People around the world are celebrating the fall of the dictator Bashar al Assad’s regime in Syria. However, the celebrations are misplaced if they are based on the assumption that what comes after Assad is some sort of Western-style peaceful democratic government.
As our friend former CIA operator Sam Faddis reminded us in a post to his X account, @RealSamFaddis, the leader of the militia faction leading the military successes that have ousted Assad is Islamist terrorist Muhammad al-Jawlani, also known as Abu Muhammad al-Golani and Muhammad al-Julani.
Muhammad al-Jawlani has a $10 million bounty on his head from the United States’ Rewards for Justice program.
In April 2013, al-Jawlani pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda and its leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. In July 2016, al-Jawlani praised Al-Qaeda and al-Zawahiri in an online video and claimed the ANF was changing its name to Jabhat Fath Al Sham (“Conquest of the Levant Front”).
On May 16, 2013, the U.S. Department of State designated al-Jawlani as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, and U.S. persons are generally prohibited from engaging in any transactions with al-Jawlani. In addition, it is a crime to knowingly provide, or attempt or conspire to provide, material support or resources to ANF, a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.
The “Levant Front,” by the way, includes Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the Mediterranean coastal area from Egypt to Turkey, so al-Jawlani’s ambitions do not likely to end with the ouster of Bashar al Assad.
As the leading regional client of Russia and Iran, Assad’s ouster may look like a victory in the sense that anything that discomfits two of our enemies is good for us, but that is a shortsighted and shallow view of the world’s security situation.
The truth is that behind all the arguments about borders, self-determination and democratic principles lurks the dark shadow of political Islam and its drive for world domination.
The truth is that the real enemy in the Near East is not Bashar al-Assad, it is political Islam, and the only way to defeat it is to drop the fiction that “Islam is a religion of peace” and use all our national power to present an alternative worldview that undermines and eventually destroys Sharia-supremacism and Iranian “Absolute Wilayat al-Faqih” (Guardianship of the Jurist).
Back in 2018, when there was criticism of then-President Donald Trump’s plans to pull American troops out of Syria, we wrote:
None of the generals who have been tasked with fighting and winning the wars in Syria and Iraq, and certainly none of the politicians who have advocated United States involvement in them, have been willing to accept and confront that truth, and as a consequence the war that was supposed to be a three month intervention to defeat the “JV forces” of the Islamic State became a seven year sinkhole of American lives and treasure.
What’s more, while neocons and Obama apologists have made getting rid of brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad a central casus belli, it is clear that Senators Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio and the interventionists on the Left did not think through who would govern Syria if he’s gone, or what America would have to do to prevent that alternative from being even more odious – and dangerous.
And therein lies another thread in the tangled skein that is the American involvement in Syria.
In July of 2015 Obama’s Defense Secretary Ashton Carter admitted that only 60 so-called "moderate" Syrian rebels were then being trained by the U.S. in the $500 million program that had been slated to put 3,000 fighters into the field against ISIS by the end of that year.
Carter told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he regretted disclosing that the number was so low but "I wanted to tell the truth. The number 60, as you all recognize, is not an impressive number. The number is much smaller than we hoped for at this point."
The $500 million Syrian training program authorized by Congress was intended to train and equip up to 5,400 fighters annually, with about 3,000 projected to be ready by the end of 2015.
In September of 2015 Senate the testimony of CENTCOM commander, General Lloyd Austin, revealed that the U.S. plan to train thousands of Syrian opposition soldiers had cost half a billion dollars and resulted in "4 or 5" trained people on the battlefield.
Most of the trainees that constituted the “Free Syrian Army” were killed in their first contact with the enemy or went over to the jihadi forces aligned with the Islamic State.
So, after the Obama-Hillary Clinton-Lloyd Austin-Joe Biden inspired failures what comes next?
Done right, U.S. intervention in the Syrian civil war might have offered the possibility of a strategic defeat of Iran. If the United States acted to tip the balance of power in the civil war, Iran would have been weakened by the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, its single Arab ally and a vital link to their important clients – Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia.
However, America through its generals and diplomats never fought that war, because they never engaged it on the most important battlefield – the battlefield of secularism versus Sharia-supremacism and Iranian Absolute Wilayat al-Faqih.
Now, having failed to think through who would govern Syria once Assad was gone, or what America would have to do to prevent that alternative from being even more odious – and dangerous – than Assad, we have been left as impotent observers with no friends on the winning side.
In an intramural Muslim war between Assad’s Alawis, Iran’s Shia and Syria’s Sunni Arab majority, from which the uprising emerged, there are no “good guys” in terms of western-oriented factions friendly to the United States. And the last time Islamists gained control of a large swath of territory in the Near East Christians, Kurds and Yazidis were massacred, raped, and sold into slavery.
Obama, Hillary Clinton, Lloyd Austin, Joe Biden never thought through or had a plan for what and who comes next if Assad was overthrown. Now, what comes next in Syria is not going to be good for the United States, or for our friends and allies, such as Israel and Jordan. At best Syria looks likely to become another failed state, like Libya or Somalia, at worst, it will become another aggressive Islamist state, like Afghanistan, on the doorstep of Israel and Europe.
George Rasley is editor of Richard Viguerie's ConservativeHQ.com and is a veteran of over 300 political campaigns. A member of American MENSA, he served on the staff of Vice President Dan Quayle, as Director of Policy and Communication for retired Congressman Adam Putnam (FL-12) then-Vice Chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee's Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, and as spokesman for retired Rep. Mac Thornberry, former Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Syria
Bashar al Assad
Hamas
Iran
Israel
ISIS
Muhammad al-Julani
Muhammad al-Jawlani
Levant Front
Russia
Political Islam
Sharia supremacy
General Lloyd Austin
Free Syrian Forces
Islamist State
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