Saddam–Assad unity was the *REAL* Axis of Resistance against Anglo-Zionist criminality

When traditional tyrants quietly demonstrate the moral soundness so-called “freedom fighters” never live up to.

Every time the empire tells you Eastasia is the enemy, the accompanying propaganda whitewash is, “we were never at war with Eurasia!” Then, it flips accordingly back to “we were ALWAYS at war with Eurasia!!”

Take the relationship between Anglo-Zionist/USAian empire and Iran: the two conglomerates held hands in unholy unison to depose Saddam Hussein from Iraq, intentionally enabling the precipitous explosion of sectarian militarized mob violence in the wake of de-Ba’athification creating the vacuum for Tehran to swallow up Baghdad into its right-arm proxy as Kata’ib Hezbollah, Badr., and co. death squads drove destitute Sunni (ex-)Ba’athists into Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), swelling the AQI-DAESH sewer’s membership numbers from triple to pentuple digits.

But we hear so often that Iran is the chief sponsorer of the “Axis of Resistance,” that it supplied arms and tactical assistance to Assad against Zionist-unleashed salafi-jihaists, how it deters both nazijews (Zionist Jews a.k.a. Fourth Reich) and ISIS, and that it out of solidarity with Palestine has sounded the death knell of hexagramic Nazi “zion”-ists. Does this convenient dualist narrative hold up to factual scrutiny? No. First off, Hezbollah’s most reliable direct ally was Assad, not Iran—take careful note who Nasrallah credited as the supplier of arms used to deter Judeonazis:

Iran was never a truly committed supporter of Assad against the FSA-Nusra-DAESH Wahhabi death squads—it only offered assistance Bashar al-Assad desperately needed as a Faustian ruse to consolidate its own regional influence for its resource and/or geopolitical hegemonic vested purposes advancing its own regional mini-superpower clout. It was observed after the coup of Dec. 8, 2024, that not only did Nazi-Zionist criminal Vladimir Putin betray Assad’s government into collapse, but that Tehran with advance knowledge sat back—a Carnegie Endowment commentary observes:¹

Iran’s initial response suggested a familiar playbook—the mobilization of Iraqi militias to shore up Assad’s defenses. However, the Iraqi government refused to allow these forces to cross into Syria. Rather than challenge this decision, Iran acquiesced with surprising ease. In a stunning development, Iranian-backed forces abandoned their most strategic asset—control of the Syrian-Iraqi border crossing—without any resistance. The IRGC and pro-Iran Iraqi fighters had already pulled out of Deir al-Zor before Kurdish forces moved in, leading to the swift capture of the crucial Qa’im-Bukamal border crossing by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

…

Iran’s withdrawal from Syria extended far beyond abandoning Deir al-Zor, marking a complete reversal of its military presence across the country. The night before Assad fled Damascus, the New York Times revealed that Iran had begun evacuating its military commanders and personnel from Syria. The stark reality of Iran’s capitulation was captured by an analyst close to the regime who told the newspaper: ‘Iran is starting to evacuate its forces and military personnel because we cannot fight as an advisory and support force if Syria’s army itself does not want to fight… The bottom line is that Iran has realized that it cannot manage the situation in Syria right now with any military operation and this option is off the table.’

Simply put, the Syro-Iranian “alliance” between Ba’athist Syria and Khomeinist Iran was always a Faustian one Tehran did not intend to uphold out of brotherly conviction. Khomeini was created in the first place as a puppet of Anglo-Zionist intelligence to serve Zionist geopolitics from the nominally,² superficial “anti-Zionist” side of the coin by leveraging the Shi’ite side of sectarianism as the much-needed Zionist counterweight to Sunni Nasserite, pan-Arab, secular nationalist, and Ba’athist influence in the late Cold War attempting to create a united Arab socialist republic that would smash the nazijew fascist Zionist regime. Hafez al-Assad, simply put, made a blunderous mistake fighting Saddam Hussein and arming Khomeini in the Iran-Iraq War, and Bashar paid the price when cornered into dependence upon Shi’ite sectarian militias who hurt his own cause of Syrian unity when “Iraqi” Khomeinist arms of Tehran only alienated Syrian Sunni support for Assad.

