The Fall of Syria: What You Need to Know
by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
December 15, 2024
In case you haven't heard yet, the world has just changed irrevocably.
After 13 years of battle, the alphabet soup of foreign-financed, foreign-armed, foreign-trained terrorist insurgents in Syria have finally accomplished their goal: the overthrow of Assad.
There are many questions to ponder here. What happened? How did a years-long military stalemate turn into a government-toppling checkmate seemingly overnight? And what does this mean for the future of Syria? For the future of the Middle East? For the future of the world?
Let's find out.
The Story So Far . . .
If you only recently started turning off the nightly news and tuning in to reality, chances are you never really knew what this whole Syria kerfuffle was about or why it's important. And, if that is the case, you have some catching up to do.
Luckily, I've been covering the Syrian debacle since it kicked off in 2011, and I have literally dozens of hours of media on the topic in the archives. If you want the one-hour summary, though, I invite you to check out my recent podcast on the subject, A Brief History of the War on Syria.
Suffice it to say, the war on Syria should not be seen as a "civil war" or a "spontaneous people's protest movement," though it has been described as both by the liars in the US State Department and their sycophantic media lapdogs. Rather, from its very inception, the war on Syria has been a regime change operation carried out by a US/NATO/Israel/Turkey/Saudi/Qatar-backed terrorist insurgency.
If you're confused by the bewildering array of acronymic terror groups taking part in this operation (HTS, SDF, ISIS, ACS, HUR, TIP, etc., etc., etc.), don't sweat it. Veteran war correspondent Eric Margolis gives an admirable two-paragraph summary of the forces that are invested in the Syrian conflict and that were alternately (or sometimes simultaneously) battling, aiding, backstabbing, working with and badmouthing each other over the course of the war.
The US and Israel have been trying to overthrow the Assad regime since 2011. Israel wanted to cement its hold on the strategic Golan Heights that it captured from Syria. The US, which now occupies the oil producing NE third of Syria, has at least 9,000 troops there and, with Israel, helps the jihadists while publicly denouncing them.
Turkey, whose leader hates Assad, is also highly active in Syria and is most likely providing logistic support to HTS and other jihadist groups while also battling leftist Kurdish groups. Add Russian air units near Latakia, occasional help from Hezbollah groups and minor operations from small Iranian forces. In short, the evolving war in Syria looks increasingly like the awful, madhouse Thirty Years' War in the 1600s.
In other words, the battle for Syria has been a long, drawn-out, multinational mess. That mess did not go according to the globalists' plans, and Assad—in stark contrast to Gaddafi—managed to hold on to his position of power in Damascus (with a little help from his "axis of resistance" friends) for 13 years. To be sure, it's been a wild 13 years. Its lowlights have included:
the Western establishment's open alliance with (and even celebration of) the Al Qaeda bogeymen;
the creation of ISIS, a newer, scarier Islamic terror bogeyman that (like Al CIA-da) has been financed, armed, equipped, trained and enabled by the United States, Israel, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia;
the Keystone Cops-level hijinks of US State Department-backed terrorists fighting against CIA-backed terrorists;
the US betrayal of the Kurds (yet again);
a dangerous game of chicken between the US and Russia (and NATO-member Turkey) that brought the world to the brink of all-out global conflict more than once;
the promulgation of debunked chemical weapons false flag after debunked chemical weapons false flag after debunked chemical weapons false flag;
and, of course, a seemingly never-ending torrent of media lies, propaganda, disinformation and psyops in the name of protecting the US-backed child-beheading terrorists from censure and sanctions.
As much as it might surprise those Westerners for whom the wholesale slaughter of innocents and disintegration of foreign nations is no more than an afterthought in the nightly news broadcast, the war on Syria never exactly ended. After years of heated battle, the Syrian government (with the help of Russia and Iran) began to turn the tide against the terrorist insurgency such that, by 2018, establishment mouthpiece Sky News felt emboldened to write an article explaining "How Assad won the Syrian civil war."
