President Trump might remove Syria from US's list of state sponsors of terrorism

Trump Eyes Syria Terror List Removal: “Guy’s Crushing It, Folks” POTUS said, referring to Syria's POS.

In a move that has foreign policy experts clutching their pearls and reaching for their smelling salts, President Donald J. Trump announced Wednesday that he’s strongly considering yanking Syria off America’s official “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list, because, in his words, the new Syrian leader is “doing a great job.” [And had probably told "The Donald" that he likes him.]

The announcement came during a press gaggle in Turkey as Trump met with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a man whose résumé apparently now reads “Reformed Bad Boy” instead of whatever it said last week when he was the "Be-header in Charge."

“Are you going to remove Syria from the state sponsor of terrorism list?” a brave reporter asked, bravely risking a brave follow-up question.

“I think I will, yeah,” Trump replied with the breezy confidence of a man ordering a well-done steak. “Why wouldn’t I? He’s done a great job. Maybe he would have brought that up in a little while. That’s a good question. Yeah. Any problems that I think we should? Yeah, I will.

”Translation: Syria went from “Axis of Evil Adjacent” to “Model Student” faster than you can say “Art of the Deal.” The country, which until recently was starring in “Failed State: The Sequel,” now gets the Trump stamp of approval.

For context, Syria currently shares the prestigious terrorism sponsor list with such luminaries as Iran, North Korea, and Cuba, the geopolitical equivalent of the island of misfit toys.

Trump seems ready to hand Syria a diploma and a participation trophy just for showing up and not blowing anything up this week. 

At press time, State Department bureaucrats were reportedly seen wandering the halls muttering, “But we have a process,” while Trump was already sketching out potential Trump Tower Damascus on a napkin. Because if there’s one thing the Middle East needs, it’s more winning. And Donald Trump is, as always, happy to oblige.

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Second in Command ISIS Scumcrumpet Got His Goats

President Donald Trump announces the top ISIS terrorist member responsible for killing 13 American troops during the Afghanistan withdrawal is in U.S. custody? Wait, no. Scratch that. The latest update is even better: the savage is dead and has gone to meet his farm animals.

The President announced late Friday that U.S. and Nigerian forces carried out an operation that killed a global ISIS leader and first class scumcrumpet. He identified the terrorist as Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, whom he described as ISIS’s second-in-command globally.

"Tonight, at my direction, brave American forces and the Armed Forces of Nigeria flawlessly executed a meticulously planned and very complex mission to eliminate the most active terrorist in the world from the battlefield," Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

"Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, second in command of ISIS globally, thought he could hide in Africa, but little did he know we had sources who kept us informed on what he was doing," Trump continued. "He will no longer terrorize the people of Africa, or help plan operations to target Americans."

Trump also thanked the Nigerian government for its cooperation in the mission."With his removal, ISIS’s global operation is greatly diminished," he added.

In a Saturday morning X post, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth confirmed U.S. forces, in coordination with the Armed Forces of Nigeria, killed al-Minuki and other ISIS leaders and provided more details about al-Minuki's role within ISIS.

"Abu-Bilal al-Minuki was the senior ISIS General Directorate of Provinces Emir — the number two for ISIS globally — responsible for overseeing the planning of attacks, directing hostage-taking and managing financial operations," Hegseth wrote. "The removal of him and other ISIS personnel makes Americans safer by further degrading ISIS’s ability to plan and carry out attacks that threaten the U.S. homeland, American citizens, and innocent civilians."

"Operations like last night’s demonstrate the exceptional lethality, patience and skill of U.S. forces, amplified alongside willing and capable partners, to address shared threats," Hegseth wrote. "This should serve as a reminder that we will hunt down those who wish to harm Americans or innocent Christians, wherever they are."

U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth leaves a state banquet hosted by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People on May 14, 2026, in Beijing, China. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Hegseth said U.S. Africa Command carried out the "precise operation to remove this terrorist" at Trump's direction and in conjunction with Nigeria's president.