As you will see, the Syro-Iranian “alliance” was fake in contrast to the true brotherhood of Arab Ba’athist kinship sowed between the Assads and Saddam Hussein from 1997-2003, namely the 2000-03 interlude in between when Bashar took the Syrian throne and prior to Saddam’s ouster/capture from power. (as I understand, Saddam never fully trusted Hafez into the latter’s death, whereas Bashar was a reliably consistent trading partner accelerating the inter-Ba’athist Syro-Iraqi rapprochement into symbolic completion burying the old 1979-96 hatchet)

I: Levantine priority restructuring: hostility softens (1996-2000)

Although the secular, left-wing nationalist Ba’athist governments of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Hafez al-Assad in Syria found mutual cooperation throughout the 1970s namely in joint revulsion towards Egypt’s treacherous rapprochement with the Zionist regime, fifth columnist accusations in 1979 led to a fractured rift between Saddam and Hafez, the two rivals funding opposite proxies against each other’s geopolitical interests for more than the next decade.

It was even so that Hafez seized upon the international fury against Saddam in the wake of Iraq’s lopsided war against Kuwait and sent 20,000 Syrian soldiers to Saudi Arabia offering joint collaboration with Egypt against Iraq, his units only avoiding direct frontline battle against Saddam’s Iraqi Armed Forces because Saudi-Kuwaiti leaders rejected full unity with Syria and instead sent its troops back home.³

Yet by 1996, signs indicated a resumption of Ba’athist entente between Syria and Iraq: a meeting was held between “low-level government officials” of the two nations to express their grievances over Turkiye’s interference of Euphrates River flow into their respective countries.⁴ The following year was when rapprochement officially manifested into fruition: Hafez—no longer sensing any threat from Saddam—viewed cultivation of restored Iraqi diplomacy as a useful counterweight to the American-Israeli empire especially in light of aghast Syrian public reaction towards the 1996 election of Jewish Nazi Benjamin “Netanyahu” Mileikowsky as Prime Minister of the so-called “State of Israel”; and yet:⁵

…while Hafiz al-Asad [sic] did resume relations with Iraq, he acted cautiously, refraining from introducing anything of substance, and certainly not turning the relationship into any kind of close or strategic alliance.

Notwithstanding Hafez’s conservative balking from increased chasm-bridging full cordiality, important progress was nonetheless made—1997 was the year the United Nations instituted the “oil for food” program as Syria renewed trade with Iraq, which desired an economic opening to evade and break free from its cornered international standing as a starved pariah. “Therefore”:⁶

…the rival Ba`thist regimes exchanged diplomatic missions and permitted the resumption of trade across their borders. Syrian vendors gained access to Iraqi markets for food and medical supplies, Iraqi exports arrived at Tartus and Latakia, and the pipeline from Kirkuk to Baniyas, closed since 1982, was reopened. The thaw in relations went further than signing formal commercial agreements. Syria made important political gestures like shutting down radio broadcasts by Iraqi dissidents and airing frequent criticism of American air attacks on Iraqi military targets.

II: Iraqi old guard meets Syrian new guard

Unlike Hafez’s conservative, obstinate old guard (who stifled and sabotaged Bashar’s fresh overtures to Baghdad⁷), his young, reform-minded, and “inexperienced” son—an ophthalmologist by profession exposed to both Arab nationalist and Western “liberal” worlds—directed a generous expansion of rapprochement with Saddam Hussein, who by all indications accepted the lifeline and threw one in grateful return to Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. Not only did oil trade blossom between the two nations, but Damascus’s “explicit and unequivocal support for Iraq” even floated a pan-Arab counterbalance to any American intention of invading Iraq.⁸

