Biden Celebrates Fall of Syria, But Christians Face Peril

The following news analysis was produced by the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts… 

Lame duck, neo-liberal U.S. President Joe Biden is celebrating the collapse of the regime of Bashar Al Assad, the former President of the Syrian Arab Republic.

Assad fled into exile, to Moscow, yesterday, as Islamist revolutionaries — including Salafi Jihadist elements — entered the Syrian capital of Damascus.

The rebel commander is Abu al-Golani, who spent five years as a U.S. prisoner in Iraq. A former member of the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) and Al Qaeda — the terrorist group responsible for 9/11 — he now, reportedly, receives funding from both the U.S. and Israel.

Biden called the fall of Assad “a fundamental act of justice,” and “a moment of historic opportunity for the…people of Syria.”

It was only under President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that regime change in Syria became an American foreign policy objective.

In 2013, acting on advice from the Israeli and Jordanian governments, and on that of his own CIA, Obama authorized the billion dollar, covert Operation Timber Sycamore, to remove Assad from power. Later, in 2016, Obama sent U.S. Special Forces to intervene in the Syrian Civil War.

In his first term, although initially supportive of intervention, President Donald Trump ultimately cancelled Timber Sycamore and decided to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria, only to be slow-footed by the Defense Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Saturday, President-Elect Trump, referring to the Syrian conflict, declared that “The United States should have nothing to do with it. This is not our fight,” a position reiterated yesterday by Vice-President-Elect J.D. Vance.

Syria’s Christians — Greek Orthodox, Eastern Rite Catholics, and Oriental Orthodox — view the fall of Assad with apprehension. Under 54 years of Baathist rule by Assad and his father, Hafez al-Assad, the country’s Christian minority was not only protected, but given participation in the civic life of the country.

The American, European and Israeli backed destabilization of Syria has brought death, flight, repression, persecution, kidnappings and ethnic cleansing to that nation’s ancient Christian community.

There have been massacres in Christian villages by Islamists. At least 120 churches have been destroyed in the war, with others seized and converted into military headquarters by jihadists.

Since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, the Christian population of that country has been devastated, falling by 80%, from 1.5 million in 2011 to less than 300,000 today.

The Acts of the Apostles tell us that it was in the Syrian city of Antioch (now part of Turkey) that the followers of Jesus Christ were first called Christians.

The Conversion of Saint Paul took place on the road to Damascus. In the first century AD, there were more Christians in Damascus, than in Jerusalem.

Seven Popes and the last Greek Father of the Church, Saint John Damascene, were from Syria. Even today, in the 21st century, some Syrian Christians still speak Aramaic — the language of Our Savior.

The Catholic Action League called the Biden supported Islamist victory in Syria “another American engineered disaster pointing towards the extinction of a native Christian presence in the region where the Catholic Faith was born.”

Catholic Action League Executive Director C.J. Doyle made the following comment: “What the Obama and Biden administrations did in Syria duplicates the mayhem caused by three Bush administrations in Iraq, where the Christian population has similarly imploded, falling by 90% since the American invasion of that country.

The last American President who successfully intervened on behalf of the Christians of the Middle East was General Dwight Eisenhower, whose Eisenhower Doctrine was invoked in 1958 — 66 years ago — to preserve the independence, security and stability of then Christian majority Lebanon.

In the last 35 years, successive American administrations have seemed determined to turn the Holy Land and the Levant into a Christian museum, pursuing policies inimical to the survival of Christian communities.

Does modern America really want to be remembered as the Great Power which accomplished what the Caliphs failed to achieve — the de-Christianization of the Middle East?

Finally, the fall of Assad is also a setback for the beleaguered population of the world’s first Christian state, Armenia, whose countrymen have suffered ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Azerbaigian strongman, Ilham Aliyev.

Aliyev’s patron is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose position in the region will be strengthened by the victory of his allies in Syria.”