By Jeremy Salt*
May 19, 2025
Israel has destroyed virtually all of Syria’s defensive capacity. Having cooperated with the takfiris, it is now using their presence in Damascus to gain more advantage.
So many truths have been stuffed down the memory hole, it’s a wonder there is still room for more. Recent Syrian history is being rewritten every day, which is reason to look back to separate past facts from continuing fictions.
Thoughts of this nature came to mind while listening to the interview of a Syrian-Palestinian émigré to the US who described his elation on hearing of the news of the overthrow of the Syrian government in December 2024.
The story he told of noble ‘rebels’ battling to overthrow a tyrannical ‘regime’ has been relayed through the ‘western’ media ever since the war in Syria was launched through proxies in 2011.
Russia and China were opposed to direct military intervention, including any repeat of the UN Security Council ‘no fly zone’ resolution that had been used by the US, France, and the UK, and then NATO as the platform for the destruction of Libya.
Still determined to destroy the government in Damascus, and not about to be thwarted, the ‘western’ collective then picked up its second-best option: a war launched through proxies.
The motives were clear. Syria was the central pillar in the ‘axis of resistance’, and if it could be pulled down, the whole structure would collapse and Iran would be cornered. Syria was a small state with limited resources, whereas theirs were enormous, so they had no doubt that they could eventually do it.
The war was a franchised operation involving the US, the UK, France, other European countries, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. Money was no problem. Billions were spent financing and arming the takfiris and running the information war through the media, along with the sanctions that eventually brought Syrian society to its knees.
There were no ‘moderate’ groups among the ‘rebels.’ All were ideological clones of Al Qaida in Iraq and the Islamic State. Their countless atrocities seem to have been pushed into the memory hole along with everything else, the gays pushed off rooftops, the burning to death in a cage of the captured Jordanian pilot, the drowning in a cage of other captives, the massacres, the murder of Christian and Muslim clerics and the destruction of markets and mosques.
While expressing horror at their brutality, these groups were the bludgeon outside governments needed to topple the government in Damascus, once the so-called ‘Free Syrian Army’ had shown that it was not up to the task. It was openly admitted by Hillary Clinton and others that in Syria, the US and Al-Qaeda were fighting on the same side.
Many of the ‘rebels’ were not even Syrian. The first non-Syrians were probably the Libyans flown to Turkey after the overthrow of the government in Tripoli and the murder of Gaddafi.
They were visible by their presence in Ankara and other cities before crossing the border to join the fight. They were followed by tens of thousands of other fighters crossing into Syria from across the Muslim world and from Muslim communities in ‘western’ countries.
There were valid demonstrations against the Syrian government, largely for the economic reasons that were the consequence of the neo-liberal ‘reforms’ first introduced by Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafiz, but accelerated by Bashar after 2000.
The welfare state, providing free education and health, gradually gave way to the privatization of banks and state enterprises. Tariffs on imports were lowered while the removal of subsidies raised prices. The selling of state—owned farms led to high unemployment in the agrarian sector. How Bashar was talked into all of this is one of many questions still in need of an answer. Nepotism and corruption in government added to the list of reasons for public discontent.
These were the causes of demonstrations that broke out in 2011, but they did not add up to the desire to destroy the secular state. That was the goal of the takfiris, towards which end they infiltrated demonstrations and killed police, using these tactics as a platform to throw Syria into turmoil, backed all the way by the money and arms of their outside sponsors.
The takfiris were experimenting with chemical weapons on rabbits from the beginning. Theo Padnos, an American captive of the Islamic State, once asked one of his captors whether he was studying chemistry at university so he could become a pharmacist: the answer came back, no, he didn’t want that, he wanted to learn how to make chemical weapons.
The OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) blamed the Syrian government for almost all chemical weapons attacks when the evidence on the ground shows they were the work of the takfiris, with outside help.
The attack in the Ghouta outside Damascus in 2013 was a staged event designed to force Obama across his own self-declared ‘red line’ and launch an air war on Syria. Warned in time by his own intelligence agencies that it looked like the setup it was, Obama backed off. The ‘attack’ on Douma in 2018 was another staged event, even more crudely arranged and quickly exposed.
The Douma findings of an OCPCW inspector exonerating Syria were reversed by the OPCW executive, wholly undermining the organization’s credibility, and putting it into the category as a stooge for the US and its allies. The evidence in many other ‘attacks’ pointed straight at the takfiris, with the ‘western’ media quickly turning accusations by ‘rebels’ into unsubstantiated ‘facts.’ This was a game being played by both of them, to their mutual benefit.
In the multi-confessional secular state that was Syria, no one would have thought to ask someone else their religious identity, but now religious identity is the dividing line between life and death.