The secretary reiterated how Trump in November "declared to the world that we will help protect Christians in Nigeria and instructed the Department of War to prepare for action.""So, for months, we hunted this top ISIS leader in Nigeria who was killing Christians, and we killed him — and his entire posse," Hegseth wrote.

The announcement comes after U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said it carried out multiple strikes against more than 30 ISIS targets in Syria in February as part of a joint military effort to "sustain relentless military pressure on remnants from the terrorist network."

CENTCOM said U.S. forces struck ISIS infrastructure and weapons-storage targets using fixed-wing, rotary-wing and unmanned aircraft.

The U.S. military carried out ten strikes against more than 30 ISIS targets in Syria following a December ambush that killed U.S. troops. (CENTCOM)

Trump told reporters on Jan. 27 that he had a "great conversation" with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa.

"All of the things having to do with Syria in that area are working out very, very well," he said at the time. "So, we are very happy about it."

CENTCOM announced in February that more than 50 ISIS terrorists had been killed or captured and more than 100 ISIS infrastructure targets struck during two months of targeted operations in Syria.

The U.S. launched Operation Hawkeye Strike in response to an ISIS ambush that killed two U.S. service members and an American interpreter Dec. 13, 2025, in Palmyra, Syria.

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ISIS Remnants Just Ambushed and Killed American Troops in Syria

A year after the Assad regime finally collapsed Syria is still a mess. The new government under President Ahmed al-Sharaa (his ISIS name being Abu Mohammad al-Julani) is trying to get its act together, but pockets of chaos remain, especially where these Islamist holdouts like ISIS are lurking, for some reason. And unfortunately, that instability just claimed American lives.

[Al-Sharaa became President of Syria in January 2025 after a period leading to the rebel offensive that overthrew Bashar al-Assad's regime in December 2024.]

Two U.S. Army soldiers and a civilian interpreter were killed in an ambush in the central Syrian town of Palmyra over the weekend, with three others wounded. The Pentagon confirmed it, and it's a grim reminder that our counter-terrorism mission there isn't over yet, and al Sharaa is a terrorist who cannot be trusted.

"Today in Palmyra, Syria, two United States Army soldiers and one civilian U.S. interpreter were killed, and three were wounded," Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell wrote on X. "The attack occurred as the soldiers were conducting a key leader engagement. Their mission was in support of ongoing counter-ISIS/counter-terrorism operations in the region," he added, noting that "The soldiers’ names, as well as identifying information about their units, are being withheld until 24 hours after the next of kin notification."

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth praised the response and sent a clear message to any jihadist scum thinking about targeting Americans. "The savage who perpetrated this attack was killed by partner forces."

"Let it be known, if you target Americans — anywhere in the world — you will spend the rest of your brief, anxious life knowing the United States will hunt you, find you, and ruthlessly kill you," Hegseth also posted on X.

The attack occurred in an area where Sharaa's government doesn't have full control, and early signs point to ISIS as the culprits, what a shocker--these rats never go away. The Pentagon is investigating, and the wounded were sent via MEDEVAC to the al-Tanf base near the Iraq-Jordan border.

This comes as U.S. forces are drawing down to about 1,500 troops as of mid-year, with plans to drop to a few hundred by year's end. We've closed or handed over some of our eight bases that were keeping tabs on ISIS since we went in back in 2014 to stop their caliphate nonsense.

Meanwhile, "The United States, CIA and military forces are reportedly deeply involved in securing and stabilizing the situation in Syria," as Dan Diker from the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs told Fox News Digital.

And just this week, Syrians were celebrating in Damascus streets marking the one-year anniversary of Assad's ouster—that lightning rebel offensive that ended half a century of his family's brutal rule. It's a new chapter, but as this attack shows, the threats aren't gone. Former U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford has been warning about the challenges ahead for the new government.

