The US backed al Qaeda takeover of Syria follows Israeli retreat from Lebanon Within hours of the Israeli-Lebanese cease fire - essentially an Israeli retreat after making no progress against Hezbollah in the ground war in south Lebanon, indicted war criminal Netanyahu turned his attention to Syria, warning Syrian President Bashar al Assad that he was "playing with fire."

The Israelis had long attacked Syria and wanted to remove the independent state as the key link between Iran and Lebanon, a conduit for material support to both the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance. 

At a NATO summit, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said Syria's key allies - Russia, Iran and Hezbollah - "had all been distracted" by their own problems, and "it looks like HTS took advantage of that fact." More to the point, Washington, "Israel", and Turkiye took advantage of that fact.

According to Palestinian journalist in Washington Saeed Arikat, the HTS attack was coordinated by the Biden administration with Turkiye and "Israel" and "came as a result of American-Israeli emergency plan" as part of "an American vision" for the second day of the ceasefire agreement in Lebanon, "especially in light of the failure of the Israelis to achieve a decisive victory" against Hezbollah and that this is "an effort to inflict a defeat on Iran and its allies in the region" such as the Syrian Army which regained control of Aleppo eight years ago.  The plan was a tremendous success. 

The rapid collapse of the Syrian army in city after city - Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and Damascus - made the takeover seem an almost bloodless coup. In the absence of any real resistance to the Turkish backed and equipped invasion (Erdogan's Muslim Brotherhood partners, the Qataris, have also been funding HTS).

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President Assad and his family fled the country (apparently to Russia) and his Prime Minister Mohammed Gazi Jalali surrendered to HTS. The "rebel" leader al-Jolani made some placating noises about no reprisals and leaving public buildings intact, but the history of this group is bloody and sectarian.

Clearly, some sort of deal was made, in part to save lives - but details are unclear. We do know who gained. The Israelis have been rewarded, probably beyond their expectations, by the removal of the key link between Iran and the Palestinian and Lebanese Resistance. Netanyahu has been more than compensated for the Israeli defeat in south Lebanon and effectively rewarded for his genocide in Gaza. 

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is the successor to Jahbat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda franchise in Syria which has been semi-covertly backed by Washington and other NATO regimes, especially that of Erdogan in Turkiye, which has stationed Turkish troops in North Syria for several years. Unlike the Resistance groups Hamas, PIJ, and Hezbollah, which are only listed as "terrorist" in the Anglo American states and their allies, HTS is banned by the UN Security Council.

It remains to be seen how Washington and its hangers on will try to recognise a "government" led by a group still branded as "terrorist" under both US and international law. The HTS regime was also supported by the three foreign states which still militarily occupy Syria: Turkiye, "Israel", and the USA.  

Some rebranding is on its way; but that is a US specialty. 

Friendly relations between HTS "rebels" (many of whom are non-Syrians) and "Israel" are well known. Several years earlier Israeli hospitals were patching up al-Qaeda fighters and sending them back into Syria. "Israel" had then helped evacuate fighters and their crisis actors, The White Helmets, to Israeli territory, in 2018. More recently, HTS has sent reassuring messages to the Israelis, assuring them that their fight was only with the Assad government. HTS supporters even thanked the Israelis for killing Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah.

Nevertheless, within hours of the HTS takeover of Damascus, Israeli tanks had crossed into south Syria near Quneitra, allegedly "to fight off Islamist rebels".