America Shouldn't Be Propping Up An Al Qaeda Terror State

By Daniel Greenfield, @ Sultan Knish Blog

In March, the Trump administration laid out conditions for ending sanctions on Syria.

The new Islamic terrorist regime led by a former Al Qaeda terrorist that had taken over Syria was warned to “exclude foreign terrorist fighters from any official roles”, difficult to imagine considering that the country was being run by domestic and foreign terrorists, “and ensure the security and freedoms of Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities”. Especially Christians.

“Any adjustment to U.S. policy towards Syria’s interim authorities will be contingent on all of those steps being taken,” the terrorist regime was warned.

This position was reaffirmed by the Trump administration in April at the UN Security Council.

Syria’s Jihadi government not only refused to expel its foreign Jihadi allies, but gave members of Al Qaeda and ISIS linked terrorists ranks in its new ‘military’. Syria not only harbors terrorist networks from as far away as China and Albania, but also Muslim terrorists from Western nations like Omar Diaby, listed by the United States as linked to Al Qaeda, who was “responsible for recruiting 80% of the French-speaking jihadists who went to Syria or Iraq” and who are at high risk of carrying out terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States.

With Al-Qaeda and ISIS Jihadis in control of Syria, the country’s Christians live in fear.

The new terrorist regime was supposed to protect Syria’s Christians as a precondition to dropping sanctions. And while Al-Jolani has made all sorts of assurances, Islamic terrorists remain in control of some Christian property seized during the war (many other churches were destroyed) and Christians have been warned to become Muslims or face the consequences.

Leaflets bearing the message “death to the pork eaters” and other threats against Christians continue to circulate. Selective curfews were imposed on Christians who defended themselves against Muslim violence and they were disarmed in at least one community.

Syria’s Christians are expected to entrust their security to the Al Qaeda and ISIS terrorists who massacred their families, took nuns hostage and destroyed churches. They’re terrified of what the future holds and they have every reason to be in a country run by terrorists whose religion commands the oppression, enslavement and or killing of everyone who isn’t a Sunni Muslim.

While the sanctions were imposed on the previous Assad regime, the Trump administration had tried to use them as leverage to convince the Al-Jolani regime to expel foreign Jihadis and protect Christians. Instead the towel was thrown in at the infamous meeting in Saudi Arabia.

And what is the United States getting in return for lifting sanctions and losing its leverage?

Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that the sanctions had to be lifted because of an urgent need to get aid into Syria. This argument, already deployed everywhere from Gaza to Yemen to Afghanistan to drop restrictions on delivering aid to terrorists has only made terrorism worse.

Sending aid to Syria, an enemy nation whose governments have been terrorists of one kind or another, is not a vital national interest. Ending the use of Syria by Islamic terrorist groups, some of whom pose a threat to the United States, is. And protecting Christians is a cultural interest.

Rubio also argued in the Senate that sanctions needed to be dropped because Syria was weeks or months “away from potential collapse and a full-scale civil war of epic proportions, basically the country splitting up.” Why this would be any worse than the current state of affairs in which Al Qaeda and ISIS terrorists run the country was not made clear.

“We want to help that government succeed, because the alternative is full-scale civil war and chaos, which would, of course, destabilize the entire region,” he argued.

Do we really want terrorists to succeed in ruling Syria? Is that in our national interest?

Why is keeping Syria united under Turkish, Al Qaeda and ISIS rule preferable to letting the various ethnic and religious groups forced at gunpoint to pretend they’re part of one country get their independence? Syria’s Christians would be more likely to benefit from independence than rule by an Islamic terrorist coalition with a history of committing atrocities against Christians.

It’s obvious why Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other participants in the coalition of state sponsors of terror, including 9/11, and who helped engineer the Arab Spring, and the Jihadi takeover of Syria would want to keep the power they seized. And we know all too well why Republican globalists like McCain adopted those same positions and got the United States into the business of backing the Syrian ‘rebels’ no matter how often they showed their true Jihadi colors.

But why is the Trump administration adopting this rebooted Arab Spring?

The biggest evidence that dropping sanctions on the Al Qaeda regime and the $10 million reward for its leader, Al-Jolani, was a grave error was that it was immediately adopted by the EU.

“Today, we took the decision to lift our economic sanctions on Syria. We want to help the Syrian people rebuild a new, inclusive and peaceful Syria,” European Commission VP Kaja Kalla tweeted. Followed by her declaration that “Sanctions are working. They hit Russia’s economy hard and hamper its capacity to wage war.”

Why do sanctions work in Russia but not in Syria? Because the EU and globalist forces support the Al Qaeda takeover of Syria. And that’s already a good reason for us not to join them.

But from the Iran negotiations to a concern about “humanitarian aid” for Gaza, our foreign policy is starting to resemble Europe’s foreign policy and that of the Obama administration. What’s missing is any sense of why this is in our national interest. Obama and the EU reject the idea that national interests matter, only an amorphous concept of “values” that favors our enemies.

We should be able to do better than this 99 cent store globalism.

The best Rubio could do was to assert some sort of domino theory, arguing that, “When Syria is unstable, the region becomes unstable.” It’s hard to see what could destabilize the region more than Al Qaeda terrorists in charge of a country, but even taken at face value, that commits the Trump administration to perpetually maintaining stability across the Middle East by propping up any government, no matter how awful, and then watching the whole thing spin out of control anyway, and recapitulating the worst days of the Clinton, Bush and Obama years. Again.

The Trump era was supposed to restore foreign policy based on national interests and an end to the United States playing the world’s policeman. Cutting a deal with Al-Jolani just showcases the foreign policy disasters that led us into allying with Islamic terrorists in Syria a decade ago in the name of such vague concepts as international law, human rights and regional stability. 

Democrats and Republicans got played by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Turkey and other Islamic states into embracing the Arab Spring. Now we’re being roped into supporting Jhadis taking over Syria all over again. And then where to next? Libya? Gaza? America?

We dropped sanctions on Syria in order to keep it in the hands of Al Qaeda while abandoning our best leverage for protecting Syria’s Christians and keeping terrorist groups from using Syria as a base. After Qatar stabbed us in the back in Afghanistan, we’re back to trusting it in Syria and Gaza. And we’ve forgotten that making deals with Islamic Jihadis only ends one way.

The same way it did for us in Afghanistan…with dead Americans and American hostages. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.