Jeffery Sachs Is Right About The War in Syria.

Professor Jeffery Sachs Reveals How The United States And Israel Helped Destroy Syria.

Introduction

In his recent appearance at the Antalya Diplomacy Forum, a diplomatic forum in Turkey, the insider economist turned American foreign policy critic, Jeffery Sachs, revealed some hidden truths about the American dirty war in Syria.

At the conference, Sachs said the dirty war in Syria was part of a larger plan from “a desire from within that Israeli government that stretches back over 25 years, Netenyahu’s idea is make the middle east in Israel's image, overthrow every government that opposes Israel, he’s had a friend in that and that is the CIA and the United States government”.

What Sachs says has been playing out in real time over the last 20 years.

In 2023, shortly before October 7th, Netanyahu gave a speech at the UN where he laid out his plan for a “new Middle East” where he signaled support for a takeover of Gaza and the West Bank by “depicted a state of Israel that stretched continuously from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Gaza and the West Bank, as Palestinian lands, were erased” as journalist Jeremy Scahil reported.

In order to achieve this, Netenyahu held up two maps, the first depicting what he called a “blessing,” the chance for Israel to normalize with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan through the Abraham Accords.

For this work, though, he presented a map of the countries he called a “curse,” which included Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and Syria.

Netenyahu’s plan is to create a “greater Israel” by expanding its territory into Gaza, the West Bank, and beyond.

His plan to do this without opposition from his neighbours is normalizing with some states to stifle opposition to it and weaken any states that would resist the project to render them unable to oppose him.

This plan has been the main driver of American foreign policy in the Middle East for the last 20 years.

As far back as 1996 -when Netenyahu first came to power- a group of influential neocons and Israel lobbyists sent him a document titled the “clean break” strategy that called to “reshape the middle east” by:

• “focusing on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective”,

• abandoning the Oslo Accords and making “hot pursuit into Palestinian-controlled areas”

• “weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria”

• help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran, and Syria.

• Supporting diplomatically, militarily, and operationally Turkey’s and Jordan’s actions against Syria

The document proposed achieving this through “Forging A New U.S.-Israeli Relationship”.

After 9/11, this plan was cemented even further. Wesley Clark, a top American general, revealed that the neocons in the Bush administration devised a plan to take out “seven countries in five years”, “starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

This is the context where Sachs put American involvement in Syria, saying, “we will not have peace until Israel stops its militarization of the entire Middle East, because the Syria war is just one of six wars that Israel has promoted, including in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Sudan”.

In a 2012 email from then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Jake Sullivan said :

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.

Sachs’s big bombshell revelation in the talk was that the United States blocked a peace agreement in 2012 that could have ended the war.

I will get to that revelation soon, but first, in this article, I will review the entire history of the U.S. and Israel's dirty war in Syria.

The Dirty War In Syria 2011-2024

The Wars Origins

In 2011, as part of the Arab Spring uprising in the Middle East, many Syrians took to the streets to protest their government led by Bashar-Al Assad, a brutal and repressive regime that had basically been in power since the 70s when Bashar’s father, Hafez Al Assad, took power through a coup.

However, since the beginning, there was always an extreme sectarian element that attempted to hijack the noble protests for their own nefarious goals.

Charles Glass, a veteran Middle East correspondent who has spent a lot of time in Syria, wrote in Harper's Magazine that the former U.S. ambassador to Syria Robert Ford told him :

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 reported that early on, there was a segment of protestors chanting “Alawites to the grave, and Christians to Beirut”, a call to kill Syria’s Alawite community ( the minority sect that the Assads belonged to) and ethnically cleanse its Christian population.

For this “sectarian element,” wrote Glass, they “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.”

The American regime change policy came, as Glass reported on August 18, 2011, when Obama said, “For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.”

By the time 2012 came around, the United States knew full well that the sectarian elements were driving the insurgency in Syria.

Robert Ford told Glass:

I wrote a memo to 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.

Similarly, a 2012 report from the director of national intelligence found the rebellion was driven by “the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda”.

Despite this, hawks in the Obama administration decided they were going to ally with their supposed sworn enemy -Al-Qaeda- to carry out the long-desired Israeli/American regime change just as they did with ISIS in Libya a year earlier.

In an infamous email, then-advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Jake Sullivan, wrote to her, “Al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria”.

