Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing William Van Wagenen.
And I'm so lucky that he's been writing for, well, you all are lucky too.
He's been writing for the Libertarian Institute, this really great series on the war in Syria.
And his most recent is called A Brief History of the Destruction of Yarmouk.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Hey, not too bad.
How are you doing?
I'm doing real good.
Really appreciate you joining us on the show today here.
No, my pleasure.
Yeah.
So listen, first of all, I really hope you turn this series into a book.
You've got such great stuff on this.
You know, I sent the link.
I know you know this because I already showed it to you.
But I sent the link to this piece to Max Blumenthal, who has a brand new book out with a great chapter on Syria, by the way.
Fixing to talk with him about that later this afternoon.
But I sent this to him and said, hey, I don't know if you know, but there's this really great writer at the Institute who's writing this stuff.
I want you to see.
And he says, oh, this guy is the best in English on this stuff.
Simple as that, and especially his great essay on the so-called Free Syrian Army, etc.
So I'm absolutely agreed on that.
And I really do hope that you make a book out of this thing and really show him up.
But anyway, so Yarmouk.
Oh, and listen, I got to admit to you that I did not have time to read this whole piece.
This is a solid 10,000 words or 20 or something here.
And I had to read Max's book yesterday and I just didn't get a chance to read this chapter, essentially, that you wrote here.
But I did read enough to get us started.
So, first of all, I guess I'll ask you, how come there's a bunch of Palestinians in Syria in the first place?
Well, back in 1947, 48, when Zionist militias were ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their homes in an effort to conquer land to create the state of Israel.
A lot of them obviously left to other countries, creating the refugee problem.
Many went to Syria.
And eventually, like in 1958, the Syrian government established the Yarmouk refugee camp for Palestinians, which was at that time just outside of Damascus.
And then over time, of course, Damascus has gotten bigger, the camp has gotten bigger, and so now it just kind of became a suburb of Damascus itself.
And so ever since the 1950s, there have been Palestinian refugees living there.
And by the time of the Syria war in 2011, there were maybe 800,000 people, many Syrian, but also many Palestinian refugees as well.
And now you say that they've been granted essentially equal civil rights as Syrians, other than the right to vote.
But does that mean the right to travel around and live wherever they want or they're stuck in that camp too?
No.
I think there are seven or eight Palestinian refugee camps throughout the country, but Palestinians are able to live wherever.
The Syrian government has been very generous in granting them.
Again, they can't vote, which maybe for any Syrians isn't that big of a deal or that helpful, but Palestinians can work, they can get jobs.
But that's different than, for example, in Lebanon, where Palestinians are there living in camps, but their right to work is very restricted.
So Palestinians in Syria have always had many more rights than Palestinian refugees elsewhere.
And so they've really thrived, and Yarmouk is considered the capital of the Palestinian diaspora and a symbol of the right of return.
That's the type of language that Palestinians use.
So it was really kind of the center of Palestinian culture and politics.
Hamas was based there until 2012.
Other Palestinian political factions, the PFLP, the PFLP-GC, which we'll I'm sure talk about a lot.
So Yarmouk's a really important place.
In fact, Ariel Sharon made a famous comment back when the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982, and there was some fighting between Syrian government and the Israelis that he made kind of a threat like, Yarmouk, your day will come.
And so anyways, Yarmouk's a very important place.
Yeah.
Well, and so that explains why there's a bunch of Palestinians stuck between these warring factions in the war in Syria beginning in the year 2011 and starting with Arab Spring.
And so you want to start right there with that?
Yeah.
So due to different things that have happened in Palestinian history in Arab countries over the past 50 years, Palestinians wanted to stay neutral and didn't want to get involved in the Syria conflict.
And so that was the mentality of most Palestinians in Yarmouk.
And in 2011, the most kind of controversial event that happened was that Palestinians, not only in Syria, but also in Lebanon, in the West Bank and in Gaza, they started planning these protests where they would try to cross the border into what is now Israel to try to return to their homes.
And so there was a big protest on Nakba Day on May 20th.
And then another protest three weeks later on Naksa Day, which are days that commemorate important times in Palestinian history.
Again, when they were defeated by the Israelis.
I didn't know about Naksa.
So I guess the Nakba is the catastrophe and then you say Naksa, that's the setback.
So that's the 48 war and then the 67 war, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Very interesting.
Okay.
So obviously this is in the context of the Arab Spring.
And so Palestinians also were trying to do nonviolent protests and things like this.
And so these protests took place in these different areas.
Palestinians organized protests in the Golan Heights where they went to the border fence between the Syrian side of the Golan and the Israeli occupied side of the Golan.
And many Palestinians tried to climb the fence and again, try to get into what is now Israel and return to their homes.
And Israeli soldiers opened fire, killed I think three or four people on the Nakba Day event on May 20th.
And then another maybe 17 or 18, a larger number, three weeks later during the Naksa protest.
But the U.S. and Israel started spreading the rumor that in fact those protests were not popularly organized by Palestinians.
That Assad had organized these protests in order to exploit the Palestinian cause.
If he could have these protests take place and have a bunch of Palestinians get shot and killed, that that would supposedly divert attention away from the protests that Assad himself faced within Syria.
And so that was kind of a rumor that the U.S. and Israel were spreading at the time and that Syrian opposition activists also spread.
So that was kind of the first part of a propaganda campaign against the Syrian government, against also the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, General Command, which is a Palestinian political faction that's really close to the Syrian government.
It was kind of the first effort to demonize the Syrian government and the PFLPGC to try to make it seem like the Syrian government is actually an enemy of the Palestinians rather than a supporter of the Palestinians.
And then also I guess Hamas played into that as well because they're just a break off of the Muslim Brotherhood.
So they were on the side in this case of Israel as long as they're on the side against the Alawites and the Shiites and the Syrian government, right?
Right.
Ironically, that's how it turned out.
I'm getting ahead of the story here.
Sorry.
Well, yeah.
So Hamas ended up leaving.
Again, the Syrian government had allowed Hamas to operate from Syria for a long time.
And it was in January 2012 that Hamas officially left Syria and went to the leadership Khaled Meshel.
He went to Qatar.
And it does seem like that Hamas basically kind of sold out.
Obviously, Qatar is a major supporter of the Syrian rebels, including the Nusra Front or the al-Qaeda franchise in Syria.
And Hamas seemed to be influenced by Qatar, whether it's for money or not, I'm not quite sure.
But yeah, so Hamas ended up turning its back on the Syrian government.
And yeah, it later played a big role in the fighting in the camp as well in Yarmouk.
But just to reiterate your previous point there, so you had the Day of Rage protests broke out all over the Middle East there in 2011 after Tunisia and Egypt and all that.
And so, of course, in the case of the Palestinians, their Days of Rage were directed toward, hey, we want to come home, move back into our grandmother's house or that kind of thing.
