Of all the tragedies of Barack Obama’s administration, perhaps none is as heartbreaking as Syria. This five-year-old conflict has been perpetuated by the United States at a tremendous cost in human lives, mostly Syrian, but also Kurdish, Turkish and Iraqi. Over 400,000 civilians have died in the struggle between the Syrian government and the “rebel forces” — whose composition is of very questionable legitimacy.
The original uprising, which began in 2011 as part of the “Arab Spring” movement that saw revolutionary protests in Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, Sudan, Iraq, Bahrain and Libya has since been expanded and funded beyond all scope of the original movement, which was merely aimed at protesting actions (and lack thereof) of the Assad government.
Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad cracked down on Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated political prisoners who had been released after his father Hafez passed away in 2000. Ironically, it was Bashar’s brother Bassel who had been his father’s chosen heir to power, but Bassel’s unexpected death in a car accident in 1994 meant that Bashar — who had studied to become an eye doctor in London — would ultimately take the reins over the country instead.
In the beginning of the Arab Spring movement, the United States stood by longtime dictators such as Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya rather than take the side of “the people” who wanted to overthrow them. However, as time went on, it became clear that in many cases, the dictators who were fighting masses of citizens in many of these countries were true despots who had abused their countrymen and plundered their nations’ resources.
In Assad’s case, though, the facts are less clear-cut. It’s true that a certain percentage of Syrian citizens wanted to protest against Assad’s non-implementation of government reforms that had been promised at the beginning of his reign. But equally true is the fact that the U.S.-aligned governments of Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia wanted a gas pipeline to run through Syria, and Assad did not.
The mass protests became a convenient way the U.S. could take the side of the opposition and fund a movement to try to wrest power from Assad and/or perhaps try to split the country in two. But as Middle East watchers are well aware, Syria is not Libya, and Assad was not Gaddafi — he was not an autocratic ruler who made decisions on a whim and dressed in ridiculous outfits, surrounded by a coterie of armed bodyguards.
In fact, at no time since the uprising began did Assad ever enjoy less than majority support from the Syrian people — indeed, Assad boasted a higher favorability rating among his citizens than Obama had in the United States; the number of people opposed to Assad’s rule under any condition (versus negotiation over a few unpopular policies) was and is actually incredibly small.
Since the conflict began, Assad was reelected by his countrymen in 2014 in the nation’s first truly democratic election in more than fifty years, and today, he enjoys popular support despite the tragic events taking place in his country’s territory.
The argument that Assad has “committed atrocities on his own people” is very debatable; a U.N. investigation into infamous chemical weapons attacks in 2013 never assigned blame for the incident to any party; the media that spun the story are aligned with globalist forces that stand to profit if Assad were to fall or be forced from power.
But the real problem in Syria is that once it was clear that the U.S. wanted to fund opposition to the government in a major way, it became apparent that the country didn’t have enough hardcore fighters willing to risk their lives to become terrorists to attack the regime, which was (and still is) very well-armed.
Various amorphous groups stepped into the fray in order to try and seize territory from Syria using money and weapons provided by the United States. Sometime around 2013, some of these groups splintered into ISIS (or ISIL — The Islamic State in the Levant — or also Daesh).
The idea of ISIS was larger than simply toppling Assad; the purpose of the organization is to create a new nation — a Caliphate — out of territory of Syria and Iraq that could eventually grow to be one of the most powerful regimes ever known in the Middle East.
Its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has visions of a realm on the order of the Ottoman Empire of the 16th century, which stretched from the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf at the peak of its power.
Although most people are unaware of this fact, al-Baghdadi was actually held in U.S. custody in Iraq from 2004 to 2009 before being released. It’s rumored that when he was released, his last words to his former captors were “see you in New York.”
At this point — in 2013 when ISIS was founded — is when things began to become cloudy. There’s a picture on the Internet floating around of U.S. Senator John McCain standing next a person who is said to be al-Baghdadi.
While the authenticity of the photo is in question, the fact of the matter is that McCain met with high-level commanders belonging to at least one Syrian rebel group, and by this time, elements of al-Qaeda in Iraq and other acknowledged terrorist groups had begun to infiltrate or even compose many of the Syrian opposition forces the U.S. was arming and funding via the CIA.
