By Senator (ret.) Richard H. Black
Sen. Richard H. Black is a retired Virginia state senator, and a retired JAG colonel who served on the Army General Staff at the Pentagon. As a Marine with the 1st Marine Division, he was wounded in fierce combat. He is a lifelong expert on foreign and military affairs and had visited the front lines in Syria during the conflict.
The slaughter of Alawites in Latakia province marks the culmination of a brutal proxy war launched under former United States President Barack Obama and finalized by President Joe Biden, leading to the collapse of Syria’s secular government and the rise of a terrorist regime.
Once admired as the most democratic country in the Arab Middle East, Syria had a constitutionally elected president, Bashar al-Assad, and an advanced 2012 constitution that guaranteed freedom of religion, speech, and women’s rights. Now, under the rule of an ex-al-Qaeda warlord, the country has descended into mass killings, terror, and revenge massacres targeting religious minorities.
A Proxy War that Led to Slaughter
The crisis traces back to 2011, when the Obama Administration orchestrated the overthrow of Libya’s President Muammar Gaddafi to seize its massive arsenal of advanced weapons. These weapons were then transferred to Syrian militants via Türkiye, under the CIA’s covert program “Timber Sycamore.” The goal was to arm a jihadist army drawn from across the globe, igniting a war that resulted in over 500,000 deaths, characterized by mass beheadings, systematic rape, crucifixions, and other atrocities.
One of the key figures to emerge from this conflict was Abu Mohammad al-Jawlani, a former lieutenant of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Once a prisoner of the U.S. Army, he was mysteriously released just as the CIA was activating the Timber Sycamore project in Syria, and he became the leader of al-Nusra, (later renamed Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS) which was, in fact, al-Qaeda in Syria.
Just 10 years earlier, 19 men from al-Qaeda had hijacked passenger jets and crashed them into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in the infamous 9-11 attacks. They killed 3,000 Americans, many of whom leapt to their deaths to avoid the flames.
