Assad Day in Damascus

Controversy and Intrigue Swirl Amidst Assad’s Fall

As always, Western corporate media asks and purports to answer all the wrong questions about the recent ousting of Bashar al-Assad from power in Syria.

Nowhere in the New York Times or the Washington Post will you find questions like: why are the Pentagon and the CIA funding militant proxy groups in Syria? Are all Syrians rejoicing? When did Al-Qaeda become hip and chic? And is it only a coincidence that this entire spectacle plays into the Greater Israel Project so nicely?

In this piece, we’ll go over the basics of what happened, examine the Western media’s manipulative reporting on the matter, and speculate as to who benefits most from the timing of the offensive.

The Basics

A significant and apparently unexpected offensive by the so-called “rebel forces,” particularly those led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its allies, has led to the dramatic collapse of President Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria.

The rebels launched their offensive on November 27, 2024, quickly capturing Aleppo, Syria's second-largest city, and then moved south toward Damascus.

By December 8, 2024, the rebels had taken control of several key cities, including Hama, Homs, and ultimately Damascus, leading to Assad's reported resignation and departure from Syria to Moscow. This rapid advance was facilitated by the withdrawal of Syrian government forces, possibly due to the lack of support from allies like Russia and Iran, who are currently preoccupied with other conflicts.

The fall of Assad's regime raises questions about the future governance and stability of Syria, especially given HTS's links to al-Qaeda. Naturally, concerns arise regarding the management of the power transition and its potential impact on various factions within Syria, such as Kurds, Turkish-backed groups, and other opposition forces.

This situation has also prompted international reactions, with Turkey denying support for HTS despite aiding some rebel factions and Russia calling for UN Security Council consultations to manage the fallout, particularly concerning the buffer zone near the Golan Heights.

The conflict has displaced millions and continues to be a humanitarian crisis, with the UN reporting a significant need for assistance in Syria. The sudden change in power dynamics also has potential implications for regional security, particularly for Iran's influence through Hezbollah and Syrian territory and for Israel, which has been targeting Iranian assets in Syria.

Deeper Analysis: Who is Abu Mohammad al-Jolani?

The coverage of the rapid ascent of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in Western media has been quite predictable, provided you are looking at it from a particular vantage point.

This vantage requires a knowledge of the CIA’s history with Al-Qaeda and ISIS, as well as the old American mythos of “Pax Americana” and the Project for a New American Century (PNAC).

For those readers who enjoy digging deep into the litany of names and acronyms that accompany any study of the Western foreign policy and national security monstrosity—what Mike Benz affectionately refers to as “the Blob”—you’ll likely already be aware of PNAC and its players.

In a nutshell, PNAC is a neo-conservative think tank with strong ties to the storied neocon hotbed of the American Enterprise Institute.

It was created in 97’ by the gruesome duo of William Kristol and Robert Kagan [Victoria Nuland’s husband] and populated with such esteemed individuals as Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Donald Rumsfeld, and many more. Of the 25 original signatories of PNAC, 14 members were given positions in Bush Jr.’s administration.

PNAC’s vision of the “New American Century” included essentially the takeover of countries including but not limited to Libya, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, in order to achieve the “Pax Americana” or American Peace, which is essentially the pretext used by the U.S. to effect regime change across the globe in the name of “Democracy.”

According to a PNAC report:

"The American peace has proven itself peaceful, stable, and durable. Yet no moment in international politics can be frozen in time: even a global Pax Americana will not preserve itself." — Rebuilding Americas Defenses

To preserve this "American peace" through the 21^st century, the PNAC report concludes that the global order "must have a secure foundation on unquestioned U.S. military preeminence." The report struck a prescient note when it observed that "the process of transformation is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor."

This report obviously came several years before 9-11, so feel free to draw your own conclusions.

General Wesley K. Clark, who ran for president in 2008 as a Democrat, made a stunning but highly relevant admission in 2007 regarding a memo he saw in the Pentagon post 9/11 that outlined a plan to “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off with Iran.”

So, we’ve established that the more nefarious players in the neocon faction of the Western hegemon have had it in their hearts to go after Syria and other countries since at least the 90s.

Going even further back in time, we had the CIA building up the Mujahideen—the precursor to Al-Qaeda—to fight against the Soviets in the twilight of the Cold War. This is part of a newer era of warfare, where the use of localized proxy groups are utilized rather than sending in U.S. troops directly; most conflicts since WWII have been fought this way.

