Ask an ordinary Syrian on the street what he thinks of September 11, on its 25th anniversary, and the answer may well be: “The Jews did it.” The claim has an obvious emotional and psychological appeal. Arabs and Muslims are not only innocent of the crime; they were framed for it. Point to al-Qaeda’s own admission of responsibility and the conspiracy expands: “Who is al-Qaeda? It’s Israel’s creation!”
This seeming absence of introspection—or even passing curiosity—about an event whose reverberations reshaped the Middle East is dispiriting. Iraqis and Afghans suffered its consequences directly and tragically. Three thousand people died in the World Trade Center attack. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that 4.5 million people have died directly or indirectly in post-9/11 war zones over the past 25 years—that is the price of US wrath. In Syria, the effects unfolded more slowly. At first, Bashar al-Assad offered to share intelligence with the US. Later, once President Bush invaded Iraq and appeared to threaten Syria with invasion and additional sanctions, his government helped funnel arms and suicide bombers across the border in an effort to mire US forces there.
“Three thousand people died in the World Trade Center attack. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that 4.5 million people have died directly or indirectly in post-9/11 war zones over the past 25 years—that is the price of US wrath.”
The courtship between Syria’s intelligence services and Iraqi insurgent groups in the 2000s helped radicalize a generation of young Syrian Sunnis. Ahmad al-Sharaa was one of thousands of Syrian volunteers encouraged to fight American troops and, as anti-American TV pundits in the Arab world put it, “fail the US project in Iraq.” The policy worked all too well.
What began as a cynical attempt by Assad to gain leverage over the US exposed an entire generation of Syrian Sunnis to Salafi-jihadist ideas and networks. In October 2005, I told The Guardian newspaper: “The Sunni Salafist movement with its jihadist offshoots is a growing force within Syria, especially among the rural young. This movement is not under the influence of traditional Islamist parties like the Muslim Brotherhood. It is a relatively new phenomenon, greatly boosted by the Iraq insurgency… it represents the strongest challenge to the [Assad] regime on the ground.”
Most analysts at the time would have scoffed at that assessment. Assad, after all, seemed firmly entrenched, and his security services kept dissent on a short leash. Meanwhile, under American occupation, Iraq passed into the hands of Shia parties close to Iran—in the long run further strengthening Assad, himself an Iranian ally.
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The two decades that followed September 11 saw a de facto alignment between the US and Shia Iran and its regional proxies, as they shared a common enemy: Sunni militant groups. Paul Bremer, America’s governor in Iraq in 2003–04, said in a 2016 interview: “This overthrow of Saddam was not just an overthrow of Saddam. It was an overthrow of a [Sunni] power structure that had been there for a thousand years.” Because of 9/11, Shia militant groups were no longer seen as the “bad guys” of the region. In the Obama years, they were even seen as a solution. Remember Obama and his Iran’s “equities” announcement? In December 2015, Obama said that he would respect Iranian interests in the Levant including the preservation of the Assad regime.
“September 11 belongs to American history, but it is also a chapter in Syria’s political history.”
The Arab Spring may have supplied the spark for Syria’s uprising, but its idealism alone could not topple Assad. By 2014, the uprisings elsewhere had largely fizzled out, while Assad had succeeded in portraying himself as another victim of Sunni extremism. Syria appeared to be overrun with bearded jihadists who beheaded people.
What changed? In a word, time. During the 25 years since 9/11, Iran had grown fat on the tacit anti-Sunni alignment with the US. It gobbled up Iraq—handed to it on a silver platter by the neocons—then Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. Only when Iran appeared to threaten Israel did things change decisively. Post-October 7, the US and Israel were so keen on checking Iran’s power that a tacit alignment with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former al-Qaeda affiliate, was contemplated. They were not friends, but they had a common enemy: Shia Iran. Such an accommodation would have been unthinkable in 2014. By 2024, it had become palatable.
The former affiliate, for its part, had spent years demonstrating what it presented as an irrevocable break with transnational jihadism. What remained was an avowedly anti-Iranian Sunni Islamist movement with the discipline and military effectiveness to serve as a counterweight to a post-9/11, 20-year Iranian regional order that had overreached.
Syria’s transformation from an Alawite-dominated state aligned with Iran and Russia into a Sunni-dominated one aligned with the US and its regional partners was a remarkable feat of geopolitical engineering. It could not have occurred without the forces unleashed by September 11: the war on terror, America’s invasions, deepening sectarianism, the rise of Islamic State and the upheavals that followed.
“Assad tried to thwart the war on terror first, then used the war on terror slogan to fight jihadists who themselves were the children of the war on terror.”
Ironically, 9/11 allowed Assad to kill thousands of civilians in the name of fighting terrorism and use the same catch-all term to kill, bomb and maim Syrians. Assad tried to thwart the war on terror first, then used the war on terror slogan to fight jihadists who themselves were the children of the war on terror.
Doubly ironic is that 9/11, which was planned by Osama bin Laden to create a crisis between the Sunni world and the US, ended up drawing Sunnis—and former al-Qaeda leaders to boot—closer to the US. That’s certainly what is happening in Syria. Perhaps Sunnis, even the radical ones, have learned a valuable lesson: an open-ended confrontation with the US and the wider West only ends up benefiting the Shia.
September 11 belongs to American history, but it is also a chapter in Syria’s political history. Syrians badly need a more sophisticated understanding of how the events of 25 years ago helped create the country they inhabit today.
Without one, they may struggle to grasp how their present rulers came to power, whose interests made their victory possible and what those facts mean for the future.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Syria Direct
