Skip to content

World War in Syria

Metadata

Syria

Highlights

Multiple subsequent coups and countercoups were launched in Syria over the next 22 years, with three occurring in March, August and December 1949 followed by further coups in 1954, 1961, 1963 and 1970. The first was engineered by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) against the government of President Shukri Al Quwatli. — location: 175 ^ref-42975

Al Quwatli was then re-elected in 1955, and his administration distanced itself from the West as a result of the CIA’s involvement in the original March 1949 coup. — location: 184 ^ref-47061

While the Soviet Union showed no such intolerance towards neutral states in the third world, the contrast between this and the absolutism of Western policy led neutral states to consistently be forced to align themselves with Moscow for protection against Western threats. — location: 200 ^ref-65305

Syria’s unwillingness under multiple successive governments to become a Western client state and abandon its independence in foreign policymaking made a close security partnership between Moscow and Damascus inevitable — location: 206 ^ref-20530

practices in the countries of the self-proclaimed ‘free world’ such as the Philippines23 and South Korea. The latter saw suspected leftists placed in concentration camps, executed alongside their families and children, and buried in mass graves, often under Western supervision. — location: 213 ^ref-64460

the American-installed government in Seoul killing 2% of its population at a conservative estimate from 1946–1949 — location: 217 ^ref-50284

Syria, which stood out in the Middle East for its neutrality, its independence, and the absence of Western military personnel on its soil, — location: 232 ^ref-52211

the rapid industrialization of the USSR in the 1930s had seen it emerge as a leading arms manufacturer with weaponry equalling and in many cases surpassing the quality of its Western counterparts. — location: 270 ^ref-57027

The emergence of a major non-Western industrial economy with a world leading arms industry seriously undermined the centuries-old world order based on Western dominance, — location: 272 ^ref-23548

Syria was increasingly portrayed as being under some kind of malign communist influence – the only plausible explanation in the minds of the U.S. and its allies for any party to reject what the West perceived as its own benevolence. — location: 314 ^ref-58722

unfounded allegations that the Soviet Union was the puppeteer behind all opposition to Western domination served both to rationalise resistance in Western minds — location: 321 ^ref-37478

Following Turkey’s accession to NATO in 1952 and its significant military commitment to the U.S.-led war effort in Korea, where its forces were responsible for multiple serious war crimes, — location: 329 ^ref-8452

One of the keys to the Arab nationalist states’ defeat in the conflict was their faith in the solidarity of the Western-aligned Arab monarchies, which proved to be their undoing on multiple occasions. — location: 388 ^ref-34960

Western client states such as Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Jordan, ruled by kings who relied on Western patronage to retain power, were natural allies of pro-Western Israel and natural adversaries of Soviet-backed Syria and Egypt. — location: 401 ^ref-46156

arguably never an Arab-Israeli struggle so much as there was a struggle between those states which accepted Western hegemony, including Israel, the Arab monarchies and the republics of Lebanoniii and Tunisia, and those nationalist Arab states which rejected subjugation to Western interests. — location: 403 ^ref-27410

Hafez Al Assad’s administration quickly moved to build institutions which both raised living standards and improved long-term stability. — location: 444 ^ref-39827

By the beginning of the new decade four strongly pro-Western governments had been overthrown in the preceding twelve years – Iraq in 1958, Sudan in 1964, Libya in 1969 and the French colonial government in Algeria in 1962. — location: 456 ^ref-6345

According to Chief of Staff Saad Al Shazly, multiple ‘political interventions’ by President Sadat in key aspects of military planning were key to Egypt’s defeat. — location: 494 ^ref-58634

Syria faced threats to its sovereignty on a third front from the Muslim Brotherhood, which came as part of a much broader trend under which Islamist militants came to target Western adversaries across the world in the late Cold War years — location: 545 ^ref-58652

