The sudden fall of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 shocked the world. After years of brutal war, foreign interference and mounting civil unrest, the regime collapsed overnight.
Few expected it, but the signs were long visible: a hollowed-out economy crumbling from the strain of Western sanctions, internal dissent from decades of repression, a fractured nation overrun by armed groups, and a swarm of foreign powers manipulating the conflict.
But Syria’s collapse was neither organic nor inevitable. It was the product of a years-long, multinational campaign orchestrated by the United States, Israel and their Western and regional allies to topple Assad — just like in Iraq and Libya.
It was never about “removing a brutal dictator” or “saving the Syrian people” — it was yet another attempt at reorganizing the Middle East in their favor. And now, the same script is being rerun — only the target has changed: Iran.
Regime change playbook
“Almost every single government in that region has been installed with Western connivance,” Afzal Ashraf, professor of international relations at Loughborough University, tells Analyst News. An expert in terrorist ideology and extremism, he has advised governments on issues surrounding global security.
“From 2011, it has been an increasingly declared policy of the United States and Western countries to achieve regime change in Syria,” he says. “They have been supported by Qatar, Jordan and other Gulf states in that regard. Turkey has also been a partner in this project. Evidence exists indicating that a great deal of the regime change effort was supported by the covert intelligence services of these states as well as their special forces.”
A plan was indeed long in the works.
Former NATO commander General Wesley Clark alleged that, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, a Pentagon official showed him a memo listing seven Muslim-majority countries the U.S. intended to destabilize: “We’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.” Today, only one remains standing: Iran, where the U.S. is currently attempting to replicate its Iraq playbook.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been in power for the better part of the last 30 years, has relentlessly pushed this campaign from the start. “If you take out Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” Netanyahu told the U.S. Congress in 2002.
One year later, the U.S. invaded Iraq under false pretenses, launching an illegal war that not only toppled Iraqi President Saddam Hussein but plunged the entire region into chaos — fueling terrorism, destabilizing neighboring countries and reshaping geopolitics to this day.
Since then, the U.S. has become militarily or covertly involved in all the countries on Clark’s list in one way or another. As renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs outlines, the U.S. has led or sponsored wars against Iraq, through its 2003 invasion; Somalia, by backing Ethiopia’s 2006 invasion; Lebanon, by funding and arming Israel; Libya, through NATO airstrikes in 2011; Sudan, by supporting rebels in 2011; and Syria, beginning with a 2011 CIA operation.
Disarming Damascus
Destabilizing Syria was always key to this effort to reshape the Middle East.
Bashar al-Assad did indeed oversee a brutal regime of oppression and tyranny. But “this war in Syria did not come from Assad’s repression,” Sachs said recently at the Antalya Diplomacy Forum. “Actually, that decision originated in Jerusalem.”
Sachs says the war began when the Obama administration signed off on Operation Timber Sycamore in 2011 to overthrow Assad. This war was heavily promoted by Israel’s government, he says, which has long worked to overthrow every Middle Eastern government that opposed it.
Backed by the U.K., Saudi Arabia and Jordan, the CIA spent $1 billion training and arming militants — including terrorist groups — to topple Assad. The U.K. spent another £350 million. Meanwhile, U.S. troops and private military contractors were quietly on the ground in Syria under the veneer of fighting ISIS.
“The focus seems to have been on preserving ISIS lives and facilitating arms rather than fighting ISIS, as publicly stated,” Ashraf tells Analyst News, citing his own informal meetings with Middle Eastern officials. “The implication is that ISIS was a sort of partner in the Western-led regime change project rather than the target of its operations.”
The terrorist group that took over Syria and toppled Assad last year is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a former Al-Qaeda affiliate which was supported by these foreign powers.
According to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, the Obama administration in 2012 made a secret agreement with Turkey to arm the rebel groups. “By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar,” Hersh writes in the London Book Review. “The CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria.” The entire operation was run by then-CIA director David Petraeus, he writes.
“Terrorist organizations were both openly and covertly used to facilitate regime change,” Ashraf tells Analyst News. “Groups like the Kurdish YPG, part of the PKK, a designated terrorist organisation by the United States, U.K. and others, were deployed by the U.S. and now occupy swathes of Syrian territory, including key agricultural and energy producing areas.”
Before the civil war, Syria was a functioning and stable economy with good prospects. In 2009, the IMF described Syria’s economy as strong, with rapid non-oil GDP growth and low debt.
Two years later, Syria was slapped with heavy sanctions by major powers. The sanctions, which amounted to an embargo on the country, were so severe that Human Rights Watch said they affected humanitarian relief efforts.
Destroying a country’s economy will invariably lead to officials becoming more prone to corruption. The Syrian military was rampant with corruption in the lead-up to Assad’s fall. This helped Western forces prop up terrorist groups to implement their plans for the overthrow of Assad.
In 2023, members of the Syrian military were paid a meager $25 a month. In 2015, the United States military had already been paying up to $400 a month to the militants it was backing. The incentives for joining Western-backed rebel forces over the country’s own military were very high.
“One of the ways in which the Western world exercises neo-colonial control is through economic and defense dependencies,” Ashraf notes.
Israel’s campaign for regional dominance
The Western world’s motives for destabilizing the Middle East have become clearer in the last couple of years.
Since Israel’s war on Gaza, Netanyahu has launched a war of expansion and aggression across the Middle East, seeking to establish Israeli hegemony. He cites Israel’s security concerns for his wars, yet it’s the countries around it that face relentless attacks and devastation. When Israel launched unprovoked attacks on Iran in June, it used Iraqi and Syrian airspace — unchallenged and unrestricted — to reach its targets.
In just 48 hours following Assad’s fall, Israel destroyed 80% of Syria’s military through its largest air strike campaign in history, conducted with U.S. backing. Defying international laws and ignoring Syrian territorial sovereignty, Israel launched almost 500 airstrikes, destroying Syria’s scientific research center and 250 military sites across the country. It wiped out its entire naval fleet and air force — actions all condemned by the United Nations.
At the same time, Israel invaded Syrian territory and announced that the Golan Heights, which it has occupied for 60 years, would be part of Israel “for eternity.”
Israel bombed Syria at least 220 times between October 2023 and October 2024.
“Syria is left completely without an independent defense capability,” Ashraf says. “It is going to need significant funding to develop its infrastructure and its defense capability, which has been deliberately destroyed by Israeli bombing.”
When President George W. Bush announced the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he started with the words, “American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq.” Netanyahu’s advocacy for the war explains the U.S.’s desire to “disarm” Iraq — just as it did in Syria, and just as it’s attempting in Iran.