Our troops are still out there doing the dirty work to keep ISIS down. This ambush is a gut punch, but Hegseth's warning is spot on: mess with Americans, and you'll regret it—briefly.

Will it? We shall see.

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Syrian President shows his true hatred of Israel

One is almost tempted to feel a pang of sympathy for the new Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa. After all, the man has only just finished overthrowing one of the Middle East's most durable dictatorships, and already he finds himself on the conference circuit, dispensing wisdom to the assembled worthies at the Doha Forum. Yet any such sympathy evaporates the moment the Jew hating scumcrumpet opens his mouth.

Al-Sharaa, formerly known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, was the leader of al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra. In other words, he is a jihadi terrorist commander in the Syrian Civil War, and now wears a suit and meets with world leaders.

"Israel has become a country that is in a fight against ghosts," Sharaa told the Qataris, with all the confidence of a man who has never had to worry about rockets falling on his own cities. 

"Israelis," he continued, use "their security concerns, and they take October 7 and extrapolate it to everything happening around them." One cannot imagine a more tone-deaf formulation. The events of October 7 were not some collective hallucination cooked up in a Tel Aviv focus group; they were the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust and for this thug to call it an hallucination is an obvious lie. To describe Israel's perfectly rational determination never to let it happen again as "fighting ghosts" is the sort of moral inversion that has become the regional specialty of the Jew haters.

But Sharaa was just warming up. 

Israel, he informed his admiring audience, "often brings its crises to other countries and tries to evade taking responsibility for the 'horrifying massacres it committed in Gaza'." This from the leader of a regime whose forces have, in the mere blink of an eye since seizing power, been accused by the United Nations and Syria's own minorities of targeting Druze in Sweida and Alawites in Latakia. 

Naturally, the Syrian president presented himself as a paragon of peaceable intent, much like the scorpion convincing the frog to carry him across the pond. Since toppling Assad, he has sent a "positive message regarding regional peace and stability," and his regime "does not seek conflict, including with Israel." How unfortunate, then, that Israel has repaid this olive branch with "extreme violence," a thousand air strikes, four hundred incursions, and so forth. 

One might ask why, if Damascus is so very peaceful, Israel feels compelled to treat Syrian airspace as its own private highway. Perhaps because the new Syrian authorities have shown no particular eagerness to evict the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Hezbollah remnants, or any of the other charming guests who made Syria such a delightful neighborhood under the previous management.

The Doha Forum, of course, is laughably billed as a "neutral platform." Its Qatari hosts insist it exists to promote dialogue on everything from conflict resolution to economic inequality. This year's theme, "Justice in Action: Beyond Promises to Progress" has a pleasantly earnest ring to it. Yet when the star speakers include a Syrian warlord lecturing the region's sole democracy on "horrifying massacres," a Turkish foreign minister pondering how best to separate Israelis and Palestinians "along the border," and a Qatari prime minister explaining that the current pause in Gaza is not a ceasefire because Israeli forces have not yet withdrawn completely, one begins to suspect that "neutrality" in Doha is rather like "peace" in Damascus: a word with highly elastic meaning.

Qatar's Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani was particularly instructive. "We are at a critical moment," he intoned. "We cannot consider it yet a ceasefire. A ceasefire cannot be completed unless there is a full withdrawal of the Israeli forces, (until) there is stability back in Gaza, people can go in and out, which is not the case today." 

In other words, Hamas may fire rockets and bullets whenever it pleases, but Israel must retreat unconditionally, or the whole thing is invalid. The same Qatar, let it never be forgotten, that has bankrolled Hamas for years, housed its leaders in five-star hotels, and now presides over a conference where Israel is ritually denounced by every speaker who matters.

And yet, in a final touch of surrealism, this same gathering, funded by a state that remains Hamas's principal financial and diplomatic sponsor is playing host to prominent American conservatives, including Tucker [Tuck You] Carlson. For many in Israel and the Jewish world, the spectacle of Western figures lending their presence to an event staged by a regime that has October 7's blood on its checkbook is simply incomprehensible. Senator Ted Cruz's sardonic “#QatarFirst” hashtag rather said it all.