The group known as the “al-Nusra Front” has commonly been acknowledged to be a cover name for al-Quaeda in Iraq, and many rebel groups are alleged to have extremely strong ties to ISIS, which itself pays its soldiers in U.S. dollars and transports its forces using military equipment and vehicles that were conveniently “left behind” in Iraq by U.S. forces when President Obama evacuated our troops from that country in 2011.
There’s speculation that much of the arms and funding the U.S. has been providing to “rebel” groups in Syria actually winds up in the hands of ISIS. Whether this happens with the implicit knowledge of the Obama administration is impossible to say. But there’s most definitely an argument that can be made that had the U.S. not pulled out of Iraq in 2011, ISIS would not have been able to form or become the force in the region that it is today.
Some pundits argue that a speculative globalist “playbook” — to overthrow the governments of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria (and possibly Iran), in that order, is currently being carried out — but obviously, the battle in Syria is likely stretching out beyond the original goalposts that had been intended for it.
The fact of the matter is that Russian involvement, which may not have originally been anticipated or calculated to the extent that it’s taken place, has shored up Assad’s regime in ways that may have been unexpected to U.S. forces.
Now that the administration of Obama is on its way out, and the Russia-friendly administration of President-Elect Donald Trump is about to take power, the prospects for the “rebels” are likely starting to look bleak. Indeed, the timing of the recent fall of Aleppo to pro-Assad troops coinciding with the election of Trump might be no accident.
The “rebel groups” may now be under pressure to retreat and/or disband if they sense that the U.S. may be about to side with the Russians instead of fighting them through the imposition of a “no-fly zone” as Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton had pressed for in her ill-fated campaign for the U.S. presidency.
In fact, had Clinton won, it’s highly possible the war in Syria might be looking quite a bit different as of today — with highly catastrophic, international ramifications.
But the worst part of the entire Syrian conflict — the most tragic part — is the number of civilians who have died because they were caught in the crossfire. The U.S. government has gotten the mainstream media (and especially social media) to repeat the lies of atrocities — that for some reason, Assad was killing his own people in Aleppo by refusing to let them evacuate the city, formerly Syria’s largest.
But the fact of the matter is that the government of Syria had announced that all citizens of Aleppo were free to leave it at any time; it even provided buses as transportation.
In Aleppo specifically, there has been tremendous propaganda claiming the government was slaughtering people and that 250,000 citizens were “trapped” by government forces. In fact, it was the supposedly “moderate” rebel groups which have tortured people, beheaded children and refused to let civilians leave the besieged parts of the city.
A supposedly neutral humanitarian group called The White Helmets was organized by U.S.-backed and British security forces, which has been accused of killing Syrian soldiers even as it’s solicited donations via Facebook.
Now that the goalposts of the conflict may be changing, the truth about the battle of Syria may finally be emerging — that it has been the administration of President Barack Obama that has expanded and enlarged the conflict there at great cost to human life as well as to U.S. taxpayers.
Like the infamous secret bombings of Cambodia in 1969 and 1970 ordered by then-Secretary-of-State Henry Kissinger to disrupt Vietcong supply chains, the funding and arming of Syrian “rebel forces” may ultimately be looked at historically as acts of extremely dubious legitimacy.
The same protesters who argue that Kissinger should be brought before the International Criminal Court in The Hague may one day accuse Obama of playing a significant part in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in Syria.
Certainly, if Bashar al-Assad had killed all of those people purposefully, it would undoubtedly be considered a war crime. But the fact that they died in the midst of battles means that it can not fall into such a category. At the same time, a strong argument can be made that Obama has blood on his hands from the affair.
It’s highly probable that President-Elect Donald Trump’s policy of getting the U.S. out of foreign conflicts (with the admitted exception of battling ISIS) would reduce the war in Syria; in fact, some people believe it would effectively end the conflict as we know it as the opposition forces would simply run out of arms and funds.
One can hope that the new presidential administration will bring some peace to much of the Syrian nation, which has suffered out of all proportion to its Middle Eastern brethren in the Arab Spring nations’ conflicts.
Dealing with ISIS is another matter, but if recent events are any indicator, they are already on the run and may yet melt away to places from whence they came once Trump steps into the Oval Office.
