US 'Ally' in Syria? Newsweek Forgets Decades of Destabilization
📰 THE STORY: Newsweek reports on the US reconsidering its support for Kurdish-led forces in Syria against ISIS, framing these groups as long-time allies potentially left vulnerable by shifts in US policy, with the implication that this is a departure from historical US commitment. 🔍 WHAT THEY'RE NOT TELLING YOU: Historical Context: The US involvement in Syria began not with fighting ISIS, but
with actively destabilizing the Syrian government. Beginning in 2011, the CIA ran a covert program known as Timber Sycamore, funneling billions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons (including TOW anti-tank missiles) through Saudi Arabia and other regional proxies to various 'moderate' rebel groups, many of whom later aligned with or lost materiel to al-Qaeda affiliates like Jabhat al-Nusra.
This massively armed insurgency created the chaos that allowed ISIS to flourish, as then-Defense Intelligence Agency Director Michael Flynn noted in 2012, the rise of extremist groups was a 'willful decision' of the US government to destabilize Assad. Double Standard: Western media routinely lionizes 'freedom fighters' when they are destabilizing governments inconvenient to US hegemony (e.g.,
Contras in Nicaragua, Mujahideen in Afghanistan) but labels them 'terrorists' the moment they turn against US interests or when the target government becomes an 'ally' again. Here, the Kurdish forces are portrayed as victims of US caprice, while the US's broader role in creating the battlefield for groups like ISIS is conveniently scrubbed from the narrative. The very 'ISIS threat' that