The Sectarian Massacres In Syria Are A Direct Result Of The Western Dirty War.

How The West Propped Up The Forces Currently Murdering Civilians In Syria.

The Current Massacres

The situation in Syria has been the most brutal since the end of the years-long civil (or more accurately proxy) war that destroyed the country and killed hundreds of thousands of people.

The violence erupted after rebels belonging to the Alawite sect took up arms against the new Syrian government led by Ahmad Al-Sharaa, who used to go by Abu Mohammad al-Julani and was previously a member of al-Qaeda before his group rebranded into HTS (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham).

His government forces and militias allied with it used this opportunity to commit massacres against Alawite civilians, the minority sect in Syria that the deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez al-Assad, who ruled the country before him, belonged to.

The anti-Assad Syria war watch group “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights” has reported that HTS and forces allied with it have killed over 973 Alawite civilians since the violence began.

The Observatory has said that these civilians were killed in “executions” which also included “looting of homes and properties”.

The Lebanese investigative journalist Jenan Moussa has documented the names of 717 Alawite civilians who were killed in the sectarian killings.

Many of the forces killing Alawite civilians are using openly sectarian language.

A resident of the Syrian city Latakia told CNN that “Armed men were moving from house to house attacking people as a form of entertainment… They declared jihad on us from all over Syria,”

Another said “My 70-year-old uncle, a history professor, and his 60-year-old wife were killed in cold blood at home” “Both were Alawites residing in the city of Baniyas in the western Tartous province”.

CNN reported that groups affiliated with HTS posted videos stating “To the Alawites, we’re coming to slaughter you and your fathers,” and “Everyone is going out with guns, we will show you the (strength) of the Sunnis”.

CNN also reported that “ a voice is heard saying these are the Alawite pigs,” “before shooting an apparently lifeless body on open ground” in a video.

The LA Times reported that HTS forces and groups allied with them were going door to door and killing anyone they believed to be Alawite. One resident told the paper “The only reason I escaped was I managed to convince them I was Sunni and not an Alawite”.

Another resident told the paper that “As I’m talking to you now, the corpse of my niece’s husband is in her home. They executed him in front of the family and no one can come to even console her”.

A resident of Syria told France 24 that “We turned off the lights and hid. When we were able to flee our neighbourhood of Al-Qusour, we found the roads full of corpses”.

Another resident said “They (HTS and affiliated militants) gathered all the men on the roof and opened fire on them” and that “My nephew survived because he hid, but my brother was killed along with all the men in the building”.

Another resident told the paper that “More than 50 people from among my family and friends have been killed” and that “They gathered bodies with bulldozers and buried them in mass graves.”

One militant affiliated with the current Syrian government posted a video where he stated

You don’t let one single member of the Alawite community live. All these pigs must be slaughtered. You slaughter them one by one. The honorable men amongst them must be slaughtered. The honorable women amongst them must be slaughtered. Don’t let old or young people live. Those are pigs. You can’t trust them. Only safety for you is to carry them on a boat to the middle of the sea and use a machine to turn them into food for the fish. Let’s go brothers in the name of Allah”

The aforementioned Jenan Moussa reported that an NGO affiliated with HTS was “distributing Iftar food packages with morbid anti-Alawite slogans on it,” saying “The right of the Alawite to live in his grave In peace”.

The Lebanese government has reported that over 6,000 Syrians have fled the country to Lebanon in order to escape the killings.

The important context missing from much of the conversations around these massacres is the fact that these same forces, mass killing Alawites, have been backed and propped up by the West since 2011, and that the West helped push for the regime change that brought them to power.

In this article, I will explain how the West’s regime change war led to the current horrors unfolding in Syria.

The Hidden Dirty War In Syria

When the Syrian war began in 2011, there were many Syrians who began to protest the corrupt and repressive Assad regime based on economic and human rights concerns.

However, since the beginning there were always sectarian elements who tried to hijack the protests for their own agenda.

Alongside the moderate protestors there were others that chanted “Christians to Beirut; Alawites to the grave” a clear signal in support of ethnically cleansing Syria’s Christians and killing its Alawite minorities.

By 2012, the U.S. DNI found in a report that these sectarian elements were leading the rebellion in Syria, writing that “the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI (Al-Qaeda) are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria”.