But news of Assad's victory was premature. Despite presidential candidate Trump's empty promises in 2015 to get the US out of its wasteful and bloody military entanglements in the Middle East, Precedent Trump instead committed thousands of US troops to secure the oil-rich region of northeastern Syria in 2018. Meanwhile, a 2020 Turkish-Russian ceasefire in Idlib—a northwestern region of the country described as "the last major rebel stronghold" in Syria—created a tenuous sense of peace in a country that had spent much of the 2010s embroiled in war.
Then, just three weeks ago, that precarious status quo shattered overnight.
The Last Three Weeks
There are so many unanswered questions about what just took place in Syria that we will likely be parsing the events of the past three weeks for years to come.
Here's what we know:
On November 27 a coalition of Syrian "rebels" (read: terrorists)—including the up-till-now designated terror group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)—launched an offensive from their home base in Idlib, quickly overwhelming the Syrian Arab Army. From there, the coalition advanced on Aleppo, Syria's second largest city—which fell to the terrorists on November 29th—then on Hama, the central Syrian city just 200 kilometres from Damascus.
Meanwhile, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)—the Kurdish-led, US-backed terrorists hitherto in charge of securing the US-controlled oil-rich northeastern portion of Syria—began an offensive in eastern Syria, capturing several villages in Deir ez-Zor province (with a little help from their American friends, naturally). And in the country's southeast, the US-backed Syrian Free Army made advances from their base in Palmyra, while a mysterious coalition of terrorists calling itself the "Southern Operations Room" took over the Syria-Jordan border crossing as well as Daraa, the city where the terrorist insurgency first kicked off in 2011.
Within days, it was all over. Over 13 years of terrorist operations in the country culminated in the seizure of Damascus on December 8, 2024.
The US, Israel and Turkey each began a massive bombing campaign, frantic to plant their flag in the bombed-out crater that is Syria.
And millions of Syrians, already traumatized by years of fighting, began holding their breath, unsure of who is in charge or what will happen next.
Here's what we don't know:
How, after 13 years of back-and-forth fighting and after several years of near-total containment, did the scattered terrorist insurgents manage such a large-scale offensive?
Why did Syrian Arab Army resistance evaporate so suddenly, creating a clear path from the terrorist enclaves straight through to Damascus?
And why did the Russian and Iranian "axis of resistance" that had been safeguarding Assad's rule over the country for much of the past decade similarly evaporate?
In short: how did any of this happen, let alone happen in the space of a few weeks?
A deal was almost certainly cut between the major foreign powers to either plan these events out or at least allow them to take place. We have seen unverified videos on social media purporting to show Syrian soldiers frothing at the mouth over the way they were abandoned by Assad (not to mention by Russia and Iran). And we know that on Saturday, December 7, shortly before the fall of Damascus, Russia, Iran and Turkey—the primary participants in the so-called "Astana peace process" presuming to bring the Syrian war to an amicable end—issued an urgent call for Assad to negotiate with the terrorists, whom they decided (for some strange reason) to call "legitimate opposition groups."
Other than that, all we have to go on are the supposed leaks of nameless "Qatari" diplomats who whispered to various "trust me, bro" reporters that Assad had tried and failed to negotiate a transfer of power with the terrorists shortly before the fall of Aleppo. Well, we have that, and we have the stone-cold reality that the Syrian army folded like a house of cards. They were either ordered to stand down or they were completely abandoned by the Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah forces that had been propping them up for years.
Needless to say, the answer to the question of precisely what deal was cut has not been revealed by any of the parties in a position to provide it.
Assad certainly isn't saying anything from his Russian retreat and is unlikely to be seen in public anytime soon.
Russia is now actively negotiating with the new, provisional terrorist-led government in Damascus about keeping their military bases in the country.