Glass reported that in 2012, “the Obama Administration dispatched nonlethal aid—what Ford called ‘food, medicines, meals ready to eat, stuff like that’—to the ostensibly moderate Free Syrian Army (FSA) faction.”

The CIA took things much further. They decided to use Muammar Gaddafi's weapons stockpile -now free after they overthrew him a year earlier- to send them to jihadist rebels in Syria.

Sy Hersh reported in the London review of books that the CIA set up a “rat line” in 2012 to “tunnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition”.

Hersh reported that “Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida.”

Here is where Sachs's bombshell revelation becomes relevant.

Kofi Annan, the Arab League-UN envoy, proposed a six-point peace plan to end the bloodshed that was unfolding in Syria.

In June of 2012, Annan resigned over the failure of this peace plan to be implemented.

The Guardian at the time reported that the plan fell -in part- because of “the US and UK position, which is implicit in the original wording, that Assad and his closest associates would be excluded from future involvement in the country's governance”.

Now, Sachs has revealed that the United States stopped the peace deal that all other parties agreed to in order to continue the regime change war.

In the talk, 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.

This testimony from Sachs comes from first-hand insider knowledge given that he “worked for Kofi Annan” and “Knows this from Kofi”.

Just as they did in Ukraine, the United States blocked a peace deal that could have ended all the ensuing bloodshed and horror in Syria for their own geopolitical goals.

Giving an Invitation for A False Flag.

After blocking the peace deal, the United States needed a pretext to get further involved in Syria.

In August of 2012, this came when MSNBC’s Chuck Todd asked Obama what would cause him to take military action in Syria to which he replied “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.”

This statement, a former US ambassador to the Middle East told Glass was “an open invitation to a false-­flag operation”.

The red line phrase, according to the Wall Street Journal, “started with Israeli officials, who used the phrase in private discussions with their American counterparts.” (Side Note: credit to Pierce Robinson for digging that one up).

In August 2013, the time came for Obama to “act” on his “red line” when a brutal sarin gas attack was launched from rockets into the rebel-held Syrian town Ghouta, killing at least hundreds and, by some accounts, over a thousand civilians.

The timing of the attack, however, seemed to bring up questions as to who launched the rocket.

As Ian Henderson, a former top officials with the UN chemical weapons watchdog, the OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) wrote in his recently released book, the Ghouta attack took place after a request “by the Syrian government, for the UN to establish an impartial, independent mission to investigate an alleged chemical attack against Syrian government soldiers and civilians in Khan Al-Asal”.

Henderson noted that the OPCW “arrived in Damascus on 18 August 2013” and “started work on the 19th and continued on the following day,” investigating the alleged attack that the Syrian government claimed was carried out by rebels on their forces.

“Then, very late that night (or, rather, early in the morning of the 21st) while they were asleep in their Damascus hotel,” Henderson wrote, the Ghouta attack happened.

As Henderson noted, this timing begged an obvious question “Why would the Syrian government, having asked the UN to send a team of investigators, wait five months until the UN finally arrives, and then the following day commit a massive chemical attack with sarin on the outskirts of Damascus, right under the noses of the UN investigators?”

Despite this obvious question of motive, the Obama administration publicly claimed they had the intelligence to prove Assad was behind the Sarin attack.

However, behind the scenes, they were not so sure.

Jeffery Goldberg, in the Atlantic, reported that :

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper interrupted the president’s daily briefing to tell him that the intelligence on Syria’s use of sarin gas was ‘not a slam dunk’

Goldberg noted that the “slam dunk” term was “a carefully chosen term,” referring to when “CIA Director George Tenet infamously told President George W. Bush that intelligence leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a ‘slam dunk.’

He also reported that then Vice president Joe Biden compared the intelligence to the Gulf of Tonkin deception in Vietnam saying “John (Kerry), remember Vietnam? Remember how that started?”

The U.S. had such little confidence in their assessment that they “handed off the task” of writing the intelligence assessment to “Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser and top speechwriter” despite the fact that he had “no intelligence experience,” as journalist Aaron Mate reported in real clear investigations.

The country responsible for providing this intelligence that insiders reportedly compared to past intelligence deceptions in Vietnam and Iraq adds an extra layer to the story.

Sy Hersh reported at the time that:

One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the administration’s assurances of Assad’s responsibility a ‘ruse’. The attack ‘was not the result of the current regime’, he wrote.

He also reported that:

A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening.