And so that was whether they were in Gaza or whether they were, I guess, I don't know what happened in Jordan.
But so in the case of southern Syria there, they were saying, hey, we want to go back to the Golan Heights or cross the fence there.
Mostly symbolic, I guess you say some people were climbing the fence and getting shot then.
And then so it's kind of funny because it disproves itself right there.
Right.
We have the same thing going on in Gaza.
But the Israelis say, as you say, rumor mongering essentially that, oh, no, Assad is putting them up to this.
They don't really want to move back into their grandma's house that we kicked her out of.
They're just doing this because Assad is trying to divert from the fact that, you know, us and Hamas are working against him there.
And we're the good guys on that one.
And so but you say then, I guess the question is then, but did that work?
And as you say, to discredit the PLFPGC, and that's the Popular Front, that means they're the leftists, not the Islamists.
Right.
And they're the allies of the Syrian state.
Right.
Exactly.
So but that those protests are always mentioned by pro-opposition people when it comes to discussing, you know, events in Yarmouk and what's been going on between the Syrian government and Palestinians during the war.
And then those there was another really controversial event that happened the very next day after the Naqsa protest, where, again, a lot of Palestinians were shot by the Israelis on the border there.
Many Palestinians were upset about the event, obviously, and they were upset that the Syrian government and the PLFPGC had not provided sufficient support for the protest.
And so in the funerals for several people who had been killed that took place in Yarmouk the next day, that turned into a protest.
And some of the protesters became angry and went to the headquarters of the PLFPGC and ended up burning down the PLFPGC headquarters.
But that was very controversial, because in the initial media report, the PLFPGC, again, the pro-Syrian Palestinian political faction, they supposedly killed 14 protesters.
So that seemed to match kind of the usual narrative of the Syrian war, where the Syrian security forces are just massacring unarmed protesters.
But if you look more closely at events, the guards of the PLFPGC, they were trying to protect the headquarters and the PLFPGC officials inside.
And they did kill two protesters.
One was a young boy, and there's no justification for that.
I'm not trying to say that, but also the protesters burned down the headquarters, and they also stabbed a PLFPGC official to death.
By one account, up to 50 times, they stabbed him after he had come out to try to calm people down.
And there was another PLFPGC guard who was burned to death in the fire.
They had two deaths on each side.
But again, if you read most of the accounts of that day from pro-opposition people, they will just say that, well, the PLFPGC murdered 14 peaceful protesters.
And so that's just not really an accurate description of what happened.
But that, again, was another event that was used to try to demonize both the Syrian government and the PLFPGC and suggest that they were enemies of Palestinians.
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And then you talk about this major assassination campaign that went on and pretty easily tied it right back to the U.S.
Yeah, there were some leaked emails from the security consulting firm Stratfor that talked about even there being some U.S. Special Forces people involved in Syria being in the country in late 2011, and that they wanted to try to get the rebels to carry out an assassination campaign to try to encourage the Syrian government to collapse.
So I can't say for sure if they are directly connected, but you do see just two months later, starting in January 2012, where a number of members of what's called the Palestinian Liberation Army, a number of leaders of the PLA, were assassinated by rebels.
And the journalist Sharmin Narwani, who I'm sure you know, she wrote some really great reports about that.
So that was kind of the first attempt by the Syrian rebels to use violence and intimidation against pro-Syrian Palestinian leaders to try to intimidate them and get them to withdraw their support for the Syrian government.
I guess I should say the Palestinian Liberation Army was originally established, I think, in the 1960s.
And there was a branch in every different country where there were Palestinian refugees.
Eventually all of them were dissolved, except for in Syria where the PLA or the Palestinian Liberation Army became just an all-Palestinian arm of the Syrian army.
But the rebels started assassinating leaders from the PLA, even though the PLA, again, was still staying neutral.
They hadn't been fighting in the conflict at all.
But rebels targeted them for assassination during that period, starting in January 2012.
And at that time, the popular opinion overall in the Yarmouk camp, it's not like everybody there is Hamas or anything like that, right?
So were they, what were they?
Well, it's just a mix.
I mean, Hamas had a presence there, but again, a lot of the different Palestinian factions, not only the PFLP-GC, but also just the PFLP, which was another Marxist faction of the PLO founded by George Habash decades ago.
But in general, people just wanted to stay neutral.
Again, they'd had all these other problems Palestinians had in other conflicts, the Lebanese civil war in Jordan in 1970, Black September, where Palestinians got involved in fighting against the Jordanian government.
There were big problems during the 1991 Gulf War when Yasser Arafat was perceived to be supporting Saddam Hussein at that time, and that resulted in some 400,000 or so Palestinians getting expelled from Kuwait.
So Palestinians had all kinds of problems getting involved in these intra-Arab disputes, and they just didn't want any part of it.
They asked the rebel groups to just leave them out of it.
But the Syrian rebels wanted to draw the Palestinians into the conflict for their own reasons, and they also wanted to take over Yarmouk camp.
Again, because it's in a very strategic position in the outskirts of Damascus.
It's just like 10 kilometers or so from Assad's presidential palace, and everyone kind of understood that Yarmouk was essentially the gateway to Damascus.
So the rebels were constantly trying to infiltrate the camp and take it over, which they eventually did, but Palestinians themselves just wanted to stay neutral and stay out of the conflict.
Yeah, that's a pretty bad position to be in there, of course.
All right, so then what happened?
Where were we at beginning of 2012 here?
So there was another really controversial event.
So in addition to the leaders of the Palestine Liberation Army that were assassinated by rebels, there were also these 16 PLA conscripts who the rebels kidnapped and murdered in the summer of 2012.
And that was another effort on the part of the rebels to intimidate Palestinians into ending their support for the Syrian government.
There's controversy about the opposition.
Activists always try to claim that it was actually the Syrian government that kidnapped and murdered these young PLA conscripts.
In the paper you can see my explanation as to why it's clear that it was actually the rebels that did that.
In fact, the spokesperson for the FSA claimed in the Lebanese Daily Star newspaper that just a few weeks after that happened that pro-Syrian government Palestinian leaders were legitimate targets.
At any rate, the details are in the paper, but those 16 PLA conscripts were kidnapped and killed.
Many of them were beheaded.
And their driver – this is an interesting event – the driver of the Palestinians that were kidnapped, they were in a bus returning home from training exercises.
And the driver, who wasn't a soldier himself, the rebels took him, didn't immediately kill him like the others.
And they tried to make him an unwitting suicide bomber, essentially, where they put him in a truck full of explosives and told him that they were going to release him and told him to drive towards the Syrian government or Syrian army checkpoint.
And he kind of figured out what was going on, and just as he was approaching the checkpoint he apparently veered away.
