'Al Qaeda Is on Our Side': How Obama and Biden Aided Our Enemies in Syria

In a lengthy investigative article, journalist Aaron Maté establishes that "Obama officials now back in office under President Biden coordinated with the jihadist franchise in an effort to topple the Syrian regime - while claiming they backed only the 'moderate opposition.'" Sullivan was one of the foremost of those officials, and now he and others are back, having learned nothing.

Maté noted that "In waging a multi-billion dollar covert war in support of the insurgency against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, top Obama officials who now serve under Biden made it American policy to enable and arm terrorist groups that attracted jihadi fighters from across the globe. This regime change campaign, undertaken one decade after Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. on 9/11, helped a sworn U.S. enemy establish the Idlib safe haven that it still controls today." In the course of this wrongheaded campaign, Sullivan, who was then Director of Policy Planning, wrote to his boss, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, "AQ [Al Qaeda] is on our side in Syria."

On Sept. 17, 2013, I wrote at JihadWatch.org: "The U.S. is now officially on the side of al-Qaeda." This was because of Barack Obama's plan to arm and train "Vetted" members of the Free Syrian Army.

In September 2014, said the New York Times, "Mr. Obama said he envisioned the Free Syrian Army's providing the ground presence needed to confront ISIS in Syria." Obama also said: "We have a Free Syrian Army and a moderate opposition that we have steadily been working with that we have vetted."

The New York Times reported in August 2014 that, according to Abu Osama, a member of a Nusra Front brigade that participated in the attack, the Arsal assault was "a combined operation involving fighters from the Free Syrian Army, the Nusra Front and ISIS." And PJ Media reported the following month that "Multiple media reports indicate that the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army is operating openly with ISIS and other designated terrorist groups."

While all this was going on, Jake Sullivan and his colleagues in the Obama State Department assumed that the Free Syrian Army was a moderate force that was on their side and even that al-Qaeda was fighting on our side in Syria.

Foreign Policy Journal reported in August 2015 that none other than Gen. Michael Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, had confirmed that "Not only had he studied the DIA memo predicting the West's backing of an Islamic State in Syria when it came across his desk in 2012, but even asserts that the White House's sponsoring of radical jihadists against the Syrian regime was 'a willful decision.'"

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/al-qaeda-our-side-how-obama-and-biden-aided-our-robert-spencer/