How the U.S. and its proxies destroyed Syria

By Judy Bello

Judy Bello, board member of the Syrian Support Movement and member of Ban Killer Drones, gave this talk on a webinar sponsored by the United National Antiwar Coalition on the U.S. role in Syria.

I first want to speak on the history of Syria. Not only has Syria developed a grounded culture for several thousand years, but Syria has been struggling to be a republic for at least 100 years. After World War I, Syria, along with Lebanon, was ceded to the French [imperialists]. The French placed Syria under the governance of a king whose father was the ruler of Arabia before the British assisted the al-Saud family to govern there.

However, the Syrians did not accept this king and he was soon sent to govern Jordan, while Syria began to build its republic. There were many coups over the course of decades. Revolution and counter-revolution. Whenever the Syrians would vote in a suitable ruler, the British and the United States would support a military coup to remove him. Then there would be another election and the process would begin again. 

Hafez al-Assad ended this turmoil, and though he was a harsh ruler in some ways, he created a republic which was stable, prosperous and independent and where all the diverse ethnic and religious sects in the country were able to live in peace and security.

I want to humanize what we are talking about, just a bit, so I will talk a little about my experiences in Syria and how they reflect on the current catastrophe there.

I first visited Syria in 2014 as an election observer. At the time, the war had been ongoing for several years, and the Russians had just recently offered their assistance to the Assad-led government.

When I arrived, I found Damascus full of people and bustling with activity. There was a mood of optimism and celebration. Syrians living in Europe and the U.S. had not been given access to vote, so many had come to Damascus to visit and vote. 

I spent the election day in Baniyas, a city on the Mediterranean in Tartous governorate. A year before my visit, a busload of conscripts was attacked and many were killed. The Western media reported that this was due to a civilian massacre by the Syrian Army shortly before that. In any case, what I saw were a lot of people in the streets, and a lot of soldiers as well. The people were mingling comfortably with the soldiers, and in some cases seemed to retreat behind them as our little group of foreigners and dignitaries passed by.

The voting area was crowded but orderly. Like others in my group, I met with enthusiastic crowds in the voting places they visited in Damascus and Homs and some other locations. I returned to Damascus that evening to find the streets full of soldiers. When Bashar al-Assad’s victory was reported, no one was surprised, but still there was jubilation. In the West we were told that he won by a landslide of 85%, because he was a dictator. But on the scene it seemed clear that he was the choice of the people. He was their leader, leading a defense of the country against an invasion of fanatical mercenaries.

And like the Mob in the U.S., these violent invaders had been able to recruit among the poor and disenfranchised. They were able to pay recruits well, they empowered people to use violence to take what they wanted, and their brutality gave them an aura of invincibility. No one was safe. Everyone had lost someone.

Mercenaries disrupt peace

The population was living together in peace up until the influx of Salafist mercenaries and weapons and propaganda from Türkiye in the north and from Libya through the city of Dara’a in the south. Because, at the time of this election, Russian advisers had arrived to assist in the war effort along with Hezbollah fighters, there was a sense that order would soon be restored.

The people supported a return to order as well as to peace. In Tartous I visited a refugee camp in a school, with people mostly from the north around Aleppo. At that time Assad and his government had managed to stabilize the value of the Syrian pound, so they were able to do what was necessary to support the growing population of internally displaced people. 

These people were supporters of the government. Some really liked Assad and others just wanted a return to order. They wanted to go home. Ordinary people everywhere we went supported the president, the war effort and the army for these reasons.

But in June, a couple of weeks after I arrived home, the news arrived of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria traveling across the desert from Mosul [in Iraq] to found their caliphate in Raqqa [in Syria]. The U.S. had been fighting with the Iraqis against ISIS in Mosul, so clearly they knew, when they declared victory there, where their supposed enemy had gone.

It would have been a miles-long caravan across open desert, clearly visible on satellite, but no one stopped them. In the first Iraq war, the same U.S. Army decimated Saddam Hussein’s retreating army. But they couldn’t be bothered to deal with ISIS moving into a largely undefended region of Syria.