And then the rebels detonated the explosives, but the Syrian soldiers at the checkpoint were saved because he did that.
So that was another big event that took place right then.
Yeah, those were the main events during that period.
And then it was not until – it was finally in December 2012 that the rebels, both the Nusra Front, the al-Qaeda franchise in Syria, and also the Free Syrian Army, that they both then finally invaded Yarmouk camp and took it over in December 2012.
So I guess that's the next major event to talk about.
Okay.
Well, yeah, so let's exactly talk about that and especially in the context of this section here.
Who are the truly moderate rebels in your piece?
And, of course, you famously have this great write-up previously for us at the Institute about – I think it's, there is no FSA, only al-Qaeda here, that kind of thing.
But the way you put it here is you say that the FSA, of course, was – oh, and you're actually quoting even a Saudi paper saying, well, of course, the FSA was originally established more or less by the foreigners with Syrian army defectors.
But that very quickly all of the Islamist groups just figured out in order to get the guns and money, you just joined up this FSA thing, call yourself a moderate and you get all the guns and money you want.
And so you have all these kooks, I guess, from the very beginning, essentially bin Ladenite-type groups coming and becoming the FSA.
And that's from the very beginning?
Yeah, from pretty early on.
That's the next paper I want to write is about what I'll probably title the Salafist roots of the Free Syrian Army.
But that's the usual Western narrative, of course, is that the Free Syrian Army are secular, moderate rebels that want democracy.
But if you look at it, events closely, most of the Free Syrian Army groups were Islamist in orientation, and they were also very sectarian and had a very anti-Alawite – had very anti-Alawite views and were constantly talking about wanting to kill Alawites.
So everyone kind of acknowledges that, yeah, Al-Qaeda has that ideology that they essentially advocate genocide against Alawites.
And ISIS, of course, has a similar ideology, and we see what they do to Alawites, Christians, Yazidis, etc.
But it's not often acknowledged that the Free Syrian Army, many of those brigades had similar ideas.
There were brigades that were named after Ibn Taymiyyah, who was kind of a fringe, fanatic Muslim scholar that lived in Damascus in, I think, the 1300s.
I'd have to double-check that.
But Ibn Taymiyyah's religious rulings are what are constantly relied on to justify killing Alawites as heretics.
And there's a long history of that view.
So the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria has advocated killing Alawites for a long time, one of their major ideologues who led the Islamist insurrection against the Syrian government back between 1979 and 1982.
He was a big advocate of citing Ibn Taymiyyah's religious rulings to justify murdering Alawites.
So these FSA groups, they're very sectarian, and so that shouldn't be any surprise that they often cooperate with the al-Qaeda franchise, with the Nusra Front, because their ideology is not very different.
And when the United States even put the Nusra Front on its terrorist list in December 2012, of course, many of these FSA groups and even the political leadership of the Syrian opposition came out and expressed their support for the Nusra Front.
Saying that they shouldn't be considered terrorists.
So anyway, those are the rebel groups.
And when people talk about Yarmouk, they rarely even mention that the rebels invaded and occupied Yarmouk, and that Syrian government violence, right or wrong, was the response to that.
But they definitely don't mention, really, who the rebels were, and that, again, it was both FSA and the Nusra Front that jointly invaded and occupied Yarmouk in December 2012.
And then the Syrian government, when they imposed the siege on Yarmouk, which is, again, what you normally hear about when reading about events there, the Syrian army imposing the siege on Yarmouk was a response to, again, al-Qaeda occupying the camp and trying to use it to invade Damascus more broadly.
And that's an important point, because I think people listening might say, man, who gives a crap about which group I've never heard of controls this camp I've never heard of, but al-Nusra is, as the State Department admitted at the end of 2012, just an alias for al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And the al-Nusra Front being just the Syrian-dominated faction of the worst part of the Sunni-based insurgency that America fought in Iraq War II, the Bin Ladenites.
And so that's why it matters, is because, as you're saying, here you have this so-called moderate secular FSA public relations front more than anything else.
Then you have these real Bin Ladenite groups joining right up with it.
And what's the proof that at least they're bad enough, if they're not actual Bin Ladenites in every respect, is that here they fight side by side with the al-Nusra Front that is sworn loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri and his goals in taking this camp, working together side by side all along.
And just to chime in a little, and not for the credit, but to point out, because a lot of people knew better all along, that we knew better all along.
Many of us said so all along.
The game was up when Alistair Crook wrote in, I'm pretty sure, July 2011, that Prince Bandar is sending jihadis to Syria.
That's all you need to know right there.
There goes your domestic progressive revolution, guys, if you ever were having one.
This is now just an extension of the Sunni insurgency from Iraq War II now spreading to the West.
Simple as that.
And for America to be on the side of those same guys and helping them do things like the rest of what you're describing here, that's the context.
That's why this stuff matters to regular Americans listening to this in Texas or Utah or anywhere else.
Yeah, and ironically, members of the leadership of the PSLTGC that was, again, fighting alongside the Syrian army, they have accused Prince Bandar of having orchestrated the initial rebel invasion of Yarmouk in December 2012.
And that could be credible because there's an NSA document that was released through The Intercept, I'm sure you're aware of, where Prince Bandar was quoted by the NSA as instructing Syrian rebels to light up the airport in Damascus.
And that took place just a couple months.
I think it was March 2013.
That was just maybe two or three months after the Nusra Front and the FSA invaded Yarmouk.
But the PSLTGC leadership there convinced it was Prince Bandar that had planned the initial invasion of Yarmouk.
Also important to mention is that the CIA program to start arming and funding the Syrian rebels probably started in November 2012.
And there are New York Times reports talking about a cataract of weaponry that the CIA was sending into Syria.
David Petraeus, the CIA director at the time, was working with the Saudis in the countries that purchased weapons in Croatia, shipped those either to Turkey but also to Jordan.
And then those weapons were moved up through Jordan and into southern Syria, which then helped with an effort to try to invade Damascus again in late 2012.
There was a recognition that all the fighting in the north and the gains that the rebels had been making in the north of the country really weren't going to be able to topple the Syrian government.
And so there was an effort on the part of the CIA to reorient the war back towards the south and then towards Damascus.
And so November 2012, again according to the New York Times reports, that's when there was just this massive flood of weaponry going to the Syrian rebels.
And so that appeared to be what allowed the rebels to then make that push to invade Yarmouk, which again was part of a broader effort to try to take over Damascus itself.
So the rebels, they are sectarian, anti-Alawite, and affiliated to al-Qaida or al-Qaida itself.
And the United States was giving weapons to them.
And it was really clear that the weapons were ending up with al-Qaida, and the U.S. planners knew this.
I mean, it was no secret.
Like you said, this is something you've known for—a lot of people have known for a long time.