All of what we just rehashed begs the question: Are these “rebels” chasing Assad from power genuine? Are they truly fighting on behalf of the Syrian people? Or could it be that this is yet another cookie-cutter regime change operation using proxy armies and facilitated by the two-headed dragon of the CIA and State Department?

Upon further examination, HTS appears to be a cleverly rebranded Al-Qaeda with “woke” trappings to make them appear more palatable for a mentally stunted and easily manipulated western audience, the same cult-of-personality drones who unwittingly cheered for the Ghost of Kyiv and the Azov Battalion.

We see the very same narrative switcheroo at play regarding HTS in Syria today.

Now, the leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, is being depicted as a “blazer-wearing revolutionary” which is certainly more disarming to Western audiences than “radical jihadist.”

This is the same al-Jolani who spent 5 years in Abu Ghraib and other prisons and is still on a State Department wanted list as a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist" with a $10 million reward.

It is public knowledge that both the CIA and the Pentagon have been involved in funding and bolstering Syrian proxy groups.

Here’s a relevant headline from 2017:

The CIA, through programs like Timber Sycamore, was known for arming and training groups aimed at pressuring the Assad regime, while the Pentagon's efforts were more focused on fighting ISIS, particularly through support for the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which is predominantly Kurdish.

The termination of the CIA's program in 2017 under President Trump was seen as a shift in U.S. policy, focusing more explicitly on counter-terrorism rather than regime change.

So, who are these rebels who suddenly overthrew a well-armed government in a matter of days?

They’re clearly backed by foreign influences with money, arms and motives that go far beyond simply “bringing freedom to the Syrian people”; that is only the palatable fairytale fed to Western audiences.

The idea that the U.S. is only involved because “Assad’s a dictator” doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, as the U.S. is quite cozy with dictators in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia; I suppose the key difference is that those are our dictators.

Typical Western Reporting

The U.S. security state, through various channels, has long since turned the media into the ultimate psychological conditioning engine. They have perfected the art of propaganda, going all the way back to the CIA’s Mighty Wurlitzer and Operation Mockingbird, but especially since the U.S. emerged as the “police of the world” in order to achieve PNAC’s New American Century.

All of the same tactics that had been used at the outset of the wars with Iraq, Iran, Libya, Egypt, etc. are at play here today. Hell, you can even add North Vietnam to that list, going all the way back to the mid-seventies.

The strategy is as effective as it is simple, so much so that the average victim of this kind of manipulation doesn’t even consider that there’s an alternative point of view. It’s a science that has been developed and perfected in the bowels of Langley and the darkest reaches of special-access hell.

They know how our thought processes work, how our emotions can be triggered, and how our reasoning can be voided.

Consider the conflict in Ukraine, one that not only never would have been able to happen without a spigot of U.S. tax dollars pouring hundreds of billions into that country (in many cases landing in the corrupt pockets of that country’s bureaucrats and military officials,) but was on the verge of being resolved before it was thwarted by the Western Hegemon via Boris Johnson back in April of 2022.

Public support for that conflict, and by extension the endless flow of cash that Congress rushed out the door, depended on shaping the consensus perception.

Naturally, if you inundate well-meaning Americans with images of bombing and sad Ukrainian grandmothers and then repeat ad nauseam from every vector at your disposal that the invasion was completely unprovoked and that Putin is the “new Hitler,” the average American who doesn’t have time to weigh and measure the complexities and nuance of geopolitics is obviously going to form an opinion that is supportive of the original end goal of trafficking billions and stimulating the war economy.

It is what the propaganda machine doesn’t show you that tells the full story.

The key omitted context in the case of Ukraine was that the State Department and its NGO blob orchestrated a color revolution and regime change in 2014, resulting in the installation of a leader who is sympathetic to the West, the prohibition of the teaching of Russian language and Russian mythology in schools, the fact that large portions of the country prefer to be ruled by Moscow rather than Kyiv, and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of fighting-age men in the country. These events could have been prevented earlier had it not been for the interference of Western leaders such as Joe Biden and Boris Johnson.

But the low-information American is continually tricked into supporting conflicts that in every instance for the last 60+ years has only benefitted the arms industry and the ruling class.

It happened in Iraq, where Saddam went from being a U.S. collaborator to a uniquely evil dictator from whom we must go and free the Iraqi people. We were then told the exact same thing about Gaddafi, the Taliban, Vladimir Putin, and now Bashar al-Assad.

And in some of these cases, it might be true that these leaders were oppressors, but almost always in the end we find out that the war was never really about that, and the populations actually suffer tremendously in the power vacuum we created.

