Capitalizing on the 2011 protests against the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, the US partnered with Israel, Gulf monarchies, Turkey, and other NATO states to fuel a sectarian insurgency that sought regime change. Although many Syrians took to the streets to protest state corruption and repression, those with the guns had other goals. As one early protest slogan put it: “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the Grave.” Before he was murdered by insurgent forces in 2014, Father Frans van der Lugt, a Dutch Jesuit priest who witnessed the war’s early years, recalled:

From the start, the protest movements were not purely peaceful. From the start I saw armed demonstrators marching along in the protests, who began to shoot at the police first. Very often the violence of the security forces has been a reaction to the brutal violence of the armed rebels.

...The opposition of the street is much stronger than any other opposition. And this opposition is armed and frequently employs brutality and violence, only in order to then blame the government.

By early 2012, the insurgency had become dominated by Al Qaeda, then known as Al-Nusra, under the leadership of Abu Mohammad al-Jolani – who is now the ruler of Syria.

Despite claiming to support the “moderate opposition”, the US understood who was in charge. An August 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report noted that “Salafi[s], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency.” Al Qaeda, the report stressed, “supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning.” Al Qaeda’s role did not dissuade Washington from supporting the insurgency as well. As Jake Sullivan, who went on to serve as Biden’s national security adviser, wrote to Hillary #Clinton six months earlier: “Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria.”

The CIA-led operation to arm the insurgents, codenamed Timber Sycamore, proved to be “one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the C.I.A.,” the New York Times later reported. Drawing on a massive arsenal sourced from across the globe—including the looted stockpiles of the government it had helped overthrow in Libya—the CIA armed and trained nearly ten thousand insurgents, who formed a part of the broader al Qaeda-dominated rebellion.

In a rare acknowledgment by an establishment US publication, the New York Times reported in April 2017 that US-backed insurgents threatened “sectarian mass murder.” The most notorious case came four years earlier, when the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army joined an al-Nusra and ISIS offensive on Alawite areas of Latakia. A Human Rights Investigation found that the insurgents engaged in “the systematic killing of entire families.” In a video from the field, former Syrian army general Salim Idriss, head of the U.S.-backed Supreme Military Council (SMC), bragged that “we are cooperating to a great extent in this operation.” The Latakia massacres came four months after the U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, hailed Idriss and his fighters as “the moderate and responsible elements of the armed opposition.”

The following year, Joe #Biden broke from his colleagues to accidentally reveal the truth. In Syria, “there was no moderate middle,” Biden blurted out to a Harvard audience. Instead, Biden explained, “hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons” were supplied to an insurgency dominated by “Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.” The following year, an Al Qaeda-led coalition, backed with CIA weaponry and intelligence, captured the Syrian province of Idlib, creating what senior Obama-Biden official Brett McGurk described as “the largest Al Qaeda safe haven since 9/11.”