The Selective War on Terror.
(Part 2)
Operation Timber Sycamore
After Iraq turned into a disaster, Washington wanted to remove Assad from Syria, but a direct invasion was politically impossible. So the United States turned to proxies, and the most effective ones available were jihadist groups.
There was never a “moderate opposition” strong enough to topple Assad. The Pentagon’s own intelligence, dated August 2012, made that clear. Al Qaeda and Salafist militias were driving the insurgency. Yet, that same year, President Obama signed off on a covert CIA program called Operation Timber Sycamore, a massive effort to arm and train anti-Assad rebels. It ran from 2012 to 2017 and cost roughly one billion dollars per year, making it one of the most expensive covert programs in CIA history.
The program trained around ten thousand fighters. Each trainee cost about one hundred thousand dollars annually, staggering numbers for an operation that was supposed to build a “moderate” rebel army. The CIA coordinated with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar, who provided funding and logistics. Weapons flowed from Croatian arms dealers, paid for by the Saudis, and later directly from U.S. stockpiles. Anti-tank TOW missiles, small arms, and ammunition were distributed through CIA operations rooms in Turkey and Jordan.
But there was one fatal flaw. The “moderate rebels” the CIA claimed to support did not exist in any meaningful sense. Al Qaeda’s branch, Jabhat al-Nusra, dominated the battlefield. U.S.-backed groups fought alongside them, shared weapons, and coordinated offensives. The CIA knew this. Internal reports spelled it out. But they needed plausible deniability in case the weapons ended up with Al Qaeda, which was not a risk but an inevitability.
One official told The New York Times that deniability was needed “in case the arms got into the hands of al-Nusra.” In reality, the entire insurgency was al-Nusra. The result was predictable. Timber Sycamore helped Al Qaeda capture Idlib province in 2015. The U.S.-supplied TOW missiles gave them the edge. Al Qaeda then turned Idlib into its largest safe haven since 9/11.
Trump shut the program down in July 2017, saying plainly, “It turns out it’s a lot of al-Qaeda we’re giving these weapons to.” By then the damage was done. Syria was in ruins, hundreds of thousands were dead, millions displaced, and Al Qaeda controlled a province the size of some countries.
That was Timber Sycamore, a billion-dollar-a-year CIA operation that armed the very organization America claimed to be fighting since 2001. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan to destroy Al Qaeda, then armed Al Qaeda’s allies in Syria fifteen years later. When those U.S.-backed rebels helped Al Qaeda take Idlib, mainstream outlets such as The New York Times and NBC News described it as one of the CIA program’s “periods of success.”
The Obama administration knew what was happening. Flynn’s DIA analysts warned them. Their reports said clearly that jihadists dominated the opposition. But the White House did not want to hear it. Those analysts got pushback. The weapons kept flowing. Publicly, Blinken talked about supporting “moderate rebels.” Days later, Biden slipped at Harvard and admitted there was “no moderate middle.” Kerry said it openly in a leaked recording. The U.S. was watching ISIS grow, hoping the threat to Damascus would pressure Assad into negotiating. It was a deliberate strategy, leveraging terrorist groups for regime change.
This is not speculation or conspiracy. It is documented fact, drawn from declassified papers and statements by U.S. officials.
Why Assad and Syria?
Assad didn’t really do anything specific to invite US wrath. The decision to target Assad for regime change came right after 9/11. Wesley Clark, the former NATO commander, said it plainly. He saw a memo in 2001 listing seven countries for regime change. Syria was on that list, along with Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.
Geography and alliances.
Assad’s regime was allied with Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia. That made Syria a strategic problem for US interests in the Middle East. It wasn’t about human rights or democracy. It was about breaking the Iran-Hezbollah-Syria-Russia axis.
A leaked 2006 US Embassy cable from Damascus laid out the strategy. The cable identified Assad’s “vulnerabilities” and discussed how to exploit them. One vulnerability was “the potential threat to the regime from the increasing presence of transiting Islamist extremists.” The US was already planning to use jihadists against Assad five years before the Arab Spring.
When the Syrian uprising started in March 2011, Washington saw an opportunity. There were genuine peaceful protests against Assad’s authoritarian rule and corruption. But those protests quickly got overtaken by armed insurgency, much of it driven by sectarian Sunni groups. The US didn’t create the uprising. But it immediately moved to weaponize it.
Assad’s actual crimes came later, during the war. The barrel bombs, the chemical weapons, the siege tactics, the torture prisons. Those are real and horrific. But they happened after the US had already decided Assad had to go.
Here’s what’s telling. The US worked with plenty of brutal dictators. Saudi Arabia beheads people and bombs Yemen. Egypt’s military killed hundreds in Rabaa Square. Bahrain crushed its uprising with help from Saudi tanks. The US said nothing.
Assad’s real crime was being in the wrong camp. He was Iran’s ally. He let Hezbollah operate. He gave Russia a naval base. That made him a target regardless of what he did domestically.
White House Welcomes a Terrorist
Ahmed al-Sharaa, better known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, just visited the White House. Trump met him on Monday, the first White House visit by a Syrian president since independence in 1946, according to NBC News. The transformation is astonishing. Barely a year ago, al-Sharaa led Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, with a ten-million-dollar U.S. bounty on his head.
Al-Sharaa’s past is no mystery. He was assigned by Al Qaeda’s leadership in 2011 to establish their Syrian branch, Jabhat al-Nusra. He fought in Iraq, was detained by U.S. forces between 2005 and 2011, and returned to Syria to wage war against Assad under Al Qaeda’s flag.
The tool was terrorism. The target was Assad. American officials decided that empowering Al Qaeda in Syria was an acceptable price for regime change. Jim Jeffrey later said it openly. Al Qaeda had become “an asset” to U.S. strategy. Not an enemy, an asset.
The policy succeeded only in destruction. Assad stayed in power until recently, but Syria became a charnel house, and Al Qaeda got its largest territorial haven since 9/11. Now al-Jolani, who literally founded Al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, is being received in Washington as a legitimate statesman.
That is the reality of U.S. foreign policy. The War on Terror was never absolute. When terrorists served American interests, they got weapons and support. When they did not, they got drones. It is the policy of the United States.
References:
The RealClearInvestigations article: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/04/20/al_qaeda_is_on_our_side_how_obamabiden_officials_helped_create_a_safe_haven_for_terrorists_in_syria_827477.html