But the weapons kept flowing to the U.S., even though the weapons were going to al-Qaida, even though they were going to the Nusra Front.
The U.S. kept getting more and more and more weapons.
As you said, that was the New York Times version of events as of, at the very least, October of 2012.
In fact, there was one piece that was before that, one major piece.
But certainly the jihadists get the majority of the weapons was the headline from David Sanger in the New York Times in October of 2012.
And that was before the State Department even admitted that Nusra was really just al-Qaida in Iraq.
But, you know, remember this.
Phil Giraldi in The American Conservative and at Antiwar.com in December of 2011 reported that Obama had signed new findings, one on Iran and one on Syria, authorizing the beginning of this.
So I know there's a question of, I guess at first, supposedly what was authorized was the coordination of Saudi, Turkey and whoever else was in on it.
And then, you know, the actual green light for American money and American guns to go beyond just coordination was later.
But certainly they'd already begun.
And in fact, Eric Margulies reported in, I'm going to have to say it was September, October, I think September of 2011, that he was just back from France and all of his intelligence and so forth.
Military sources were telling him that French special forces were on the ground helping coordinate the beginning of the war at that point.
So the whole thing definitely was on from 2011.
Yeah, and a lot of supporters of the opposition, they constantly complain that the United States hasn't helped the rebels.
They complain that, well, actually the U.S. wants Assad to stay in power.
And they talk about, again, maybe certain brigades of the Free Syrian Army that don't have enough weapons and things like that.
But again, most of it was, as you're mentioning, most of it early on, it was just coordinating through the Saudis and the Qataris.
And so then there's this attempt on U.S. officials' part, like, oh, well, we can't control these crazy Saudis.
They're Qataris giving weapons that are ending up in the hands of jihadists, and we can't do anything about it.
But in reality, that was all being coordinated by the CIA, and that's not conspiracy theory or anything, as you're mentioning.
There are lots of reports, including the New York Times, talking about that coordination.
And I think you even quoted before in one of your other pieces, you quoted my interviews with Flint Leverett, where right around the time in 2012, certainly like in the summer of 2012, or at the same time the DIA is saying the same thing about what's going on here, Flint Leverett, the former CIA analyst and NSC staffer, agreed that, yes, when they say that Saudis doing this and Qatar and Turkey are doing that, this is simply deniability.
This is, you know, America's the empire, our CIA, again, New York Times version, is coordinating all of this.
So who's zooming who here?
Right.
So, yeah, I think that's just an important thing to emphasize, that anything the Saudis and the Qataris were doing, that that essentially was in accordance with U.S. policy.
And we shouldn't be kind of thinking that, oh, the Saudis and the Qataris are doing all this rogue activity and sending weapons to ISIS or Minusra or whatever.
But, you know, that, again, is in accordance with U.S. policy, based on, again, all the references you just discussed.
Yep.
And, of course, you know, Biden complains about it, that it's so unfortunate.
And then Kerry turns right around and goes, yeah, so that's what we were trying to do.
So I think I'll take Kerry's word for it.
He was the one being secretly recorded, unlike Biden, who knew he was on camera.
Yeah, exactly.
So that's another really disturbing thing, is that not only did the U.S. support al-Qaida in the form of the Nusra Front to invade Yarmouk and occupy it in December 2012, but later in 2015, the Nusra Front cooperated with ISIS to allow ISIS militants to enter the camp.
And then from April 2015 until the camp was liberated by the Syrian army in May of 2018, it was ISIS that was the main armed faction in the camp.
And, again, that was in 2015.
And of that period, as you mentioned, John Kerry discussed secretly or privately, acknowledged that actually U.S. planners welcomed ISIS threatening Damascus.
The U.S. thought they could use the threat of ISIS against the government in Damascus to get leverage against the Syrian government and get them to give up power.
So U.S. planners were actually happy to see ISIS on the verge of taking over Damascus.
And, again, you could just imagine how terrible that would have been if what U.S. planners wanted would have actually taken place.
Obviously, we see that in, say, Sinjar in Iraq, where Yezidis were massacred and women were taken as sex slaves and all these things.
I mean, that's the type of thing that would have been happening in Damascus.
And that was something that U.S. planners actually welcomed just because they wanted to bring Assad down and just because they wanted to weaken Iran, who is the Syrian government's ally.
And that's really, obviously, it's very disturbing, to say the least, I guess.
Well, and even the thinking behind, of course, we know how it worked out, as Kerry himself put it, that, ah, geez, instead of capitulating, Assad went and asked Putin for help.
And Putin called our bluff, and so now our bluff is called.
And so here we are.
That was in 2015.
There, no regime change after all.
But even without Russia involved, the thinking that what we're going to do is we're going to support, as you're talking about, these essentially murderous, nihilist monsters, suicide bomber, minority sect enslavers, that we're going to unleash them, back them, turn a blind eye to them, help our friends support them, to put pressure on Assad so that he will then step down.
In favor of who?
In favor of what?
What in the world is John Kerry talking about?
What force was there?
It was supposed to be the next Ba'athist?
We're going to keep the state but not Assad?
Is that what he's trying to say?
But does he even have a name?
Do they even have a plan at all?
They're saying that this was just pressure.
Not that they wanted to replace Assad with the Islamic State, heaven forfend, but what were they going to do?
And how did they figure that faced with the Islamic State and the al-Nusra Front as his replacements, that Assad would do anything but fight to the death?
Again, with or without help from the Russians.
Right?
It's insane to think.
It's just like saying that, you know, if the French and the British gave a lot of support to the South in the American Civil War, that that would pressure Abraham Lincoln to step down rather than double down.
Hey, give me a break.
The whole thing is just stupid on the face of it.
If anyone put themselves in Assad's position, they would see why, especially as a leader of this minority Alawite sect who, as you mentioned, are the special targets of these bin Ladenites.
You know, their focus above and beyond the Christians or the Shia or anybody else.
That's who they hate and want to kill more than anyone.
But that's going to pressure him to – imagine that John Kerry somehow lost to George W. Bush.
You know?
Here we are.
Yeah, and not only that it would make Assad try to stay in power, but just that it would make Syrians in general, you know, want to continue fighting with the Syrian army against the rebels.
Right.
Again, not only just Alawites.
Had Damascus fallen to either Nusra or ISIS, as U.S. planners had hoped, it wouldn't just be the Alawites who would have been massacred, but pro-government Sunnis.
I mean, that's the other big misconception, or the many big misconceptions about the Syria war, but there's this idea that all of the Sunnis in Syria, which are about 70 percent, that they all support the rebels.
And that's just not the case.
You know, when you understand that Syria has a very secular history, good relations for the most part between Christians, Muslims, Alawites, et cetera, most Sunni Muslims in Syria aren't Wahhabis.
They're not Salafis, and that's the orientation of these rebel groups.