Of all the foreign powers, Iran, given its very public backing of the Syrian government, potentially has the most to lose from the fall of Assad. The Iranians seem to be taking a peculiarly ambiguous stance on the terrorists who toppled their ally. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has just delivered a speech in which he referred to the terror groups as "fighters" and declined to offer an opinion on the new government—leading many Iranians to wonder if the years of fighting and large amounts of aid to the toppled Assad government had been worth it.
Whatever the case, all of these powers—not to mention the US, Israel, Turkey, Qatar and the Saudis—seem pretty sanguine with the new face of the Syrian government, Abu Mohamed al-Jolani, and the Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham terror group he led to power in Damascus.
Of course, the uncomfortable little fact that everyone is trying to avoid right now is that the new Syrian "government" is just . . .
Al Qaeda in Suits
Supposedly, the terrorist brigade that "liberated" (read: obliterated) Syria was not Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) but the "Southern Operation Group," a shadowy and mysterious terrorist coalition that first announced themselves to the world on December 6, 2024, only two days before storming Damascus and bringing a shockingly swift end to a brutal 13-year war. But you wouldn't know that from reading the establishment press coverage of the events, almost all of which touts HTS and its central role in the dramatic events.
Nor would you realize that the interim Prime Minister leading the provisional government over Syria is Mohammed al-Bashir, the largely unknown, unassuming, balding engineer who hitherto served as the Prime Minister of the so-called "Syrian Salvation Government" that had presumed to rule over terrorist-occupied Idlib.
You wouldn't know this because the public face of the takeover of Syria has been neither al-Bashir nor anyone associated with the "Southern Operations Group," but, rather, Abu Mohamed al-Jolani, the leader of HTS.
And, if you are the type of gullible rube who slurps up whatever the establishment media shoves in your face, you probably think al-Jolani is a "diversity-friendly" woke rebel hero. Or that he is a reasonable politician who should be taken seriously on the international stage. Or that he is a former jihadi who "reinvented himself" as a "rebel politician." Or that he is a "pragmatic" leader who's open to reform and compromise as needed.
Needless to say, these are all lies.
What, then, is the truth? Here's a crash course on the "al-Jolani" character:
To begin with, his name is not Abu Mohamed al-Jolani. As with so many of the characters who populate the war of terror, this is a nom de guerre he invented to stress his connection to Syria. His grandfather, we are told, was expelled from the Golan Heights by Israel in 1967, thus prompting the HTS leader to adopt the demonym "al-Jolani," meaning "the Golanite." His real name is Ahmed al-Sharaa. And, although evidence has yet to emerge of his literal CIA or Mossad status, we can say for certain that his career has been enabled by US and Israeli aid and cooperation every step of the way.
Supposedly radicalized by the second Palestinian intifada, he went to fight in Iraq, where he joined Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). AQI was the local Iraqi Al CIA-da branch that, according to the usual sources, was too brutal even for Al Qaeda. AQI was led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was himself a largely fictional character created in a US psyop program that the US military's lead spokesman called America's "most successful information campaign to date" . . . but that's another story.
Al-Jolani was captured by US forces in 2005 and detained at Camp Bucca. Yes, that's the same camp where mythical ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was also detained. Baghdadi was released along with 5,700 other budding jihadis in the Great Prisoner Release of 2009—an event that even Naval War College professor Craig Whiteside was forced to concede led to the incubation and revitalization of ISIS—but Jolani was transferred to another prison.
The story goes that, upon the 2011 outbreak of the terrorist insurgency in Syria, Baghdadi shipped the by-now-released Jolani off to join the battle with a $50,000 per month stipend. Jolani used the money to stage suicide bombings, executions, torture and general mayhem in the country he was supposedly liberating. By 2012, he had founded "Jabhat al-Nusra," an organization that was quickly identified by the US State Department as a terror group, landing Jolani on the Specially Designated Global Terrorist list in 2013.