Meetings with Syrian leaders

I visited Syria again in 2016 and in 2017. In 2016, members of my delegation spoke to many government officials, to people working in U.N. programs and to President Assad himself. We met with the head of the SSNP, the Syrian Socialist National Party, a party that was born through support for a greater Syria, and which has supporters in Lebanon and Palestine as well. It is the second largest party in Syria after Assad’s Baath party, which is a pan-Arab party. 

We also met with Sheikh Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun, the Grand Mufti of Syria. At the time we met him, Sheikh Hassoun was traveling around with the Orthodox Patriarch in Syria, demonstrating their solidarity with one another and with all the people of Syria. Both had had their youngest sons murdered during the first year of the war. These were acts of pure terrorism targeting officials of the secular state. The boys were both college students, civilians who were stopped and murdered while traveling home from school.

One of the most interesting meetings was with Ali Haidar, head of the SSNP, who was Minister of Reconciliation at the time. Reconciliation was a procedure whereby mercenary jihadists and their allies could be extracted from an area with limited fighting. The army would besiege a town, and then young men from special forces would go in and negotiate with the civilian government to provide resources for the civilian population, on the condition that the armed fighters, who had in any case been hoarding aid supplies, must be expelled. We also met with a passionate group of young men who actually participated on the ground.

Anti-government fighters, some Syrian, others not; salafists and men using violence to gain power in their communities; and mercenaries were all given the choice to join the Syrian Arab Army, to disarm and join the civilian community or to take the bus to Idlib. This greatly cut down the level of violence and fighting, so people were excited about the idea. But, it left a problem in Idlib for the future. I think that [the government was] hoping to send the foreigners back into Türkiye from whence they came, and that the rest could be managed and eventually reabsorbed into the diverse fabric of Syrian society.

Horrific battles and mass destruction

After that, there were the horrific battles necessary to liberate East Aleppo. People later said that those who occupied Aleppo were not from Aleppo. They came from the north (from Türkiye) all of a sudden in 2012 and occupied the streets of East Aleppo. The historic buildings of the old city were severely damaged. The prosperous manufacturing district, Syria’s largest, was destroyed. Foreign fighters had taken the contents of factories, the machines and raw materials, in trucks across the border into Türkiye then destroyed the buildings. After these battles the people returned to East Aleppo, but there was little reconstruction.

In 2017, I attended a World Federation of Trade Unions conference outside Damascus that was called to oppose the sanctions on Syria and encourage rebuilding. At the end of the conference, we attended a speech by President Assad. He was, at the time, transformed by hope. He talked about rebuilding and spoke in glowing terms of a new global economy to arise out of the work of China’s Belt and Road and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and other countries), an economy in which Syria would be a full participant. 

However, this was not to be. The United States and Türkiye still occupy much of Syria’s territories and resources. The new global economy has not matured in time to protect Syria from increasingly severe U.S. economic coercive measures under the Caesar Act sanctions.

At the end of the day, peace came to central Syria, but the northern border was still under Turkish control, along with the al-Qaida-led groups in Idlib. Abu Mohammad al-Joulani originally came to Syria as second in command in ISIS under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, until he broke with him in a power struggle and became the head of al-Qaida in Syria. Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, a native of Saudi Arabia, had taken the name Abu Mohammad al-Joulani to imply that he was Syrian.

But al-Joulani is not the main problem the Syrians face. More than one-third of Syrian territory remains occupied by the U.S. and Türkiye. Early attempts to negotiate with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan through the Astana process failed, and Assad had recently refused to meet with him. Türkiye retained control of the northern corridor of Syria along the border and the groups in Idlib. Today, Turkish officials meet daily with al-Joulani, the new al-Qaida president of the country. 

Meanwhile, the United States has removed al-Joulani’s terrorist designation and the $10 million bounty on his head. He gets favorable news coverage here as a moderate, but in Syria his men have looted government offices outside of Damascus, the Central Bank of Syria and the universities.

U.S. occupation and sanctions

The U.S. continues to occupy a large portion of eastern Syria, including its oil wells and its wheat fields, with over 2,000 U.S. soldiers, an assortment of contractors and Kurdish proxies who are invited to consider this territory their own.