Once Assad had officially fled the country for Moscow, the corporate media dusted off the “overthrown tyrant” template and got to work.

For nearly all the years that the al-Assad family ruled Syria, silence reigned. No one spoke freely, fearful of who might hear. Everyone knew the consequences of dissent: disappearance into government prisons, from which few ever returned.

But as Saturday turned to Sunday — the first day in more than five decades that dawn broke without an al-Assad in the presidential palace — the streets were loud with joy.

Nonstop celebratory gunfire crackled around Damascus, the capital, like so many fireworks displays. Crowds shouted in the squares. Rebel fighters celebrated from atop their trucks…

It had been 13 years since those opposed to President Bashar al-Assad first hoped to follow revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya by overthrowing their own autocratic leader: 13 years of bloodshed and death, of homes and loved ones lost, of lives abandoned and ruptured. — NYT

There are so many things to comment on here.

We are led to believe that the Syrian people are unanimously ecstatic that rebel groups have overthrown their government; we’ve been told over and over again how much of a cruel dictator Assad is, and depending on who you’re talking to in Syria, that might actually be true.

There are many in Syria who were happy to see their friends and families liberated from the prisons. There are other parts of the country, particularly religious strongholds that hold Assad in high regard, particularly Alawites, from whom Assad hails, along with other minorities like Christians who have historically been wary of Sunni Islamist opposition groups, and who have supported Assad due to fears of persecution under different rule.

Many of these groups are either withdrawing their support or adapting to the new political landscape in Syria.

Regardless of what is and isn’t true about Assad’s fall, the way that the media has reported on the situation will prevent you from ever asking or learning how things got to be the way that they are there, what actually caused this “uprising” to happen, now of all times, and what will happen in the coming months and years.

Will Syria actually become more free?

What else strikes me from the NYT excerpt above is the mention of “Tunisia, Egypt and Libya” all of them countries that we “helped” in our selfless benevolence. All of them received the exact same treatment in the media—even the presidential addresses.

Joe Biden shambled out from his crypt to read a prepared message from a teleprompter.

If any of that seemed familiar, it’s because it is.

The narrative is nearly identical to what we heard after the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Vietcong in South Vietnam, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.

‘We vanquished the tyrant, the people are finally free, we stand with them; this is what the United States is for. We will help manage the aftermath.’

We also got a helping of more of the same from Keir Starmer while he was, coincidentally, abroad in Dubai meeting with the GOOD dictators and autocrats of the United Arab Emirates.

Yes, Keir Starmer is “very pleased” that Al-Qaeda is running the show in Syria.

The M.O. has been to slander anyone seeking a compromise or an outcome that deviated from the wishes of the blob as a “Russian agent.”

This is exactly what happened to Tulsi Gabbard.

Gabbard met with Assad in January 2017 during what she described as a "fact-finding" mission to Syria. This meeting was notable because Gabbard was the first member of the U.S. Congress to meet with Assad since the Syrian civil war began in 2011.

Tulsi Gabbard then committed the most heinous and unforgivable sin: she called for the U.S. to stop arming and funding proxy groups in Syria.

Immediately, the Democrat establishment distanced itself from Gabbard.

In the wake of her appointment as Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, they revived the story, unsurprisingly suggesting that she’s yet another Putin puppet, the official slander for anyone who deviates from the U.S. security state’s multi-decade endeavor to make Russia into another forever enemy.

---

The best we can hope for as the Biden administration prepares to transfer power to Team Trump is that the U.S. doesn’t get involved in the situation. The last thing we need is another multimillion-dollar aid package filling the pockets of rebels to bolster their forces for yet another future conflict.

The Trump policy, which is often referred to—derogatorily—as “noninterventionist,” seems to be the ideal disposition toward this conflict. The bottom line is that one of the many reasons for Trump’s victory in November was that the American people are sick of funding conflicts in parts of the globe that most couldn’t even point to on a map.

It is uncertain who will benefit the most from the timing of these events, but time will certainly tell in the coming weeks and months.

My money is not on that being the Syrian people.

---

Badlands Media articles and features represent the opinions of the contributing authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Badlands Media itself.

---

If you enjoyed this contribution to Badlands Media, please consider checking out more of Ryan’s work for free at the Post-Liberal.

---

Badlands Media will always put out our content for free, but you can support us by becoming a paid subscriber to this newsletter. Help our collective of citizen journalists take back the narrative from the MSM. We are the news now.