How Trump Ended Up Meeting With A "Former" Al-Qaeda Leader.

The U.S. dirty war on Syria led to this current moment.

Recently, Trump met with the current Syrian leader, Ahmad al-Shara, in Saudi Arabia.

On a positive note, Trump has announced he is lifting the barbaric starvation sanctions on Syria, which block food, vital medicine, and reconstruction aid.

This move will certainly do a lot to ease the suffering of ordinary Syrians and help them begin to return to a normal life after suffering fourteen years of a brutal proxy war.

However, the only reason Trump is lifting the sanctions now is that they have completed their goal of overthrowing the Assad dictatorship in Syria and replacing it with a more U.S.-friendly one (hence why Trump still has sanctions on countries like Venezuela and Iran, where the United States has not yet achieved their regime change goal).

Before and after meeting with him, Trump had endless kind words for the new Syrian leader.

“I have already taken the first steps towards restoring normal relations between the United States and Syria for the first time in more than a decade, and am very pleased to announce that Secretary (of state) Marco Rubio will be meeting with the new Syrian foreign minister in Turkey later this week” Trump said in a speech in Saudi Arabia before meeting with al-Shara.

After meeting with him, Trump has even more words of support for the Syrian leader, saying in response to the question, How did you find the Syrian president? “Great, I think very good, young, attractive guy, tough guy, strong past, very strong past, a fighter, he’s got a real shot at pulling it (Syria) together”.

In reality, Ahmad al-Shara, who previously went by Mohammad Al Jolani’s “strong past,” includes him being a top “fighter” in Syria for Al Qaeda and ISIS.

As the New York Times reported, “In 2003, he (Jolani) went to neighboring Iraq to join Al Qaeda.”

The Times went on to report, “He later emerged in Syria around the start of the civil war and formed the Nusra Front, a Qaeda affiliate, which eventually evolved into Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)”.

Jolani/al-Shara had also worked closely with ISIS. Foreign Policy magazine reports

After the Syrian uprising began, Jolani talked to [Islamic State leader] Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi about a project in Syria. By summer 2011, Jolani went to Syria to build a new organization called Jabhat al-Nusra. It was essentially an official branch of the Islamic State of Iraq. They began to conduct operations once the Syrian civil war became militarized, and they became more integrated within some of the insurgency, especially those that were more Islamist in nature.

Due to the successes that were seen in the initial year or so, Baghdadi wanted to essentially show publicly what was known behind the scenes—that Jabhat al-Nusra was one and the same as the Islamic State of Iraq. In April 2013, Baghdadi announced the Islamic State [of Iraq and Syria], or ISIS.

Before taking over the Syrian government, Jolani/al-Shara controlled the Syrian province of Idlib, which the former U.S. envoy to the Middle East, Brett McGurk, called “the largest Al Qaeda safe haven since 9/11”.

In 2017, the U.S. The Embassy in Syria posted a picture of Jolani with the caption “Stop this terrorist” and offered a 10 million dollar reward for anyone who could report his location.

The graphic’s bottom said that Jolani “is the leader of the terrorist organization al-Nusra Front, al Qaeda's affiliate in Syria”, and accused Jolani of “carrying out multiple terrorist attacks throughout Syria, often targeting civilians”.

Pictured above: Poster posted online by the U.S. Embassy in Syria in 2017.

This was Jolani/al-Shara’s past, but some may ask, has he moderated his view since?

Hardly, he has certainly rebranded his image, looking more like a clean-cut politician rather than the leader of a jihadist group, but his new government still harbours many of the sectarian and genocidal views of Al Qaeda and ISIS.

As the veteran Middle East correspondent Charles Glass, who has extensive expertise in Syria, recently wrote in the Nation Magazine, Al-Shara “has donned a suit, trimmed his beard, and dropped his nom de guerre (Jolani), but Syrians are still afraid.”

Glass wrote:

In the group’s previous incarnations as part of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, HTS members rampaged through Iraq and Syria from 2014 to 2017, showing no respect for ethnic or religious differences. Its militants massacred Alawis, Christians, and Yazidis. The assault on the Yazidis, whose men they slaughtered and whose women they sold into sex slavery, was genocidal by any standard. HTS militants had expelled Syrian Kurds, although mostly Sunnis, from their ancestral villages in Afrin province and attacked their autonomous region in the northeast.