[The U.S. doesn’t] need Syria’s oil and wheat. We just don’t want the Syrians to have it. Türkiye and the [Kurdish groups] profit. Israel gets oil that no one else will sell them. In 2020, the Caesar Act sanctions finally brought the Syrian economy to its knees. The Syrian pound plummeted to near zero. It became impossible to rebuild, impossible to provide subsidies and impossible to acquire or maintain hospital equipment and drugs.

During a terrible earthquake that struck Idlib and Aleppo along with parts of Türkiye in 2023, Syria was unable to obtain earth-moving equipment to rescue people under collapsed buildings and to provide general aid for those displaced. Sending $1,000 to Syria was difficult; sending material aid, more difficult. I know because the Syria Support Movement sent charitable aid to Syria during this period.

There has been continuous bickering in the U.N. Security Council, because under U.S. sanctions, aid can only come into Syria via the U.S.’s Kurdish proxies and the extremist-controlled areas in Idlib along the northern border. Russia and China have vetoed efforts to keep more aid channels open on the northern border (controlled by Turkish proxies) and Idlib while the U.S. has used its sanctions to ensure no aid came in anywhere else.

A couple of weeks ago, a revived force from Idlib attacked Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city, under the command of Al-Joulani, now acting President of Syria, with U.S. approval and Turkish mentoring. Al-Joulani, actually a Saudi national, led a small force of well-paid, well-trained and well-armed  mercenaries from Idlib to Aleppo. Al Jazeera announced that [these forces] had taken the city before they arrived. On arrival they broadcast that they would restore power to Aleppo after several years of mostly darkness. But currently, people in Damascus only get electricity one hour out of every 12.

A few months ago, Assad had released large numbers of soldiers from the first war to return home and limited the number of new conscripts. His government could not pay them. Most of the experienced soldiers were in the south dealing with Israel and the fallout from the war on Lebanon. The response to the attack on Aleppo was slow and weak. Apparently, on top of their other problems, Syrian communications were jammed, leaving untrained units at the front with little direction from their superiors.

Syria’s allies have seen this before. Russia, in particular, has been repeatedly presented with a small war against a weak foe in support of Russia’s allies. But then the United States begins an endless supply chain, replenishing and reinforcing this apparently weak opponent, making it virtually invincible. Russia saw it in Afghanistan and in Ukraine. They cannot afford to take the bait again. 

Meanwhile, Iran suffers severe sanctions, and has to protect its own people against continual threats from Israel, a backer of this insurrection in Syria.

The Syrian people are exhausted by what amounts to one long war. Under U.S.-imposed, globally enforced sanctions, the people of Aleppo and all of Syria had been living with a few hours of electricity a day for years, mostly jobless, with bread shortages and hospitals without medicines. 

The manufacturing sector had never been restored, and the United States has occupied Syrian wheat fields and oil wells since the end of the first war, directly causing the shortages of bread and energy for heat and cooking. Just under two years ago, the devastating earthquake struck northern Syria. Aid poured into Idlib while Aleppo could not even get equipment to rescue survivors from the rubble.

Syria is a charter member of the Axis of Resistance, but it has kept a low profile during the current Israeli war. They have provided military, political and humanitarian support for the Palestinian people throughout many years. 

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Israel has routinely bombed locations inside Syria. Apparently it wasn’t a surprise that the takfiris in Idlib were being trained by Ukrainians to use more sophisticated weapons; not a surprise that the U.S. greenlighted an attack on Aleppo. No surprise that they launched the attack early to accommodate Netanyahu’s need for distraction from his failures in Lebanon and Gaza.

It is true Assad walked away from a new war. We are told he wavered and changed his mind several times. His army and his people are exhausted. The war on them never ended. It merely changed form. The odds of winning a hot war are, at the moment, limited. Assad’s allies offered assistance, but, and it’s a big but, when they met with [Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan in Qatar, he was intransigent and in the long run, Assad was unlikely to win. Maybe Assad just made the choice where he believed the least number of people would likely die.

This talk has been edited.