Did the US fund the Syrian rebels that toppled Assad?

After Syrian opposition forces led an offensive that rapidly swept through Syria’s major cities in a matter of weeks and ultimately led to the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government, US President Joe Biden publicly took credit for the rebel takeover.

“Our approach has shifted the balance of power in the Middle East,” Biden said earlier this week.

“Through this combination of support for our partners, sanctions, and diplomacy and targeted military force when necessary, we now see new opportunities opening up for the people of Syria and for the entire region.”

Biden’s comments, as well as a deluge of commentary claiming that Washington – and Israel – were secretly behind the offensive, have caused questions to resurface about the US’s role in Syria over the past decade and a half.

Under the Barack Obama administration, the United States first entered the Syrian civil war in 2013 through CIA operations, and later in 2014, when US troops were deployed to fight the Islamic State (IS) group that had taken over large swathes of Iraqi and Syrian territory.

But by the time President Donald Trump’s first administration came into play, the US role in Syria had trickled down to 900 troops in the northeast of the country, where Kurdish-led groups were in control.

And just before the rebel takeover over the weekend, the United Arab Emirates was reportedly brokering talks between the Assad government and the US.

Middle East Eye examines the US’s role in the Syrian conflict and the groups it supported or did not support throughout the past decade.

Syrian Democratic Forces

A good place to start is by taking a look at the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a group largely made up of fighters from the People’s Protection Units (YPG), which is an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The PKK is a terrorist group, according to the US.

The US’s stated goal with the SDF was to help the group defeat and prevent the resurgence of IS in Syria.

Kurdish forces pushed the Syrian army to withdraw from northeastern Syria by 2012. In 2015, the SDF was established as an umbrella group of predominantly Turkish groups, with some Arab and other ethnic groups making up more minor factions.

In the following decade, the SDF ended up controlling about a quarter of Syria’s territory, where it ran an administration autonomous from Syria’s central government.

In 2019, the SDF struck a deal with the Assad government after Trump announced a troop withdrawal from the country. Today, 900 of the roughly 2,000 US troops remain in Syria. The agreement allowed Syrian army troops to re-enter some of the territories under SDF control to help defend against Turkish military operations. 

Since the fall of the Assad government, the SDF has lost some territories to Turkish-backed rebels, with the US now scrambling to contain the offensives against the SDF.

In the Biden administration’s Pentagon budget for 2024, $156m was allocated to a fund, CTEF, for countering IS in Syria. That money went towards training, equipment, logistics, and infrastructure, among many other items. The Pentagon’s 2025 budget has requested $148m for this same fund, while in 2023, the fund received $160m.

Inside the budget, the Pentagon lays out that one of the main groups that will receive this funding is the SDF and, by extension, the YPG.

“CTEF will continue providing small arms and light weapons to support the SDF,” a Pentagon budget document states.

The SDF did not play a role in the 2024 rebel assault that toppled the Assad government, but they celebrated and welcomed Assad’s departure.  

Syrian Free Army

Another group receiving CTEF funding from the Pentagon is the Syrian Free Army (SFA), not to be confused with the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which was an umbrella group of different factions within the Syrian opposition and is now known as the Syrian National Army (SNA).

The SFA operates in southeastern Syria near the border with Iraq and Jordan. It has even been hosted by the US at its military base at al-Tanf, a garrison in the Syrian desert on the highway linking Damascus to Baghdad.

“The SFA remains a crucial partner for coalition forces operating near At Tanf Garrison (ATG) in southeast Syria,” a Pentagon budget document says.

The SFA was previously named Maghawir al-Thawra and has been backed and trained by the US for years.

The US says it supported the group in its fight against IS. But Washington has also used the SFA to help maintain security around al-Tanf Garrison, which US Air Force Colonel Daniel Magruder previously argued could be used as a point of leverage for the US to decide an “acceptable outcome in Syria”.

The Syrian Free Army played a minor role during the rebel assault of 2024, primarily in the province of Homs, where they succeeded in pushing back Syrian government forces. 

Operation Timber Sycamore

Over the past two weeks, a leaked email from 2012 has resurfaced online in which Obama’s assistant national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, tells former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that “AQ is on our side in Syria”, referring to al-Qaeda.

The email snippet has been cited as proof that the US has supported al-Qaeda and IS in Syria.

However, in the same email, Sullivan says: “Al-Qaida leader al-Zawahiri called on Muslims in Turkey and the Middle East to aid rebel forces in their fight against supporters of Syrian President Assad in an internet video recording. Al-Zawahiri also urged the Syrian people not to rely on the AL [Arab League], Turkey, or the United States for assistance.”

There are no public records showing that the US directly funded IS or al-Qaeda’s operations inside Syria.

But a year later, the Obama administration approved a CIA operation called Timber Sycamore, in which the US began to train and arm certain Syrian rebels against the Assad government.

In all, the CIA spent $1bn on this programme. Still, the US was unable to maintain control over the rebels they funded, and had difficulties as al-Nusra Front, the former al-Qaeda affiliate and precursor to Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), was making significant gains in its fight against al-Qaeda, the IS group, and the Assad government.

The Trump administration ultimately scuppered Timber Sycamore, and Trump tried to fully withdraw US troops from Syria to no avail.

Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham

HTS, known in English as the Committee for the Liberation of the Levant, is the main Syrian opposition group that led this rapid takedown of the Assad government.

It was founded in January 2017 and is the latest rebranding of Jabhat al-Nusra, also known as the Nusra Front, a hard-line rebel group founded by Ahmed al-Sharaa in 2012 to oppose Assad’s rule and turn Syria into a Sunni Islamic state.

In its earliest months, Nusra coordinated with the Iraqi group that would later become IS. However, in 2013, it pledged its allegiance to al-Qaeda, and Nusra and IS became enemies and rivals.

Over time, the al-Qaeda label began to hang heavy on Nusra, and its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, began to distance himself from al-Qaeda’s transnational jihadi ideology, expressing a desire for international legitimacy.

Nusra officially broke links with al-Qaeda in 2016, rebranding as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, and gradually rooted out elements committed to carrying out attacks outside of Syria. Then, in 2017, they merged with some smaller groups and rebranded to become HTS.

The group is a US-designated terrorist organisation, and Washington has never directly supported HTS.

Former US ambassador James Jeffrey told PBS News in 2021 that HTS had sent a message to Washington asking for US support, which Jeffrey said he ignored.

“Why should I… take the high-risk position of urging somebody get dropped from the terrorist list?” Jeffrey told PBS.