This shady intelligence, just like the “red line” phrase itself, actually came primarily from Israeli intelligence.

The Guardian reported at the time that:

The bulk of evidence proving the Assad regime's deployment of chemical weapons – which would provide legal grounds essential to justify any western military action – has been provided by Israeli military intelligence

(emphasis: mine)

They even reported that Israel gave the U.S. the intercepted communications, which Hersh reported was manipulated, writing:

The 8200 unit of the Israeli Defence Forces, which specialises in electronic surveillance, intercepted a conversation between Syrian officials regarding the use of chemical weapons

A later widely accepted study done by Theodore A. Postol of MIT and Richard M. Lloyd at Tesla Laboratories found that the chemical rocket containing the Sarin gas used in Ghouta “had a range of about three kilometers”.

Postal and Loyd have argued that this suggests the rockets were fired from rebel-held territory. Lloyd has said he believes the rockets were “launched from fields” that were rebel-controlled.

Obama eventually decided not to intervene militarily in Syria, ostensibly after the Assad regime gave up their chemical weapons program (though more likely because the intelligence was so flimsy).

Despite this, Hawks in the Obama administration wanted to continue the regime change policy in Syria, just more covertly.

As Charles Glass reported, they eventually settled on a “compromise between direct military involvement and staying out” which was “a covert operation to raise an insurgent army and train it in nearby countries; provide weapons, sustenance, and communications; and oversee the military campaign.”

This is what birthed Tymber Sycamore.

Tymber Sycamore: The Dirty War Heats Up.

The CIA program to arms and train rebels, codenamed Tymber Sycamore, was “high-risk for the locals and casualty-­free for the Americans,” as Charles Glass wrote.

An Obama administration official told Glass that Obama “commissioned a report on the history of arming groups.”

Despite the fact that the CIA report found “only one or two instances of successful proxy wars,” the Obama administration decided to “provide direct support to the (Syrian) opposition, including military support,” as former Obama administration White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf Region Phil Gordan told Glass.

Glass reported that “Obama assigned the CIA to train militants in Turkey and Jordan under what is called a Title 50 program in defense of American national security.”

Gordan admitted that the program only prolonged the brutal war, saying, “I think that what we saw was that the more we did for the opposition, the more the backers of the regime did for the regime”.

Glass noted that during this time, many jihadists from around the world came to join the CIA-backed rebels, writing, “On the opposition side, jihadis from Chechnya, Afghanistan, Algeria, China, and Europe joined the fight. Together with indigenous fundamentalists, they reduced the FSA (Free Syrian Army, the supposed ‘moderate Rebels’) to irrelevance.”

The CIA program was, according to the New York Times, “one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the CIA” 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”.

The Washington Post reported that the program was “one the agency’s largest covert operations, with a budget approaching $1 billion a year” and that “$1 of every $15 in the CIA’s overall budget” went to the program, according to leaked documents from Edward Snowden.

The Post reported that the program “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.”

Far from backing “moderate rebels,” the New York Times reported that “White House officials also received periodic reports that the CIA-trained rebels had summarily executed prisoners and committed other violations of the rules of armed conflict.”

Furthermore, the program just ended up benefiting Al Qaeda and other sectarian jihadist groups. The New York Times reported that “some of their C.I.A. weapons ended up with Nusra Front (Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch) fighters — and that some of the rebels joined the group”.

Sam Heller, an analyst based in Lebanon, wrote in the American think-tank Century Foundation that the CIA weapons “have functioned as battlefield auxiliaries and weapons farms for larger Islamist and jihadist factions, including Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate”.

Obama administration official Phil Gordan admitted to Charles Glass that “the worst guys were the ones that would take and use the weapons” provided by the CIA. Glass noted that “The most extreme elements, the Al Qaeda offshoots Jabhat al-­Nusra and the Islamic State, not only used the 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.”

The Washington Post has reported 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 Washington Post reported that the CIA program led to “rebels at the gates of Latakia on the northern coast, threatening Assad’s ancestral homeland and Russian bases there” by 2015.

Robert F. Worth, a New York Times reporter who visited Aleppo, Syria after it was taken back from Rebel fighters reported that “If the rebels had captured the area (Latakia) where Alawites are the majority — a result would almost certainly have been sectarian mass murder” a prophetic warning on what was about to come.