As Glass noted, Al-Shara’s regime continued this sectarian legacy, massacring Alawite civilians, the Syrian minority sect that the former dictator Bashar Al-Assad and his father, who ruled before him, belonged to. As Glass wrote:

CNN documented an assault the next day on the Alawi village of Sanobar that left 200 villagers dead. The CNN journalists wrote that ‘government-aligned forces subjected largely unarmed villagers to summary executions, looting, arson and sectarian slurs, and bodies were piled up in two mass graves.’ More massacres followed during what the Associated Press called ‘among the bloodiest 72 hours in Syria’s modern history, including the 14 years of civil war.’ Reuters correspondents ‘saw many homes and shops torched and looted, and villages largely deserted, during a visit to the area on [March 13].’ The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) wrote on March 10 that it ‘has documented the death of 973 civilians in recent days, all of whom were executed and killed in cold blood.’

Glass compared the sectarian massacres by the new Syrian regime to Israel’s genocidal conduct in Gaza, writing:

The jihadis, not unlike Israeli soldiers in Gaza, posted videos of themselves proudly committing war crimes. One sang that he was engaging in ‘ethnic cleansing.’ Shara, whose followers took part, promised an investigation—much as the Israeli prime minister said the IDF would investigate itself for alleged criminal behavior.

Staff members from a “Western aid organization currently on the ground in Syria” told the Grayzone and antiwar.com that “4000 Alawites have been killed” in these sectarian massacres.

The sectarian massacres have not ended either, the New York Times recently reported

The rebels who overthrew the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in December have vowed to unify their country. But persistent outbreaks of sectarian violence have stoked fears among Syria’s many minority groups (Druse, Alawites, Kurds and Christians) that the country’s new government, which mostly belongs to the Sunni Arab majority, will not or cannot protect them from extremist groups in Syria.

Dozens of people were killed in late April when Islamist fighters attacked neighborhoods around Damascus, the capital, which are home to many in the country’s Druse minority.

Going by the official narrative of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, Trump’s cozying up to the current Syrian government makes no sense. One may ask, aren’t the United States in Syria to fight Al Qaeda and ISIS?

Not exactly, the dirty secret of the United States’ war in Syria is that Al Qaeda has always been on “our side,” and Trump’s friendly relationship with the new Syrian government is just a continuation of a long-standing regime change policy.

How The United States Embraced Jihadists In Syria.

Going back to 1996, the United States and the Israel lobby have wanted to overthrow the Syrian regime led by Bashar al-Assad.

A 1996 document sent to Benjamin Netanyahu when he first came to power, written by influential Israel lobbyists and neo-conservatives titled “A Clean Break,” stated, “Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria”.

“This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions,” the document went on to write, setting the stage for the 2003 Iraq war.

This rough U.S./Israeli plan was further segmented after 9/11. The U.S. general Wesley Clark said that after 9/11 the United States planned to overthrow “seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

“The rhetoric of regime change is directed towards you from the United States. They are actively looking for a new Syrian leader, they’re granting VISAS and visits to Syrian opposition politicians, are talking about isolating you diplomatically, and perhaps a coup or your regime crumbling,” said journalist Christiane Amanpour when she interviewed Al-Assad in 2005.

In 2011, when protests erupted in Syria against the Assad regime as part of the larger Arab Spring movement, it gave the United States the perfect opportunity to enact its regime change goal.

While the majority of the initial protests were moderate, demanding economic and human rights reforms from the brutal and corrupt Assad regime, there was also a more radical, jihadist-aligned element.

The former U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, told journalist Charles Glass in Harper's Magazine that “The first really serious violence on the opposition side was up on the coast around Baniyas, where a bus was stopped and soldiers were hauled off the bus. If you were Alawite, you were shot. If you were Sunni, they would let you go.”

Glass went on to note, “At demonstrations, some activists chanted the slogan, ‘Alawites to the grave, and Christians to Beirut.’ A sectarian element wanted to remove Assad, not because he was a dictator but because he belonged to the Alawite minority sect that Sunni fundamentalists regard as heretical”.

By 2012, when the protests turned into full-on civil war, the sectarian elements took over the insurgency fighting the Syrian government.

A 2012 director of national intelligence report found that “the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria”.

“I wrote a memo to (Hillary) Clinton with a copy that went to the White House—this was in June 2012—that the Al Qaeda faction is taking over eastern Syria. And the Free Syrian Army doesn’t have enough supplies, not enough money, to hold them off. If eastern Syria falls, they are going to link up with the people on the other side of the border in Iraq and create this gigantic entity,” former ambassador Robert Ford told Charles Glass.

However, the United States continued to pursue its regime change goal.

That same year, then advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Jake Sullivan, wrote her an email saying “Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria”.

Israel similarly wanted to continue the war in Syria for regime change goals.

