In a new interview with Turkish TV channel, NTV, U.S. Ambassador to Ankara and Special Envoy to Syria Thomas Barrack announced that the American military would be significantly reducing its footprint in Syria.
“Our current policies toward Syria will not resemble the policies of the past 100 years, because those policies did not work,” Barrack to NTV. Additionally, Barrack confirmed that the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were still considered an important ally for Washington.
Crucially, the ambassador gave concrete numbers regarding America’s “reconsolidation” of its presence in the country, saying, “from eight (military) bases, we will end up with just one.”
The reduction is “happening,” he added, noting that regional partners will need to take part in a new security arrangement for Syria. “It’s a matter of integration with everyone being reasonable.”
This jibes with today's news that the U.S. has already withdrawn 500 troops from the estimated 2000 it had in the country, according to Fox News.
Moreover, after his meetings last week with new Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, Barrack signaled that the U.S. was not going to try to run Syria but transition to a support role for the new Syrian government, “enabling it.” He also announced that President Trump would be removing Syria from its list of states that sponsor terror.
The Trump administration has been signaling for months that it would reduce America’s presence in the country. An unnamed Department of Defense official confirmed in February that the Pentagon was drafting plans for a potential exit. Trump also ordered all sanctions to be lifted from Syria in May to give the country “a chance at greatness.”
The Syrian Civil War that started in 2014 came to an end in December 2024 when then leader, Bashar al-Assad, was ousted and replaced with the current president, Ahmad al-Sharaa.
In addition to internal conflict, Syria has been the victim of recent Israeli attacks, as well as an invasion beyond the UN buffer zone in southern Syria. Barrack said confidently that “America’s role is simply to start having a dialogue,” when referring to Israeli-Syrian negotiations.
Aaron is a reporter for Responsible Statecraft and a contributor to the Mises Institute. He received both his undergraduate and masters degrees in international relations from Liberty University.
Top Photo: A soldier deployed to At-Tanf Garrison, Syria, fires an M3 Carl Gustaf Recoilless Rifle during a familiarization range hosted by Special Forces July 19, 2020. (US Army Photo by Spc. Chris Estrada)
Syrian security forces walk together along a street, after clashes between Syrian government troops and local Druze fighters resumed in the southern Druze city of Sweida early on Wednesday, collapsing a ceasefire announced just hours earlier that aimed to put an end to days of deadly sectarian bloodshed, in Sweida, Syria July 16, 2025. REUTERS/Karam al-Masri
In March of this year, Laya’s world came crashing down.
Following a series of skirmishes in the coastal region of Syria, the country’s transitional government had mobilized forces to put down what it saw as a brewing rebellion among Alawites, a minority offshoot of Shia Islam and the religion of former President Bashar al-Assad. The operation quickly turned into a bloodbath.
Government-affiliated militants and non-state actors swept through coastal towns, going door to door and killing any Alawite men they could find. Hundreds of bodies were dumped in the sea or in mass graves. “They killed my cousin,” recalled Laya, who lost several relatives in the attacks. “They came to his door and killed him there, in front of his wife and children.” His family survived but was too afraid to go outside in order to bury him. “His body remained in the house for four days,” Laya told RS, adding that “there are mothers who lost four or five children” in the killings.
After four days of massacres, Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa put a stop to the brutality carried out by his loosely organized forces. But not before at least 1,400 civilians, including roughly 100 women and children, were killed, according to a United Nations investigation. (Laya, who has worked to gather testimonies of the attacks, believes that the real number is much higher.)
Today, Laya and many of her fellow Alawites have resigned themselves to staying holed up in their homes, fearful of harassment or violence that they could face outside. “I left my work because I'm afraid to come and go from the house at the same time [every day],” she said. “I could be kidnapped.”
Ten months after the fall of the Assad regime, sectarian and ethnic tensions have come to represent a ticking time bomb at the heart of the new Syria. Sharaa may publicly call for creating a “Syria for all Syrians,” but minority groups, which represent roughly 35% of Syria’s population, remain unconvinced. While 81% of Sunnis believe the new government represents their interests, only 23% of respondents from minority religions can say the same, according to a recent poll.
Many of these problems were to be expected. During the brutal 14-year civil war, the Assad regime often inflamed sectarian divisions in order to bolster support for it among minority groups. But the new government has exacerbated these tensions by refusing to pursue a serious process of transitional justice, in which people are held accountable for atrocities related to the civil war, according to experts and regular Syrians who spoke with RS.
