Supporting American Syria Intervention Is Supporting Islamic Terrorists

The hypocrisy of Donald Trump’s rhetoric about radical Islamic terrorists was revealed this month, when he came out in support of the U.S.’ efforts to help jihadists in Syria. While the president has used fear of Islamic extremists to persecute innocent Muslim Americans, he’s let the U.S. military protect terrorist groups like ISIS to advance the war against the Assad government. And now that Syria and Russia are trying to reclaim Syria’s Idlib province from the jihadist rebels who’ve occupied the region, Trump is effectively siding with the terrorists by having the U.S. defend Idlib from Assad and Putin’s intervention efforts.

This is the uncomfortable truth behind all of the anti-Assad propaganda that Western politicians and pundits have been putting out for the last eight years; supporting the war against Assad is the same as supporting al-Qaeda and the other terrorist groups that are benefiting from the destabilization of Syria.

And despite the attempts from mainstream media outlets to portray America’s support for jihadists as a conspiracy theory, the evidence for this practice is undeniable. Last year, while co-sponsoring the Stop Arming Terrorists Act, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard said in an interview that:

This isn't a matter of giving weapons to people, but they end up falling into the wrong hands. We are directly arming militants who are working under the command of al-Qaeda, all in this effort to overthrow the Syrian government. We have been providing direct and indirect support to al-Qaeda, the very group which attacked us on 9/11, that we are supposedly continuing to fight against and trying to defeat...The thing that should make everyone feel sick is that people would rather support, directly and indirectly, al-Qaeda, than actually give up their regime change goals.

If Gabbard’s claims have any deniability, even Obama official Ben Rhodes recently admitted that the U.S. has been supporting jihadists in Syria. Here’s a transcript of an interview with Rhodes from this June, wherein The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan presses Rhodes about how the terrorist factions were being treated:

MH: Oh, come on, but you were coordinating a lot of their arms. You know, the U.S. was heavily involved in that war with the Saudis and the Qataris and the Turks.

BR: Well, I was going to say: Turkey, Qatar, Saudi.

MH: You were in there as well.

BR: Yeah, but, the fact of the matter is that once it kind of devolved into kind of a sectarian-based civil war with different sides fighting for their perceived survival, I think we, the ability to bring that type of situation to close, and part of what I wrestled with in the book is the limits of our ability to pull a lever and make killing like that stop once it’s underway.

Despite Rhodes’ attempt in this statement to shift the blame for the war away from the West, his use of the word “yeah” confirms Hasan’s charge.

This “dirty war” strategy of directly giving these terrorist groups arms may have ended last year, but like I said, America’s current actions in Idlib continue the effort to support jihadists. As does the Trump administration’s apparent endorsement of a new regime change effort in Syria, which will result in a massive jihadist takeover of the region if Assad is successfully overthrown. Then there’s the U.S.’ ongoing support for the White Helmets, a propaganda-oriented group whose members have been repeatedly revealed to include jihadists.

These facts aren’t surprising at all when you look at the history of imperialism. The U.S. worked with Nazi scientists after World War II; during the 1980’s, the CIA aided militant Islamist groups to help fight Afghanistan’s  government; collusion with terrorist groups, dictators, and criminal organizations has been a regular part of American foreign policy for decades. But America’s support for terrorists in Syria needs to be put into the public consciousness, because the credibility of the West’s war propaganda depends on the perception that the rebels and their Western backers are noble people who want to defeat the “monster”Assad.

If we take the masks off of the “moderate” rebels, Americans will overwhelmingly reject their government’s murderous Syria policies.