Another email sent to Hillary Clinton by Jake Sullivan in 2012 states,

One particular source states that the British and French Intelligence services believe that their 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. At the same time, the fall of the House of Assad could well ignite a sectarian war between the Shiites and the majority Sunnis of the region drawing in Iran, which, in the view of Israeli commanders would not be a bad thing for Israel and its Western allies. In the opinion of this individual, such a scenario would distract and might obstruct Iran from its nuclear activities for a good deal of time. In addition, certain senior Israeli intelligence analysts believe that this turn of events may even prove to be a factor in the eventual fall of the current government of Iran.

Recently, at a conference in Turkey, the economist Jeffrey Sachs, who worked closely with the then Arab League-UN envoy, Kofi Annan, revealed that the United States stopped a peace agreement at the UN in 2012 to continue this regime change goal.

Sachs said:

Kofi Annan, arranged a peace in Syria, you know why it didn’t happen? Because all the parties agreed to peace except one. The United States of America. The United States said there will be no peace unless Basahr al Assad goes on the first day. The United States said Assad must go on the first day of any agreement or we block it. And so Kofi Annan stepped down from his position after negotiating his peace arrangement, and we have had 500,000 people dead since then.

That same year, the United States began covert operations to arm rebels in Syria.

A year prior, the United States intervened to back jihadist rebels in Libya to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi.

Billed as a “humanitarian intervention,” to stop Gaddafi from massacring civilians, a 2015 UK parliament report revealed that “Qaddafi was not planning to massacre civilians. This myth was exaggerated by rebels and Western governments, which based their intervention on little intelligence” along with the fact that “The threat of Islamist extremists, which had a large influence in the uprising, was ignored — and the NATO bombing made this threat even worse, giving ISIS a base in North Africa.”

The United States actually used that intervention to continue the next intervention in Syria.

Legendary journalist Seymour Hersh reported that in 2012, the CIA created “a ‘rat line’, a back channel highway into Syria”.

Hersh went on to report “The rat line, authorised in early 2012, was used to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition. Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida”.

By 2013, the CIA took a more direct role in the Syrian war and opted to directly train and arm rebels in Syria in an attempt to overthrow the Syrian government.

The program was called “Timber Sycamore,” which the New York Times described as “one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the C.I.A” and “one of the most expensive efforts to arm and train rebels since the agency’s program arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980s”.

Reporting on the program, the Washington Post wrote, “At $1 billion, Syria-related operations account for about $1 of every $15 in the CIA’s overall budget”.

The Post went on to write, “U.S. officials said the CIA has trained and equipped nearly 10,000 fighters sent into Syria over the past several years — meaning that the agency is spending roughly $100,000 per year for every anti-Assad rebel who has gone through the program.”

A separate Washington Post article in 2017 noted that “One knowledgeable official estimates that the CIA-backed fighters may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies over the past four years”.

The program also helped draw the Russian military into the war on the government’s side in 2015. As David Ignatius noted, “What did the CIA’s covert assistance program for Syrian rebels accomplish? Bizarrely, the biggest consequence may be that it helped trigger the Russian military intervention in 2015 that rescued President Bashar al-Assad — achieving the opposite of what the program intended”, (or more likely exactly what it intended, similar to the “Afghan trap” of the 1980s).

The CIA program also empowered the Jihadists currently ruling Syria, with whom Trump is meeting and praising.

The American think tank “Century Foundation” wrote that the CIA program “has functioned as battlefield auxiliaries and weapons farms for larger Islamist and jihadist factions, including Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate”.

Phil Gordan, a former Obama administration official, admitted to Charles Glass that “the worst guys were the ones that would take and use the (CIA-provided) weapons.”

Glass noted that “The most extreme elements, the Al Qaeda offshoots Jabhat al-­Nusra and the Islamic State, not only used the (CIA provided) weapons but also advertised them in videos that included beheadings, the hurling of gay men off towers to their deaths, the murder of American journalists and British aid workers, and the rape of Yezidi women”.

As the New York Times noted, “the Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front often fought alongside the C.I.A.-backed rebels.”

The Times wrote that “some of the C.I.A.-supplied weapons had ended up in the hands of a rebel group tied to Al Qaeda” and that “some of their C.I.A. weapons ended up with Nusra Front (Al Qaeda’s Syria branch) fighters — and some of the rebels joined the group”.

The Continuation of The War.

By 2017, Donald Trump fully pulled the plug on the CIA regime change program in Syria.

This was, however, followed by an endless barrage of propaganda from hawkish elements in Washington to continue the war.

The U.S. government, through USAID, heavily funded the white helmets, a rescue group with close ties to extremist rebels that would openly call for U.S. military intervention and sanctions on Syria.

