Bashar al-Assad was the president of Syria until his fall from power. John Kiriakou recounts one of only two times he gave Senator John Kerry unsolicited advice: after Kerry repeatedly called Assad “my dear friend” in a speech, the Lebanese ambassador and “every Lebanese in Washington” called Kiriakou furious. He told Kerry to stop; Kerry protested that they were genuinely friends who had ridden motorcycles together down to the Golan Heights. Kiriakou answered that, “be that as it may, he’s a genocidal maniac.” Kerry backed off.[1][2]
Russian bases and the “illegal” U.S. presence
Kiriakou notes that about a week and a half before one 2023 interview, Assad traveled to Moscow and asked for two additional temporary Russian bases plus offered a permanent one — on top of the small Russian navy base already in northwestern Syria for decades — prompting State Department condemnation despite what Kiriakou calls the illegality of the U.S.’s own presence in Syria.[3] He argues there are only three legal justifications for militarily occupying a foreign country — invitation by that country (as Russia has), an order of the UN Security Council, or that the country attacked you militarily — none of which apply to the U.S. troop presence in Syria.[4] He says Donald Trump, as president, chose to maintain the Special Forces presence Barack Obama had established in northeastern Syria ostensibly to “guard the oil fields,” which Kiriakou calls a war crime, since occupying a country’s territory to seize its resources is illegal.[5]
Assad, minorities, and the case against “moderate rebels”
Kiriakou states there is no such thing as a Syrian moderate rebel, the Kurds aside, and that the U.S.’s strategic error was pretending the Nusra Front — formerly known in Syria as al-Qaeda — was somehow moderate.[6] He says U.S. allies Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the UAE poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anti-Assad forces, most of which ended up with Nusra and other al-Qaeda-linked jihadi extremists.[7] ISIL/ISIS, he says, originated as al-Qaeda in Iraq — a byproduct of the U.S. invasion and occupation, and more radical than al-Qaeda because it considered al-Qaeda insufficiently anti-American — and after being pushed out of Iraq found open territory in eastern Syria, working alongside Nusra, which the U.S. had itself designated a terrorist group but could not convince its own allies to stop supplying.[8][9] Against that backdrop, Kiriakou says Assad has a long history of supporting Christian and other religious minorities in Syria: the foreign minister was a Christian, women served in the cabinet and parliament, and Damascus was home to an active Jewish community with one of the oldest continuously operating synagogues in the world.[9]
After Assad’s fall
Kiriakou notes that Syria’s post-Assad president is a former al-Qaeda member and one of the co-founders of ISIS.[10] Discussing the episode with Ted Rall, Kiriakou questions why Israel would have supported Assad’s overthrow given the result was an ISIS-linked government on its own border, noting that this new Syrian government publicly endorsed the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran the day before their conversation.[11] More broadly, Kiriakou says intelligence analysts avoid bold, outside-the-box conclusions — such as predicting Assad could be overthrown — for fear of risking their careers.[12]