Curiously enough (for those who still believe in the "War on Terror" fairy tale), this censure did not prevent Jolani or his associates from benefiting from Uncle Sam's largess in Syria, including the billion-dollar "Timber Sycamore" operation to arm the "moderate rebels" (read: child-beheading scum) in the country. In 2015, US-supplied anti-tank TOW missiles helped Jabhat al-Nusra (and their "Free Syrian Army" allies) secure Idlib, creating what US official Brett McGurk conceded was "the largest Al Qaeda safe haven since 9/11."
The US postured even harder in 2017, putting a $10 million bounty on al-Jolani's head . . . but somehow this failed to stop the dastardly terror mastermind from operating with impunity in the US-created Idlib terrorist stronghold. Nor did it stop him from rebranding Jabhat al-Nusra several times and engaging in a PR blitz in 2021 that sought to transform his image from that of a brutal terrorist jihadi to that of a "moderate rebel" leader seeking "a new relationship with the West."
That PR blitz is now paying off, with al-Jolani being treated by the establishment media as a serious and respectable politician. Both the US and UK are currently engaging in the performative "should-we-or-shouldn't-we?" dance that will inevitably lead to HTS being taken off the terror group list and the bounty being taken off al-Jolani's head.
Of course, there is no tangible evidence that al-Jolani is a literal CIA agent or Mossad operative. But, as the anonymous author of "Abu Mohammad al-Julani: Putting lipstick on a pig"—an article on TheCradle.co attributed to "A Cradle Correspondent"—rightly observes:
The question of who Abu Mohammad al-Julani is—his motivations, ideologies, and transformations—is ultimately less important than what he represents. Over the past two decades, one fact remains consistent: Julani is a tool of US and Israeli strategy.
So, will al-Jolani (or Julani or Jawlani or Joulani or however they choose to spell it this week) continue to be a serviceable US/Israeli puppet from his role as the power-behind-the-throne in Damascus?
Let's see what the Magic 8 Ball says:
Just on the level of geostrategic analysis, Israel is happy to work with HTS, the FSA, the SDF and any other terror group that will sever the so-called "Shia crescent" landline linking Iran to Hezbollah forces in Lebanon via Damascus.
But, perhaps more importantly, al-Jolani and his fellow "radical jihadis" in HTS are already tipping their hand with respect to their compliance with the Zionist plan for a Greater Israel. So far, they have been remarkably tightlipped about the Israeli airstrikes that have been obliterating Syria's military assets and infrastructure over the past weeks, with an HTS spokesman pointedly avoiding answering a question on the subject from a reporter. And al-Jolani himself has outright reassured Israel that he will not be fighting the Israeli military over the Golan Heights—the very basis of his phoney identity—or any other patch of Syrian territory they deem necessary to seize to accomplish their goal of the formation of a Greater Israel. "We are not about to engage in a conflict with Israel," he stated during an interview on Syrian TV on December 14.
And now—wouldn't ya know it?—HTS is ordering Palestinian resistance factions to shut down their operations in Syria. Riddle me this, Batman: why would a committed anti-Israeli jihadi like al-Jolani and his fellow radicals do a thing like that?
It goes without saying that if al-Jolani really is a deep state puppet, then he is as disposable as Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zarqawi or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or Abu Omar al-Baghdadi or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi or any of the other puppets, toys, dupes, patsies or fictional characters who have shared the stage of the War of Terror shadow play before him. It's very possible that the installation of al-Jolani is just an excuse to kickstart War of Terror 3.0—starring the newer, scarier ISIS!—thus giving the US and Israel even greater justification for even further meddling in the region.
. . . And, right on cue, here come the articles informing us that US proxies in Syria are releasing scores of ISIS prisoners and here come the videos showing ISIS fighters executing pro-Assad soldiers and civilians.
At the moment, things could go either way. The US/Israel/NATO establishment could—with the help of their mockingbird media repeaters—launch a full-court press to convince the public that al-Jolani is a reformed, enlightened leader . . . or they could throw him under the bus and use the rejuvenated Syrian terror brigades as an excuse for a fresh invasion. We'll get a chance to see which way the wind is blowing by assessing how Israel reacts to Kurdish pleas for help from HTS forces.
