Syria’s collapse was neither organic nor inevitable. It was the product of a years-long, multinational campaign orchestrated by the United States, Israel and their Western and regional allies to topple Assad — just like in Iraq and Libya.
It was never about “removing a brutal dictator” or “saving the Syrian people” — it was yet another attempt at reorganizing the Middle East in their favor. And now, the same script is being rerun — only the target has changed: Iran.
“Almost every single government in that region has been installed with Western connivance,” Afzal Ashraf, professor of international relations at Loughborough University, tells Analyst News. An expert in terrorist ideology and extremism, he has advised governments on issues surrounding global security.
“From 2011, it has been an increasingly declared policy of the United States and Western countries to achieve regime change in Syria,” he says. “They have been supported by Qatar, Jordan and other Gulf states in that regard. Turkey has also been a partner in this project. Evidence exists indicating that a great deal of the regime change effort was supported by the covert intelligence services of these states as well as their special forces.”
A plan was indeed long in the works.
Former NATO commander General Wesley Clark alleged that, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, a Pentagon official showed him a memo listing seven Muslim-majority countries the U.S. intended to destabilize: “We’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.” Today, only one remains standing: Iran, where the U.S. is currently attempting to replicate its Iraq playbook.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been in power for the better part of the last 30 years, has relentlessly pushed this campaign from the start. “If you take out Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” Netanyahu told the U.S. Congress in 2002.
One year later, the U.S. invaded Iraq under false pretenses, launching an illegal war that not only toppled Iraqi President Saddam Hussein but plunged the entire region into chaos — fueling terrorism, destabilizing neighboring countries and reshaping geopolitics to this day.
Since then, the U.S. has become militarily or covertly involved in all the countries on Clark’s list in one way or another. As renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs outlines, the U.S. has led or sponsored wars against Iraq, through its 2003 invasion; Somalia, by backing Ethiopia’s 2006 invasion; Lebanon, by funding and arming Israel; Libya, through NATO airstrikes in 2011; Sudan, by supporting rebels in 2011; and Syria, beginning with a 2011 CIA operation.
Destabilizing Syria was always key to this effort to reshape the Middle East.
Bashar al-Assad did indeed oversee a brutal regime of oppression and tyranny. But “this war in Syria did not come from Assad’s repression,” Sachs said recently at the Antalya Diplomacy Forum. “Actually, that decision originated in Jerusalem.”
Sachs says the war began when the Obama administration signed off on Operation Timber Sycamore in 2011 to overthrow Assad. This war was heavily promoted by Israel’s government, he says, which has long worked to overthrow every Middle Eastern government that opposed it.
Backed by the U.K., Saudi Arabia and Jordan, the CIA spent $1 billion training and arming militants — including terrorist groups — to topple Assad. The U.K. spent another £350 million. Meanwhile, U.S. troops and private military contractors were quietly on the ground in Syria under the veneer of fighting ISIS.
“The focus seems to have been on preserving ISIS lives and facilitating arms rather than fighting ISIS, as publicly stated,” Ashraf tells Analyst News, citing his own informal meetings with Middle Eastern officials. “The implication is that ISIS was a sort of partner in the Western-led regime change project rather than the target of its operations.”
The terrorist group that took over Syria and toppled Assad last year is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a former Al-Qaeda affiliate which was supported by these foreign powers.
According to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, the Obama administration in 2012 made a secret agreement with Turkey to arm the rebel groups. “By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar,” Hersh writes in the London Book Review. “The CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria.” The entire operation was run by then-CIA director David Petraeus, he writes.
“Terrorist organizations were both openly and covertly used to facilitate regime change,” Ashraf tells Analyst News. “Groups like the Kurdish YPG, part of the PKK, a designated terrorist organisation by the United States, U.K. and others, were deployed by the U.S. and now occupy swathes of Syrian territory, including key agricultural and energy producing areas.”
Before the civil war, Syria was a functioning and stable economy with good prospects. In 2009, the IMF described Syria’s economy as strong, with rapid non-oil GDP growth and low debt.
Two years later, Syria was slapped with heavy sanctions by major powers. The sanctions, which amounted to an embargo on the country, were so severe that Human Rights Watch said they affected humanitarian relief efforts.