Updated Briefing on Syria

The Syrian Fuse is Burning Again

I have written about nine articles on Syria going back as far as 2017. Several of them concerned the genocide of Syrian Christians by radical Sunni Muslims opposing the rule of Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria from July 2000 until December 8, 2024. Assad is a Shia Alawite Muslim. The Alawites are exceptionally moderate Muslims and have allied with the Christians in economic and politics in Syria for many generations, protecting them from the Sunni Muslim majority in Syria, whose fundamentalist Islamic religious doctrines strongly oppose Christians, Jews, Druze, and in fact, all non-Muslims and moderate Muslims.  

The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, is the largest and most powerful Sunni Muslim organization in the world. The Muslim Brotherhood is “Salafist”—back to fundamentalist basics—in its doctrines and has especially little tolerance for religiously moderate Muslim leaders. For many decades,  the Ikhwan (Brotherhood) planned to remove the Assad regime, begun by Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez al-Assad after a military coup in 1971. The Arab Spring, backed by President Barack Obama in 2011, was the perfect opportunity to pursue Muslim Brotherhood goals in Syria. By the way, a 2004 FBI raid in Virginia uncovered hundreds of documents revealing Muslim Brotherhood plans to build a framework to overthrow the culture and Government of the United States.  

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has recently reintroduced a bill to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. Hamas was a 1987 offshoot of the Brotherhood.  South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace has introduced a similar bill in the U.S. House. Saudi Arabia and Egypt consider the Muslim Brotherhood a threat to government stability and have designated them as terrorists. However, in the past, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and a few wannabe liberal Republicans have defended the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2012, he attacked conservative Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann for her efforts to expose Muslim Brotherhood activity in the U.S. and Hillary Clinton’s chief aide Huma Abedin’s close family connections to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

During her term as Secretary of State (January 2009 to February 1, 2013), Hillary Clinton had arms shipped to Al-Qaeda militias in Syria.  Al-Qaeda is the very same terrorist organization that planned and executed the 9-11-2001 attack that killed nearly 3,000 Americans in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. Al-Qaeda became the driving force in the Sunni civil war against the Assad regime. Some Al-Qaeda factions evolved into ISIS, which was responsible for slaughtering many Christians and other minorities in Syria. 

Before becoming his father’s heir apparent to become President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad was a rather shy ophthalmologist in London. In order to justify American participation in the war against his regime, he was demonized by the CIA, British MI6, and other influencers. This demonization plan included accusations that he was using poison gas to kill Syrian civilians. These alleged poison gas attacks were later identified as British MI6 false flags. Trump was taken in by one of these, but based on his nominal bombing response, must have learned the truth. Thereafter. Trump began plans to withdraw American troops from Syria. Tulsi Gabbard was one of the first to expose our misguided alliance against Assad as a Democrat member of Congress in January 2017. Trump would be well advised to listen carefully to her as Director of National Intelligence.

The estimated population of Syria for 2025 is about 25.3 million. The ethnic and religious breakdown of the population approximated by using several sources, including the CIA Factbook and Wikipedia sources, is 73 percent Sunni Muslim Arabs, 10 percent Sunni Kurds, 11 percent very moderate Shia Alawite Muslims, 3.1 percent culturally unique Druze Shia Muslims, and according to Wikipedia, 3.8 percent Christians, mostly Antiochian Orthodox.  

The Christian population was about 10 percent in 2010,  but it has been considerably reduced by genocidal civil war on Christians, Alawites, and Druze by the dominant radical Sunni Muslim militias.  More recent and detailed surveys indicate the number of Christians may have been reduced below 2 percent, more than 80 percent having fled or been murdered by Sunni radicals. The present Syrian government has been in the hands of radical Sunnis since the overthrow of Assad in December 2024.  

Syria’s chief natural resources are oil and gas and phosphate. In peaceful times, it is also a major agricultural exporter.

The new President of Syria is Ahmed al-Sharaa, former commander of the radical Sunni Islam revolutionary forces in Syria. There is little doubt that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan supported and financed the rebel victory in Syria. Erdoğan has an interest in suppressing the Kurds, which the Turks consider a troublesome minority in Turkey. The Kurds have ambitions to create a Kurdistan nation combining Kurdish areas of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Erdoğan considers himself the de facto global head of the Muslim Brotherhood. Moreover Turkey has the largest and most powerful Army in European NATO. Turkey also has the most powerful military force in the Mideast, surpassing Israel, Iran, and Egypt.

The driving force of the civil war against Alawite rule by Bashar Assad from 2011 to 2020 was the radical dominated Sunni Muslim majority.  Beginning with the “Arab Spring” of 2011, the Obama Administration followed a Mideastern foreign policy sympathetic to the designs of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Russian Federation intervened with military support for the Assad government in 2015.  This gave the Russians access to the Mediterranean Sea via the ports of Latakia and Tartus in NW Syria. Moreover, there was Russian Orthodox concern over genocidal slaughter of the Orthodox Christians and their moderate Alawite allies in Syria.  The Trump Administration continued opposition to Assad for a while, perhaps because of Israel’s conflict with Syria over its Golan Heights northern border,  but with waning enthusiasm. By the end of his first term, he favored withdrawing from Syria, but his orders were not fully obeyed.

Bashar al-Assad and his family were given refuge in the Russian Federation following his overthrow as Syrian President in December 2024.

In recent developments in southern Syria, radical Sunni militias have attacked and killed about 60 Druze in the predominantly Druze province of Suweida. Israel, now claiming to be the protector of minorities in Syria, bombed Syrian Army and radical militia units in Suweida.

Here is an interesting aside about Israeli culture and politics. Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian Jews began massive emigration to Israel. Nearly one million arrived between 1989 and 2006. Russian Jewish immigrants and their descendants now number about 2.0 million, 20 percent of Israel’s 10 million population. Ashkenazic Jews  arriving earlier and especially in the 1950s, originating in central and eastern Europe, including Russia and Ukraine, brought  the total Ashkenazi population of Israel to 32 percent in 2018. Since 1948, Israel has had 11 Ashkenazic presidents or prime ministers, including Benjamin Netanyahu. Relationships between the Russian Federation and Israel were good until the present Ukraine War. About two-thirds of American Jews identify as Ashkenazic.  Ashkenazic Jews have a predominant mixture of Mideastern and Central and Eastern European DNA. Ashkenazic Jews have the highest average IQ scores (112 to 115) of any known group with significant data.  They are particularly strong in verbal analysis and reasoning.  Although they represent only 0.2 percent of the world population, they receive 22 percent of Nobel Prizes. One hundred times the expected representation!

On July 16, Israel conducted airstrikes on Damascus, targeting the Syrian Ministry of Defense and areas near the presidential palace. Israel claims these attacks were a response to recent atrocities against the Druze in Suweida. There have also been clashes between Druze militias and Syrian forces and Sunni militias.  Many analysts, however, believe Israeli attacks on the Syrian government are more related to Israel’s conflict with Iran.

It is tragic that in 2011 the U.S. was led to assist radical Islamic terrorists in a civil war to overthrow one of the most moderate, perhaps the most moderate, Muslim leader in the Muslim world.  It is shameful that we have ignored a genocide of Christians in Syria that has reduced the Christian population of Syria from 10 percent to less than 2 percent. Now Syria is a fuse that may light the flames of war over the whole Middle East and Western Asia.

“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: ‘May those who love you be secure. May there be peace within your walls and security within your citadels.”—Psalm 122:6-9

“If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men”—Romans 12:18

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God”—Matthew 5:9

“Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.  And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”—Genesis 12:1-3