Revisiting 'American ISIS' After the Fall of Syria's Brutal Regime
The collapse of Bashar al-Assad's government comes after 13 years of civil war. My 2021 Audible series tells part of that history.
After 13 years of civil war in Syria, President Bashar al-Assad has fled his country, receiving asylum in Russia. An ophthalmologist by training, al-Assad inherited the dictatorship established by his father, Hafez al-Assad, who died in June 2000.
In 2011, amid the broader Arab Spring movement, protests broke out in Syria. Al-Assad responded with a brutal crackdown, ordering his military to round up activists and attack peaceful demonstrators with shelling, heavy machine guns, and snipers. According to a United Nations estimate at the time, these actions killed more than 2,000 Syrians in just a few months.
In response, several rebel groups formed a coalition known as the Free Syrian Army to protect protesters and civilians, marking the beginning of the Syrian Civil War. At the outset, jihadi groups were not active in Syria. That quickly changed as extremist factions and the world’s great powers began to see Syria as a proxy battlefield.
The Islamic State group (ISIS), an evolution of Al Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate, established Nusra Front as an Islamist rebel faction in Syria. Its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, was a Syrian who had fought with ISIS in Iraq and spent five years in American detention facilities, including Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca. Camp Bucca, operated by the U.S. military, imprisoned dozens of insurgents who later formed ISIS, including its first so-called caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
While building Nusra Front, al-Julani broke away from ISIS after gaining recognition from Al Qaeda as an independent branch. This schism led to fierce competition and conflict between ISIS and Nusra Front. Soon, ISIS sent fighters into Syria to battle not only the Assad regime but also Nusra Front.
The war became increasingly complex, involving multiple actors and great powers. Turkey, concerned about Kurdish nationalism and security along its southern border, launched attacks on ISIS forces in northern Syria. Meanwhile, a Western coalition, led by the United States, Britain, and France, bombed ISIS positions in eastern Syria. As Assad’s grip on power weakened, Russia expanded its military presence, launching airstrikes against rebel groups. Although Russia claimed to target ISIS fighters, these actions also aimed to weaken all rebel factions and solidify Assad’s role as the head of a Russian client state.
Last week, after years of fighting, al-Julani’s rebel group, Tahrir al-Sham (a successor to Nusra Front), seized control of Aleppo and Homs. They then advanced on Damascus, prompting Assad to flee to Moscow. For Russia, already entrenched in Ukraine’s invasion quagmire, this sudden collapse of the Syrian government echoes America’s “Saigon moment.”
The United States also played a significant role in Syria’s civil war. Dozens of Americans traveled to Syria to fight against Assad’s regime, and some were prosecuted as terrorists upon returning home. The U.S.-led coalition’s airstrikes left large swaths of eastern Syria in rubble, killing scores of civilians as much of the world looked away.
This recent news had me reflecting on a project I worked on for several years: American ISIS, an eight-episode podcast series for Audible about Russell Dennison. Dennison, an American convert to Islam, traveled to Syria to fight — first for Nusra Front and later for ISIS.
For over six months, Dennison secretly communicated with me from Syria, sending hours of voice recordings about his life and the war there. His only condition: I could not release the recordings until he was killed or captured. At the time, I was reporting on the U.S.-led coalition bombing campaigns and their civilian casualties. Dennison became one of my key sources, providing firsthand accounts and photographs from the ground.
In early 2019, Dennison was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Baghuz, in eastern Syria, during ISIS’s final stand as a physical caliphate. This was the last recording I received from him, describing civilians killed in airstrikes as they attempted to flee Baghuz amid the fighting:
I consider American ISIS a historical record: the story of the Syrian Civil War and the rise of ISIS, told through the perspective of an American who was there.
Now a U.S.-designated terrorist, al-Julani appears to be the new leader of Syria. Meanwhile, American forces have launched fresh airstrikes against positions in the country. With incoming President Donald Trump promising an isolationist foreign policy and Russian President Vladimir Putin bogged down in Ukraine, the future of the Syrian Civil War is as uncertain as ever.
If you want to understand this war through the perspective of American who lived it, I encourage you listen to “American ISIS.”