Continuity of Agenda: Trump Administration White-Washes Bush-Obama-Biden-backed Al-Qaeda in Syria

May 29, 2025 (NEO – Brian Berletic) - US President Donald Trump announced during his May 2025 trip to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia that the US would be lifting long-standing sanctions on Syria, Reuters reported. 

Reuters would also claim: 

The end of sanctions on Syria would be a huge boost for a country that has been shattered by more than a decade of civil war. Rebels led by current President Ahmed al-Sharaa toppled President Bashar al-Assad last December.

During this same trip, President Trump would also meet and shake hands with the current Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, also known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani who – before taking power – headed the still US State Department-designated foreign terrorist organization  al-Nusrah Front, (now referred to as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham or HTS).

In reality, the conflict in Syria was not a civil war, but rather a proxy-war waged by the US alongside its Persian Gulf allies, Turkey, and Israel against the Syrian Arab Republic. 

The US sanctions President Trump is now lifting were designed to cripple the Syrian government, economy, and military, prevent reconstruction and economic recovery, and devastate the civilian population, all to hollow out the Syrian state to precipitate its eventual collapse as former US Department of Defense official Dana Stroul stated publicly in 2019. 

The proxy-war included a US-led campaign training, funding, equipping, and arming a network of extremists including al-Sharaa/al-Jolani’s terrorist al-Nusrah/HTS. 

Throughout the conflict in Syria, even US-based publications like the New York Times admitted as early as 2012 the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was facilitating the flow of billions of dollars in weapons, ammunition, and equipment from Turkey into Syria. 

While the official narrative was the US had been arming “moderate rebels,” no explanation was given as to how or why terrorist organizations like al-Nusrah/HTS quickly ended up dominating the Western-backed militancy. If the US and its allies were providing billions in aid to “moderate rebels,” who was providing even greater amounts of aid to extremist organizations allowing them to dominate the US-backed proxy-war in Syria? 

Trump Plays Role in Decades-Spanning Proxy-War Waged by the “Deep State” 

The answer is simple – there were never any “moderate rebels.” The US planned years before the conflict even began to use extremists as proxies to overthrow governments across the region, including Syria’s. 

Seymour Hersh as early as 2007 in his New Yorker article, “The Redirection,” warned: 

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

Preparations to build up militant groups as well as their political wings – especially the Muslim Brotherhood  – were already ongoing when Hersh wrote his 2007 article and continued until the US-engineered “Arab Spring” unfolded in 2011 under the Obama administration. 

The New York Times would admit in an April 2011 article that: 

A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington, according to interviews in recent weeks and American diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.

The same article also admitted: 

The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department.

The chaos the US-engineered “Arab Spring” created was used as an opportunity to launch multi-wars and proxy-wars across the region including a NATO-led regime change operation against Libya in North Africa, a US-backed Saudi-led coalition targeting Ansar Allah in Yemen, and the US proxy-war in Syria which eventually involved the US invasion and occupation of eastern Syria while NATO-member Turkey invaded and occupied its northern regions. 

Throughout the first Trump administration (2017-2021) brutal US sanctions and the illegal occupation of Syrian territory which began under the Obama administration were continued or even expanded. While many supporters of President Trump have attempted to claim his administration wanted to withdraw US forces from Syria, the Trump administration repeatedly and eagerly launched military strikes across Syria and carried out attacks on Syria’s ally Iran including the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani who at the time was in fact waging a regional war against US-backed terrorist organizations including/especially al-Nusra/HTS and the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (ISIS) as even US government-funded media PBS admitted at the time.

Thus, President Trump lifting US sanctions on Syria now that US-backed terrorists have succeeded in Washington’s goal of overthrowing the Syrian government, is simply the next step in what is clearly continuity of agenda, allowing US-backed proxies to consolidate control over Syria and prepare it as a springboard for wider regional violence aimed at Iran and what remains of its network of allies and partners. 

President Trump’s Role in Continuing the “Deep State” Agenda 

While al Nusra/HTS remains a US State Department designated foreign terrorist organization at the time of this writing, if recent history can serve as a guide, attempts will be made to delist it – allowing the US to more overtly aid it as Washington’s confrontation with Iran continues. 

A similar process took place during the US-led NATO war in Libya. The US had likewise armed and backed the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) – Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Libya – even as a US State Department-designated foreign terrorist organization. 

LIFG remained on the US State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations until long after the successful overthrow of the Libyan government. Despite providing weapons, training, equipment, and even air cover for LIFG, the US sought to maintain plausible deniability as the terrorist organization committed ethnic and religious-driven atrocities all throughout and immediately after the conflict. 

In late 2015, LIFG was officially delisted by the US State Department even as the organization and its members continued carrying out terrorism – not only across the Arab World – but within the borders of its Western sponsors, including the 2017 Manchester attack in the United Kingdom, the BBC reported. 

US President Donald Trump ran for office both in 2017 and 2024 on the premise of “draining the swamp” and fighting against the “deep state.” During his first administration and now continuing throughout his second administration, he has instead demonstrably played his role in continuing all of the policies of the “deep state.” 

Just as has been the case throughout the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations, President Trump will continue overseeing the use of extremist groups to advance US foreign policy objectives around the globe, including in the Middle East and specifically against the nation of Iran. President Trump’s lifting of sanctions on Syria and his normalization of the leader of a still US-listed terrorist organization demonstrates the vast disparity between President Trump’s rhetoric and the reality of what his administration is actually presiding over.  

The world should have learned by now that holding its breath and waiting for the United States to end continuity of agenda on its own is a dangerous, irresponsible fantasy and only through cooperation and concerted effort can the global system the US draws its power from be displaced/replaced and the rise of multipolarism used to secure nations and regions around the world from the decades-spanning interference and aggression of the United States government and the corporate-financier interests determining its policies – no matter who sits in the White House.  

Those seeking comfort in the delusion that President Trump represents “change” are betrayed by President Trump’s own words, actions, and policies as his administration clearly is picking up right where the Biden administration and others left off.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.