for the Syrian state after Islamist militant group Hay’at al Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and other allies launched an offensive against the city of Aleppo towards the end of November. In short order, the Syrian military crumbled and the Islamist rebels overran the country with little to no resistance in the ensuing week.
Amusingly, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the emir of HTS and the de facto leader of Syria after Assad’s departure, has a $10 million bounty on his head for previously engaging in terroristic activity. To casual observers of international affairs, this seems like a bizarre turn of events. However, the US has a long track record of backing Sunni extremists in great power conflicts — from the Caucasus all the way to Xinjiang — as a means of creating geopolitical quagmires for its rivals. The US backing the likes of HTS and similar organizations is par for the course. In fact, there is already talk of the US and its NATO allies removing HTS’s terrorist designation because of the group’s alleged pragmatic turn, which is more likely a cynical reward for the group’s successful effort to topple the Assad government.
It remains to be seen if HTS’s pivot to moderation is genuine. Though it would be wise to not get ahead of ourselves here. The Syrian Civil War is far from over, and it might be entering a new phase similar to that of the Libyan Civil War as extremist factions duke it out to determine who will be king of the hill in the Levantine state.
For his part, president-elect Donald Trump has good instincts on recent events in Syria. In an X post he published on December 7, 2024, he proclaimed, “Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!”
The only quibble here is the US has been “involved” in Syrian affairs in some capacity for over a decade. As mentioned before, the US has used tools spanning covert operations to harsh sanctions to destabilize the country. The damage is already done, and chaos awaits Syria.
For now, US leaders should exercise some self-awareness and admit their interventions have cause unwarranted degrees of suffering abroad, Syria included. Sober minds should also acknowledge there is no critical national security interest at stake in Syria, nor does the country pose an existential threat to the US.
With the US dealing with a wide array of domestic problems, ranging from mass inflation to a ballooning national debt, the last thing it should entertain is getting involved in another Middle Eastern geopolitical scuffle.
