“But in the shell game of U.S. proxy war, HTS and its leader are Washington’s assets. From 2011, the Americans and their NATO partners used Al Qaeda, ISIS, Jabhat al Nusra Front (later HTS) with ratlines of weapons and fighters from Libya, Turkey and all over the world to descend on Syria to inflict horrors.
“Only last week before the final push on the Syria capital, Damascus, Al-Jawlani, the HTS commander, was given a primetime interview/platform by CNN, the U.S. news channel, to rehabilitate his image as a statesman-like leader instead of being a wanted terrorist. Al-Jawlani says the days when he and his organization were associates of ISIS and Al Qaeda are long gone. And CNN and other Western media do their best to make the claim sound plausible. Ah, such a happy ending!”
Paul Craig Roberts
I have complained about the difficulty of acquiring an understanding of Syria’s sudden disappearance. Neither the Western nor Russian media provide a believable account. Recently I came across Finian Cunningham’s article,”Syria after 13 years of US State terrorism,” on the website of the Strategic Culture Foundation. https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/12/10/syria-after-13-years-of-us-state-terrorism-what-do-you-expect/ This site is often difficult to access, because Washington stupidly regards it as Russian disinformation.
On the surface Syria’s sudden collapse looks like Syria’s allies, Russia and Iran, might have sold out Syria. This perception could prevail to the disadvantage of Russia and Iran as reliable allies, but the real explanation is that the years of economic and trade sanctions the West enforced on Syria, the years of Washington’s proxy war against Syria, the foreign occupation of Syria’s oil and wheat provinces by American and Turkish military forces, thus depriving the government of revenues, hollowed out the Syrian economy and left the Syrian military poorly paid for its services. Syria, Cunningham wrote, fell to “a 13-year war of attrition” on which all the victims on both sides were Arabs. The Syrian people, starved of food, medicines and fuel, with over half the population displaced, suffered high inflation and a destroyed currency, and ran out of ability to resist.
I contacted Finian, an international journalist whom I have known for years and learned much that permits me to provide an explanation of Syria’s destruction.
I begin by withdrawing my suspicions of Russian and Iranian perfidy in Syria’s collapse that I expressed in recent columns and interview on Dialogue Works with Nima https://www.youtube.com/live/NfxD_4DhxFo . Cunningham agrees that Russia and Iran’s fateful strategic blunder was, having repelled the American proxy forces, halting the conflict before decisively defeating Washington’s terrorist proxies and forcing the few American troops controlling the oil fields out of Syria. Cunningham has convinced me that Russia and Iran were genuinely blindsided by the sudden collapse of Syria, indicating perhaps intelligence failure and unpreparedness, but not perfidy.
Thirteen years of US and European sanctions and proxy war together with US and Turkish occupation of Syria’s oil and wheat provinces deprived the state of export revenues, leaving the people with blackouts and hyperinflation and the soldiers impoverished and demoralized. The halt in the conflict prior to the total defeat of the American proxies and eviction of Turkey and Washington from Syria meant that the exhausting multi-year struggle had no payoff for Syria. For their own reasons Putin and Iran wanted the fighting to stop, and it stopped before Syria achieved any benefit from the success in repelling Washington’s proxy army. The oil and wheat provinces remained in enemy hands. So the war stopped too soon and the victory was hollow.
Assad’s ability to govern was crippled by normal Arab corruption and a self-serving bureaucracy. Additionally, Assad was lured by Saudis and oil sheikdoms with false promises of normalizing relations of the Alawite Syrians with Sunni Arabs.
Be seeing you
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