The following decade Israeli and Western experts would notably highlight the presence of radical Islamist elements as an asset to undermine Damascus which “would not be difficult to operate again” and offered “increased U.S. opportunities for destabilization activities if this form of pressure proves necessary.” — location: 558 ^ref-26258

Hussein ended talks for political unity and went on to form close ties with the Western Bloc, — location: 567 ^ref-34178

In the early 1980s the U.S. National Security Council notably published a paper titled ‘The Destabilisation of Syria’ in which a range of options to increase pressure on the Middle Eastern state and if possible to topple its government were explored. — location: 576 ^ref-16501

“When he broke with the Soviets in 1974, Sadat put all the sophisticated Soviet weaponry Egypt’s armed forces possessed at the disposal of America. The damage this did to the Arab cause was incalculable; its effects will be felt for years.” — location: 597 ^ref-36897

Threats posed by the Western Bloc, by Israel as a major Western client, and by jihadist forces, were all connected in that all were working to further the interests of Western hegemony over the Middle East. — location: 600 ^ref-27314

“The Arab Israeli dispute… became essentially a contest between Israel and Syria” — location: 610 ^ref-35958

seriously.” In the eyes of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, according to Seale, Syria was “the main regional enemy to be neutralised,” — location: 616 ^ref-9845

“Take the from Red Army stocks. I will not allow any power in the world to threaten Syria.” — location: 645 ^ref-10606

Syrian S-200s were reportedly successful in downing three U.S. Navy combat jets in a single day on December 4, 1983, which was the first time an Arab state had directly confronted the U.S. militarily. — location: 663 ^ref-22541

the Lebanon War cemented Syria’s emerging partnership with the Islamic Republic of Iran, and although ideologically very distant the two shared several common enemies and remained the only major actors in the region outside the Western sphere of influence. — location: 678 ^ref-31145

Syria would move to cement defence ties with North Korea, Iran and Hezbollah – the latter two despite very considerable ideological differences – to strengthen its position. With the deterioration of its conventional forces in the 1990s, Korean support in particular was key to providing some form of deterrent against the massive Western, Israeli and Turkish forces situated near its borders through asymmetric means. — location: 716 ^ref-59744

Syria began to acquire Hwasong-6 missiles from North Korea from 1991 to 1995, — location: 721 ^ref-37551

“One of the big causes of discontent in Syria is precisely the transfer of the state assets into private hands.” — location: 758 ^ref-24243

Kerry had predicted in 2009 regarding the impact of the new leadership in Damascus: “My judgment is that Syria will move; Syria will change, as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States and the West and the economic opportunity that comes with it.” — location: 767 ^ref-27909

with a Westphilian reformist line taken by the president leading the military and intelligence establishments to conduct key aspects of foreign policy related to security independently, which often appeared contradictory to the presidential line. — location: 775 ^ref-47995

There was an irony to the fact that the pretext for American military intervention against Iraq, which proved to be entirely fabricated, was key to deterring such intervention against Syria. — location: 819 ^ref-10523

A number of factors made Hezbollah’s war with Israel a highly consequential event. It was the first major incident of successful armed resistance on a significant scale to the Western-led order after the Cold War’s end, and along with Russia’s victory over Western-aligned Georgia two years later in defiance of European and American demands it marked the end of the unipolar world order under which Western power had been unchallenged. — location: 831 ^ref-47211

A key material facilitator of the Lebanese militia’s victory was its heavily fortified and extremely large network of tunnels and bunkers, which were constructed by North Korean experts154 — location: 836 ^ref-10293

Taking Syria out of the picture was increasingly highlighted by Western and Israeli sources as a way to cripple Hezbollah and cut its supply lines — location: 851 ^ref-26309

Following Hezbollah’s 2006 victory, the urgent need to weaken the ‘Axis of Resistance’ by targeting Syria scuppered Western plans to wait for a gradual Gorbachev-style shift in Syria under the new Assad government. — location: 882 ^ref-51774