“The majority don't see justice being carried out because it's not being processed in a formal way,” said Joshua Landis, a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute and professor at the University of Oklahoma. The result is an escalating cycle of violence. Vigilantes and militants harass or kill people over alleged support for the Assad regime, then members of aggrieved minority groups strike back, leading to further reprisals. The open wounds of the civil war continue to fester.
So far, the U.S. has largely ignored this cycle of violence. Rather than pressing Sharaa to pursue transitional justice, American officials have set the question aside in order to focus on economic questions, according to Landis. But without foreign pressure, Sharaa is unlikely to do much more to heal the wounds of the civil war. And without steps toward reconciliation, fighting could return at any moment.
A State Department official told RS in a statement that the U.S. is pushing for the protection of all groups in Syria. "We support Syria’s national unity and a peaceful and inclusive integration of all its constituents, including religious and ethnic minorities," the official said. "We continue to call on the Syrian government to hold all perpetrators of violence accountable for their actions."
Signs of trouble have already started to appear in the northwest, where some Alawites are attempting to launch an insurgency. Anti-government militants remain weak, but they may not stay that way for long. “The Alawites can maybe endure for a year or two, but in the end, oppressed people can't remain unarmed,” Laya told RS.
An 'existential threat'
Transitional justice in Syria was never going to be easy. More than 600,000 Syrians died during the 14-year-long civil war, and at least 6 million of the country’s 22 million people fled the country and became refugees. Atrocities were commonplace, from the barrel bombings and chemical weapons attacks perpetrated by the Assad regime to the mass killings and public executions carried out by ISIS and other jihadist groups.
In May, Sharaa’s government announced efforts to pursue justice for crimes committed by the Assad regime, and authorities arrested at least 600 former officials on accusations of war crimes. But Damascus has largely kept this process out of the public eye, and it has shown no interest in investigating crimes committed by militants, according to Radwan Ziadeh, the chairman of a leading Syrian news channel and a prominent expert on transitional justice. “What concerns me the most is that this file is not a priority for the current government,” Ziadeh said, adding that Sharaa’s transitional justice commission has “zero experience” in the field. (Note: This reporter briefly worked for Ziadeh as an intern at the Arab Center in 2019.)
Sharaa has also attempted to strike a difficult balance with Syrian business leaders, many of whom built their empires on corruption and favors from the Assad regime. In order to raise funds, the new government has allegedly offered amnesty to some of these tycoons in exchange for large portions of their ill-gotten assets, sparking controversy among many in Syria, who want to see Assad allies punished for their crimes.
In the absence of visible transitional justice, some have attempted to take matters into their own hands. Revenge attacks against former regime officials have become commonplace, and the government remains unwilling or unable to stop them. Misinformation campaigns have made matters worse, as some viral posts scare minorities with false stories of sectarian attacks and others inflame anger at minorities with lurid stories of anti-Islamic acts.
More challenging yet has been the question of violations committed after the fall of the regime, like the massacres of Alawites in March. Many Syrians now view Alawites as an internal enemy. Assad’s military and government employed a disproportionate number of Alawites, some of whom contributed to the regime’s horrific human rights violations, including the torture and killing of thousands of prisoners both before and during the civil war. Many Alawites at least tacitly supported the government during the war, in part due to their fear of jihadist groups fighting on the other side.
When the regime fell, the Alawites were left exposed, with no domestic or international backer to protect them. As tensions with authorities grew, some Assad loyalists launched attacks on forces associated with Sharaa’s government, which helped spark the crackdown that descended into massacres in March. “Alawite civilians who had nothing to do with the Assad regime paid the price of others because Assad used the Alawites as a way of governing Syria,” Ziadeh told RS.
Under Ziadeh’s recommendation, Sharaa launched a commission to investigate the attacks, which led to the arrest of 232 people, according to Ziadeh, who described the commission’s report as “fantastic.” But many Alawites feel that these efforts didn’t go far enough.
Further complicating the transition has been the government’s uneasy relationship with the Druze, followers of an esoteric Abrahamic faith with a sizable population in southern Syria. Tensions had grown in the months following the fall of the Assad regime as Israel crossed into Syria and took up positions in Druze-majority regions, where some local leaders welcomed Israeli troops.
In July, clashes erupted in which government-affiliated militants and local Bedouin groups fought Druze militants, resulting in the deaths of at least 539 civilians. Israel joined the fray, launching airstrikes against the Syrian Ministry of Defense building in Damascus. The government attempted to impose a ceasefire, but a local notable named Hekmat al-Hijri rejected it, leading to a standoff that continues today. Many Druze who previously opposed Hijri now back him because of what they see as an “existential threat” from Damascus, according to Nanar Hawach of the International Crisis Group.
