США должны заслужить доверие Сирии после десятилетий сотрудничества с режимом Асада

By Ruth Riegler The United States accommodated the Assads, outsourced torture to their prisons, abandoned Syrians to Russia and Iran, and endorsed Israel’s annexation of Syrian land. Yet the Washington Post says it is Syria that must earn Washington’s trust. In a Washington Post article published today, Ilan Berman declares that “Syria’s leaders need to prove they can be trusted.” The subtitle warns that Syria’s schools “still teach radicalism” while “Islamists serve openly in its military.” The article reveals considerably more about Washington’s prejudices and selective memory than it does about Syria. The article starts with the now-customary tired Islamophobia. Its most basic term—“Islamist”—is never defined. Berman does not identify which military personnel he’s referring to, what they presently believe, whether they advocate violence or what conduct supposedly makes them unfit to serve. Instead, the terminology slides imperceptibly from “Islamists” to “foreign fighters,” “extremists,” “foreign jihadists” and “militants,” as though all were synonymous. They are not. A foreigner is not necessarily an extremist; an Islamist is not necessarily a jihadist; and a practising Muslim serving in a Muslim-majority country’s military is not presumptively a terrorist. If particular soldiers committed war crimes, retain allegiance to transnational terrorist organisations or advocate sectarian violence, Berman should name them and present evidence. If “Islamist” merely means a Muslim whose political outlook is influenced by religion, the headline is not a security assessment but a religious test—one the Post would never apply to Christian nationalists serving openly in the US government or Jewish supremacists serving openly in Israel’s cabinet. WaPo allegations vs truth The article’s central allegation concerning foreign fighters is also contradicted by the public record. Berman claims their removal was a central American condition for sanctions relief and presents their integration into Syria’s military as evidence of Damascus’s failure to comply. In June 2025, however, Trump’s Syria envoy Thomas Barrack publicly confirmed Washington’s understanding with Damascus over the transparent integration of approximately 3,500 foreign fighters into a designated Syrian army division. Barrack explained that bringing them under state command was safer than abandoning thousands of armed, experienced men to possible recruitment by ISIS or al-Qaeda. Berman has taken a policy the Trump administration understood and accepted and repackaged it as evidence that Syria defied Washington. Here we see the supposedly liberal Washington Post positioning itself to the right of Donald Trump’s administration, demanding a more punitive approach while repeatedly condemning Trump’s extremism elsewhere. The article’s educational evidence is similarly questionable. Its sole foundation is a report on the Dar al-Wahi al-Sharif religious school network by the Alma Research and Education Centre, an Israeli security advocacy centre founded by Sarit Zehavi, who spent 15 years in Israeli military intelligence and retired as a lieutenant-colonel in the IDF’s Northern Command. A previous investigation by L’Orient Today found that nine of Alma’s 20 personnel were Israeli military veterans, including a former head of Israeli censorship and former intelligence officials. That provenance does not automatically make every textbook excerpt false. It does make independent verification essential—particularly when Israel is occupying Syrian territory, bombing the country and declaring that it will not withdraw. Berman does not say that he examined the original textbooks, verified Alma’s translations, consulted independent Arabic-speaking educational specialists or sought responses from Syria’s education and religious-affairs ministries. Nor does he establish that one expanding religious school network represents Syria’s national curriculum. Nevertheless, the Post’s headline converts a report about that network into the sweeping declaration that Syria’s “schools” teach radicalism. Confusing aggressor with victim Incitement against Jews or Christians should be condemned and removed wherever it appears. But Berman also treats maps identifying historic Palestine and hostility towards Israel as self-evident proof of ‘jihadist indoctrination’. In reality, Syria is currently being attacked and occupied by Israel. Opposition to an occupying state is not synonymous with hatred of Jews, just as rejection of Russian occupation in Ukraine is not hatred of Russians. Nor is Alma a neutral authority entitled to decide which Syrian responses to Israeli occupation are permissible. The provenance of Berman’s own argument deserves scrutiny too. He is senior vice-president of the American Foreign Policy Council, a Washington national-security think tank that works directly with Congress and the executive branch. His affiliated programmes include AFPC’s “Countering Islamic Extremism Project,” and his books include Winning the Long War: Retaking the Offensive Against Radical Islam. He has consulted for the CIA and the US Departments of State and Defense and has a substantial record of writing from an emphatically pro-Israel perspective. Again, that background does not automatically invalidate his argument. But it makes his undefined use of “Islamist” and “radicalism,” and his dependence on an Israeli military-linked organisation, legitimate matters of public interest. Double standards on extremism Berman’s concern about radicalism is spectacularly selective. Washington is courting European far-right movements that speak of “civilisational defence,” portray Muslims and migrants as demographic enemies and seek to restructure Western politics along ethno-religious lines. It simultaneously arms and protects an Israeli government containing ministers who advocate annexation, permanent occupation and mass Palestinian displacement. Those extremists are not fringe activists. They hold state power, command armed forces and determine the fate of millions living under occupation. Yet their ideology is called politics, national security or civilisational defence. A vaguely defined Muslim presence within Syrian institutions, by contrast, becomes proof that the entire country may be untrustworthy. The Washington Post is not resisting this Islamophobic double standard. In publishing a headline that treats “Islamists serving openly” as inherently sinister without defining the word, it is promoting it. More fundamentally, Berman constructs trust as a test imposed by an innocent