The Western Bloc countries have partnered with and provided considerable assistance to radical Islamist militant groups to destabilise those countries outside the Western sphere of influence, including both neutral and Soviet-aligned states, for decades. — location: 1368 ^ref-51281

Indonesia in 1965, in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 90s, and in Yugoslavia and the post-Soviet states in the aftermath of the Cold War. — location: 1370 ^ref-2426

partnerships between the West and jihadist militants to neutralise states which had in various ways resisted Western global hegemony, — location: 1373 ^ref-12502

Although Indonesian leader Sukarno had crushed communist efforts to seize power in the country, he ran a developmentalist and largely centrally planned economy and resisted Western pressure to ban the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI - communist party) from running in elections. — location: 1382 ^ref-18128

The value of a partnership with Islamist groups would become clear in 1965, when a Western backed military coup saw Islamist militants play a major role in purging those suspected of being unsympathetic to the new pro-Western government in Jakarta. — location: 1404 ^ref-39679

documents since declassified show that overt Western support for Islamist insurgents began in July 1979 at the very latest – half a year before the Soviets had intervened. — location: 1441 ^ref-15863

American groups such as the Federation for American-Afghan Action, Free the Eagle, the Committee for a Free Afghanistan, and the Freedom Research Foundation, many with close ties to U.S. intelligence, played a key role in lobbying Congress for more direct American action. They also took the lead in influencing media outlets in the West and the Muslim world to cover the insurgency sympathetically. — location: 1482 ^ref-5595

hey.. sounds like the WUC/Uighur Congress

Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan would have close parallels in the Syrian War, where more modern variants of the F-16 used by Turkey and Israel similarly forayed into the target state’s airspace to provide air support to Western-backed insurgents. Turkey would also embed special forces45 with jihadist militants in Syria and was responsible for handling arms transfers to them46 and providing them safe haven on its territory,47 in close coordination with the U.S., almost exactly as Pakistan had in Afghanistan. — location: 1513 ^ref-47960

A particularly notable feature of the Afghan War, which would closely mirror the case in Syria years later, was the importance of Western global media in shaping its outcome. This allowed the West to frame the insurgency to the world as a virtuous cause against evil, rather than as terrorism, and to discredit Soviet narratives regarding the nature of their intervention. — location: 1527 ^ref-32561

Had the U.S. and its allies not intervened to support the Afghan insurgency, there is a very significant possibility that the USSR would not have dispatched its armed forces to Afghanistan. — location: 1531 ^ref-34848

The fate of the formerly progressive and fast modernising country after its defeat, from sharp declines in the status of women, drug abuse, life expectancy and economic output to peace and stability, can be observed until today. — location: 1538 ^ref-9809

America’s chief Balkans peace negotiator, Richard Holbrooke, himself testified that deployment of jihadists from Afghanistan played a key role in ensuring the survival of Western-aligned local militias in that conflict. — location: 1544 ^ref-21972

The fate of the Yugoslav population in defeat was dire, with a rise in human trafficking and American soldiers on the ground found to have taken teenage and pre-teen girls as sex slaves. — location: 1550 ^ref-45579

An understanding of the means used to destabilise Indonesia, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and Russia, therefore, is vital to placing later efforts to effect similar change in Syria in the context of broader trends in U.S. — location: 1591 ^ref-18347

“In ’78–79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism – in every version they produced, the lawyers said the U.S. would be in violation.” — location: 1596 ^ref-32998

In the context of inter-state relations, information warfare has often involved the manipulation of public opinion by an enemy state in line with that offending state’s interest. — location: 1613 ^ref-52354

Western information warfare offensives in Syria must therefore be understood as part of a revolution in the Western way of war, capitalising on new technologies such as social media to find new ways of targeting adversary states by directly accessing their populations. — location: 1636 ^ref-52842

efforts to pursue “civil society programming” and “behaviour reform” to effectively reshape Syrian thought and political culture in line with U.S. interests. — location: 1684 ^ref-44057

involved funding the anti-government satellite television network Barada TV, with the American origin of the funds kept secret. — location: 1687 ^ref-38119