Neocons in the U.S. government decided to use these forces in an attempted regime change against the Assad regime in Syria, which they had plotted to overthrow since the so-called “war on terror” began.

The U.S. General Wesley Clark said that the neocons in the Bush administration were planning on overthrowing the Syrian government after 9/11.

In a 2005 interview with Bashar Al-Assad, CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour told him, “the rhetoric of regime change is headed towards you from the United States.” “they are granting visas and visits to Syrian opposition politicians, they are talking about isolating you diplomatically, and perhaps a coup d'état”.

Despite the fact that the DNI acknowledged that the Syrian rebellion was dominated by extremists, hawks in the Obama administration saw it as an opportunity to carry out the long-planned regime change war.

In 2012, Jake Sullivan, who at the time was an advisor to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, sent her an email saying “Al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria”.

Sullivan was signaling that the United States should deploy the same strategy in Syria that they had only a year earlier in Libya.

For context, the United States and other NATO states intervened in Libya on behalf of rebels who they claimed were moderate to topple Muammar Gaddafi, who they claimed was about to commit a massacre against civilians.

In 2015, the UK parliament inquiry into this regime change operation proved that this was bogus. The report found that “Qaddafi was not planning to massacre civilians” and 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”.

Following this, the United States decided to connect their previous regime change war in Libya to the upcoming one in Syria.

Journalist Seymour Hersh reported in the London Review of Books that the CIA “authorised a rat line in early 2012” which was “used to funnel 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”.

By 2013, the CIA went farther than this and launched “Operation Timber Sycamore”, a covert program designed to arm rebels in an attempt to overthrow Assad.

The New York Times, which reported on the program in 2017, called it “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 operation “accounted for about $1 of every $15 in the CIA’s overall budget” and that the “agency was spending roughly $100,000 per year for every anti-Assad rebel who has gone through the program.”

The New York Times also reported that “some of their C.I.A. weapons ended up with Nusra Front fighters (Syria’s al-Qaida branch) — and some of the rebels joined the group.

The Times also reported that “some of the C.I.A.-supplied weapons had ended up in the hands of a rebel group tied to Al Qaeda”.

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

In other words, the U.S. and the West have spent billions of dollars propping up, arming and funding the exact elements in Syria that are currently carrying out the massacres against Alawites in an attempted regime change war.

Contemporary Regime Change Policy.

After the plug was pulled in 2017 on Timber Sycamore, the U.S. continued its regime change policy in Syria in more covert ways.

One way was through its military occupation of Northeast Syria, where the U.S. claimed they were fighting ISIS.

Defense Department official Dana Stroul admitted that in reality the U.S. “owned” one third of Syria, which was “the resource-rich economic powerhouse of Syria” “where the hydrocarbons are” “as leverage for effecting the overall political process for the broader Syrian conflict”.

In other words, the U.S. was militarily occupying the resource-rich areas of Syria to keep the population miserable in hopes that it would lead to regime change.

The U.S. also did this through starvation sanctions on the country.

At the time they claimed the sanctions were only targeted at the Assad regime but mainstream media has since admitted they were targeted at ordinary Syrians.

After the fall of the Assad regime, The Washington Post 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.

The paper went on to report 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.

and that

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.

There are certainly many domestic factors that led to the fall of the Assad regime including its refusal to implement any economic or human rights reforms, its use of torture at places like the infamous Saydnaya prison, and the fact that Assad’s mostly conscripted army was paid next to nothing.

But the U.S. siege warfare on Syria undoubtedly played a role in the regime change that allowed sectarian forces to gain more influence and carry out the current massacres.

In 2017, New York Times journalist Robert F. Worth travelled to Syria and warned “If the rebels had captured the area (of Latakia) — where Alawites are the majority — a result would almost certainly have been sectarian mass murder.”

The U.S. continued their regime change policy, and now this warning from Worth is playing out exactly.

There is no doubt that the Assads and the Ba'athist party were a brutal and corrupt regime that had clearly worn out any welcome they may have had in Syria a long time ago.

But the U.S. used this situation to arm sectarian extremists in a regime change war who are now carrying out the mass murder campaign that many experts and analysts warned they would.

It seems that Syria is just another part of the bloody and brutal legacy of American imperialism.

---

Note to readers: The Dissident is a reader-supported outlet. If you liked this article, consider becoming a paid subscriber.