The ‘rebels’ made their intentions known from the beginning. ‘Christians to Beirut, Alawis to the grave,’ in accordance with which Christians were driven into Lebanon while Alawis were slaughtered wherever the takfiris found them.
The overthrow of the government in December 2024 flung the gate wide open to massacres, murders, kidnappings, the murder, rape and enslavement of Alawi and other women, the theft of property and other crimes.
European politicians are flocking to Damascus to congratulate Ahmad al Shara’a, né Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, or they are receiving him in their home countries, even as the atrocities against minorities continue.
Jolani was a prisoner in Camp Bucca, the US prison in Iraq, for several years until released in 2011, ‘coincidentally’ at the outset of the onslaught on Syria. The obvious guess has to be that he was ‘turned’ but if he was not an asset then, he is certainly one now.
He set himself up in Idlib and, over time, through force, brought all takfiri groups in the province under the control of Hay’at Tahrir al Sham, the rebranded replacement for the group he had formed after his arrival in Syria, Jabhat al Nusra. Idlib was run as a harsh Islamic statelet far removed from the moderate image now emanating from the presidential palace in Damascus.
For two years, Theo Padnos, an American, was moved between 13 takfiri prisons where torture was systematic and death was everywhere. He spoke excellent Arabic, so he understood everything being said around him.
The Alawis and other objects of takfiri hatred were just insects who had to be exterminated. The takfiris wanted to “ethnically cleanse the country out of existence,” Padnos said in a 2021 interview. His comparison was with the Nazis. “Jolani can invent any reality he wants and he does. ”
The successful outcome of the onslaught launched in 2011 is now on display for all to see. Thousands of Alawis have been massacred, and Christians live in fear. Syria has been destroyed as a unitary state, with Turkey occupying the northwest, the US the northeast through its Kurdish proxie,s and Israel the south, where it is now engaged in mock defence of the Druze to further its strategic interests.
Israel has destroyed virtually all of Syria’s defensive capacity. Having cooperated with the takfiris, healing them in its hospitals after moving them across the Golan Heights, it is now using their presence in Damascus to gain more advantage.
The roots of the assault on Syria are long and deep. It needs to be remembered that there has been a hundred-year war on Syria as well as Palestine. The centrality of Syria geographically, culturally, and historically, and as a hub of the Arab national idea, was the reason why the imperial ‘west’ had to break it up after 1918. They have kept at it ever since, directly, indirectly, and through the attacks by the settler state they created in Palestine.
Finally, they have succeeded for a second time. Syria lies in ruins after 14 years of war, gradually bled dry of everything a society needs to stay on its feet. Unless it had continuing intervention equivalent to the resources spent on destroying it, the eventual downfall of its government was a mathematical certainty. Russia intervened but then walked away, for reasons still subject to conjecture.
For the moment, Syria has been effectively partitioned. Israel has taken advantage of the moment by adding more Syrian territory to the occupied Golan, as well as destroying all of Syria’s defensive capacity and bombing it when and where it wants. The next stage is to try and break it up into easily manageable ethno-religious statelets, which has been its goal ever since 1948.
In Damascus, Shara’a holds power as a self-elected ‘president’ who has no intention of defending Syria but instead wants to ‘normalize’ relations with Israel, sending a further positive signal to the US by ‘detaining’ PFLP and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) leaders in Damascus. Representatives of other groups have left the country.
All Palestinian factions have been forced to surrender their weapons, their freedom of movement has been restricted, and only the Palestinian embassy, representing the collaborationist regime of Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, will be recognized as the official Palestinian voice.
Sanctions are being lifted and Shara’a is welcomed in European capitals. In Saudi Arabia this week, he will be sitting down with Trump, Muhammad bin Salman, Mahmud Abbas and Joseph Aoun, the president designated to pull Lebanon back into line with the US and Israel, to nail down the future of the Middle East just as Britain and France did more than a century ago.
Shara’a will be putting on the table backdoor negotiations with Israel, heading towards recognition and access to Syria’s already looted oilfields for US corporations. The construction of a Trump Tower in Damascus has also been raised. Perhaps this tribute could be complemented by a golden statue of the great man outside the Suq al Hamidiyya. In return for these genuflections, sanctions will be lifted, diplomatic relations restored, and the ‘Abraham Accords’ opened to Syrian participation.
As represented by the regime in Damascus, Syria will be given the “chance of greatness,” as Trump puts it. Where is Gaza, where is Palestine, in the thinking of Ahmad al Shara’a? Absolutely nowhere.
This is the grotesque outcome of a ‘revolution’ that was actually the cover for the most concentrated effort ever made by the historic enemies of Arab independence and their regional allies to destroy an Arab government. The greatest beneficiary was always going to be Israel. Those supporters of Palestine who did not see it at the beginning should be able to see it now.
* Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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