Syria’s relative isolation from the Western economies, however, meant that although the fallout from the 2008 crisis was significant, it was still much smaller than that affecting Western client states such as the gulf countries and Egypt. — location: 1704 ^ref-17480

2006 in the form of a secret cable from the American embassy in Damascus titled — location: 1718 ^ref-6137

PLAY ON SUNNI FEARS OF IRANIAN INFLUENCE: — location: 1723 ^ref-30538

not only were uprisings against the Syrian state from March 2011 closely connected to Western NGOs, where the leaders of several anti-government groups had received extensive training, but the U.S. Congress and State Department had worked with tech giants to strengthen these operations. — location: 1749 ^ref-19413

Google Maps, for example, renamed various streets in government-controlled Damascus after jihadist leaders, wiping the internationally and UN recognised Syrian government off the map as a result. — location: 1770 ^ref-48235

Western social media platforms have proven to be highly effective tools for social engineering to promote both Westphilian narratives portraying the West and Western-aligned parties positively, and narratives which demonize or otherwise undermine faith in political actors or ideologies targeted by the West. — location: 1800 ^ref-7208

The Obama-era State Department was fully aware that the gulf was providing massive material support to the Iraqi Al Qaeda branch for operations in Syria, which suited Washington’s interests well. — location: 1833 ^ref-28360

Syria thus faced pressure not only from domestic conditions, but also from very mature and sophisticated information warfare operations and from a jihadist movement at the height of its power which the Western world was able to effectively manipulate. — location: 1844 ^ref-40596

one common factor underlying every rationale for targeting Syria was the country’s position as an independent state under a single ruling party which was outside the Western sphere of influence. — location: 1848 ^ref-22290

The second rationale for war was the need to isolate Iran and cripple Hezbollah, which was the primary casus belli involving the interests of Israel and the Gulf states as leading Western regional allies. — location: 1862 ^ref-12961

taking Syria which was geographically central out of the picture had the potential to break this axis without direct military confrontation – destroying Hezbollah without the need for another war in Lebanon and leaving Iran almost totally isolated in the region. — location: 1872 ^ref-28465

The third rationale for war was largely economic and pertained to Western intentions both to isolate Iran and to develop alternative sources of natural gas for Europe to that provided by Russia. — location: 1883 ^ref-35011

the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad — location: 1899 ^ref-27032

After the toppling of Ba’athist Iraq and the absorption of communist South Yemen into the north, Syria remained the only state in the Arab Middle East outside the sphere of Western control. — location: 1906 ^ref-47340

The fifth and most controversial major benefit the Western Bloc looked to gain from the Syrian government’s overthrow was the creation of a new launchpad for advances by jihadist groups against other Western adversaries. — location: 1914 ^ref-1428

He stated that the Western powers not only had failed to take any action against IS in Afghanistan, but also indicated that the terror group was receiving direct Western support. He recalled regarding IS in Afghanistan: “from the two years onwards to today, every day the local people, the local elders, government officials, media and others began to report that unmarked foreign helicopters, would go in and support extremists in all parts of the country… there’s a lot of evidence, unfortunately, that shows that these extremist forces are supplied from the foreign bases within Afghanistan.” — location: 1920 ^ref-866

“The support to Daesh [IS] in Afghanistan is not definitely meant for the purposes in Afghanistan. The U.S. has already established itself in Afghanistan. It doesn’t need to have a reason to establish itself there. It must be for objectives beyond Afghanistan, to cause trouble in the region.” — location: 1929 ^ref-3180

Available evidence indicates that Western plans to topple the Syrian government through support for an insurgency date back to at least 2009 — location: 2325 ^ref-62492

Operations to topple the government in Damascus under the Obama administration followed on from the Bush administration’s authorisation of CIA operations targeting Hezbollah, Syria and Iran from 2007 — location: 2351 ^ref-37258

