31 January 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)
CNN, which is controlled by U.S. billionaires who fund the Democratic Party, euphemistically headlined on January 29th, “Former al Qaeda member named as Syria’s president for transitional period”, about the U.S. Government’s now-successful operation that had started actually in 2009, and intensified in 2011, and intensified yet further in 2012, to replace Syria’s secular Bashar al-Assad led Government of Syria, and to install one that would be acceptable to Israel and especially to the Saud family that own’s Saudi Arabia and the world’s most valuable oil company, Saudi Aramco. But, actually, even the euphemistic CIA-edited and written Wikipedia (which blacklists (blocks from linking to) sites that aren’t CIA-approved) says, in its article about this “member,” that
As the emir [leader] of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) [al-Qaeda in Syria] from 2017 to 2025, he played a key role in the 2024 Syrian opposition offensives, which led to the downfall of the Assad regime and the establishment of the Syrian transitional government. Al-Sharaa subsequently served as the country’s de-facto leader until his appointment as president.[9][10]
Al-Sharaa was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to a Syrian Sunni Muslim family from the Golan Heights, and grew up in the capital, Damascus. Shortly before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he joined al-Qaeda in Iraq and fought for three years in the Iraqi insurgency. American forces captured and imprisoned him from 2006 to 2011. His release coincided with the Syrian Revolution, and he created the al-Nusra Front in 2012 with the support of al-Qaeda to take part in the Syrian civil war against the Ba’athist government of Bashar al-Assad. As emir of the al-Nusra Front, al-Sharaa built a stronghold in the northwestern Idlib Governorate. He resisted Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi‘s attempts to merge al-Nusra with the Islamic State, leading to war between the two groups.
The U.S. State Department listed al-Sharaa as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” in May 2013,[11] and four years later announced a $10 million reward for information leading to his capture.[12] The reward offer was rescinded in December 2024 after al-Sharaa met with an American delegation led by Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara A. Leaf.
In 2016, al-Sharaa cut al-Nusra’s ties with al-Qaeda, merging it with other organisations to form Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham the following year. Since breaking with al-Qaeda, he has sought international legitimacy by focusing on governance in Syria rather than transnational jihadism. HTS established a technocratic administration in the territory it controlled, …
This CNN article on January 29th prominently linked to their 3 January 2025 propaganda-piece against Assad, “Exclusive: Dealing with Assad’s toxic legacy, one secret chemical lab at a time”, which described how al-Qaeda in Syria was now trying to reveal (or perhaps create) evidence that Assad (instead of al-Qaeda in Syria) had actually itself created, the actually false-flagged-by al-Qaeda in Syria (to be blamed against Assad) alleged and some real chemical-weapons attacks there during that long U.S.-led war against Syria.
On January 30th, the U.S. pro-Republican-Party site Zero Hedge, headlined more honestly than CNN, “Jolani Declares Himself President Of Syria After Canceling Elections & Constitution”, and closed by saying
As we’ve documented previously, this solidifies Islamist hold over Damascus for the long term, or what is essentially rule by al-Qaeda in suits. Even Washington still considers Jolani’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group a foreign terror organization, according to current law and designations.
This means sanctions on Syria are still in place, which has only made the common population’s suffering more acute, as there’s hardly any electricity or fuel, and medicine and food remains an immense difficulty. As for Syria’s new unelected autocrat, he’s expected to soon travel to Saudi Arabia in his first official trip abroad.
So, without further ado, I shall now link directly to the January 30th video from the great independent British investigative journalist Vanessa Beeley (who is smeared, of course, by Wikipedia — which article about her links to many Western news-reports, some of which I know to have been false), who since 2016 has personally been in Syria many times to cover the U.S./UK war to overthrow and replace Assad. She had been living in Damascus on 8 December 2025 when Assad was overthrown by al-Qaeda, and she promptly escaped on that same day. However, she remains in constant contact with sources inside Syria who have been telling her what’s happening there:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KxInsDUxPo
“Trump Middle East rampage begins”
One typical example from that video:
—
2:47
Obviously, there are, um, daily
2:50
reports of atrocities committed by the
2:53
HTS um unelected government in Syria,
2:57
the former and still a proscribed terrorist
2:59
group conducting dozens of sectarian
3:02
executions kidnappings and um tortures
3:06
across Syria, and we’ll just play one
3:09
video that is not particularly gruesome
3:11
but it shows a young Shia Muslim man [al-Qaeda hates Shiites] uh
3:14
discovering that three members of his
3:16
family have been murdered by the HTS
3:19
terrorists [i.e., jihadists]; so, if we can just play this.
3:54
Um, his anguish is very obvious and when
3:57
we’re talking about women, this is Dr.
3:59
Rasha al-Ali, who was a university
4:03
researcher at homs University and a
4:05
member of the Arab writers Union, who was
4:08
kidnapped on the 20th of January after
4:11
she objected to the um imposing of a
4:16
nicab law wearing a nicab. Um, her body
4:23
was discovered on the 25th of January
4:26
with her fingers amputated and signs of
4:29
extreme torture uh, and obviously
4:32
she was killed for her views, um, about
4:35
women in Syria; um, equally, Syrian
4:39
Christians, of course all minorities, are,
4:41
are being faced with ethnic cleansing.
4:44
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The U.S./UK/Turkey/Qatar-installed current al-Qaeda government of Syria says that such horrors are not allowed by them to occur; for example, here is their denial of the claims that Dr. al-Ali was tortured to death — they say she is simply missing.
PS: If you like this article, please email it to all your friends or otherwise let others know about it. None of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media will likely publish it (nor link to it, since doing that might also hurt them with Google or etc.). I am not asking for money, but I am asking my readers to spread my articles far and wide, because I specialize in documenting what the Deep State is constantly hiding — what the ‘news’-media ignore if they can, and deny if they must. This is, in fact, today’s samizdat.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.