Charles Glass wrote that “Syrian conspiracy theorists claim the US goal was to destroy Syria, as it did Iraq, to protect Israel. Only if that were true could the United States be said to have achieved any objective.”

In my opinion, “Syrian conspiracy theorists” are correct: this dirty war, pushed by Israel all along, delivered their desire to destabilize Syria dating all the way back to the “clean break” document.

While Donald Trump ended “Timber Sycamore” in 2017, he continued the Syrian war in other ways.

The Siege Warfare On Syria

While Trump did end the CIA regime change war in Syria, he continued it in an arguably even more sadistic way.

The Trump administration tried to overthrow Syria by keeping occupying troops in northeast Syria, where the country’s oil and wheat are, and to place Cuba-style starvation sanctions on the country.

The idea was to keep the Syrian population in misery in hopes that they would rise up against the government.

Don’t take my word for it; this was admitted by Dana Stroul, a top Pentagon official for the Middle East with close connections to the Israel lobby.

During a talk, Stroul admitted that “one-third of Syrian territory was owned via the US military”, which was “the resource-rich, economic powerhouse of Syria, where the hydrocarbons are”.

Stroul admitted that this, along with “the economic sanctions architecture”, blocked “reconstruction aid” in order to keep “The rest of Syria in rubble” in hopes that this would “affect the overall political process for the broader Syrian conflict”.

The economic sanctions mentioned by Stroul were the "Caesar sanctions” signed into law by Trump in 2019.

The official narrative around the sanctions was that they sanctioned members of the Assad regime for human rights abuses, but as Stroul admitted, they just kept regular Syrians in misery while having no effect on Bashar-Al Assad or his cronies, who kept his collection of luxury cars while regular Syrians suffered.

The UN’s top sanctions expert, Alena Douhan, issued a report stating that the sanctions helped cause “90 percent of Syria’s population to be below the poverty line, with limited access to food, water, electricity, shelter, cooking and heating fuel, transportation and healthcare”.

She reported that:

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.

Douhan noted that the sanctions “caused serious shortages in medicines and specialised medical equipment, particularly for chronic and rare diseases”, and “stalled “rehabilitation and development of water distribution networks for drinking,” which “created serious public health and food security implications.”

Douhan’s report concluded that the sanctions “severely harm human rights and prevent any efforts for early recovery, rebuilding and reconstruction”.

This fact about the sanctions on Syria was only acknowledged by the mainstream media after the Assad regime fell in December of 2024.

In 2025 -after Assad fell- The Washington Post finally put out an article acknowledging the real impact of sanctions.

The article reported that:

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.

and that

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.

The article even acknowledged that the sanctions did not impact Assad and only hurt regular Syrians, writing:

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.

(Emphasis: mine)

This was no accident; the sanctions had the intention of making regular Syrians suffer in hopes that it would lead to regime change, and it worked.

The aforementioned Charles Glass, one of the last Western reporters to visit Assad-controlled Syria before he fell, reported on the ground on the effect of the sanctions in March of 2023.

Glass reported that :

Damascus reminded me of Baghdad on my many trips there between the war over Kuwait in 1991 and the American invasion in 2003. In those years the US, the EU, and the UN were enforcing similar restrictions based on their conviction that economic hardship would destabilize Saddam Hussein’s regime or compel a hungry populace to depose him. In Iraq then, as in Syria now, the regime flourished and people starved.

Glass reported that since the sanctions were placed on Syria, “The value of the Syrian pound had dropped steadily, from 3,000 to the US dollar to 6,500”.

Glass wrote that the “Orwellian preamble to the State Department’s fact sheet” claimed that the sanctions “are not intended to harm the Syrian people”.

Glass noted that :

My daily promenades through Damascus’s old and new sections suggested that the intention is belied by reality. The run-down flats and houses of the poor, who complain of the struggle to afford food and heat, coexist with the prosperous Abu Rummaneh and Malki quarters’ neon-lit restaurants, cafés, and nightclubs.

One of Glass’s Syrian friends even told him that life in Syria was worse under the sanctions than during the heat of the war, saying: “We miss the rocket times, If we died, we died. It was a war. Now we don’t know”.

“What he didn’t know,” Glass wrote, “was how he would feed his children.”

The Fall Of Assad And Takeover By HTS.

In December of 2024, the sanctions, coupled with the fact that Assad’s allies, Russia and Hezbollah, had been weakened through the Ukraine proxy war and U.S.-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon, led to Assad’s downfall.

