The US government has trained and supplied the rebels since 2012.
Lmao no. I understand the point was not to actually provide information but to try and make the United States look like the evil empire arming terrorists but I will explain just who the US has been supporting and a rough timeline.
"The Rebels" are not a monolithic entity. "The Rebels" are a literally hundreds of groups over the course of the last 13 years. Some of them were destroyed, some absorbed by other groups, some changed sides, some changed their ideologies entirely. There are several books written about exactly who "The Rebels" are and how they evolved. The "group" the United States started training and supplying in 2012 was the Free Syrian Army, which itself was an umbrella of over a dozen different units that ascribed more or less to a coherent ideology and had a unified command. They were around only for a few years, and sometime during the whole ISIS thing the vast majority of the remaining members of the FSA fled into Syrian Kurdistan and joined up with them. This is when the US switched away from dealing with the Syrian Civil War to dealing exclusively with ISIS, and at this point the vast majority of military assistance was sent to the YPG and Peshmerga, the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, respectively. After ISIS was destroyed, the entity we now refer to as "The Kurds" is this mixture of Kurds, Assyrians, Yazidis, and Arab Democrats from the FSA. After ISIS was destroyed, the United States has almost exclusively been providing support to the Kurds. During the war against ISIS, the Syrian government took the opportunity to engage non-ISIS rebel groups, and eventually everyone that wasn't the Kurds were forced inside the Idlib Enclave, which was an area around the Syrian city of Idlib in northern Syria which was effectively under Turkish protection. The Syrians begrudgingly accepted a ceasefire deal mediated by the Turks where they wouldn't press the issue of Idlib. The Idlib Enclave was mostly under the control of the National Salvation Government, which was an islamist group, and eventually it was taken over by HTS. Now, in the ceasefire period there was also this group called the FSAT, or the Free Syrian Army in Turkey, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the original FSA. It was a group propped up by Turkey and they used the FSA name to garner legitimacy. The Turkish used the ceasefire period to arm and train HTS.
The United States never supported HTS. The United States still considered HTS to be an AQ affiliate and terror group. Two weeks ago, seeing an opportunity in the form of a weakend Russian and Iranian presence due to the Israeli and Ukrainian wars, coupled with an exhausted SAA, HTS went for broke and the Assad regime collapsed.
Now the country is split essentially into three. HTS controls the center and northwest of the country, the Kurds control the mountainous north, and the south is controlled by a group called the "Southern Operations Room," which
is supported by the United States and Israel as a counterbalance to HTS. The SOR rapidly moved in to fill the vacuum left by retreating SAA. Who is the SOR? The SOR is primarily made up of Druze tribesmen and allies of the Druze. Who are the Druze? The Druze are an ethno-religious minority that have long standing beef with Islamic extremism and have a vested interest in not allowing HTS to run roughshod over Syria. They are currently allied with HTS for the purpose of ousting Assad, but have signaled that they do not intend to allow HTS to set up a unitary islamist government over all of Syria.
