Dan Burmawi@DanBurmawy
Dave, let me educate you like I always do:
The seeds of Syria’s chaos were sown in the 1970s, when Hafez al-Assad, a member of the Alawite minority, took power in a Sunni-majority country.
In the eyes of Sunni Muslims, it was intolerable to be ruled by someone they did not consider truly Muslim.
To secure his position, Assad sought legitimacy from a Shia cleric who issued a fatwa declaring Alawites as Muslims to defuse the theological tension. But that wasn’t enough.
Sunni Muslim groups rejected it and responded with violence.
Between 1970 and 1978, their opposition escalated, culminating in the massacre of 80 Alawite cadets at the Aleppo artillery school.
Assad responded by consolidating power around fellow Alawites, excluding Sunnis from the security apparatus, and preparing for inevitable revolt.
That revolt came in 1982, when Assad crushed a Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Hama, slaughtering an estimated 25,000 Sunnis and silencing dissent for a generation.
Fast-forward to 2011. The Syrian "uprising" wasn’t just a protest against dictatorship, it was a jihadist resurrection, funded and armed by Islamic countries looking to reshape Syria into an Islamic stronghold.
From 2011 to 2025, millions of Syrians were governed by jihadist factions: al-Qaeda affiliates, ISIS remnants, and new militant groups under different names but with the same goal, an Islamic state.
The U.S. and Israel did not try to take al-Assad down for years; if that had been their goal, they could have done it in the first year.
On the contrary, they wanted him to remain in power because they realized the alternative would be Sunni Islamic terrorism.
After October 7, there were attempts to welcome al-Assad back into the international community.
However, there was one condition: cut Iranian supply lines to Hezbollah through Syria.
Because Iran had effectively controlled Syria during the war years, al-Assad was unable to do so, so removing him became the only option.
The legitimacy given to the ISIS leader was the result of $2.4 trillion in Qatari and Saudi investment promised to the U.S. economy, along with a request for Trump to approve Ahmad al-Sharaa as president of Syria.
Trump was assured by MBS and Qatar that they would control al-Sharaa, and they did.
However, the real problem is the hundreds of thousands of ISIS fighters who became the Syrian army.
So even if al-Sharaa were a Mossad agent, he would not be able to control them.
Blaming Israel for Islamic jihad is ridiculous and reflects ignorance of what has actually happened.