And in fact, most Sunni Muslims in Syria for a long time were Sufis, and so they don't like Salafis.
The major, the biggest, the most famous Syrian cleric who was murdered by the rebels in 2013, Muhammad Sayyid Ramadan al-Buti, he was a Sufi and a very strong critic of Salafism.
And so that's one big reason why he stuck with supporting the government when the Syria conflict broke out.
But that's, again, a big misconception that all Sunnis in Syria support the rebels.
In my view, most of them don't, and it makes sense because most Syrian Sunnis aren't extremists.
They're not Wahhabis.
They're not Salafis.
So the rebel groups are just, those are not the type of people that most Syrian Sunnis would support.
So again, if ISIS or Nusra had taken over Damascus, many, many pro-government or just regular Sunnis would have been killed as well, probably.
Yeah.
So, and that's such an interesting point because you're right.
The way people try to phrase it or, you know, the media essentially try to frame it is that it's this minority rule against the majority there when, first of all, the minority includes all of these different sects, right?
Three or four different kinds of Christians, the Shiites, the Druze, which it's interesting.
I actually have a friend who's a Lebanese Druze, and he says they're a combination between, I'm pretty sure he said Sunniism, Christianity, and Greek mythology.
So I'm just quoting him.
I don't know a thing about it, but that's what he told me.
So that's kind of fun.
And then, of course, all the Shia and the Alawites, which the Alawites sort of predate the Shia, and there's sort of a break off of the Shia, depends on who you ask in the context there.
And then you have, as you say, 60 percent, sorry, 70 percent of the population of the country are Sunni Arabs.
And then, so there's a huge question then, of course, of what percentage of those Sunni Arabs favor the state and secular rule and the old regime, which was an inherited family monarchy dictatorship.
Let's not kid ourselves here, a police state.
Which percentage of them support and did support back then, especially in this context, the central state versus the foreign-backed, essentially jihadist rebellion here?
And by the way, and I guess taking into account, too, that the way I understand it, the majority of the infantry and the enlisted men in the army were Sunni Arabs.
And then I'm not sure about the percentage of the officer corps, because I've heard that debated back and forth, but can you comment on that?
And then when you say, as far as you can tell, it's a majority, in terms of the overall Sunni Arab population.
Can you tell us what are your best indications of that?
Well, most of the, just because most of the Syrian population is Sunni Arab, most of the conscripts in the Syrian army are also Sunni Arab.
Most of the, in the officer class and in the higher ranks, more for sure are Alawite, a little bit like in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein, he had most of the top officers were not only Sunnis, but people from his tribe and his area around Tikrit, keeping people that were, you know, that he could rely on or trust that were close to him.
So it didn't even matter that they were Sunnis so much, but that they were from, you know, tribes around Tikrit.
But that's my understanding of the Syrian military as well, that most of the top echelons of the army are Alawite, but most of the conscripts are Sunnis.
And that's not an ideal situation.
But there's always this accusation, too, that the Assad regime is sectarian, and they're trying to commit genocide against Sunnis.
And that's just not the case.
Again, most of the people in the army are Sunnis.
There have been some defections, obviously, from the Syrian army, and there are some people who defected to join the rebels and some who just deserted and left the country.
But there are still large, large numbers of Sunni soldiers.
And it just wasn't in the interest of Assad or the Syrian government to try to carry out some type of campaign against Sunnis as an ethnic group or as a religion, because that was a base that Assad needed.
You know, he needed support of many of the Sunnis in the country, and if he didn't have that, he would have been gone a long time ago.
On the other hand, it was in the interest of the rebels to promote sectarianism, to promote the idea that Alawites should all be murdered and killed, because if they could convince 70 percent of the Syrian population that the government was somehow trying to carry out genocide against Sunnis, well, then that's a pretty big constituency that they win, and they suddenly have the majority of the country.
Assad, on the other hand, that was not in his interest.
He had to appeal to the Sunnis in order to keep enough support.
And so from the Syrian government, you don't get the idea that, hey, we need to kill the Sunnis.
I mean, to a lot of Americans, it's distasteful that the Syrian government refers to the rebels all as terrorists.
And that's obviously problematic and reminiscent of the things that George Bush was doing during the so-called war on terror.
You obviously dehumanize people when you refer to them as terrorists.
So I don't support that.
I don't think that's a good thing.
But at the same time, the Syrian government doesn't talk about just saying, hey, we need to kill all the Sunnis, whereas the rebels talk about, hey, we want to kill all the Alawites.
So at least the Syrian government was saying, hey, let's just talk about these people as terrorists without any reference to their ethnicity, without any reference to their religion.
I mean, again, Assad, his wife is Sunni.
He goes and prays in Sunni mosques all the time.
There's no effort, there's no war against Sunni Islam on the part of the Syrian government.
They're at war with the rebels who are affiliated with al-Qaeda and don't support that they refer to them all as terrorists necessarily.
But it's better than what the rebels are doing on the other side in terms of promoting sectarianism and talking about committing genocide against another ethnic group.
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Well, I mean the Bin Ladenites as I call them, I focus on the political radicalism.
Because you could be an Islamist but not willing to fight to the death about it, right?
You could be a total quietist on, you know, any kind.
There's a lot of variations, I guess, in terms of how seriously people take their religion versus how seriously they're willing to try to implement it against someone else's wishes and these kinds of things.
But the Bin Ladenites, we know who they are.
They're essentially, you know, like these right-wing Wahhabist, Leninist sort of revolutionaries in a way, right-wing radicals who want to overthrow this whole damn order and all of that and are willing to go to the most extreme lengths to do it, as we've seen since, you know, obviously Al-Qaeda itself in the 90s and with 9-11 and all of that.
But then, of course, with the Zarqawiites in Iraq War II.
And we've seen how, from the very beginning here, how the Yalnuz Refront do business, murdering people, suicide attacking schools full of women and children and God knows what.
I remember in 2013, there was the young boy with the vegetable cart and someone tried to say, hey, give me a discount on an orange or something.
And he says, hey, I wouldn't even give a discount to Muhammad himself.
And the Al-Nusra guy says, what did you just say?
Bam!
And shoots him in the head.
And these were the moderate rebels.
These are the guys we're working with here.
And, you know, Obama himself, as we were talking about before with the moderate this and Islamists, Obama bin Laden himself, the president, said it was always a fantasy that the doctors and lawyers and pharmacists and factory workers and whoever were going to come together and form this militia that was going to take on all the jihadists and all of Hezbollah and Iran and the Syrian state and all of these things, that that didn't exist.
He knew that didn't exist all along, but there sure were a lot of fighters.
So who were they then?
They were not doctors and pharmacists and farmers and friends.
They were a bunch of kooks.
They were a bunch of, essentially, a bunch of Zarqawiites.