These fatal skirmishes have also factored heavily into the thinking of Syria’s Kurds, who lead the government in the country’s northeast under the banner of the Syrian Democratic Forces. SDF leader Mazloum Abdi has engaged in protracted negotiations with Sharaa’s government aimed at incorporating the northeast and the SDF’s military into the Syrian state. But fears of reprisals against Kurds — and a hunch that the Sharaa government could lose control at any moment — have led Abdi to slow roll the implementation of any plans.
But Sharaa isn’t the only one dealing with a restive population. The SDF rules over a territory in which Kurds are vastly outnumbered by Sunni Arabs, many of whom are anxious to bring their region under the control of Damascus. If Abdi continues to drag his feet, he could face uprisings of his own, according to Ziadeh. “If they continue to go this way I'm actually concerned [about the possibility of] political and maybe social unrest there,” he told RS.
Washington’s Goldilocks option
The Trump administration has played a major, if somewhat controversial, role in Syria’s transition. On the positive side, U.S. envoy Tom Barrack has helped to mediate talks between Damascus and the SDF while also throwing his support behind efforts to lift U.S. sanctions, which continue to strangle Syria’s economy.
But many experts fear that Barrack is ignoring the concerns of Syria’s minorities — an omission that could help exacerbate cycles of violence in the country. Analysts are also worried about Sharaa’s decision to fire all of the soldiers and officers from Assad’s army, leaving some 500,000 trained fighters, most of whom are Alawites, without jobs or life prospects. After all, when the U.S. implemented a similar policy in Iraq, it helped lead to the rise of ISIS.
“The international community at large, and the U.S. specifically, are incredibly well positioned to nudge Damascus to take bold steps,” Hawach said, noting the Syrian government’s strong desire for Western support. Hawach argues that U.S. leaders should urge Damascus to pursue accountability for atrocities and reform security institutions to better protect minorities.
Barrack has also sparked controversy by rejecting calls for some level of federalism in Syria. "As Ambassador and Special Envoy Barrack has affirmed, a unified Syria under 'one army, one government, one state' is pivotal to national and regional stability," a State Department official told RS. On this point, he has the support of many within the country. “A federal system based on ethnicity or religious sectarian lines is a recipe for civil war,” Ziadeh said, adding that he supports “administrative” decentralization but would otherwise want a strong central government.
But many minorities fear that a centralized system will leave them vulnerable to discrimination by the government in Damascus. In order to balance these interests, Steven Simon and Adam Weinstein of the Quincy Institute have suggested a Goldilocks solution. “The United States would be wise to stop rejecting federalism and encourage the transfer of some power to local or regional authorities,” Simon and Weinstein wrote in Foreign Affairs, cautioning that key issues like “monetary policy, foreign relations, and defense of Syria’s borders should remain with the central government.”
Such an approach could help push the new government toward a stable transition despite the concerns of minorities. “Ultimately, Syrians will determine their own system of government, and that is how it should be,” Simon and Weinstein wrote. “Yet the Trump administration must recognize the weight of its words and ensure that it is not inadvertently encouraging the interim government’s worst inclinations.”
A newly-created firm called Show Faith by Works is embarking on a “geofencing” campaign to target Christian churches and colleges across the American Southwest with pro-Israel advertisements. The pastors and congregations themselves are seemingly unaware of this campaign, and some have concerns with Israel’s methods to target Christians.
According to the firm’s filing under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), Show Faith by Works will “geofence the actual boundaries of every Major (sic) church in California, Arizona, Nevada, and Coloardo (sic) and all Christian Colleges during worship times” and then “track attendees and continue to target [them] with ads” on behalf of Israel. The geofencing campaign is part of a larger $3.2 million contract that also includes trying to hire celebrity spokespeople and paying pastors to produce content.
RS reached out to hundreds of churches in California, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado that were listed as potential targets of the geofencing campaign. None that responded were aware of the campaign. “We were not aware of that, no—you are the first to bring that to our attention,” said the press office for Bethel Church in Redding, California.
The project manager of the operation, Chad Schnitger, explained in an email to RS that the ads may include “invitations for Christians to visit one of our upcoming Mobile Museum exhibits, or to go to our website to learn more about the program, or to visit Israel with your church.” The firm’s pitch deck describes the ads as “pro-lsreal (sic) and anti-Palestinian.”