Annals of Arab brotherhood

I will touch on the oil dimension in greater detail, and just to highlight the genuine significance of this inter-Ba’athist cooperative solidarity between Iraq’s dinosaur Saddam Hussein and Syria’s then-renegade new president Bashar al-Assad: the Zionist regime in Tel Aviv was notably irked at the tactical Syro-Iraqi coordination, Israeli sources charging that Iraqi “WMDs” were hid in Syria by Assadist permission, that the Levantine Ba’athist conduit turned a blind eye to the smuggling of weapons into Iraq from Eastern Europe, and even a triple Hezbollah interlock.⁹ The United States’ premonitory moves against Iraq were met with hostility by Assadist Syria, which rallied an international campaign of outcry against the regime change plot targeting Saddam; the vice president of Syria (Abd al-Halim Khaddam) cautioned:¹⁰

The American attack on Iraq is designed to bring about the partition of that country, which is a strategic objective of Israel’s; in fact, it is part of the long-standing Zionist aim of breaking up the national fabric of the countries of the region ... We are defending Iraq, which is an Arab country, and the fate of the all the Arabs is bound up with its fate. We are not Finland and therefore we cannot relate to Iraq's fate with equanimity. Iraq is a strategic hinterland for Syria in its conflict with Israel. We supported Kuwait when Iraq invaded its territory, but today Iraq is under attack and therefore we are standing at its side.

He wasn’t kidding—Prof. Jeffrey Sachs confirmed Adolf Mileikowsky’s rabidly deranged¹¹ push¹² to overthrow Saddam Hussein:

Adnan Umran, Syria’s then-Ministry of Information, concurred:¹³

The excuse that the Americans are providing for the expected attack on Iraq is ludicrous. The entire Arab world is in fact a target for threats by the United States. The involvement of the Americans in the internal affairs of the Arab states recalls the colonial period, and there is no doubt that if Washington could, it would take all of us back to that period.

The Syrian president Bashar al-Assad saw through the whole facade:¹⁴

[The United States] is interested only in gaining control over Iraqi oil and redrawing the map of the region in keeping with its world-view. … In the past, we did not sense the danger closing in on us in the face of fateful developments, including the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Balfour Declaration, the establishment of the State of Israel, but the danger to the Arabs inherent in the war in Iraq is no less than any of those.

Syro-Iraqi Ba’athist oil exchange: defying Anglo-Zionist empirical overlords on a tightrope

In the wake of 9/11, Bashar seeking to defuse Anglo-American wrath against Syria offered intelligence cooperation with the West against al-Qaeda while simultaneously retaining a hardline anti-Zionist stance—a temporarily outward overture of warmth by London towards Damascus was opened, in addition to the Syrian mukhabarat’s coordination with the CIA in the detention and “enhanced interrogation” of al-Qaeda suspects.¹⁵ Syria’s advance-knowledge intelligence sharing with the United States was credited by the latter with saving the lives of American military personnel.¹⁶ All this was not Machiavellian sadism—Assad was thrown onto the tightrope and forced by untimely conditions to walk upon it or fall quickly into an abyss.

Despite Assad’s nominally vowed commitments to Anglo-American “security” interests, his true colors revealed a deeply tight-knit kinship to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in an unspoken yet mutually understood Arab brotherhood against the interloping Western-Zionist imperial axis. It was in fact precisely because of Assad’s unwaveringly strident credentials as an upstander for the hated Saddam that the U.S. government came to incrementally deride and scorn the Syrian state despite the quenching of variously frenzied “security” demands met by Damascus. For Assad, torturing al-Qaeda suspects post-9/11 was acceptable but for the Levant to abandon Iraq would cross a moral red line—D.C.-Damascus relations thereby soured.¹⁷

Effective oil transaction between Syria and Iraq was secured through an old—but usable—pipeline. Dubya’s SoS Colon Powell admonished the placement of Iraqi oil shipments under the UN program, but:¹⁸

…that would be far less profitable for Bashar. The arrangement he had with Iraq gave Saddam cash outside the UN system and allowed Bashar to use cheap Iraqi oil for domestic consumption and then export Syria's own oil at market price.

It was estimated in the fall of 2000—several months into Bashar’s presidency—that Damascus was buying (from Iraq) some 100,000 to 150,000 petroleum barrels daily at a discounted price allowing Syria “to increase its foreign exchange earnings by exporting a larger quantity of its own petroleum production”—USAian government protests were met with semantically clever pivots by Assad in a middle finger pointed to the Anglo-American empire.¹⁹ Zionist Jew Barry Rubin’s words of scorn for Assadist Syria pointed out and highlighted the fact that:²⁰

In the Iraqi case, defying the whole world cost Damascus absolutely nothing and netted it about $8 billion. Syria received preferential deals to sell goods to Iraq, while Iraq used a pipeline and trucks to smuggle oil through Syria, paying Damascus 60 percent of the oils value on the international market.