And from the beginning, and, you know, one more thing about this before I stop talking and let you talk more.
David Enders, the great reporter who I've been talking with him since, you know, the worst days of Iraq War II in like 2004 and 2005, I think.
And then so he was doing all this great work on Syria, too.
And one of the things I had learned from him back in Iraq War II was that it really was unfair to call the entire Sunni insurgency there terrorists because a lot of them didn't target civilians and a lot of them were not Zarqawiites.
And it was al-Qaeda in Iraq was really a small part of the Sunni-based insurgency there.
But it made sense for Zarqawi and it made sense for the U.S. and I guess for their Shiite allies as well to really focus on him in order to discredit the entire insurgency as, you know, these terrorists.
When essentially it was just a normal nationalist-type reaction about get the hell off my lawn and that kind of thing, just like you'd have anywhere.
And yet in the Syria war, same reporter, same question from the same questioner.
And the answer was no.
See, there may be a lot of people who, you know, were part of the protest movement and are very kind of anti-government here.
But in terms of who's doing the fighting against the Assad regime, the whole thing is dominated by the al-Nusra Front.
And it really always was from the beginning.
They weren't the smallest part of the Sunni-based insurgency here.
They were the Sunni-based insurgency here virtually all along.
The only thing with the Islamic State, as you obviously talk about in the scheme of things, is just that they ended up breaking off.
The Iraqi faction of al-Qaeda in Iraq broke off from al-Qaeda and from the Syrian faction.
But it was the same thing.
Yeah, and as Theo Padnos discusses, he was a journalist who was kidnapped by the Nusra Front for a couple years.
And so he had conversations with a lot of their leadership during his time when he was kidnapped.
But he talks about how ISIS and Nusra essentially split off due to a dispute over oil revenue.
Who was that that you're citing that said that again?
Theo Padnos.
So I talk about that in one of my earlier articles about why the Syrian government had to end up buying oil from ISIS.
It wasn't any effort to support ISIS or anything.
It was just a necessity because in 2000, I think it was March 2013, both the FSA and the Nusra Front together jointly occupied a bunch of areas near Deir ez-Zor in eastern Syria, took over the oil fields there.
And so suddenly the Nusra Front realized, hey, they were sitting on these big oil fields where they could make a lot of money off of that, obviously.
And it was literally basically the same week that Baghdadi, the head of ISIS, informed Jelani, the head of the Nusra Front, that, hey, the Nusra Front is being dissolved and actually we're all just one organization, and I, Baghdadi, am at the top of it.
He made that announcement right after – or right, it might have even been as Nusra Front was about to take over all these oil fields, in eastern Syria.
That was right when Baghdadi made the announcement.
So Padnos claims that, hey, it was just a dispute over oil revenues is what made these groups split, and that would make sense given the timing of it.
But when you read the Syria commentators, they talk about the split between ISIS and Nusra.
They talk about ideology or doctrine or this or that, and it's like, no, it's just kind of a power grab.
I mean, these groups are more like gangs than anything.
But anyway, I can forward you the link on that.
Yeah, I'm not sure.
I think that's different.
I've read that before elsewhere.
I'm pretty sure in the Jihad Next Door in Politico magazine, I think had a bit about the oil there.
And then I'm trying to remember, there's some other – it may be the thing that you're sending, but it may be something else.
But I've read that before as well, that it really was.
Yeah, Jelani was saying, well, geez, I don't really need you, Baghdadi.
And Baghdadi was saying, oh, yeah, you do too.
And then what was I – and see, I'm sorry, I've been reading so much about this, I got all confused.
I was just reading a thing in Max Blumenthal's new book last night, where part of that, he talks about how Baghdadi insisted that the Al-Nusra Front attack a group of so-called moderate FSA types inside Turkey.
And how Jelani said, man, that's crazy.
We need the Turks' help.
There's no point in alienating them right now.
And that Baghdadi was in a rage about that.
And I didn't know about that.
I'll have to go back and check the sourcing on that.
But that was part of the lead up to that as well.
And it seems like that Baghdadi guy kind of has an ego problem with people telling him, no, I can't see that.
Yeah.
Mr. Caliph Ibrahim and all of this stuff.
And telling Zawahiri that, hey, I don't have to take orders from you.
Which there's a lesson there about decapitation strikes, right?
Is even getting Osama, now you just set Baghdadi free.
Whereas he would have done what Osama said, but he didn't feel like he had to obey Zawahiri.
Yeah.
And maybe to go back to the earlier point about the nature of the rebels being Islamists.
You're right.
Some Salafis are quietists and they don't want to get involved in politics.
They don't want to be fighting or killing anybody.
So that's an important point to make.
And then other Islamists, Hamas, they're Islamists, of course.
But they are not sectarian.
So Hamas for years had been cooperating with Hezbollah and obviously getting support from Iran.
And so there was no problem for Sunnis from Hamas to be working.
Again, even if their origins in the Muslim Brotherhood, there's no problem for them to be working with Shiites.
And that the sectarianism just was not a thing.
But there's a difference in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, it seems like, where there is that history of anti-Alawite sectarianism based on the influence of, again, Ibn Taymiyyah.
And so you see that as being a big driver of that insurrection from 1979 to 82, is that they couldn't stand that there was an Alawite president.
And so there's been that idea that we hate the Alawites, we want to kill the Alawites.
It kind of seems unique to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, which again provided a lot of the ammunition for the Syrian uprising to kind of explode and become very violent, where it didn't in Egypt, for example.
I mean, a lot of the Egyptian opposition that overthrew Mubarak, some of it was liberal, secular Democrats, but a lot of it was Muslim Brotherhood, obviously, as evidenced by the fact that Morsi won the election.
But why didn't it get militarized there?
I mean, partly the CIA wasn't sending guns to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
That's one big reason.
But also, you know, there just isn't that issue of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria hating the Alawites and wanting to start a war as a result of that.
So, you know, obviously I don't want to make it seem like all Islamists are bad.
That's not my view.
I mean, I'm not an Islamist or a Muslim, obviously, myself, but there are different shades of things.
But in Syria, it was like there was this special sectarianism from the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria that you just don't really see from Muslim Brotherhood groups even in other countries in the Middle East.
Yeah, of course, they participate in the parliament in Qatar.
And as you say, they ran for office and won in Egypt before America and Israel and Saudi Arabia's allies in the military canceled that back in 2013.
Of course, Hamas ran for election and won and survived a coup.
And of course, that's why al-Qaeda, Zawahiri especially, has always denounced the Muslim Brotherhood.
Or not always, but since he split from them in the early 1980s, he's always denounced them for, you know, playing a sucker's game and going along with parliamentary systems and democratic elections and the Western trappings of power when they ought to be suicide bombers like him.
Yeah.