This was, in a lot of ways, a long time coming due to the policies of the Assad regime.

As journalist As`ad AbuKhalil wrote, there were many domestic factors that led to Assad being unpopular, including “losing support in rural areas especially after the neo-liberal policies adopted by the regime”, “Corruption growing and widening among the ruling elite”, Bashar’s failure “to address his own people,” and the regimes “extreme brutality and savagery in handling dissidents and opponents”.

Many in Syria celebrated the fall of Assad with things like the release of prisoners from Sednaya prison, a Syrian military prison notorious for its barbaric use of torture.

But just like in Iraq and Libya, just because a brutal regime is gone does not automatically mean what replaces it will be any better.

In this case, what replaced Assad was HTS (Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham), a rebranded branch of Al Nusera, Syria’s Al Qaeda branch.

The West previously recognized the group as a “terrorist” group and an offshoot of Al Qaeda.

The UK government previously recognized HTS as “an alternative name for Al Qa’ida”.

The group’s leader,r Ahmed al-Sharaa, who previously went by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, also had a very questionable resume, to put it mildly.

As the New York Times reported, “in 2003, he went to neighboring Iraq to join Al Qaeda”. The Times reported that “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).

The BBC reported that “In 2011, Baghdadi sent Jolani to Syria with funding to establish al-Nusra Front, a covert faction tied to ISI. By 2012, Nusra had become a prominent Syrian fighting force, hiding its IS and al-Qaeda ties.”

In 2017, the U.S. embassy in Syria labeled Jolani a “terrorist” and placed a 10 million dollar bounty on his head.

The embassy bounty accused him of “carrying out multiple terrorist attacks, often targeting civilians”.

Before taking over Syria, Jolini ruled Idlib province in Syria, where his record was equally concerning.

Bret McGurk, a U.S. envoy to the Middle East, admitted that Idlib was “the largest Al Qaeda haven since 9/11”.

Even in March of 2024, protests erupted against Jolani’s brutality in Idlib for what they said were his “arrests and enforced disappearances of thousands”.

The German outlet DW reported that the protests were in response to “the death of a prisoner in jail, apparently through torture at the hands of security forces of the Islamist militia Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).”

Despite all this, the Western media claim that Jolani- despite his history- would somehow become a democratic leader of Syria who would tolerate the country’s minority population, a “diversity-friendly jihadist” as one particularly ridiculous headline in the Telegraph called him.

However, it didn’t take long for the now ruling HTS faction to reverse their new “diversity friendly” position and go on a series of genocidal massacres against Alawites, the minority sect Assad belonged to.

As Charles Class recently reported in the Nation, this was hardly surprising given HTS’s history of sectarian violence, noting:

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. Jihadi propaganda branded Christians and non-Sunni Muslims—Shia, Alawi, Ismaili, and Druze—as “kafirs” (infidels) deserving death. Sunni fundamentalist clerics had preached in the mosques that it was legitimate to murder kafirs and rape their women.

After an attack on HTS forces by an Alawite militia, the group responded with a small genocide, killing any Alawite they could find.

Charles Glass compared their conduct 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.

The LA Times reported that HTS started “their rampage from the start of a street in the Qusoor neighborhood in the Syrian coastal city of Baniyas and working their way down the block, building by building, home by home,” killing anyone who was Alawite.

The paper spoke to a survivor of the massacre who told them, “The only reason I escaped was I managed to convince them I was Sunni and not an Alawite.”

“Staff from a Western aid organization currently on the ground in Syria” told the Grayzone and Antiwar.com that “over 4000 Alawites have been killed, thousands are wounded with little access to medical assistance, and some 200,000 are internally displaced, in hiding from sectarian death squads that have destroyed entire villages and conducted widespread looting”.

At the same time, the Western starvation sanctions are still in place in Syria.

Just as the sanctions did not affect Assad, they will have no effect on the current ruling militia behind the massacre and will only cause those affected from the massacres to suffer more.

After all the horror the West has unleashed on Syria, the least they can do is lift their starvation sanctions to at least partly relieve the suffering that they played a large part in creating.

Note to Readers: For a more in-depth breakdown of Syria, I would highly recommend the recent book “ Syria: Civil War to Holy War?” by the brilliant Middle East correspondent Charles Glass, who has done in-depth reporting in Syria and was a crucial source for this article.

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