Now that the author has gained respect as an astute and honest geopolitical analyst of the Middle East, I no longer have to argue that he is eminently qualified to describe the current US Empire moves in Syria and their effects.
Sometime around 2010 the Empire strategists decided to employ a chaos strategy (which was honed in previous operations against Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, etc.) to cause a regime change in Syria because that government would not cooperate with Empire's strategy to punish Russia and to prevent further economic ties between Russia and Europe, specifically involving oil/gas pipelines.
First, they constructed a phony proxy army which consisted of mostly violent people from the prisons of Saudi Arabia and its satellite states, and riff-raff across the world. This proxy army was funded by Saudi Arabia and its allies, and supported in various ways by the Empire's European satellites, Israel, and Turkey (the latter for mostly different reasons which Russia used to separate Turkey's geopolitical interests from the Empire's).
Added to the Empire's chaos strategy is the protection and support given to the Syrian Kurds in order to fight against their own proxy army. The Syrian Kurds had held out hopes to have their own territory carved out of Syria, and likely they dreamed of extending it to the Kurdish areas of Iraq. Thus, the Empire's very complicated strategy used various military and political actors for their own objective: to destabilize Syria and cause regime-change. The truth which has been highly fragmented by various independent journalists can now be told after the failure of this grand chaos strategy. Magnier makes a valuable contribution to that effort in this article.
He [Trump] finally ordered his forces to do so after long months of inaction, during which the US effectively offered protection to the terror group and allowed tens of thousands of ISIS militants to move freely to attack the Syrian Army and its allies along the Deir-ezzour al-Bukamal axis. [northeastern Syria]
The significance of Trump’s decision to finally move against ISIS cannot be overestimated. Since 2014 the US has been engaged in a phoney war against ISIS, pretending to fight this brutal takfiri group while in fact allowing it to expand and killing Syrian Army soldiers who actually fought the group. Throughout this time the US has used ISIS as a pretext for the US military presence in Syria. The US did bomb ISIS occupied Raqqah and destroyed it; it then made a deal to deport many thousands of ISIS partisans. But the ongoing Battle of Baghuz marks the first time the US has really fought ISIS. To his credit, Trump is now doing what the US has only pretended to do for five years: actually fighting ISIS. This spectacular and drawn out campaign allows Trump to take credit for defeating ISIS, although for half a decade the forces actually fighting ISIS have been the Syrian Army, Russia, the Iraqi PMU/Hashed al-Shaabi, the Iraqi Army, Lebanese Hezbollah, and Iran.