And so in Syria, again, it's important to point out that, hey, the FSA, for example, they're not the secular Democrats that they're always portrayed to be.
I mean, they are Islamists.
And, you know, that could be a problem or it could not be a problem.
But in the case of Syria, it is a problem because of the anti-Alawite sectarianism that's just deeply embedded within the Muslim Brotherhood.
And then also, again, within Salafism itself, there is a lot of anti-Alawite sentiment that seems pretty consistent.
And Salafism was growing, you know, in the decade before the outbreak of the Syrian conflict and was becoming more and more prominent due to the influence of, you know, Saudi religious channels and also Syrians that would go to work in Saudi Arabia, pick up Wahhabi or Salafi ideas and then come and bring them back to Syria.
And so that's something that, you know, you see the areas where they were quickly militarized and the rebels that started fighting against the government.
I mean, they were just mostly from Salafi areas.
And that's really the makeup of the Free Syrian Army.
Even Douma, for example, on the outskirts of Damascus, where the Jaysh al-Islam, and Zahran al-Lush were very powerful.
That was like kind of a Salafist hotbed on the outskirts of Damascus.
Anyways, those are important points to make, I think.
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All right, so tell us more about the poor Palestinians stuck in this Yarmouk camp between American-backed al-Qaeda coups and the Syrian Arab Army.
Yeah, so it was a tough situation when the al-Qaeda, or sorry, Nusra and the FSA invaded in December 2012.
In response, the Syrian government imposed a siege on the camp, limited what was coming in and what was going out, food, things like that.
And that created really tough conditions, obviously.
And it does appear that between, especially September 2013 and December 2013, that the Syrian government really locked the camp down.
And that's when you started getting people starving to death because there wasn't enough food.
And that was obviously what a lot of the human rights groups are focused on.
When you read about Yarmouk is the government siege, which was very brutal and definitely a bad thing.
In January 2014, again after about four months of the camp really being closed and having a terrible effect on people, the Syrian government seemed to change their policy and did start to facilitate food entering the camp.
The PFLPGC was trying to get food into the camp.
And that was a period where, oddly, rebels were shooting at these humanitarian convoys trying to enter the camp with their snipers.
And so the rebels exacerbated the siege by preventing food from coming in at times once the Syrian government was trying to get it in, and then also by hoarding food that actually was in the camp.
And that was also something that you see in a lot of areas that were under Syrian government siege.
In Douma, that was a lot of reports of the rebels there hoarding food that people needed.
And as a result, people starved.
Same thing in Aleppo.
But that kind of characterized the situation from September 2013 until January 2014, when again the Syrian government tried to do better and start allowing food in.
And then in addition, there were constantly, throughout the period where the camp was occupied by the rebels, there was constantly efforts to negotiate an exit of the rebels.
I mean, that was what the Palestinians wanted.
It was, again, to make the camp neutral.
There were different delegations from the PLO that came and tried to negotiate an end to the fighting.
And it was always the condition that the rebel groups should leave, and so the camp could become neutral again.
And the rebel groups just always ended up refusing to do that.
So there are a number of quotes from Palestinian officials where, you know, they talk about how the Syrian rebels are largely to blame for the problems in Yarmouk, which again runs very counter to the narrative that you get when you're reading, say, something from Amnesty International in terms of what was going on in the camp.
Yeah.
And now, so what's the situation there, you know, presently?
At the moment, I mean, the Syrian army was finally able to liberate the camp in May 2018, so it's just coming up on about a year.
I guess I didn't mention this earlier, but when the rebels did invade in December 2012, as a result of the fighting between the Syrian army and the rebels, most people left.
Again, there had been maybe 800,000 Palestinians there before the fighting started.
And once the rebels invaded, within about a week or two or three, there was probably just 20,000, 30,000 people in the camp, and it had remained that way for the next five years with just more and more people slowly being able to get out of the camp, and the Syrian government at different times has facilitated people, civilians evacuating.
So by the time the Syrian army assaulted the camp starting in April 2018, there was maybe 5,000 civilians in the camp at that point, and then right at the beginning of the army operation in April 2018, another 5,000 or so civilians were evacuated, and so by the end there were probably only a couple hundred people there.
So the camp is largely destroyed from the fighting, and there's just been slow efforts on the part of the PLO with the Syrian government to begin trying to rebuild.
But my understanding so far is that there has not been a ton of progress made in terms of people being able to come back to the camp yet or to rebuild it, because, again, much of it was destroyed over the course of the five years of fighting.
Man.
Yeah, you know what?
And this is one of those things where I guess if we were talking about priorities for TV news coverage, this isn't even on there anywhere.
It's below 1,000 on the list, the Palestinians of Syria.
Yeah, you would think it was pretty big news for the camp to be, or for ISIS to finally be defeated in Yarmouk and in the outskirts of Damascus broadly.
I mean, it's big news in the U.S. when ISIS is defeated in Mosul or in Raqqa or, you know, obviously it's been in the news a lot recently, these last pockets of ISIS control in eastern Syria where ISIS is finally being defeated.
Well, get with the times, man.
You know, it used to be that jihadists east of the Sykes-Picot line were bad, but west were good, but now clearly that line is the Euphrates River.
So, jihadists west of the Euphrates, they're still totally kosher.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
It really is as stupid as that.
I'm sorry for putting it that way, but isn't that the policy?
I'm pretty sure it is.
Well, yeah, that's an interesting thing that I'd like to write another paper about as well.
I thought about kind of including some of this in the Yarmouk piece, but obviously it was just getting too long.
But when the Russians, I mean, again, you know, based on a lot of things we've discussed already, it was basically U.S. policy to have the jihadists of one form or another take over eastern Syria, establish the so-called Salafist Principality that's talked about in the DIA memo from 2012.
So that was the policy.
And then as ISIS created their so-called caliphate and continued to expand, they took over not only Mosul and Fallujah and all these places in western Iraq, but they were also finally threatening Erbil where there's U.S. interests, U.S. military bases and western oil companies.
When ISIS took over too much territory, suddenly the U.S. had to intervene and prevent ISIS from expanding or expanding into Baghdad.
And then in Syria, the U.S. intervened in, say, Kobani in 2014, I think it was, when ISIS was pushing up against the Kurds and threatening to take over all this Kurdish territory.
But what the U.S. never bothered to do and never wanted to do was to defeat ISIS as they were expanding west.
So from, you know, Palmyra, for example, or towards Damascus, it was always the policy that, hey, we want ISIS to expand if they're threatening the Syrian government, whereas we want to bomb them and fight against them if they're threatening the Kurds, whether in northern Syria or in Iraq.
And so then when the Russians intervened in 2015, you know, in my view at least, the Americans kind of understood that the game was up, that, hey, now that the Russians are involved, they're going to defeat Nusra in northern and central Syria.
