Trump lifts sanctions on Syria’s new anti-Christian jihadist government and invites its foreign minister to Washington

by Leo Hohmann | Sep 19, 2025 

Leo Hohmann – Leo’s Newsletter Sept 18, 2025

Syrian President Jolani

NOTE FROM LEO: Dear friends, the below article gives important history on the destruction of ancient Christian communities in Syria that I hope you will share with your friends and family. Meanwhile, if you appreciate these updates, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. This lets me know you value my independent reporting and analysis on issues that matter — war and peace, the surveillance state, globalism, etc. Some in my audience have canceled their subscriptions because they cannot handle any criticism of President Trump. I need those who appreciate honest and factual reporting, regardless of who it offends, to make up the difference. If you can afford $7 a month or $80 a year, please stand in the gap for me. Thank you and God bless.

The Associated Press reports that Syria’s foreign minister was in Washington on Thursday, September 18, “kicking off the first official visit to the United States by a top Syrian official in 25 years as the new government in Damascus struggles to recover from the civil war and boost relations with the West following the fall of autocrat Bashar Assad.”

Before hebecame president, a reward poster for Jolani fromthe “war on Terror” era. Click to enlarge

The new Syrian government is filled with bloodthirsty Sunni jihadists, but the sick implication of the AP’s article is that they’re pro-Western, so it doesn’t matter.

Assad was backed by Russia and thus, in the eyes of the AP, he must be described as “autocratic.” While it’s true Assad was autocratic, all Arab leaders are autocratic and using this word to describe him doesn’t give the complete picture or context. Assad was in fact a protector of the Christian and Alawite religious minorities in Syria. He held off the dogs — the bloodthirsty Sunnis — and when he was overthrown with the help of Israeli and Western intelligence agencies, it became open season on Alawites and Christians. This is a fact the American neocons don’t want you to know.

Richard Ghazal lays out the sad story of Syria’s Christians in a July 7 op-ed for The Hill titled “The vanishing Christians of Syria: A crisis the world cannot ignore.”

But the AP can’t help itself. It can’t report the truth about Syria because it’s so tightly connected to the false narratives perpetrated by the U.S. military-industrial-intelligence complex, which is part of the neoconservative/neoliberal warmongering establishment in Washington. This establishment is inherently pro-Israel, but it’s also stridently pro-Sunni jihadist and anti-Russian. That’s why neocon Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham traveled to Syria in February 2012 and communicated to the Sunni tribes there that they had the backing of the West in their desires to overthrow Assad. From that point on, Syria disintegrated further and further into bloody civil war.

According to Ghazal’s article in The Hill, prior to the start of the Syrian Civil War, “Christians made up approximately 10 percent of Syria’s population and played key roles in academia, medicine, commerce and in public life. They coexisted with their Muslim neighbors to preserve a fragile but buoyant multiethnic, multiconfessional social fabric.”

The civil war, however, shattered this pluralistic order. Today, fewer than 300,000 Christians remain in Syria, down from roughly 2 million prior to the war.

To this day, I shudder whenever I hear a conservative pundit portray Putin as just another oldline KGB communist. The hatred of Russia has nothing to do with communism and everything to do with the struggle to maintain U.S./U.K./E.U. hegemonic control over the Middle East and the world. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, until it is, and that’s when U.S./Western adventurism triggers the slaughter of ancient Christian communities in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere.

Putin is no doubt an authoritarian leader, a nationalist and a pragmatist who gravitates to policies that magnify his grip on power.

In other words, one could make the argument that Putin is very nearly a Russian version of Donald Trump. He likes power. He wields it unapolagetically, austensibly for the betterment of his country’s standing in the world. But he’s no communist. Get over it all you gals and guys working in the well-funded think tanks with your heads still firmly entrenched in the 1980s. If Putin was a communist he would not be vilified day in and day out by the liberal Western media in the U.S., U.K., Germany and France. He would not have been protecting Syria’s Christians.

Interestingly, when Russia was communist, the AP, The New York Times, The Guardian and other liberal Western news agencies treated them much better and gave them much less hostile coverage.

Thursday’s jubilent AP report reflected its giddiness that “Washington has steadily been easing sanctions imposed on Syria under Assad since after U.S. President Donald Trump met interim Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa in Saudi Arabia in May — a key event that set Syria’s new authorities on the path to end decades of international isolation.”

Trump signed an executive order in June ending most of the U.S. economic sanctions on Syria, following through on a promise he made to the new Syrian president during their meeting. John McCain would be proud. Lindsey Graham is toasting the president and offering to pay for their next round of golf.

So the picture is clear. For all willing to see it. Align with Russia and you get branded a vicious dictator and are economically isolated by the West. Align with the U.S. and no matter how brutal you are to your own people, particularly Christians, you get an invite to the White House with offers of lucrative trade deals.

The new Syrian foreign minister, Asaad al-Shibani, earlier this year attended meetings with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, two of the major tools of Western hegemony used to shower friendly regimes with loans and financial goodies. He was also invited to New York where he held talks at the United Nations. Syria is now a member in good standing of the “international community,” aka modern Babylon. The Christian blood on the Syrian regime’s hands matters not. All that matters is they’ve agreed not to do business with Russia and to kiss the ring of Washington’s neocons while inviting in Western corporations to rebuild their war-torn nation. The Western corporations will be paid largely with loans that Syria’s new government gets from the IMF and World Bank. See how the scam works?

Original Source