and reliable United States upon a suspect Syria. History supports almost the reverse. Decades of US complicity with the Assads Washington’s opposition to the Assad dynasty was never principled or consistent. When Hafez al-Assad joined the US-led coalition against Saddam Hussein in 1990–91, the United States rewarded him with improved relations, inclusion in the Madrid peace process and acquiescence in Syria’s domination of Lebanon. Assad did not become less dictatorial or murderous. He became useful. After September 11, Washington made direct use of the torture system it now recalls only when condemning Assad. In 2002, US officials detained Canadian citizen Maher Arar at JFK Airport and rendered him through Jordan to Syria. He was confined in appalling conditions and tortured for almost a year despite never being charged with a crime. Canada later cleared him, apologised and paid compensation. The United States has never apologised, while the Obama administration helped prevent his claim from reaching court. And while his case is well-known, it’s far from the only such incident, with Assad’s jails being a favourite destination. So Washington did not merely overlook Sednaya and Assad’s other prisons. It sent suspects to them to be tortured because it knew what Assad’s interrogators, trained by a former Nazi official, would do. During the Syrian revolution, meanwhile, Barack Obama announced a red line against chemical-weapons use, then declined to enforce it when Assad crossed it. His administration resisted meaningful measures to protect Syrian civilians and increasingly reduced their revolution to a counterterrorism problem.By 2016, his administration was proposing intelligence-sharing and coordinated strikes with Russia against ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra. Russia was not a neutral counterterrorism partner. It was Assad’s principal air force, bombing hospitals, markets and opposition-held cities while Moscow and Damascus routinely stretched the word “terrorist” to cover virtually anyone resisting Assad. At the same time, Obama prioritised securing and preserving his nuclear agreement with Iran while Iranian forces, the IRGC, Hezbollah and other foreign militias kept Assad in power. Whether or not strengthening Tehran and Moscow was Washington’s intention, it was the foreseeable result of American policy. Syrians seeking freedom were effectively abandoned beneath the Russian-Iranian military juggernaut. Israeli coordination with Russia in Syria Israel, Washington’s closest regional ally, was not opposing Russia’s Syrian intervention on behalf of the Syrian people. It maintained extensive military coordination with Moscow, operated a deconfliction mechanism with Russian forces and saw Benjamin Netanyahu cultivate a close personal relationship with Vladimir Putin. Israel attacked selected Iranian assets when they threatened Israeli interests, but it did not support Syrians’ struggle to dismantle the system that had invited both Russia and Iran into their country. Then, in 2019, the United States became the only country in the world to recognise Israel’s purported sovereignty over the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. Washington retains that recognition while Israel occupies additional territory seized since Assad’s fall, conducts repeated airstrikes and ground incursions, destroys Syrian military capacity and declares that it will not withdraw. American officials occasionally issue cosmetic protests. They impose no meaningful consequences. Yet Berman describes Israel simply as a “neighbour” naturally alarmed by Syrian forces. Israel’s occupation, far-right government and territorial expansion apparently raise no equivalent questions about reliability or radicalism. Against this long, inglorious history of US collusion with a brutal hereditary dictatorship, it is extraordinary to depict sanctions relief as a generous American wager on an unproven Syria. Punishing Syrians for Assad’s crimes The US sanctions architecture was built ostensibly to constrain Assad and those responsible for his atrocities. Assad fell. Continuing to strangle Syria afterward would have punished his victims, prevented reconstruction, encouraged state failure and created precisely the deprivation in which ISIS and foreign interference flourish. Nor did Washington “pull Syria out of Iran’s orbit,” as Berman claims. That formulation appropriates a Syrian achievement. The United States did not overthrow Assad. Syrians did. The United States did not expel Iran’s forces and allied militias. Syrians did. The United States did not sever Tehran’s principal land corridor to Hezbollah. Syrians did. The United States did not defeat Russia’s project to preserve Assad indefinitely and dominate Syria’s strategic facilities. Syrians did, forcing Moscow to accept a sharply diminished and restructured position under greater Syrian control. Washington gaining from Syrians’ achievements Washington is now collecting the geopolitical dividends of a victory achieved by people it repeatedly declined to protect. Since Assad’s fall, Syria has confronted ISIS, intercepted Iranian-linked weapons intended for Hezbollah, dismantled Captagon factories and trafficking networks, cooperated with the IAEA, reduced Russia’s strategic control and assumed security responsibilities that allowed American troops to leave. Despite more than a thousand Israeli attacks and hundreds of incursions, Damascus has responded through diplomacy rather than opening another regional war. These are concrete outcomes advancing American interests. They are not “hope” and they were not delivered by American coercion. Syria is not receiving a blank cheque. Its authorities remain under continuous scrutiny, conditionality and threat of renewed sanctions. The strategic transfer of value runs substantially in the opposite direction: Syria is giving Washington outcomes that successive American administrations sought and failed to obtain. America did not liberate Syria from Russia and Iran. Syrians liberated themselves after American policy had helped abandon them to both. Damascus is now choosing to make its victory serve shared interests with the West. After Washington accommodated the Assads, used their torture chambers, abandoned its chemical-weapons red line, helped enable Russian and Iranian entrenchment, coordinated indirectly with Assad’s protectors and endorsed Israel’s annexation of Syrian land, the remarkable question is not whether the United States can trust Syria. It is why Syria is still willing to trust the United States—and whether Washington can finally prove itself worthy of that trust.