Life for Syrian People is Far Worse Today than Under Assad

Jeremy Kuzmarov, CovertAction Magazine, May 31, 2026 —

Recipient of the Serena Shim Award for uncompromised integrity in journalism, Vanessa Beeley gained an excellent reputation for first-hand reporting during the Syrian War (2011-2024) that challenged dominant media narratives.

In December 2024, Beeley was forced to flee Syria after the overthrow of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, who was replaced by Mohammed al-Jolani, a darling of the Trump administration who has a background in al-Qaeda.

On May 14, Beeley told the Uncontrolled Opposition radio show that “life for the Syrian people today is far worse than under Assad.”

Dominated by Wahhabi mercenaries from all over the world, the country, she said, “is being plunged into the familiar debt enslavement by IMF loans. Mastercard and Visa are back [under Jolani] along with McDonalds, KFC and Burger King but there is less electricity than under Assad—and it was already pretty bad in the last years of the war against Syria—and little employment. Many are being laid off if they are not Wahhabi, particularly the [Shia] Alawites [who supported the Assad government] and Druze. The Druze are now not allowed to go through the Syrian education system, that’s a ruling put out in just the last two days.”

Beeley’s assessment underscores the hypocrisy of U.S. media and pseudo-liberal intellectuals who for years parroted U.S. government propaganda about the supposed evils of the Assad regime but are now completely silent about the plight of the Syrian people under what amounts to a U.S. and Israeli client government.

The plight of Syrians today further underscores the horrific ramifications of the CIA’s Operation Timber Sycamore, a billion-dollar covert operation that helped empower al-Jolani’s al-Qaeda government.^[1]

CovertAction Magazine has previously reported on the attacks on Shia Alawites and Christian churches in Syria and ethnic cleansing being carried out under al-Jolani’s oversight.

Beeley warned that al-Jolani was “settling Wahhabi Takfiri elements in all of Syria, so Syria is going to now become kind of a hotbed of Takfiri^[2] al-Qaeda factions that can then be turned potentially against Lebanon. They are also still being aided by Ukraine on the eastern border of Lebanon and can be sent into Iraq to tackle the Iranian-linked/allied resistance factions there, which include the popular mobilization forces.”

Most people opposing the war on Iran rarely discuss how the U.S. regime-change operation in Syria set the groundwork for the war there, with Syria being used to provide air space for bombing attacks while being counted on to disrupt weapons supplies between Iran and Hezbollah and Palestinian resistance groups.

Beeley stated: “If you go back to the clean break doctrine, it was made very clear by the CIA and Israel that they would take down Iraq, that Baghdad would be the road to Damascus, and for them it was incredibly important to break the back of Syria because Syria was really the main spine of the resistance axis; it was the land bridge from Iran through Iraq into Lebanon and Palestine, but it was also the primary manufacturer of weapons for the Palestinian resistance and also for the Lebanese resistance. So therefore Syria was incredibly important [for U.S. neoconservatives and Zionists] to bring down prior to the war against Iran.”

Beeley went on to note that, “if you go back again to Wesley Clark when he named the seven countries [that the U.S. intended to overthrow after 9/11], Iran was at the end of that list because Iran for them is the most difficult to destroy. Syria held on for fourteen years, actually for seventy-five years because the destabilization of Syria has been ongoing since its independence [from France] in 1946.”

While U.S. policy-makers consider the regime-change operation in Syria to have been a great success, Beeley pointed out that, “even though they consider that they have destroyed the supply routes from Iran through Iraq and Syria into Lebanon, they haven’t, because they imposed an al-Qaeda regime on Syria that is stocked with Wahhabi mercenaries from all over the world. Many of them are not Syrian. So they don’t care. If a delivery is coming through Syria and someone is going to pay them the money to let it go across the border into Lebanon, they’ll let it go. And every now and then al-Jolani, will make a big hoo-hah about oh we stopped a delivery of weapons to Hezbollah, but it’s like once every three months.”

One of the most nefarious Americans operating in Syria today is Tom Barrack, a wealthy private equity real estate investor and Trump fundraiser who was appointed by Trump as a special envoy to Syria and U.S. ambassador to Turkey.^[3]

Beeley said that Barrack had come into Syria and was “stuffing his pockets full of the billions that the Gulf Arab states are prepared to invest to get a foothold in Syria.”

An outspoken advocate of al-Jolani who served as Deputy Undersecretary of the Interior in the early 1980s, Barrack was formerly CEO of Colony Capital, which has been involved in Middle Eastern investments for decades.

With foreign interests again plundering Syria’s economy and the country serving as a base for foreign aggression using proxy forces, Beeley believes that al-Jolani may have “finished his job for the West” and will probably “not be around for much longer” because he is “not able to stabilize the country” and will “never be able to because those that are working underneath him or beside him have interests in other areas and the majority of his military forces are foreign mercenaries.”

When pressed about who the person might be to replace al-Jolani, Beeley said it would likely be a secular Sunni Moslem living in the diaspora, in France or the U.S., Beeley, in turn, noted that the name of Firas Tlaas was being floated.

Tlaas is a wealthy businessman—close at one time to Bashar al-Assad—who defected to rebel forces during the Syrian war. A staunch neo-liberal, he was sentenced to prison in absentia in France for funneling money to armed jihadist rebels.

If Tlaas is indeed the one to replace al-Jolani, it would follow a long historical pattern of the U.S. supporting right-wingers of shady moral character who can be counted on to advance U.S. business interests and geo-political scheming—which in the case of Syria has sowed disaster.

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1. See Jeremy Kuzmarov and Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change, with foreword by Oliver Stone (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2025). ↑

2. Takfiri is a reference to Muslim extremists associated with al-Qaeda. ↑

3. Barrack graduated from USC in 1969 and the University of San Diego School of Law in 1972; his first job out of law school was with the law firm of Herbert Kalmbach, Richard Nixon’s personal lawyer. After that firm sent him to Saudi Arabia, he became a squash partner of a Saudi prince. In 2021, he was indicted for working as an agent of the United Arab Emirates, though was found not guilty. ↑