Simply put, Bashar and Saddam mutually assisted one another at a time Ba’athist Iraq was facing a gathered storm of Anglo-American wrath and still anyways decided out of selfless brotherhood accord to lend a returning hand of assistance to its Levantine brother who generously reached out to heal the rift-instigated wound. Here is the more detailed expansion of the matter especially if you are far more economics-savvy than I am to comprehend the full picture:²¹

[The Syro-Iraqi rapprochement’s] centrepiece was the reopened oil pipeline from Iraq to Syria's Mediterranean port of Banias through which Damascus was said to receive about 200,000 barrels per day of Basra Light crude at below market prices for processing in local refineries, while exporting an equivalent amount of Syrian Light crude at much higher international prices. The pipeline could produce up to $1 billion a year in revenue for the Syrian government, about 5 percent of Syria’s gross domestic product. There are also plans to build a new pipeline to Iraq. On top of this, increased trade with Iraq was considered a critical element in reviving Syria’s stagnant economy and giving Syrian business a foothold in the Iraqi economy at a time when an end to the sanctions seemed on the horizon. A huge cross-border commerce developed while contracts to provide Iraq with goods under the food for oil program, which increased from $57 million in 1997 to $2 billion in 2001, allowed the private sector to export goods that might not be competitive on the free market. The pipeline revenues accrue to the cash-strapped state and the monopolies acquired in the Iraqi market by the regime's business clients service its patronage networks. While this will not solve the wider crisis of the Syrian economy, it may be enough to preserve the regime while relieving pressures to conform to the neo-liberal demands of ‘globalisation.’

…

The Iraqi pipeline became an issue with the USA and a political lever Syria tried to manipulate against Washington well before 9/11. After the Los Angeles Times reported that Syria was facilitating the sale of Iraqi oil outside the oil-for-food regime, US Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Damascus to coordinate pressure on Iraq in March 2000. He reported that he had won Bashar’s agreement to allow the UN to monitor the pipeline, to refrain from violating international sanctions on Iraqi oil and to put proceeds from Iraqi oil in UN escrow accounts. In reality, Iraq oil is largely bartered for Syrian goods shipped to Iraq, short-circuiting such escrow accounts. Ibrahim Hamidi reported that Powell mistakenly understood that Syria intended to include the existing oil pipe in the framework of the UN resolutions, while the Syrian President had referred to the new pipeline Syria plans to lay down. Syria claims it merely assured Powell that it was committed to ‘all UN resolutions’ and international legality, implying that its full compliance was contingent on Israel's compliance with such resolutions. The Syrians also tried to balance between Washington and Baghdad regarding the American proposed ‘smart sanctions.’ On the one hand, they did not want officially to oppose them and only expressed ‘great caution’ about them. Yet Syrian Foreign Minister, Faruq Al-Shara’ refused to discuss the Iraqi issue with an American envoy on the grounds that there must first be ‘firm positions regarding the Israeli aggression against the Arabs.’ Syria hoped to make the price of cooperation in keeping Iraq isolated, at the expense of its own economic interests in Iraqi ties, significant. The fact that Syria still did not have full diplomatic relations with Iraq (which even Jordan does) suggests that, for Damascus, Iraq was viewed as a geopolitical card that it can play in return for concessions from the USA.

As the arch-Zionist author Rubin noted, Syrian funds “furnished Saddam’s largest source of illegal income”; in addition:²²

Saddam used part of the money he received from Syria to buy arms, and Bashar helped here, too. According to captured files that Los Angeles Times reporters obtained from the al-Bashair Trading Company in Baghdad, prior to the U.S. attack in 2003, it bought tens of millions of dollars in arms from Syria, holding more than fifty contracts with a Syrian counterpart, SES International Corporation. The general manager of SES was Asif Isa Shalish, a cousin of Bashar; another of the biggest shareholders was Major General Dhu Himma Shalish, a Bashar relative and head of the presidential security corps. When Saddam was overthrown, the director-general of al-Bashair, Munir Awad, fled to Syria, where he lives under government protection. Clearly, Awad is a man whom the Syrian authorities would not like to be captured and questioned about his business activities.