But all of this leads to the greatest question of all: where do we go from here?
The Next Chapter
Anyone who is paying attention will realize that something of world-historical importance just took place in Syria.
But some questions remain: what just happened, precisely, and what does it mean for the region and for the globe?
Good questions. As you might imagine, there are any number of pundits willing to throw their hot takes on the Syria situation into the ring. For example, there's:
Mike Whitney opining on how "For Bibi, the Road to Tehran Goes Through Damascus";
Robert Inlakesh discussing Israel's brazen Syria land grab and reminding us of "How the US and Israel Quietly Revived Al-Qaeda Allies in Syria’s Idlib Offensive";
Vanessa Beeley speculating on the deals the major powers might have cut to bring about the sudden fall of the Syrian government;
Syriana Analysis host Kevork Almassian explaining the new reality in Syria now that "The Axis of Resistance is Over";
Pepe Escobar doing his usual "ra-ra Putin is a secret 5D chess grandmaster" cheerleading routine;
Rurik Skywalker making the more plausible assessment that Putin convinced Assad to flee because the Syrian drug pipeline was coming to a rapid end;
Ruel Pepa making the hopium-fuelled argument that the fall of Assad was in fact not a defeat but "A Strategic Retreat";
Peter Koenig bemoaning how Syria has been "Left Alone by an Abandoning World" as Greater Israel marches ahead;
and Ali Bilgic noting how "China Could Emerge as an Unexpected Beneficiary From Assad’s Downfall."
I'm sure there are other important sources of hot takes on this topic, and I'm sure my kind readers will provide links to them in the comments of this post on corbettreport.com.
Here's my own hot take: what happened in Syria isn't regime change (although that certainly did happen.) And it's not a foreign land grab or a resource grab (although those things happened, too). And it's not even a "regional war."
No, this is beyond a regional war.
After all, the Syria story doesn't bring in just regional powers like Turkey and Israel and Iran. It doesn't bring in just the world unipower, the US. It also brings in superpower also-ran Russia, which has been a staunch Syrian ally since 1946.
As a result of that Russia-Syria relationship, we've seen an incredible story play out involving Russia's own regional enemy: Ukraine. Lost amid the tumult of stories is the fact that Russia has accused Ukraine of supplying drones and drone operators to HTS before they launched their government-toppling offensive. That incendiary claim was recently confirmed by the Western dinosaur media.
So, just to be clear: Ukraine pounced on an opportunity to help boost a military operation in Syria that they hoped would divert Russian military attention from the Ukrainian front.
Then, too, there are China's recent attempts to establish a diplomatic presence in the region (such as the establishment of the Gulf Cooperation Council), raising the specter of yet another world power with an interest in events in Syria.
No, this is not a "civil war." It's not a regime change operation. It's not even a regional war. It's a window into the world war that is already taking place right now.
That's my hot take, anyway.
If my assessment is correct and these recent events really are the signpost of world war, it wouldn't be the first time that events of world-historical import have taken place in Syria.
As students of the Bible will remember, Saul of Tarsus was on the road to Damascus when he was struck by a blinding light. It was there he received the vision of the resurrected Jesus that prompted the rechristened Apostle Paul's mission to spread the Christian message far and wide, penning letters the effects of which are still reverberating through the world to this very day.
It remains to be seen whether a blinding light will strike those troops currently on their way to Damascus, but I fear whatever vision they may encounter will not be a harbinger of peace.
Like this type of essay? Then you’ll love The Corbett Report Subscriber newsletter, which contains my weekly editorial as well as recommended reading, viewing and listening. If you’re a Corbett Report member, you can sign in to corbettreport.com and read the newsletter today.
Also, Corbett Report members can access this week’s newsletter for a 50% discount on all Corbett Report media (dvds, usbs and online courses) at NewWorldNextWeek.com!
Not a member yet? What are you waiting for? Sign up today to access the newsletter and support this work.