When, at the height of the Arab Spring, Syrian troops began gunning down peaceful protestors, the country’s ruler falsely claimed that his victims were terrorists. He then strove to make reality resemble his lie and, as Michael Totten writes, “created a terrorist menace to fight.”
For years Bashar al-Assad had been keeping radical Islamists quarantined in his jails, many of whom had fought returned home after fighting with al-Qaeda in Iraq, and in the most cynical “criminal-justice reform” in history, he let them out of their cages. They did exactly what he knew they would do—coalesced into terrorist armies out in the [Syrian] desert.
One of them was the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front and the other was Islamic State (IS), forged from the shattered remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq whom the world hadn’t heard from in years. . . . Assad . . . finally had the war that he needed. . . .
Assad is nothing if not a brilliant manipulator. Against all evidence, he managed to convince the secretaries of state John Kerry and Hillary Clinton that he was a “reformer” at a time when he was precisely the opposite, and he managed to convince [many others in high levels of government] that he’s fighting IS even though he and [his Russian allies] have spent more than 99 percent of their time, energy, and ammunition on every rebel army in the country except IS.
[Assad] still has plenty of supporters in the West, though, because he’s “secular” and therefore preferable to Islamists. As an individual, yes, Assad is secular. . . . The problem is, his chief political and military backers—Hizballah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps—are radical Islamists. His own army has been reduced to a shattered husk of its former self and will likely never again be able to impose secular rule on the entire country.
Read more on Tower: http://www.thetower.org/article/assad-still-must-go/