… Bashar even lied directly to [Colon] Powell’s face during his 2001 trip to Damascus by claiming that the Syria-Iraq oil pipeline was merely being tested and not carrying large amounts of petroleum.

The undeniably sh*tholed depraved scum of a long intestine Colon Powell on a visit to Damascus issued the demand that Assad shut down Syro-Hezbollah relations and abandon its military presence from Lebanon, at which the Syrian president issued an empty vow to close the Damascus offices of Palestinian resistance factions while “quietly” retaining his sponsorship of anti-Zionist movements.²³ The Syrian president couldn’t have exhibited more profoundly his shunning disregard for American demands simultaneous to his unspoken, mutually understood ironclad loyalty to Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi nation that was marked for death.

If the substantive body of continued American accusations re. Syro-Iraqi military coordination are factual, it only goes to further demonstrate how consistently brotherly the two last Ba’athist state heads treated one another—Dubya’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and co. alleged Syrian bolstering of Iraqi operations via night-vision binocular smuggling, in addition to permitting usage of its land as a conduit facilitating Arab volunteers’ entries into Iraq as well as the escape from Iraq of Iraqi political figures via Syria as a medium.²⁴ Although the Syro-Iraqi border was subsequently “closed” “officially” as a result of outlandish American government conspiracy theories (including the allegation—yes, already in the early 2000s!—of Syria “producing chemical weapons”) out of semi-necessitated expedient “compliance,” its otherwise consistent mutual assistance with Saddam in the latter’s last politically capable gasps struck a chord of defiance against their common USAian enemy²⁵ whose government records consistently reveal a consistently acknowledged kinship between the two last Ba’athist governments it despised.²⁶²⁷²⁸²⁹

Did Bashar and Saddam ever meet directly?

One random author—apparently a neocon warhawk himself?—claimed that the two Ba’athist political leaders met personally vis-à-vis:³⁰

August 8, 2002 — Under the cover of night and with only a few loyal aides, Saddam travels to the Iraq/Syrian border town of Abu-Kamal. He meets with Bashar al-Assad, his brother Maher, and at least one senior IIS official for an all night summit.

Unfortunately, I have not found direct corroboration of this detail elsewhere, and therefore don’t know if it’s factually substantiated in full or not.

III: Ouster of Saddam and insurgent aftermath

The only primary “exception” (as far as I’m aware, as of typing) to the inter-Ba’athist rapprochement between Bashar al-Assad and Saddam Hussein was Syria’s shakily waffling stance of “pragmatism” attempting in vain to appease and soften Anglo-American hostility towards Baghdad—it as a UN Security Council rotating member voted in favor of Resolution 1441’s final bullying ultimatum against Saddam Hussein to disarm (related to the fabricated WMD hoax and outgrowth co-optation nonsense)—a move disdained by its indigenous home population’s rank-and-file—though came to consistently oppose the War [Against] Iraq after its outbreak.³¹

Assad’s government pushed back against the (anti-)Iraq War not only in verbal terms “but implemented actions against the Americans. Syria started shipping military equipment to Iraq on the eve of the war and as the war became imminent, the Syrian government started facilitating the movement of Syrian volunteers to fight alongside Saddam Hussein’s regime.”³² Eerily farsighted as it was, Assad warned:³³

…that a war on Iraq would be only the beginning of a larger campaign to upend states opposed to Israel, which would include Syria, as well as Libya and Iran. ‘We are all targeted. . . . We are all in danger,’ he said to the assembly.