The “Mobile Museum” Schnitger is referring to is a mobile trailer coordinated by his firm that will visit Christian colleges and churches highlighting atrocities from the Hamas attack on October 7, as well as “footage of IDF explaining the difficulty of fighting bad guys in hostile territory with civilians.” Schnitger confirmed the firm currently has one mobile museum exhibit, and that it would be ready to start travelling to churches and colleges in about a month.
Geofencing has long been a way for corporations to capture audiences by using their location services. It allows corporations to market their products using the location of mobile devices, triggering texts, in-app notifications, or mobile ads when users enter a certain physical boundary.
In an interview with RS, Megan Iorio, Senior Counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information, described geofencing as a “privacy nightmare.” Iorio explained that data brokers vacuum up data from various applications that use location services, and then will either sell that data to marketing firms or offer marketing tools themselves. Then, users with location services enabled might, for instance, see an H&M advertisement if they walk within a certain radius of an H&M store.
Schnitger said that media reports covering the geofencing campaign have been “sensationalized” and pointed out that it’s a common marketing tool; “It is not sending information back to a foreign entity; it's a way to deliver ads…This is a 1-way ad push using marketing tools that have been in place for over 10 years.” Iorio explained that while it is commonplace, the technique is “incredibly invasive.”
“The fact it has become so common and that foreign governments are now using it for targeted, precise influence campaigns shows how much we need regulation to stamp down on the practice. Today, it's the Israeli government looking to curry favor among Christians, but tomorrow it could be a foreign adversary looking to foment discord in a specific US city, and that has broad national security implications.” she added.
Some members of the communities listed as potential targets of Israel’s geofencing campaign share these concerns about Israel using this marketing technique.
Micah, a mechanical engineer in Colorado Springs, has been conducting outreach to pastors and local newspapers in order to raise awareness that seven local churches were listed in the document as targets of the geofencing campaign. Micah circulated a document outlining his concerns, which RS obtained a copy of.
“What jumps out immediately is how the entire document talks about Christians as targets to be manipulated. This isn't respectful outreach - it's warfare language,” he wrote.
One of Micah’s main concerns is that the firm is paying pastors on behalf of Israel. Show Faith by Works’ pitch deck includes a plan to give stipends for “individual guest pastors, bilingual pastors, or pastors who match target demographics to record messages based on content creation targets.” Micah says that this “creates financial conflicts of interest where religious leaders become financially dependent on foreign government messaging, compromising their independence and integrity.”
Asa, Micah’s brother, attends Scottsdale Bible Church in Arizona, one of the churches listed by Show Faith by Works. Asa said that Show Faith by Works’ campaign is a reaction to Israel losing the support of America's youth. “This entire project is an attempt to regain the attention and hearts/support of Gen Z through the use of religious manipulation,” he said. Micah and Asa requested that RS exclude their full names to discuss the matter freely.
Schnitger is optimistic about swaying Christians’ views on Israel. “For those who dislike Israel, maybe some of these exhibits and materials will change your mind.” Part of that effort is to stress anti-Palestinian talking points. The firm’s pitch deck includes talking points about how “[P]alestinian and Iranian goals are not land-focused, but genocidal.”
Timothy Feldman, a software engineer in Plano, Texas, explained in an email to RS that he was upset to see his church listed as a potential target for Israel’s geofencing campaign. “I am disgusted that a genocidal apartheid state is attempting to whitewash its atrocities by propagandizing the good people of Christ United Methodist Church,” said Feldman.
Despite the inclusion of Texas churches like the one in Plano in the pitch deck, Schnitger clarified in an email that the firm is currently not doing anything in Texas.
A church worker in Prescott, Arizona, saw his church on the list too and explained to RS in a phone interview that it’s unclear how the pastors will respond. “The demographics in Prescott tend to be pro-Israel, so it’s hard to know how the church leadership will react to this. All we can do is make people aware of it,” he said, requesting anonymity to speak freely about the issue.
The geofencing campaign will be overseen by Eran Shayovich, the Chief of Staff at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Israel. Shayovich is spearheading an initiative called “project 545,” which he describes as a campaign to “amplify Israel’s strategic communication and public diplomacy efforts.” Shayovich is also the point of contact for Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager who is coordinating efforts to train ChatGPT on behalf of Israel and integrate pro-Israel messaging into conservative media.
Some states have taken action against geofencing as a practice. In June, Oregon passed a law that prohibits the sale of precise geolocation information, following a similar provision passed by Maryland last year.
