The news out of Syria is nothing short of horrific, and it provides a fresh illustration of what a catastrophic failure the Obama strategy in the Middle East has been.
Greek City Times reported that “hundreds of Christians, including Greek Orthodox, and Alawites have been killed after clashes broke out on Thursday in the Latakia and Tartous regions on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, according to a human rights monitoring group.”
That death toll may be a tragic underestimation. Greek City Times added that “the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) said on Friday that more than 225 people have been killed since Thursday. However, this is believed to be a gross underreporting, with activists on the ground, such as Coast Youth Forum, believing the death toll could be as high as 1,800, mostly Alawites, but also Christians.”
The perpetrators are members of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamic jihad group that toppled the Assad regime and took control of Syria several months ago. But the groundwork for what is happening in Syria now was laid years ago, and is the direct result of policies that Barack Obama and Old Joe Biden (you know, the guy known as “Obama’s Third Term”) pursued. According to a revealing Apr. 2022 piece in RealClearInvestigations, Obama apparatchiks who had returned to positions in the Biden regime “coordinated with the jihadist franchise in an effort to topple the Syrian regime – while claiming they backed only the ‘moderate opposition.’”
The article noted that “in waging a multi-billion dollar covert war in support of the insurgency against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, top Obama officials who now serve under Biden made it American policy to enable and arm terrorist groups that attracted jihadi fighters from across the globe. This regime change campaign, undertaken one decade after Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. on 9/11, helped a sworn U.S. enemy establish the Idlib safe haven that it still controls today.” In the course of this astoundingly foolish campaign, Old Joe’s future National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who was then Director of Policy Planning, wrote to his boss, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “AQ [Al Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.”
I was among the few who were calling attention to this wrongheaded policy at the time. On Sept. 17, 2013, I wrote at JihadWatch.org: “The U.S. is now officially on the side of al-Qaeda.” This was because of Barack Obama’s plan to arm and train “vetted” members of the Free Syrian Army. In Sept. 2014, said the New York Times, “Mr. Obama said he envisioned the Free Syrian Army’s providing the ground presence needed to confront ISIS in Syria.” Obama also said: “We have a Free Syrian Army and a moderate opposition that we have steadily been working with that we have vetted.”
In reality, the Free Syrian Army was not vetted, not moderate, and never actually in a position to confront ISIS. Nor did it ever do so. There were numerous reasons why Obama’s plan was unwise from the start. In an eerie foreshadowing of what is happening in Syria now, in July 2013, Free Syrian Army fighters entered the Christian village of Oum Sharshouh and began burning down houses and terrorizing the population, forcing 250 Christian families to flee the area. Nor was that an isolated incident. Worthy News reported that just two days after the attack on Oum Sharshouh, Free Syrian Army rebels “targeted the residents of al-Duwayr/Douar, a Christian village close to the city of Homs and near Syria’s border with Lebanon … Around 350 armed militants forcefully entered the homes of Christian families who were all rounded-up in the main square of the village and then summarily executed.”
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The New York Times reported in Aug. 2014 that, according to Abu Osama, a member of a Nusra Front brigade that participated in the attack, the Arsal assault was “a combined operation involving fighters from the Free Syrian Army, the Nusra Front and ISIS.” And PJ Media reported the following month that “multiple media reports indicate that the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) is operating openly with ISIS and other designated terrorist groups.”
Yet while all this was going on, Jake Sullivan and his colleagues in the Obama State Department assumed that the Free Syrian Army was a moderate force that was on their side and even that al-Qaeda was fighting on our side in Syria. Now we are seeing the fruits of the Obama/Biden team’s ignorant, fatuous, self-defeating policies in Syria. And we see it once again: the willful ignorance and denial of reality to which the left is addicted is dangerous. It kills people.
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