Rubio Says Syria Could Be ‘Weeks Away’ From Civil War, State Collapse (Again)

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio last Thursday met with Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani and other ruling Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) officials in Antalya, Turkey – just as President Trump controversially greeted Syria’s new ruler Ahmed al-Sharaa (Jolani) in Riyadh. Rubio’s was the first such US meeting with a Syrian foreign minister in fifteen years, the State Department later said.

Following this, Rubio on Tuesday went before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to defend the administration’s dropping of all Syria sanctions, in order to “give them a chance” – as Trump said of Syria while on his Gulf visit. Rubio sounded an alarm, warning that the already war-torn country could be weeks away from civil war and collapse of the HTS government. Watch:

Syria is likely on the verge of ‘full scale civil war’ — Marco Rubio

The US state secretary laments the country’s current rulers ‘didn’t pass their background check with the FBI’ https://t.co/gBUH1gCYwa pic.twitter.com/g2mY1UMcZC

— RT (@RT_com) May 20, 2025

“It is our assessment that, frankly, the transitional authority, given the challenges they’re facing, are maybe weeks — not many months — away from potential collapse and a full-scale civil war of epic proportions, basically the country splitting up,” Rubio told the Senate hearing. There have for weeks been running street battles between HTS and Druze factions in the south and in suburbs of Damascus.

Describing the rationale behind dropping the years-long brutal US sanctions, Rubio said: “We want to help that government succeed, because the alternative is full-scale civil war and chaos, which would, of course, destabilize the entire region.”

Of course, the supreme and dark irony here is that it was Washington which led destabilization efforts in Syria over the last decade in the first place, with the CIA’s Operation Timber Sycamore. Assad fled the country on December 8, and since then the brutal Islamist group HTS and US-designated terrorist Sharaa/Jolani has ruled from Damascus.

everything is finepic.twitter.com/RIrzRbjLn3

— Hassan Ridha (@sayed_ridha) May 20, 2025

To state the obvious, just maybe the US should not have sought to overthrow the largely secular government of Bashar al-Assad, which protected the minority religious communities now being massacred by HTS? Christians, Alawites, Druze, and secularists of all strips in Syria are now living in a new dark ages.

Rubio actually said before the senators that “When Syria is unstable, the region becomes unstable.”

But, he continued, “If we engage them, it may work out, it may not work out. If we did not engage them, it was guaranteed to not work out.”

Important “Islamic State Leader Omar al-Shishani Fought Under U.S. Umbrella as Late as 2013” by @BradRHoff https://t.co/JQg5TwcLDp

— Joshua Landis (@joshua_landis) March 10, 2016

It should be recalled that over the past decades Rubio himself as a senator had called for regime change in Damascus on many occasions.

For example, in 2015 – at a moment the Islamic State was making gains in eastern Syria and across the region, Rubio said “Ending Assad’s reign of terror once and for all will be, too. And both will be much more difficult than if we had acted at the outset of the civil war in Syria, as some of us urged President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But it is still not impossible.”

* * *

Dear Marco, 

In calling for Assad’s removal and approving regime change efforts and policies as a US Senator over the prior decade, this is who you helped empower (news footage below).

Signed, 

Syria’s Persecuted Christians