Despite Syria’s secular government and Sunni majority both among the population and in government, the sectarian paradigm promoted in the West for viewing regional conflict framed it as a collaborator with the Shiite world due to its position in the Axis of Resistance and its joint stance with Iran and Hezbollah against Western regional hegemony. — location: 2387 ^ref-62499

The outbreak of a jihadist insurgency in Syria in 2011, spear-headed by groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and various Al Qaeda branches, was thus long in the making, and directly resulted from the Bush administration’s strategic shift to make preparations for confrontation with the ‘Axis of Resistance.’ — location: 2406 ^ref-23682

as a spontaneous revolution demanding Western style political reforms, the background to Western and allied operations to lay the ground for an Afghan-style jihadist takeover of Syria painted a very different picture. — location: 2411 ^ref-23010

the U.S. State Department had been able to directly exert an influence over Al Jazeera’s news coverage. — location: 2420 ^ref-42079

Western expectations for mass protests in major Syrian cities such as Damascus and Aleppo were dashed early on, despite extensive attempts to use American social media sites Facebook and Twitter to stoke them, — location: 2443 ^ref-40050

“Since the early weeks of the uprising, Robert Ford’s senior staff had held low-key meetings with opposition leaders and posted carefully worded encouragement on the U.S. Embassy’s Facebook page.” — location: 2447 ^ref-33915

This was closely reflected in the distribution of protests, which were overwhelmingly concentrated in rural areas or in areas with high populations of rural migrants. — location: 2468 ^ref-18648

more seriously than the ongoing and initially mostly peaceful protests, in terms of a direct threat to national security, were the mass attacks simultaneously being carried out against government buildings, police and military positions by militants pouring into the country. — location: 2473 ^ref-2146

militants had been armed and prepared for operations in Syria long before the first signs of any unrest had appeared. — location: 2476 ^ref-59467

“Syrian government claims that it is being assaulted by rebels who are armed, trained, and financed by foreign governments are more true than false.” — location: 2479 ^ref-21053

Britain, France, the U.S., Turkey and Jordan had all deployed special forces to Syrian territory to support the covert military campaign, which was largely shielded from view by the chaos of mass protests. — location: 2490 ^ref-47260

There was little illusion among Syria’s foreign adversaries that mass protests could topple the Ba’ath Party by themselves, with the protesting minority, no matter how well trained and vocal their organisers were, still relegated to outlying areas and holding few prospects of gaining support in the capital. What the protests did achieve, however, was to create enough confusion and disruption to allow Western-trained militants flowing across the borders to make serious gains. — location: 2492 ^ref-36454

U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency document from 2012 notably attested to this, stating that “Salafist, Muslim Brotherhood and AQI [Al Qaeda]” were “the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.” — location: 2509 ^ref-38849

The dominance of jihadist elements in the insurgency from its earliest days closely reflected the trend in Afghanistan, where there had been a small secular Maoist insurgency against the government which had clashed with the Soviet military. These non-Islamist militants could not be credited with even a single percentage of Afghan government or Soviet battlefield losses. — location: 2511 ^ref-24490

The Washington Post would refer to Al Nusra in late 2012 as the most aggressive and successful arm of the Free Syrian Army, — location: 2529 ^ref-42621

It was far from uncommon from the war’s earliest stages for crimes such as massacres to be blamed unanimously by Western media on the Syrian government or its partners, only for it to later emerge, often through investigations by Western reporters on the ground, that FSA insurgents were responsible. — location: 2533 ^ref-27402

