The Crucial Context Left Out Of Mainstream Media Reports On the Syria Crisis.

Some important background on the current flare up in Syria

This will likely come as no surprise to my readers, but the mainstream media is not giving you the full story on Syria. Currently- after a few years of relative stability- the war in Syria has sparked up again. The Syrian Rebel Group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Al Nusera) has retaken the Syrian city of Aleppo, while the Syrian government led by Bashar Al Assad and its foreign allies such as Russia have responded with air strikes in the city.

What the mainstream media is leaving out is the fact that this flare-up is in large part the result of a ten-year-long CIA and Gulf State proxy war waged on the country in an attempt to take out the current Syrian regime, as well as the nature of the rebels groups and their extremist, sectarian ideologies and practices. In this article, I will give the context that mainstream reports are leaving out regarding the current crisis.

Inside The Regime Change War In Syria.

Since the 9/11 attacks, a regime change war in Syria has been a goal of the United States. Wesley Clark, a top American general said that after 9/11, the Pentagon informed him that the U.S. planned to “take out seven countries in five years” “starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

While the plan did not happen exactly as the U.S. wanted, they went through with much of it. Of course, the U.S. invaded Iraq and took out Saddam Hussien in 2003 killing a million people. Years later in 2011 the U.S. along with its NATO allies took out Muammar Gaddafi in Libya based on claims that he was about to commit a massacre against his own people, who were moderate pro-democracy rebels.

But years later a 2015 U.K. parliament report found that this narrative was bogus. According to the report, the claims that Gaddafi was about to commit a massacre on his own people were “exaggerated by rebels and Western governments, which based their intervention on little intelligence.” Along with this, the report found that the NATO states involved were “motivated by economic and political interests, not humanitarian ones”, that the rebels were not pro-democracy but “Islamist extremists” and that the regime change operation gave “ISIS a base in North Africa.”

In 2011 protests sparked against the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, who certainly did very little to reform the human rights and economic issues that existed under his father Hafez al-Assad, who led the country before him. This along with a long drought in Syria that led 75 percent of farms to fail and 85 percent of livestock to die between 2006 and 2011 led people to take to the streets and protest the current government. While many of the initial protestors were moderate and were just demanding a better economic and humanitarian situation in Syria there were also sectarian elements such as those who chanted “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the Coffin".

By 2012 the sectarian, extremist elements of the rebel groups had certainly taken front and center in the rebellion. According to a 2012 DNI report “the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda” were the “major driving forces driving the insurgency in Syria”.

Despite knowing this, the U.S. saw this as an opportunity to do the regime change war they had long planned in Syria. In 2012 an email was sent to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by her advisor Jake Sullivan who said “Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria”. The same year the CIA set up a “rat line” to transfer the stockpile of weapons in Libya- now available after Gaddafi was overthrown- to Syrian rebels. A 2012 report from legendary reporter Sy Hersh found that this CIA “ratline” was established to “funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition.” According to the report from Hersh “Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida.”

By 2013 the CIA went further than transferring weapons to Syrian rebels and instead launched a program called “Timber Sycamore” in partnership with Saudi Arabia that directly gave arms to Syrian Rebels. According to the New York Times, the program cost “more than $1 billion over the life of the program” and was “one of the most expensive efforts to arm and train rebels since the agency’s program arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980s”.

A report in the Washington Post found that the program was even more costly than what the New York Times had said. According to the Post report -based on leaked documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden-, the program cost “$1 billion a year” with “$1 of every $15 in the CIA’s overall budget” being spent towards arming rebels in Syria.

While the CIA claimed they were arming and training “moderate rebels” most of the weapons ended up in the hands of extremist groups that now make up Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. According to the New York Times, “some of their C.I.A. weapons ended up with Nusra Front fighters” ( an Al Qaeda affiliate), and “some of the rebels joined the group”. According to the American think-tank “century foundation”, the CIA weapons program “functioned as battlefield auxiliaries and weapons farms for larger Islamist and jihadist factions, including Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate.”

Aside from empowering the current extreme groups taking over Aleppo, the program massively ramped up the Syrian war. A U.S. official told the Washington Post that the program “killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies”. A recent UN report on the death toll of the Syrian war confirmed that non-ISIS “Islamic factions” which were armed by the CIA program killed 87,039 in the conflict while “anti-government groups” directly armed by the CIA killed 18,519 people. This together makes up 30 percent of deaths in the war.

The program officially ended in 2017 but the U.S. regime change war against Syria continued in other ways. The U.S. officially occupies one-third of Syria ostensibly to protect Kurdish minorities from ISIS, but in reality for more sinister reasons. Defense Department official Dana Stroul admitted that one-third of Syrian territory was “owned via the U.S. military” because it is the “resource-rich economic powerhouse of Syria as well as the agricultural powerhouse” and they could use the occupation “as leverage for effecting the overall broader Syrian conflict”.