Lina Khan's FTC bannedseveral data brokers from collecting and selling data from sensitive locations such as churches and military installations. While these companies — including Gravy Analytics and Mobilewalla — have attracted significant media attention over the last several years, there is an extensive industry of data brokers that continue to operate in the shadows buying and selling location data at places of worship.
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Top image credit: Pavel Chagochkin via shutterstock.com
There is good news and bad news for critics of the United States’ bloated 21st century war machine. The good news: the “war on terror” is dead.
The bad news? It seems to have become a part of the walking dead — a kind of zombie war on terror that is continuing and radically expanding, even as the fears and threats that originally motivated all its excesses are seemingly vanishing from the American psyche.
Consider the following facts: despite the public release only a few years ago of evidence showing the Saudi government’s direct complicity in the crime of September 11, 2001 — the central, instigating act of terrorism that drove and justified every aspect of the “war on terror” that followed — associating with or even taking money from that same government appears to carry no stigma. The Biden administration’s efforts to pledge American lives and treasure to defend that same government elicited relatively little controversy. And this year, dozens of top U.S. comedians, from the left-leaning Bill Burr to the right-leaning Andrew Schulz, happily took its money to help whitewash its image. The Saudi government’s expanding encroachment into U.S. sports and entertainment in general continues only to receive an eager welcome.
Meanwhile, after spending more than a decade fighting the shadowy threat of al-Qaida, the U.S. government has now seemingly come to terms with the terror group’s ongoing influence in the region. It has enthusiastically gone along with the installation of an al-Qaida-linked militant, Ahmed al-Sharaa, as the leader of Syria, whose former president Washington spent years trying to remove from power expresslybecause of his alleged support for terrorism — including the very al-Qaida its new president hails from.
Sharaa swiftly had the $10 million U.S. bounty on his head removed, the terrorist designation of the al-Qaida offshoot he led has been revoked, and just a few weeks ago, he was given a warm welcome during the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where on one stage, former CIA Director David Petraeus acknowledged the two had been on opposite sides of the civil war in Iraq 20 years ago, in between lavishing him with praise and declaring himself a “fan.”
It’s not just al-Qaida. The Biden administration had explored teaming up with the Taliban to fight ISIS’s branch in Afghanistan, while the Trump administration is now inchingtoward normalizing relations with the group, which George W. Bush once said was “threatening people everywhere by sponsoring and sheltering and supplying terrorists.”
The Taliban’s link to al-Qaida was once upon a time the rationale for regime change and 20 years of U.S. war in Afghanistan — which, of course, ended with the Taliban coming back into power, which Washington appears to be coming to peace with now.
Together, these stories suggest that both the American public and the Washington national security establishment have moved on from the core motivations that drove the “war on terror” for the better part of two decades. Al-Qaida, the Taliban, the government forces behind September 11 — none of it matters anymore, apparently.
And yet the “war on terror” is not just still with us, it’s expanding in radical new ways. The Trump administration has now explicitlyrepurposed the tactics and powers used against terrorism against a new, unrelated target: drug traffickers — launching airstrikes on private Venezuelan boats in international waters on the basis that drug smugglers are terrorists, and that their transportation of drugs constitutes “an armed attack against the United States.” This is despite widespread doubts about the legality of such strikes and concerns about the risks of this terrorist designation.
Meanwhile, Trump has also continued and escalated the trend started under the Biden administration of turning the “war on terror” inward. The president is now threatening to deploy the military against what he calls the “enemy from within,” as his administration pushes to treat a variety of domestic critics, dissidents, and opposition groups as terrorist threats over their First Amendment-protected activity, and draws up secret watchlists of supposed domestic terrorists.
This is all a vindication of the many civil libertarians who warned over the past 24 years that the expansive powers claimed by President Bush and then Obama would somewhere down the line be used in new, alarming ways they were never originally intended for, including to intimidate and punish political dissent. What’s absurd is that this is happening at the exact time that the threats that originally justified all of this are simply being forgotten.
What we are witnessing is the war on terror in zombie form: devoid of its original life force and human drive, but more dangerous than ever, as it shuffles mindlessly forward in a search for human flesh to no end.
Trump may be the first president to use this zombie “war” for ends that it was never meant for, but history suggests he will not be the last, unless we make the collective political choice to put a lid on and roll back the radical growth of executive war-making power that has accumulated year after year since 9/11. Until then, this zombie will stagger on.
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