Cable news would run an endless barrage of segments pushing for military intervention in Syria, CNN once ran an interview with a seven-year-old girl named Bana Alabed, who was clearly reading cue cards calling for U.S. military intervention in Syria.

The U.S. even interfered at the UN’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and got the organization to sideline two of its top inspectors, Ian Henderson and Brendan Whelan, because their investigation into an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria, raised questions about the official U.S. narrative.

Leaked photos dubbed the “ceasar photos” were portrayed as showing 50,000 people killed by the Syrian regime in prisons, when in reality, Human Rights Watch found that “28,707 photographs showed detainees who died in (Syrian government) detention” while “24,568 photographs depicted dead government soldiers and crime scenes (including incidents of terrorism, fires, explosions, and car bombs)” showing that both sides of the war had committed severe war crimes, including the CIA backed insurgents.

All this propaganda eventually resulted in the Orwellian-named “Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act” signed into law by Trump in 2019, which actually placed starvation sanctions on regular Syrians while having almost no effect on the Syrian government.

Dana Stroul, a defense department official with the Trump administration, admitted that the sanctions were designed to keep Syria in “rubble” and prevent “reconstruction aid”.

Along with this, she bragged that the United States “owned” one-third of Syria through its military occupation, which was “the resource-rich, economic powerhouse of Syria, where the hydrocarbons are, as well as the agricultural powerhouse”.

She admitted that this was intended to keep the Syrian population in misery in hopes that it would “affect the overall political process for the broader Syrian conflict”.

The UN’s top sanctions expert, Alena Douhan, said that because of the Syria sanctions, “90 percent of Syria’s population was living below the poverty line, with limited access to food, water, electricity, shelter, cooking and heating fuel, transportation and healthcare”.

Douhan said:

With more than half of the vital infrastructure either completely destroyed or severely damaged, the imposition of unilateral sanctions on key economic sectors, including oil, gas, electricity, trade, construction and engineering have quashed national income, and undermine efforts towards economic recovery and reconstruction

She also said that

Blocking of payments and refusal of deliveries by foreign producers and banks, coupled with sanctions-induced limited foreign currency reserves have caused serious shortages in medicines and specialised medical equipment, particularly for chronic and rare diseases.

and that

rehabilitation and development of water distribution networks for drinking and irrigation had stalled due to the unavailability of equipment and spare parts, creating serious public health and food security implications.

Only after the fall of the Assad regime last year did the mainstream news admit that the sanctions actually affected regular people in Syria.

A report in the Washington Post after the fall of Assad noted

American and European Union sanctions aimed at punishing the regime of President Bashar al-Assad have weakened the medical system that millions of Syrians rely on — preventing hospitals from maintaining or importing lifesaving diagnostic machines and making it more difficult to provide timely treatment to the wounded and the sick.

MRI and CT scanners have fallen out of service and are hard to replace. Laboratories lack equipment. The domestic pharmaceutical industry that once covered up to 90 percent of the local market has all but collapsed, leaving pharmacy shelves filled with imported, expensive, and sometimes poor-quality drugs.

In the days after Assad fled, Syrians finally learned how well the family had lived. Rooms were topped with crystal chandeliers, and basements were full of luxury cars. The powerful had found their way around the sanctions, it seemed; the public, meanwhile, had been left to suffer.

Regime Change Goal Achieved.

The former Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad was undoubtedly a brutal dictatorship, but as evidenced by the sectarian massacres, so is the current regime led by Ahmad al-Shara.

Assad, however, was allied with U.S. and Israel enemies, namely Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah.

Al-Shara, on the other hand, is much more open to aiding U.S. and Israeli interests.

The Times of London reported that Al-Shara “offered concessions including access for American companies to exploit natural resources in a Ukrainian-style minerals deal” in exchange for sanctions relief.

The outlet also reported that he “raised the possibility of a Trump Tower in Damascus”, “may offer to begin talks on joining the Abraham Accords (normalization with Israel),” and “could be willing to create a demilitarized zone or to allow Israel to retain a security presence in southwestern Syria”.

This has always been the U.S. goal in Syria: to create a new government similar to Saudi Arabia that would be more friendly to the U.S. and Israeli interests than the previous one, even if it is connected to extremists and commits sectarian massacres.

Trump lifting the sanctions is a huge positive, but he is not doing it out of any care for Syria, but simply because this government is no longer out of line with U.S. interests.

Trump’s meeting with Al-Shara shows what the West’s goal in Syria was the entire time: to have an Al Qaeda-dominated government that is on “our side”.

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