Another way the U.S. continued the regime change war in Syria was through its implementation of brutal Cuba-style sanctions on the country. Stroul admitted in the same clip that the U.S. sanctions blocked “reconstruction aid” and left the “rest of the country in rubble”. Alena Douhan, the UN’s special rapporteur on sanctions said that the U.S. sanctions on Syria “deprive the Syrian people of the chance to rebuild their basic infrastructure”. Douhan also said the sanctions “quashed national income, and undermined efforts towards economic recovery and reconstruction” and have “caused serious shortages in medicines and specialized medical equipment, particularly for chronic and rare diseases.”

This regime change war has played a huge part in the current takeover of Aleppo. As the Syria expert, Joshua Landis said the “US role in the Syrian regime's stunning collapse around Aleppo is not negligible, even if indirect.” in part based on the above-mentioned U.S. strategy to “keep the regime as weak as possible, through sanctions, taking its oil, and isolation”.

Aside from the sanctions and occupation weakening the Syrian government (and causing the Syrian people to suffer) the CIA program played an even bigger part in the takeover and the arms sent to rebels in Syria is what allowed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to grow and control Syrian territory in the first place. The U.S. may say today that they do not support the group but they cannot erase the fact that they spent billions of dollars for years sending arms to them- allowing them to grow and gain influence in the first place.

Why Many Syrians Do Not Want To Live Under Rebel Groups.

The conversation around regime change is often centered around childish discussions over whether the targeted leader is “good” or “bad”. In the case of Syria’s Bashar Al Assad, there is no denying that he is a dictator with a long record of human rights abuses such as torture. There is also no denying that over the course of the Syrian war, his response to the rebel groups was very brutal and that the Syrian government committed many war crimes by bombing civilians and civilian infrastructure.

But the choice in Syria is not between “good” and “bad” but between living under a secular dictator or sectarian, extremist rebels and based on this it is understandable why many chose the former.

There is also the issue of the state collapsing and what happens afterward. Saddam Hussien was a monster, but Iraq was objectively worse off after he was removed. Gaddafi was no saint but Libya became a failed state with open slave markets after he was taken out.

Many on-the-ground reports in Syria have found that this is why many Syrians are fearful of what would happen if Rebel groups take over their country, even if they are not fans of Assad. PBS’s Martin Smith traveled to government-controlled Syria and was able to speak to regular people without a government minder.

He found that most people he spoke to had a “consistent narrative” being that

The protesters that took to the streets in 2011 had legitimate demands, but that the demonstrations were quickly hijacked by foreign backed jihadists. They reject the idea that Western-backed rebels are “moderates” as they are often termed in the US.

Smith revealed that while many were not fans of the government they were fearful of regime change after watching what happened in Iraq and Libya. One Syrian told him that they support the government, “not because we love the regime” but because “we don’t want the collapse of the state.”

As Smith put it in the article

They saw what happened in Iraq after Saddam, and in Libya after Qaddafi. They watched as state infrastructure — schools, hospitals, police, water, electricity — crumbled with the fall of the central government, and they didn't want the same to happen to them.

Another important thing to remember is that Aleppo, the city currently taken by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham was previously taken over by Rebels groups, and many residents suffered under them.

The New York Times's Robert F Worth visited Aleppo after it was first taken back from Rebels by the Syrian government and found that many were strongly opposed to the Rebel groups' rule. One resident he spoke to who took part in the original 2011 protests against Assad said that while “No one is 100 percent with the regime”, “people are unified by their resistance to the opposition”. He also said that under Rebels Aleppo was “only a Turkish card guarded by jihadis.”

Worth went on to report that the Rebel’s takeover of Aleppo “persuaded many ordinary Syrians that the regime, for all its appalling cruelty and corruption, is their best shot at something close to normality.” According to one resident the Rebel Groups “stole everything, then they burned everything”.

Worth also reported that had these Rebels taken further Syrian territory the “result would almost certainly have been sectarian mass murder”.

In the same article, Worth spoke to Tarif Attora the head of the “Aleppo People’s Initiative” one of the only rescue and repair groups that operated in both government and rebel-controlled areas of Syria. He told Worth that while “people consider him opposition” he was opposed to the conduct of the Rebels in Aleppo because they “destroy the country and put us back 100 years” He told Worth he believed “That kind of opposition is a betrayal of the country, a betrayal of the ideals I’ve grown up with.”

He also said that the war boiled down to a foreign proxy war on both sides saying “We all served the politics of other countries in our own land, whether we knew it or not”.

While much of the mainstream media will likely cheer on the Rebel’s takeover as a positive for residents, the reality on the ground shows that while many do not like the current situation, the situation under rebels will be even worse.

Missing Context

All of this context has been completely absent from the mainstream media reports on Syria. Syria is certainly a complicated and messy topic, but the reality of the years-long regime change war on Syria and the reality of the Rebels groups is crucial in navigating the current crisis.