Neo-Saddamist sympathies, Syro-Iranian cracks

When Iraqi Sunni Ba’athists left systematically disenfranchised from American de-Ba’athification policy organized their own faction of revolt against Anglo-American meddlers, Assad lent his support to the Sunni paramilitaries, not consistently towards the Iranian-backed Shi’ite “Iraqi” government who Iraqi Sunni Ba’athists opposed for their Khomeinist sectarian brutality³⁴ as the newly heralded “Iraqi” government as a client vassal of Tehran despite its outwardly professed nominally pro-Assad credentials in accordance to the “Syro-Iranian alliance” quarreled intensely in a few episodes over Syria’s fundamental preference towards Sunni Ba’athism.³⁵

Simply put, while the post-Saddam, Khomeinist-dominated “Iraqi” government professed its allegiance to Syria, the new nature of the “Syro-Iraqi alliance” was an extension of the pure duplicitous fakery defining the Syro-Iranian “entente.” The new pro-Iran so-called “Iraqi government” dominated by sectarian, Tehran-beholden Shi’ite death squad partakers and enablers (who did nothing more than drive Iraqi Sunnis into al-Qaeda in a cynically depraved self-fulfilling prophecy):³⁶

…accused Damascus of supporting the Sunni insurgency and condoning the transit of foreign fighters into Iraq to target the US Army and Iraqi security forces. The Shi’ite-dominated Iraqi government was also unhappy with Syria’s pressure to reconsider the de-Ba’athification law, which excluded major Sunni opposition powers and elements from the former regime from the political process. Syria was clearly unhappy with the rise of pro-Iran, Shi’ite religious parties. It sought to include secular Sunni forces in the political process so that it could balance Iran’s rising influence in Iraq.

Iranian president Mohammad Khatami openly admitted that Iran partook in a regime change operation against Saddam Hussein:

It’s worth highlighting here for emphasis sake that Tel Aviv/Mileikowsky clamored for regime change against Iraq which simultaneously served Iran’s interests by driving the sectarian wedge proliferating both al-Qaeda death squads to radicalize destitute Iraqi Sunnis and Khomeinist death squads to radicalize destitute Iraqi Shi’ites in the power vacuum left after Saddamist Ba’athism was liquidated. Read that again: Iran and Israel were on the SAME SIDE in opposing Saddam Hussein. In addition, it’s a documented FACT that the “State of Israel” previously in the Iran-Iraq war brazenly abetted and sent arms to Ayatollah Khomeini against Saddam:³⁷

Lessons

1. dissidents against Anglo-Zionist empire don’t necessarily start off angelic contrarians, instead becoming ever-dissident embodiments in symbolic revolts when it’s too late for them to indefinitely retain their governance any longer—Hafez made the grievous mistake of exacerbating tensions with Saddam for over a decade but ultimately began the rapprochement process Bashar continued

2. one’s own conservative fogey ranks are too often fifth columnists sabotaging much-needed bilateral peace for spitefully unconstructive reasons

3. records of authentic solidarity between different dissident national leaders are always buried after the anciem régime is overthrown in order to facilitate the newly whitewashed dualist fake narrative, i.e. “Syro-Iranian alliance” or “Iran-Israel opposition”

4. the real “duality” between good and evil is cosmic, not fleshly

5. authentic solidarity necessitates reaching out to like-minded seekers of moral virtue and unfettered human decency from “across the aisle” instead of enabling the empire’s preservation of ideological chasm divide-and-conquer separations preventing you from cultivating the much-needed kinships they dread

6. Assad could’ve selfishly thrown Saddam under the bus—since Syria hypothetically could have cozied up fully to Anglo-American empire and abandoned Baghdad—but chose not to, and even honored Saddam’s legacy by funding Sunni Iraqi Ba’athists against the Iranian-owned new “Iraqi” government when there was no direct benefit for Syria per se, and instead Assad acted out of loyalty to native Arab resistance against Anglo-American occupiers

7. truly remarkable and respectable political leaders are more often the “traditional tyrants” than “modern pro-democracy” vote-hustlers, and who in spite of their cold brutality stick to a sacred moral code of inviolable brotherhood their detractors will never grasp

When Saddam Hussein accepted the last, riskily managed lifelines of assistance and mutually beneficial coordination offered by Bashar al-Assad, and in return handed Syria a lifeline for economic recovery via generous oil deals, he sent an implicitly heartfelt message of ostensibly compassion-driven empathy to the Levant: “the daggers to quickly seal my fate will hunt you down the line likewise and annihilate your Ba’athist state of preserved secular nationalist stability also, so take this, Bashar, and prepare yourself for the Zionist-Masonic-Wahhabi revolution knocking on your door later.”

