In yesterday’s newsletter, I mentioned some of the myths that collapsed along with the Assad regime. Noah Rothman adds four more, perhaps the most pervasive of which was that Bashar al-Assad used his brutal rule to rein in jihadists:
This binary dichotomy—a brutal secular dictatorship vs. the Islamist theocrats who attacked the United States on 9/11—is one that is preferred by Assad and his backers. The dithering they encouraged allowed the regime and its Iranian and Russian backers to neutralize pro-Western elements among Syria’s rebel ranks, but Assad’s flatterers were promulgating a fiction.
Even as Damascus’s friends in the West insisted that the Assadist-Russian-Iranian concordat was dismantling Islamist elements, Assad was incubating Islamist groups like what became Islamic State, allowing IS forces to maneuver and reconstitute themselves, and even coordinating with the terrorist outfit to eliminate [the most serious non-jihadist rebels]. That behavior continued long after the United States reluctantly concluded that it could not rely on Moscow to preserve its interests in the region. And we’re about to learn more about the nature of the Assad regime’s support for terrorism.
Following the fall of Damascus, the United States and Israel conducted a series of airstrikes on Assad’s chemical weapons facilities (the stuff Barack Obama said Russia would dispose of for us) and on Islamic State targets inside erstwhile regime-controlled areas of Syria.
More about: Barack Obama, Bashar al-Assad, ISIS, Syria, U.S. Foreign policy