The 21st century’s second bloodiest war has long been overshadowed by the war in Ukraine. However, despite the overthrow of the Ba’athist regime in Syria in 2024, the war in the country has not subsided in the slightest. Why? Because the United States and its Western allies have ceded the sovereignty of the cradle of civilization to a former Al-Qaeda terrorist.
Former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime was the definition of misanthropic, killing 500,000 Syrians from the beginning of the war in 2011 until he fled the country in 2024. Despite a military intervention against ISIS, who used the power vacuum created in the country’s eastern provinces on the Iraqi border to conquer large parts of Iraq in 2014 and committed some of the worst crimes against humanity on Iraqi Yazidis and Syrian minority groups, the Assad regime was able to continue barrel bombing large civilian areas and using chemical weapons, while imprisoning its own citizens and executing them en masse in killing factories that can only be compared to Auschwitz, with hydraulic machines for crushing human remains that were then disposed of in acid or buried in mass graves at the Saydnaya Prison on the outskirts of Damascus.
When the regime fell, this abhorrence did not receive the international attention that has been shown to other troubled parts of the Middle East, most particularly Gaza. There was no international condemnation or calls of “genocide” despite a body count at least 8–10 times the size of the current war in Gaza.
One of the reasons we can speculate as to why this happened is that Assad was an evil brute who gave the appearance of fighting off demons who perhaps were worse. The coastal region of Syria, made up of Alawites, Druze, and Christian communities, is one of the oldest surviving bastions of religious tolerance in the Middle East. Much like Tito’s Yugoslavia, this was kept in check with an iron fist to prevent conflict between the different interethnic groups, Syria’s most dominant being the Sunni Muslim population. The Faustian bargain these groups made with the Assad regime, despite being backed by the fascistic clerical regime in Shia Iran, was that if Assad went, these ethnic groups would have no protector.
Despite the myth of the “secular Syrian opposition”—something that largely did not exist after an onslaught by ISIS and the regime between 2014 and 2017 that concurred with operations against ISIS by Russia and Western powers—new players claiming to be moderate were able to form powerful groups to take on the Assad regime, while the United States government focused on building up the “Syrian Democratic Forces” in the majority-secular Kurdish region of Syria known as Rojava.
The most prominent of these groups, based itself on the border with Turkey in the city of Idlib, was Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham. Using the iconography of the earlier Syrian democratic movement that was wiped out, their leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, as well as most of its base, were from the previously named Jabhat al-Nusra, a designated terrorist group and the official offshoot of Al-Qaeda in Syria. A Vice News documentary on the group shows children in areas under the group’s control being trained in paramilitary camps and venerating pictures of Osama Bin Laden. The group had a cozy relationship with the Iraqi-originated ISIS until ISIS became the largest player in global jihadism, leading to eventual armed confrontation. In 2016, the group dropped its association with Al-Qaeda, but it continued the same practices as the group, albeit more in the dark.
Al-Sharaa knew that he could rebrand himself as a principal opponent of the Assad regime, and despite a near ceasefire from 2020 to 2024, he built up his forces for a push to knock Assad out of the war with Turkish support backing him. Censored images from this military operation often show former ISIS fighters still wearing the insignia of the group, partaking in operations with HTS. Meanwhile, Al-Sharaa went on a PR blitz that included sit-down interviews with organizations like PBS, which resulted in the Frontline documentary The Jihadist, painting him as a moderate and not as an Islamist. Al-Sharaa, however, had worked for and was a foot soldier or commander in the ranks of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which strove to create civil war in Iraq by pitting the religious groups against each other, leading to the Iraqi civil war between Sunnis and Shias that killed hundreds of thousands. Zarqawi also personally beheaded American Nick Berg in 2004.
Al-Sharaa is anything but a moderate and comes from a lengthy background in brutal Salafi jihadism riddled with contempt for non-Sunni Muslims. Despite this, when he took power in 2024, he made promises to be a secularist who would respect the religious tolerations of coastal Syria, once governed by the Assad regime. Anything but has been the case.
Al-Sharaa began his rule by attacking the coastal city of Latakia and revenge killing the Alawite community from which former President Assad came. At least 2,000 were killed, mostly civilians. Al-Sharaa then turned his focus on the longtime Israeli-allied Druze communities, killing at least 3,000, with news agency Popular Front showing videos of HTS thugs, some wearing ISIS patches, killing civilians in hospitals.
Other videos posted by the group include the berating of Syrian Christians. Videos posted on X show the torture and humiliation of Christian men, as well as the burning of their villages. The European Union, on March 11, was informed of a massacre of as many as 1,300 Christians and Alawites by Afroditi Latinopoulou, a right-wing Greek politician and member of the EU Parliament, but did not make any credible response.
Meanwhile, despite HTS brazenly committing acts of ethnic cleansing akin to ISIS, the world has remained largely silent, and Al-Sharaa has been protected by interest groups in the US State Department and Turkey, who were happy to see Russian/Iranian proxy Bashar Al-Assad gone.
As the world stares down the barrel of an actual genocide of non-Sunnis in Syria that can be widely watched on the internet, nobody in Western media is reporting on Al-Sharaa’s crimes or who he keeps in his entourage. He has been embraced as the new leader of a democratic Syria and invited to speak at the United Nations, the rest of the world seemingly forgetting that he cut his teeth by helping Al-Zarqawi cut off heads in Iraq, and got his organization off the ground by being associated with Al-Qaeda. He’s not quiet about it, either, appointing former Bin Laden confidant and journalist Ahmed Muwaffaq Zidan, as media and political advisor to his presidential office.
Even though one of the world’s oldest civilizations is now being governed by terrorist thugs, nobody in the West seems to care, focusing on the much smaller military operations taking place against Hamas in the Gaza Strip by Israel.
HTS forces have also begun military operations against the Syrian Kurds and the allied Syrian Democratic Forces, meaning that the civil war in Syria is likely to continue long-term. Yet despite this, crickets in the West, just as there was under the Assad regime when it was destroying cradles of civilization like Aleppo, and although we may view this problem as far away from us, the Syrian refugee crisis had disastrous impacts on Europe, the ramifications of which can still be felt today.
Has the West lost its mind? When did decapitating Jihadists from Al-Qaeda become partners, and how long until the fruits of this recognition come home to roost in our countries again, as happened on 9/11, after the West first supported Islamist Terrorists in Afghanistan?
Header image: via @jenanmoussa