They're also going to eventually defeat ISIS in eastern Syria, in Raqqa, for example.
And so in my view, that's when U.S. policy shifted from saying, hey, we're going to just basically put a bunch of weapons into the country that Nusra can use to try to fight the Syrian government.
And at that point, they realized that strategy wasn't going to work, and so they shifted gears, and that's when the SDF, the Syrian Democratic Forces, were created.
The U.S. had been collaborating already with some Kurdish militias from the YPG, but they established the Syrian Democratic Forces literally like 10 days after the Russians announced their intervention in September 2015.
And then that started basically a race to defeat ISIS in eastern Syria.
It was a race between the U.S. and the SDF on the one hand, and then between the— on the other hand was the Syrian army and the Russian military.
And so the Syrians and the Russians were west of the Euphrates, and they were going towards Deir ez-Zor trying to defeat ISIS, and then the Americans and the SDF were coming from the northeast, on the eastern side of the Euphrates, as you mentioned.
And again, it was just a race to see who could defeat ISIS first.
And the U.S. figured, hey, if we can't get the jihadists to overthrow the Syrian government in the form of Nusra, that at least what we can do is directly occupy certain Syrian territory.
We can defeat ISIS and occupy the territory that ISIS had been controlling, which has Syria's oil fields.
It's very strategic, important territory.
And that would allow the U.S. to then maintain leverage in the conflict if the U.S. and the SDF could then defeat ISIS in Raqqa and east of the Euphrates and prevent the Syrian government from defeating ISIS and then taking back control of the entire country.
So that was kind of convoluted.
I don't know how well that made sense.
I'll have to write up something proper about it.
Well, the situation's a mess, but you explained it well.
And, of course, that leaves, of course, Idlib province still in the hands of the al-Nusra Front and their allies, I think, you know, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which is what they're calling themselves nowadays, and their alliance with Nur al-Zinki and these other groups.
They're still dominant there.
And I guess from everything I know, William, correct me if I'm wrong about this, but the Washington Post report, which, as they put it, move sure to please Vladimir Putin.
Donald Trump calls off CIA support for the rebels in Syria.
That was in July of 2017, which, that is the funniest thing.
I should get the paper copy of that and hang it on my wall.
It's so funny.
So what I understand is that that really happened.
And, in fact, I asked a CIA, former CIA, you know how that goes, former CIA officer that I know about, well, what was the reaction at the CIA to that?
And he said they all supported that move.
They always hated this treason of supporting al-Nusra.
Obama gives them orders, they carry it out.
But they don't hate Iran and Hezbollah more than they hate al-Qaeda.
And so they were happy to call this thing off.
And I guess Pompeo was the head of the CIA at the time, and there was consensus about going ahead and ending this program at that point, which was already way too late.
We're talking about the summer of 2017 by the time they finally canceled it.
Yeah, and it seemed like, again, U.S. policy shifted a little bit starting in late 2016, and that was when, again, Russia had already intervened for a year, and then the Syrian army and the Russians were about to take back eastern Aleppo, which was a big blow to the Syrian rebels and to the U.S.
First, there was a Washington Post article where some Obama administration officials acknowledged that they had done a deal with the devil, where the United States basically held its fire against Nusra because the group was supposedly popular with Syrians, and that it, quote, furthered the U.S. goal of putting military pressure on Assad.
So they acknowledged that they had been allied with Nusra, even though, again, of course, the weapons had been flowing to Nusra as well.
But that's when Obama administration officials kind of acknowledged, I guess that was like a bad strategy, not for any moral reasons probably, but just because it was losing.
And then John Brennan at the time, I think, was still really trying to continue the CIA program and continue support for Nusra and for the rebels, but then when Trump was elected, again, as you mentioned, he formally ended the Timber Sycamore program in 2017 there.
And then that's where you see, too, suddenly all these rebel groups in Damascus suddenly start being willing to actually agree to evacuation deals.
They must have understood that, hey, the U.S. support, our foreign support isn't coming anymore.
And so when the Syrian government was then trying to defeat the rebel groups in the suburbs of Damascus in late 2017, early 2018, which again culminated in the defeat of Jaysh al-Islam in Douma, which is famous, of course, and then also defeating Nusra and ISIS in Yarmouk, these rebel groups just realized, hey, we're not getting foreign support anymore.
And so I think it does have to do with the fact that the CIA ended that program in mid-2017, that suddenly the Syrian government had a much easier time of defeating the rebel groups around Damascus.
And that's another indication that when there's foreign support for insurgencies, I mean, there's a reason why it's against international law for foreign states to support insurgencies in other countries, because it just escalates the fighting.
It just lengthens the fighting.
It just prolongs the fighting and prolongs the suffering of people.
And so, I mean, yeah, as soon as the U.S. cut off the flow of weapons or basically gave up on supporting the rebels, it wasn't very long before suddenly the war is coming to an end.
Right.
And you know what?
This should go without saying because there's such silly nonsense, but we should mention that when the rebels were chased out of east Aleppo, for example, Assad didn't say, aha, now no one is there to oppose me and I can finish my job of exterminating the civilian population of Aleppo, which is what I was up to.
That didn't happen.
As soon as the last of the jihadists took off toward Idlib, he just went chasing them.
The whole job was just to take that territory back.
It never was about killing the civilians who were caught in the middle.
What a thin line of propaganda that the Americans would cite any resistance by the central government of this state against American and other foreign-backed mercenaries as the reason for the fight in the first place.
But they do get away with that.
I want to point out, you just mentioned pressure on Assad, that Washington Post story about holding their fire on al-Nusra is a nice way to put it, using pressure on Assad.
So it's such a long piece.
I went and hit control F, pressure on Assad.
There's two instances.
One is, as we talked about, John Kerry's own words about why we allowed the rise of the Islamic State, thought we could manage, thought it would put pressure on Assad.
And then the other instance is this Washington Post piece, quoting Obama administration officials anonymously, but talking to the Post, saying that, well, that was what we were doing with al-Nusra too, with both versions of al-Qaeda there.
And with that, I'm so sorry that we're way out of time here.
And there's so much to cover in this great piece, just like all the stuff you've written for the Institute.
I can't tell you, William, how much I appreciate it.
Everyone, this one is called A Brief History of the Destruction of Yarmouk.
It's at the Libertarian Institute, libertarianinstitute.org.
And before that, the myth of U.S. inaction in Syria.
There is no FSA.
There is only al-Qaeda.
Why does Assad buy oil from ISIS, which he mentioned, and more.
There's two or three more of those.
So check all that out at libertarianinstitute.org.
And thank you very much, William.
Really appreciate it.
Oh, hey, I appreciate it.
It's great to finally talk to you in person.
Yeah, man.
Hopefully we will again soon.
Okay.
Sounds good.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
