Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

With Assad out, this is what we must do to help save Syria

Man stepping on ripped poster

A man treads on a picture of Syria's ousted president, Bashar al-Assad, as people enter his residence in Damascus on Dec. 8.

Omar Haj Kadour/AFP via Getty Images

This was a long day coming, and frankly one I never thought I’d see.

Thirteen years ago, Syria’s Bashar Assad unleashed a reign of unmitigated terror on his own people, in response to protests of his inhumane Ba’athist government.


Over the course of the civil war, he unabashedly committed the worst atrocities imaginable — barrel bombing schools and hospitals, torturing  children and the elderly, releasing sarin gas on toddlers and infants. His war on his own people is estimated to have killed 500,000 Syrians, 50,000 of them children. Upwards of 35,000 have been “disappeared” or imprisoned. Millions more have been displaced.

For 13 years, a small cohort of journalists, war reporters, aid groups, and lawmakers tried everything we could to not let these atrocities go unnoticed or forgotten. But it often felt like screaming into a void of indifference.

That indifference is the world’s burden to share, and will always be a tragedy on top of a tragedy — inexplicable, indefensible, unforgivable.

But now that Assad the Butcher is finally gone, we owe it to the Syrian people to correct our moral failures.

The unexpected fall of Assad has brought Syrians hope for the first time in more than 50 years, but it also opens the door to some potentially dangerous unknowns that must be addressed by world leaders. There are two immediate concerns: Assad’s chemical weapons and the state’s Captagon production.

Assad used chemical weapons, including sarin and chlorine barrel bombs, against his own people on multiple occasions. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has spent more than 10 years trying to determine exactly which ones the regime still possesses, with no luck. Now is the time to find them and hold Assad accountable for their use, and more importantly, dispose of them properly so they don’t end up in the hands of terrorist factions circling Syria.

Similarly, Captagon is a dangerous synthetic stimulant that’s been mass-produced and trafficked in Syria by the Assad regime since the war began and Syria’s economy imploded. The drug brought in billions for Assad. But Syria cannot rebuild as a narco-state, and containing Captagon is a national security and public safety must.

Then, Syria will need, well, everything — the rebuilding of schools, roads, and hospitals; a functioning government; the means by which to welcome back millions of refugees; protection from vulture groups looking to exploit the new vacuum.

We not only have a role to play in all of this; it’s in our own economic and national security interests to ensure Syria’s rebirth as a democratic partner in the region. And we have the leverage to do it.

In April 2011, the U.S. issued its first sanctions against Syria and many more followed. Eventually, the U.S. would prohibit any new investment in Syria, embargo its oil, impose travel bans, freeze the assets of a number of Syrian entities and persons, and prohibit the export of any U.S. goods and services. The European Union, Australia, the Arab League, Turkey, as well as multiple non-EU countries would follow suit, plunging Syria into economic darkness.

Along with our allies, we should engage in talks to lift these sanctions, and in fact pour resources back into Syria under a checklist of conditions. Syria must draft a new constitution. It must conduct democratic elections. It must release all prisoners of war. It must allow refugees to return home. It must allow outside agents to dispose of its chemical weapons and Captagon.

There is so much more that a new Syria will have to do to regain its stability and economic footholds, to rebuild its infrastructure, to heal its people. It has a long road ahead, after suffering down a long road of Assad’s terror.

We don’t need to send troops, nor do we need to envision our role as nation builders. This isn’t a heavy lift for the U.S., nor will it put incoming President Trump in a politically compromising or “interventionist” position. We have a golden opportunity to help give the Syrian people what they’ve long been demanding and deserve — a free and fair democracy. That’s good for Syria, and good for America and our allies.

We can’t go back and intervene when perhaps we should have. We can’t bring half a million innocent people back to life. We can’t undo the torture and horrors Bashar Assad brazenly unleashed on his people for years. And we can’t wash the stain of indifference off of our hands.

But we can help Syria rebuild. And after years of inaction and apathy, it’s quite simply the least we can do.

Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.

©2024 S.E. Cupp. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Read More

Supreme Court greenlights Project 2025 Plan to Dismantle  Education Department

In the summer of 2025, the Trump administration’s education agenda is beginning to mirror the blueprint laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

Getty Images, Maskot

Supreme Court greenlights Project 2025 Plan to Dismantle  Education Department

This past spring and summer, The Fulcrum published a 30-part, nonpartisan series examining Project 2025—a sweeping policy blueprint for a potential second Trump administration. Our analysis explored the proposed reforms and their far-reaching implications across government. Now, as the 2025 administration begins to take shape, it’s time to move from speculation to reality.

In this follow-up, we turn our focus to one of the most consequential—and quietly unfolding—chapters of that blueprint: the dismantling of public education.

Keep ReadingShow less
Community-Driven Support Helps Refugees Thrive

Illustration of silhouette refugees walking in line over American flag

Getty Images I stock illustration

Community-Driven Support Helps Refugees Thrive

Ali’s name has been changed to protect his identity and ensure the safety of his family, who remain in Afghanistan. The name of the Colorado nonprofit featured in this story has also been withheld out of concern for the potential danger to the refugee clients it serves.

Ali knew it was time to flee on August 15, 2021. The day the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, he and his family became a vulnerable minority overnight. Fearing for their safety, they fled – first to Iran, then Qatar, then Japan – before ultimately resettling in Colorado in 2023.

Keep ReadingShow less
Rock Stars of American Science May Soon Take Their Expertise Abroad. That Should Alarm All Americans.
person in blue shirt writing on white paper
Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash

Rock Stars of American Science May Soon Take Their Expertise Abroad. That Should Alarm All Americans.

Recently, I attended a West Coast conference on the latest research findings in cosmology and found myself sitting in a faculty dining hall with colleagues from around the country. If it had taken place a few months earlier, our conversation would have been filled with debates on the morning’s presentations, but now everything had changed. Against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s attacks on universities and research funding, the question we struggled with was: “When is it time to leave the U.S. and establish our research programs elsewhere?”

One colleague planned to enroll their children in an international school to learn French in case the family had to leave the country in the next few years. Another, whose home institution has been under particularly fierce attacks by the government, said they would stay and fight to support their students, but only so long as their family remained safe. At the same meeting, I heard from a Canadian researcher whose institution was compiling a list of American scientists now considered vulnerable.

Keep ReadingShow less
As Puerto Rico’s Power Grid Crumbles, Rural Medical Patients Are Turning to Rooftop Solar

Plaza de la Independencia Energetica, operated by Casa Pueblo in Adjuntas, Puerto Rico. The plaza’s solar panels provide power and shelter for Adjuntas residents to use during natural disasters.


Photo Provided

As Puerto Rico’s Power Grid Crumbles, Rural Medical Patients Are Turning to Rooftop Solar

In this two-part series, Lily Carey reports on energy instability in rural Puerto Rico and its impact on residents with chronic medical conditions. Faced with limited government support, community members have begun building their own power structures from the ground up, ranging from solar microgrids to community health clinics.

In the second and final part of the series, Carey reports on how local activists are providing for sick and elderly residents in Puerto Rico’s Cordillera Central.

Keep ReadingShow less