The empire and its controlled opposition tentacles want you to forget the lessons of what true solidarity looks like. Will you let those Nazi-Zionists occupy your mind?

1. Nicole Grajewski (Dec. 9, 2024), “Why Did Iran Allow Bashar al-Assad’s Downfall?” Carnegie Middle East Center.

2. Cf. chapter 9 of Bob Dreyfuss’s book Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (2006), in addition to Executive Intelligence Review archives i.e. here.

3. David Commins (2004), “Historical Dictionary of Syria,” Historical Dictionaries of Asia, Oceania, and the Middle East, no. L, ed. II, p. 140.

4. Ibid.

5. Meir Litvak (2006), “Middle Eastern Societies and the West: Accomodation of Clash of Civilizations?” pp. 72-73.

6. Commins (2004), loc. cit.

7. Amjed Rasheed (2023), “Power and Paranoia in Syria-Iraq Relations: The Impact of Hafez Assad and Saddam Hussain.”

8. Litvak (2006), loc. cit.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., pp. 73-74.

11. Sep. 12, 2002, “User Clip: Netanyahu's Expert Testimony on Iraq in 2002,” C-SPAN.

12. Hamed Alealiz (Oct. 31, 2012), “FLASHBACK: Netanyahu Said Iraq War Would Benefit The Middle East,” ThinkProgress.

13. Litvak (2006), op. cit., p. 74.

14. Ibid., p. 75.

15. Con Coughlin (2023), “Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny,” ch. IV.

16. Sam Dagher (May 28, 2019), “Assad Or We Burn the Country: How One Family's Lust for Power Destroyed Syria,” ch. VI.

17. Demet Şenbaş (2018), “Post-Cold War Relations Between Turkey and Syria,” p. 138.

18. Dagher (2019), loc. cit.

19. Commins (2004), loc. cit.

20. Barry M. Rubin (2007), “The Truth About Syria,” p. 153.

21. Rick Fawn, Mary Buckley (2003), “Global Responses to Terrorism: 9/11, Afghanistan and Beyond,” pp. 140-41.

22. Rubin (2007), op. cit., p. 187.

23. Coughlin (2023), loc. cit.

24. Litvak (2006), op. cit., p. 75.

25. Ibid., pp. 75-76.

26. United States House Committee on International Relations (Oct. 15, 2003), “Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003: Report,” p. 3.

27. United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (Oct. 30, 2003), “Syria: U.S. Policy Directions,” p. 27.

28. United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce (May 16, 2005), “The United Nations Oil-for-Food Program: Saddam Hussein’s Use of Oil Allocations to Undermine Sanctions and the United Nations Security Council,” pp. 220-75.

29. United States House Committee on Ways and Means (Jan. 2013), “Compilation of U.S. Trade Statutes,” pp. 751-52

30. Sam Pender (Nov. 2004), “America’s War With Saddam,” p. 180.

31. Commins (2004), loc. cit.

32. Haian Dukhan (Dec. 7, 2018), “State and Tribes in Syria: Informal Alliances and Conflict Patterns,” ch. V.

33. Afshon Ostovar (Aug. 2024), “Wars of Ambition: The United States, Iran, and the Struggle for the Middle East,” p. 48.

34. William W. Harris (Jun. 12, 2012), “Lebanon: A History, 600-2011,” p. 267.

35. William M. Habeeb, Rafael D. Frankel, Mina Al-Oraibi (2012), “The Middle East in Turmoil: Conflict, Revolution, and Change,” pp. 191-92.

36. William R. Thompson, Imad Mansour (2020), “Shocks and Rivalries in the Middle East and North Africa,” pp. 118-19.

37. Alex Winston (Jun. 14, 2024), “Israel-Iran alliance: Jerusalem’s arm sales to the Islamic Republic during Iran-Iraq War,” The Jerusalem Post.