Operation Timber Sycamore was perhaps the most expensive covert operation since the Cold War ended. From 2013 to 2017, the CIA spent over $1 billion trying to strengthen "moderate rebels" against both Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and anti-American extremists in the opposition. Separately, the U.S. military spent $500 million on its own Train and Equip program for Syrian militias. And these programs failed, miserably. Al Qaeda and the Islamic State cannibalized the Syrian opposition before Assad took back power through a brutal crackdown.
Now it looks like the Syrian government is falling to exactly the forces that the U.S. wanted to keep out of power. Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, former head of Al Qaeda in Syria, organized a surprise offensive against the Syrian government on November 27. Since then, Jolani's Levant Liberation Committee (known by the Arabic acronym HTS) has taken Aleppo and Hama, two major cities that the Syrian opposition had never fully conquered before. The Syrian army is in disarray. Jolani, a man considered an outlaw by the U.S. government, is accomplishing in a week what the CIA tried and failed to do for years.
