Former ISIS deputy commander Abu Mohammed al-Julani and his rebranded Al Qaeda affiliate, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), have sacked Damascus. Once again, as with the CIA’s brutal dirty war against the Syrian government under Barack Obama, Joe Biden’s regime has sided with Al Qaeda as part of its regional aim to cripple Iran and strengthen Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel. “At long last, the Assad regime has fallen…A fall of the regime is a fundamental act of justice,” the president declared before describing Al Qaeda’s victory as a “historic opportunity.”
Worse still, the incoming Donald Trump administration, overflowing with foreign policy nominees known for their Israel-First and neoconservative tendencies, have reportedly “turbocharged” discussions regarding the possibility of joining Tel Aviv in bombing Iran’s internationally safeguarded nuclear energy program.
Although it caught most of us by surprise, if the recent trajectory of Washington and Tel Aviv’s policy in the Levant and the broader Middle East was going to be successful, then the fall of Damascus and the end of Bashar al Assad’s rule were to some degree inevitable. As a result of the destructive Israeli campaign throughout the region and the devastating U.S. economic war on Syria, Hezbollah and the Syrian Arab Army were evidently unable to defend the country from Julani’s jihadists as they once did.
As veteran war reporter Eric Margolis explains, “Syria—or what’s left of it—was divided up into zones—a third of the country with all its oil and gas fields is under the control of U.S. military forces. Revenues from this oil and gas accounted for half of Syria’s income and paid its armed forces. Deprived of pay and munitions, the Syrian armed forces faded away, leaving the roads to Damascus open to Islamist forces, branded ‘terrorists’ by the west.”
Or as Joe Biden put it on December 8, during “the past four years, my administration had pursued a clear and principled policy toward Syria. First, we made clear from the start sanctions on Assad would remain in place…Second, we maintained a military presence in Syria.” Biden bragged that his policy included “never ceding an inch” of the illegally occupied territories.
Ever since Hamas broke out of the Gaza prison to launch its attack on Israeli military and civilian targets in October 2023, the United States and Israel have been at war, in varying degrees, with all of Al Qaeda’s worst enemies in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. As Biden emphasized in his speech, he enabled Israel’s “freedom of action against Iranian networks in Syria and against actors aligned with Iran.”
Now this is not because Al Qaeda, the same group which sponsored the September 11 hijackers, boasts some exceptionally powerful influence lobby in Washington and Tel Aviv which demands our legislators and members of the Knesset exhibit total fealty to its leadership and their regional designs.
The absurd policy today is instead a result of the fact that Israel maintains such a powerful lobby in Washington, spearheaded by AIPAC and the neoconservatives, and all of Israel’s enemies happen to be Al Qaeda’s fiercest foes as well.
Even though Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the lead 9/11 hijackers were all vehemently anti-Zionist, Al Qaeda itself has never crossed Tel Aviv. ISIS only attacked Israel once in Syria during all these years of chaos but the group apologized, according to former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon.
For decades, Syria was the logistical bridge along which weapons were transferred from Iran to Hezbollah. In the early 1980s, the Lebanese militant group rose up in resistance to Israel’s nearly twenty-year occupation in southern Lebanon. Ironically, U.S.-backed atrocities during Israel’s wars against Lebanon were once a major Al Qaeda grievance and crucially motivated 9/11 hijackers such as Mohamed Atta to join Bin Laden’s cause.
This alliance between Iran and Hezbollah was an immense source of pressure on Israel, precluding Netanyahu’s plans to ethnically cleanse not just Gaza but the occupied West Bank of its indigenous Palestinian population as well. With Assad now out of the picture and Hezbollah’s supply lines cut, Israel has drastically increased its freedom of action fulfilling some of the ultimate objectives arch neoconservatives like Richard Perle and David Wurmser presented to Netanyahu when he first became prime minister almost thirty years ago.
Assad needed to be taken down primarily for the sake of the Likud party’s annexationist agenda, especially after the neocons’ disastrous regime change war in Baghdad, decisively pushed by Tel Aviv and its U.S. lobby, vastly empowered their Iranian enemies. By knocking off Iran’s arch nemesis, secular Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein, and putting Tehran’s Iraqi Shi’ite allies in power, George W. Bush established what has since been dubbed the “Shi’ite crescent.”
In fact, it was in this war where the Saudi-born Julani cut his teeth, fighting for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in Iraq as part of the Sunni Insurgency against American occupying forces. According to a 2013 report from The Times of Israel,
After al-Zarqawi was killed by a US airstrike in 2006, al-Golani left Iraq, briefly staying in Lebanon, where he offered logistical support for the Jund al-Sham militant group, which follows al-Qaeda’s extremist ideology, the [two senior Iraqi military intelligence officials] said.
He returned to Iraq to continue fighting but was arrested by the US military and held at Camp Bucca, a sprawling prison on Iraq’s southern border with Kuwait.
…After his release from prison in 2008, al-Golani resumed his militant work, this time alongside Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq—also known as the Islamic State of Iraq. He was soon appointed head of al-Qaeda operations in Mosul province.
Shortly after the Syrian uprising began, al-Golani moved into Syrian territory and, fully supported by al-Baghdadi, formed the Nusra Front, which was first announced in January 2012.
During the Obama years, the United States, Israel, Turkey, and Washington’s Gulf dictatorship satellites backed Julani’s Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, the Al Nusra Front, along with its ideological cohorts in ISIS, and other jihadists from across the Islamic world eyeing regime change against Assad. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed and millions more displaced as a result of the dirty war. Even after Trump rightfully shut down the multi-billion dollar CIA program, “Operation Timber Sycamore,” aiding Al Nusra and their fellow jihadists in 2017, the Israeli and Turkish support remained.