British journalist Robert Fisk, who investigated the incident on the ground, found that the Free Syrian Army had been responsible and had massacred civilians and off-duty soldiers it had been holding prisoner. — location: 2538 ^ref-26305

with defections largely exaggerated former soldiers were found to comprise only around 4% of the insurgent coalition’s numbers even in the conflict’s initial months. This figure would decline sharply over the course of the war. — location: 2552 ^ref-63041

on October 19, 2011, that “large crowds of Syrians rallied in the northern city of Aleppo in support of the government of President Bashar Al Assad” – a sign that the government “can still command support.” — location: 2624 ^ref-38811

ceasefires strongly benefitted jihadist groups and allowed them to cement their control over newly occupied territories and strengthen their power bases within Syria’s borders. The conflict escalated from October 2012, following the failure of the last of the ceasefire agreements, with insurgent groups making major gains on all fronts, which led to particularly fierce fighting in the Turkish border regions. — location: 2766 ^ref-47126

Evidence that Libyan civilians were ever in danger from their government was highly questionable, with Foreign Policy among others noting that the Western claim of an imminent massacre by government forces unless NATO launched an offensive “does not stand up to even casual scrutiny.” — location: 2812 ^ref-27140

North Korea’s defence partnership with Syria dates back over half a century, with its armed forces, the Korean People’s Army (KPA), fighting alongside the Syrian Arab Army in all its major wars since the Six Day War in 1967 including the Yom Kippur and Lebanon wars. Bolstering Syria represented part of a broader Korean effort to push back against Western interests in the third world and was one of multiple KPA overseas operations conducted since the country had first gone to war with the United States in 1950. — location: 3021 ^ref-43424

Within six months the UN refugee agency reported that more than 440,000 internally displaced Syrians and around 31,000 of those who had fled abroad had now returned home, — location: 6023 ^ref-34664

the nature of the American bombing campaign, and in particular what appeared to be the intentional destruction of vital and very costly infrastructure which, unlike the Syrian Air Force and its partners, the U.S. made little effort to avoid damaging. — location: 6883 ^ref-25415

China, too, was a leading provider of economic assistance which would allow Syria to further withstand Western pressure, — location: 7613 ^ref-62496

Had Turkey not placed the last major bastion of jihadist forces in Syria under its protection, it is likely that the Syrian War would have ended in 2018 — location: 7962 ^ref-813

“Idlib Province is the largest Al Qaeda safe haven since 9/11.”194 Turkish protection was the only thing keeping it that way and preventing the SAA and its partners from rooting terrorist elements out. — location: 7966 ^ref-13763

The fact that Azerbaijan had an overwhelming Shiite majority, but was nevertheless a close partner of Turkey, Israel and the West and saw Sunni jihadist militants fighting alongside its own forces, notably did much to undermine the narrative that conflict in the Middle East and Central Asia was predominantly sectarian based. — location: 8092 ^ref-39792

Turkey’s former Foreign Minister Yasar Yakis stated to this effect in early 2020: “Turkey initially did not intend to fight in Syria against Syrian soldiers but became too active in Idlib, where it defended armed Salafi jihadist groups. However, now Turkey has no intention of abandoning them, and continues to protect them.” — location: 8120 ^ref-14003

“The United States has an ideology of world hegemony and does not accept any prospect of any country being sovereign or acting on its own. You have to be an American vassal state.” — location: 8863 ^ref-64344

The notion that any country could be forced to accept the presence of a Western military on its soil and have its government deemed illegitimate if it did not accept Western political values and adopt a Western style political system, as demonstrated in Syria, is an extremely dangerous one.i — location: 8882 ^ref-13188

The narrative of a sectarian Shiite-Sunni war had serious inconsistencies, the most notable being the diversity of the Syrian state and the Ba’ath Party leadership which strongly represented all minorities but was predominantly Sunni. — location: 8924 ^ref-63517

The end of the Donald Trump administration in January 2021 portended a much harder line from Washington against Syria, including a redoubling of economic warfare efforts and a cementing of the American commitment to maintaining the occupation of the northern regions. — location: 8944 ^ref-11512

Even though Syria prevailed, the West was able to achieve its destruction at very little cost to itself, much as had been the case in Afghanistan before it, meaning the final outcome of the war still represents a strengthening of the Western position at Damascus’ expense. — location: 9014 ^ref-26394

Backlinks

The following pages link to this page: