The map of the Middle East is being rewritten again

The jihadist warriors who now control Syria have a horrific history. They demonized the Alawite minority, to which Assad belongs, and fought with the battle cry “Christians in Beirut, Alawites to the grave.” In 2017, the United States put a $10 million bounty on the head of its top leader, Abu Mohammed al-Golani. His notice, under the headline in bold red letters “Arrest this terrorist,” called him “a senior leader of the Al-Nusra Front, the affiliate of Al-Qaeda in Syria.” Under his leadership, the US statement said, the Al-Nusra Front “carried out multiple terrorist attacks throughout Syria, often targeting civilians.”

Today, al-Golani is Syria’s strongman and putative liberator. He promised peace, but revenge executions have already been reported. Many foreigners remain doubtful. “Some of the rebel groups that toppled Assad have their own record of terrorism and human rights violations,” President Biden said after the collapse of the Syrian regime. “They say the right things now. But as they take on greater responsibilities, we will evaluate not only their words but also their actions. »

Syria’s spiraling civil war began in 2011, with the civil protests that were part of the Arab Spring. The protests degenerated into violence. Religious fanatics who had long hated Assad for his secularism saw their chance. Chechens, Uyghurs, Uzbeks and other foreigners have flocked to Syria. “The time has come for President Assad to step down,” President Obama said at the time.

In 2013, Obama approved a secret program, Timber Sycamore, intended to support anti-Assad militias. Over the next four years, CIA instructors trained thousands of jihadist fighters in camps in Jordan and Turkey and provided them with assault rifles, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank missiles and various other weapons. Many of them were al-Qaeda veterans. “AQ is on our side in Syria,” Jake Sullivan, then a State Department official and now President Biden’s national security adviser, wrote in a memo as the anti-Assad rebellion took shape. The United States spent $1 billion on Timber Sycamore before President Trump ended it.

In 2015, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in a classified memo that “the best way to help Israel deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability is to help the Syrian people overthrow the Bashar regime.” Assad. the Assad regime in Syria which allows Iran to undermine Israel’s security.” The following year, Clinton’s successor, John Kerry, was asked about Syria and responded: “We have deployed an extraordinary amount of weapons to Qatar, to Turkey, to Saudi Arabia – an enormous amount of weapons and huge money. »

Assad’s transcendent goal was to restore Syria’s sovereignty over its territory, torn apart by foreign-backed fighters for more than a decade. This will now be al-Golani’s challenge. To succeed in restoring Syrian control over Syria, he will have to fend off the competing interests of Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia – and the United States, which, with its Kurdish allies, controls more than a third of the country.

Foreign powers prepared the ground for al-Golani’s rise to power, and he promised not to carry out “external operations” against them. Yet it seems unlikely that he will become pro-American. He said he was radicalized as a teenager by the 2000 Palestinian Intifada and began “thinking about how I could fulfill my duties, defending a people oppressed by the occupiers and the invaders.” He left Syria to fight the US military in Iraq, became an al-Qaeda leader, was captured and imprisoned in the notorious US prison Abu Ghraib.

“What was the reason why these people joined Al-Qaeda? al-Golani reflected in a 2021 interview with PBS. “Is post-World War II U.S. policy toward the region partly responsible for people turning to the Al-Qaeda organization? And are European policies in the region responsible for the reactions of sympathizers of the Palestinian cause? …Are the broken and oppressed people who had to endure what happened, for example, in Iraq or Afghanistan responsible?”

The United States played a key role in the overthrow of two other Middle Eastern dictators, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Their suppression led not to democracy but to terror and upheaval. The same thing could happen in Syria. Al-Golani, like the rest of the world, is absorbing the magnitude of his victory. How he governs will decisively shape the new Middle East he helped create.

Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.