At Assad’s request, it was Hezbollah, Tehran’s IRGC Quds Force, the Shi’ite militias of Iraq, and Moscow which came to the aid of Damascus, beat back Al Qaeda, helping destroy the Islamic State Caliphate, driving Julani and his men to the northwestern Idlib province where they remained for years protected by Turkey, Washington’s NATO ally.
Along with Yemen’s Houthis, these anti-ISIS and Al Qaeda forces deem themselves the “Axis of Resistance.” Their common enemies are not coincidentally ISIS, Al Qaeda, Tel Aviv, and Washington. These were the battle lines already in place last year when Israel began its campaign of wanton destruction in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran. Likewise, these Axis of Resistance forces, particularly the Houthis and Hezbollah, were the only regional actors willing to fight Israel over its genocidal assault against defenseless Palestinian civilians and resist Tel Aviv’s broader regional depredations.
Since the war on Gaza and the Israelis’ wider rampage erupted in 2023, Tehran has largely taken a back seat as part of this resistance front against Israel apart from retaliating against Tel Aviv when attacked directly. Iran’s leadership clearly prefers to avoid a direct war and Masoud Pezeshkian, the new moderate president, is still holding out for diplomacy with Washington. Nevertheless, the Iranians find themselves more firmly in American and Israeli crosshairs than ever as they are seen as vulnerable now that their partners have been largely decimated or neutralized in the cases of Hezbollah and Assad’s Syria respectively.
After months of Israel’s massive bombing raids in Lebanon, coupled with its ground invasion and high profile assassinations of Hezbollah and Hamas leadership, Tel Aviv is free to finish seizing large swathes of territory in Gaza and potentially southern Lebanon. Israel’s enemies may reluctantly accept “ceasefire” agreements which, in practice, cannot even prevent Israel’s daily airstrikes and bulldozing of homes in southern Lebanon, let alone the indefinite occupation and coming settlement expansion in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Israel is now even more free to bomb Syria, as Tel Aviv has launched over 800 airstrikes including in Damascus, Tartus, Latakia, Homs, and Palmyra, just since Assad fled the country. Netanyahu publicly took credit for the regime change during a visit to the illegally occupied Golan Heights, proclaiming “This is a direct result of the blows we have inflicted on Iran and Hezbollah, the main supporters of the Assad regime.”
After Damascus fell, “a historic day in the history of the Middle East” per Netanyahu, Tel Aviv immediately began stealing more Syrian land with Washington’s support. The IDF is indefinitely taking control of territory outside the illegally occupied Golan Heights in the UN sanctioned demilitarized buffer zone established in 1974, with Israeli forces reportedly holding positions beyond those areas within fifteen kilometers of Damascus. Illegal settlement expansion in the Golan Heights is surging.
Most unfortunately, as hundreds of thousands have already been slaughtered and maimed not just in Gaza, but from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea, the Palestinians are likely going to be hit that much harder now. Only the American people can stop this U.S.-backed carnage by exerting relentless pressure on their own government to cease funding Israel’s wars.
A legal route may be the only sufficient way to force an end to American complicity in the Israeli rampage. Washington is currently breaking myriad laws on our own books, including the Arms Export Control Act, the Foreign Assistance Act, and the Leahy Laws by supporting Israel’s mass slaughter campaign against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere.
Israel’s refusal to allow humanitarian aid into the Strip despite the White House’s public demands, particularly as Tel Aviv escalates its ethnic cleansing plan in the north, its countless gross violations of human rights across Palestine and Lebanon, as well as its unlawful possession of nuclear weapons, all render Washington’s transfer of billions in military aid to the Israelis totally illegal.
The efforts of Palestinians, including at least one US citizen, to sue the State Department and Democratic party lawmakers’ campaigns against the White House’s unlawful support for Israel’s war machine deserve the American people’s support. But, across the political spectrum, there must be more grassroots action as the hawks in Trump’s transition team and Tel Aviv seek to drag the United States into a war with Iran while Tehran appears temporarily weakened. As Trump recently told Time magazine when asked about the chances of war with Iran, “anything can happen.”
Such a war could cost millions of lives, including enormous American casualties, and trillions of dollars, likely dwarfing the mayhem of Washington’s killing sprees in the region thus far this century.
In the meantime, HTS rules an Arab capital city while the United States is seeking to delist them as a terrorist organization. The White House has already rescinded Washington’s $10 million bounty on Julani’s head. His new Islamist dictatorship may be soon funded directly with American taxpayer dollars. The U.S. military still occupies a third of Syria stealing the country’s oil and wheat resources and the bipartisan Caesar Act sanctions continue strangling the economy with 90% of the population living below the poverty line. The U.S.-backed Kurds occupying the northeast of the country could soon come under attack not just by Turkey, which also illegally occupies Syrian land, but HTS as well with approximately 2,000 American troops possibly caught in the crossfire.
The catastrophic policies above have remained consistent throughout the Israel-First administrations of Trump and Biden as they callously capitalized on the perceived gains of Obama’s treasonous dirty war.
The top priorities of any “America First” administration here would be to withdraw from Syria and Iraq, lift the Caesar Act sanctions so the Syrian people can finally rebuild their country and trade freely with the rest of the world, and permanently cut ties with Israel as well as Al Qaeda.
If Bin Ladenites start massacring civilians in the United States again, it will be because an America First agenda was rejected.
