After the US invasion of Iraq, Assad had to balance two things - he wanted to (1) inflict chaos in Iraq to discourage the US from moving on to Syria and (2) sic his home-grown Sunni Arab jihadists - who view Alawites like him as apostates to be killed on sight - on to a powerful enemy (the US) that would eliminate his jihadist problem for him. His problem is the classic one - when two of your enemies fight, one almost always comes out victorious and, in many cases, stronger. In Iraq, the jihadists won, by driving the US out. Their accumulated expertise, gained against the most sophisticated military machine in the world, made short work of a Syrian military that defected en masse because it was majority Sunni Arab, as opposed to the Syrian leadership, which is overwhelmingly Alawite, with a few token Sunni Arabs entrusted with little real power.
https://archives.frontpagemag.com/fpm/us-didnt-create-isis-assad-and-saddam-did-daniel-greenfield/
[Before the Islamic State’s current incarnation, it was Al Qaeda in Iraq and its pipeline of suicide bombers ran through Syria with the cooperation of Assad’s government.
Assad and Al Qaeda in Iraq had a common enemy; the United States. Assad had a plan to kill two birds with one stone. Syrian Islamists, who might cause trouble at home, were instead pointed at Iraq. Al Qaeda got manpower and Assad disposed of Sunni Jihadists who might cause him trouble.
Meanwhile Al Qaeda openly operated out of Syria in alliance with the Baathists. While Syria’s regime was Shiite and Iraq’s Sunni, both governments were headed by Baathists.
The Al Nusrah Front, the current incarnation of Al Qaeda in the area ever since the terror group began feuding with ISIS, named one of its training camps, the ‘Abu Ghadiya Camp”. Abu Ghadiya had been chosen by Zarqawi, the former leader of the organization today known as ISIS, to move terrorists through Syria. This highway of terror killed more American soldiers than Saddam Hussein had.
The Al Qaeda presence in Syria was backed by Assad’s brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat, who had served as Director of Military Intelligence and Deputy Defense Minister. His real job though was coordinating Islamic terrorist organizations. During the Iraq War, he added Al Qaeda to his portfolio.
Handling terrorists without being burned is a tricky business though and the blowback kicked in.
In 2008, a US raid into Syria finally took out Abu Ghadiya and some of his top people. A year later, General Petraeus warned that, “In time, these fighters will turn on their Syrian hosts and begin conducting attacks against Bashar al-Asad’s regime itself.”
Shawkat was killed by a suicide bomber three years later. Assad’s support for terrorists had hit home. Those Sunni Islamists he had sent on to Iraq who survived returned with training and skills that made them a grave danger to his regime.
Exactly as Petraeus had predicted.]
O.K.. and your point, at THIS POINT IN TIME is?