By José Niño

On December 8, 2024, the 24-year reign of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad came to an end after a rebel coalition of  Al-Qaeda offshoots, Turkish proxies, and other Islamist militants overwhelmed the capital of Damascus. In effect, a Sunni Islamist saturnalia brought an end to the Middle East’s last secular Arab government. 

The Assad family, starting with Hafez al-Assad in 1971, has held an iron grip on Syrian politics for over five decades. As committed members of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, the Assads aligned with rivals to the West and Israel such as the Soviet Union, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and later on the Russian Federation.

For it being a perennial thorn in the US‘s and Israel’s side, Syria was mentioned as a potential target for regime change by neoconservative policy advisors Richard Perle and Douglas Feith in their policy document A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. The neoconservative plan, authored in 1996, was directed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was serving his first term as Israeli prime minister. The proposals outlined in the document have guided the foreign policy grand strategies of the ultranationalist Likud coalition that has dominated Israeli politics in the last three decades in addition to American Zionists across the political aisle. 

During the Global War on Terror, the Syrian regime and the then-administration of George W. Bush briefly became strange bedfellows on the issue of torture. Because the Bush administration could not torture suspected terrorists during interrogations on US soil, it turned to the controversial practice of extraordinary rendition to circumvent restrictions on torture. As former CIA agent Robert Baer candidly put it, “If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria.”

Whatever rapprochement took place between Syria and the US during the Bush year soon evaporated after the Arab Spring uprisings........

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