One leaves the Doha Forum with the distinct impression that "justice in action" means something very specific in that part of the world: the continued demonization of the Middle East's only liberal democracy, the rehabilitation of its enemies, and the polite preterence that none of this has anything to do with the pogrom of October 7, 2023. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose – only now with better canapés and a more expensive backdrop.

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The Mask Slips: Ahmed al-Sharaa’s Regime and the Return of Syrian Duplicity

One need hardly be surprised. The same Syrian president who, only weeks ago, was being feted in certain Western quarters as a moderate, tolerant reformer (Ahmed al-Sharaa, once known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani) has now been credibly linked to direct attacks on Israeli soldiers and, even more grimly, to the organized persecution of Syria's ancient Druze minority.

According to a report by Israel’s public broadcaster KAN, citing informed sources, it was none other than "Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa's general intelligence" that orchestrated Thursday night's ambush of an IDF arrest raid in southern Syria, as well as earlier assaults on Druze communities in the country's east. The very same regime operatives who opened fire on Israeli reservists as they withdrew from Beit Jinn, wounding six, are said to be the identical group that has been terrorizing the Druze in Khader.

Let us be clear about what happened. In the early hours of Friday, soldiers of the IDF's 55th Reserve Paratroop Brigade entered the Syrian town of Beit Jinn to detain two brothers affiliated with the terrorist organization Al-Jama'a al-Islamiya. These men had planted roadside bombs and had participated in launching a high-altitude missile toward Israel. The arrests themselves were textbook: the brothers were taken quietly from their beds. It was only as the Israelis withdrew that regime-linked gunmen opened fire, triggering a fierce exchange in which several terrorists were killed and six Israeli reservists wounded (one of them the brigade commander who had raced forward to extract his trapped men). Syrian media, with their customary regard for truth, promptly claimed thirteen "civilians" had been slaughtered.

All of this, we are now told, was directed by the intelligence apparatus of the man who assured the world he had broken with jihadism.

One struggles to recall a more rapid unmasking. Barely had the champagne corks stopped popping in Washington and certain European salons (where al-Sharaa was hailed as the acceptable face of the Syrian opposition) than his regime began doing precisely what the Assad apparatus did for decades: using proxy militias to bleed Israel while simultaneously waging low-intensity genocide against religious minorities inconveniently parked along the new ruler's path to absolute power.

The Druze of southern Syria, who have already endured years of siege and starvation at the hands of Islamist factions, now find themselves targeted by the very government in Damascus itself. Syrian Druze who have spoken to The Jerusalem Post have been unequivocal: Israel's buffer zone, so noisily condemned by Damascus as a "violation of Syrian sovereignty," is the only thing that currently allows humanitarian aid to reach their villages and prevents their complete annihilation.

Yet the al-Sharaa government continues to denounce the zone, even as his own militias fire on the soldiers who keep it functioning. The cynicism is breathtaking.

Meanwhile, reports multiply that Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are quietly rebuilding their infrastructure inside Syria with the new regime's tacit blessing. The old Iranian playbook (use Syrian territory as a forward base against Israel) has evidently been dusted off and handed to the new management.

Western governments that rushed to embrace al-Sharaa as a bulwark against ISIS and a potential partner for peace would do well to study the photographs emerging from Damascus: crowds waving portraits of a man whose intelligence service now shoots Israeli soldiers in the back and drives the Druze toward extinction. Those images tell a simpler and truer story than any number of carefully stage-managed interviews.

The lesson, as ever, is that jihadist movements do not moderate; they merely learn to smile for the cameras while reloading. Israel, having learned that lesson the hard way across decades of betrayal, will continue to do what it must: arrest terrorists in their beds, return fire when ambushed, and maintain the thin buffer that stands between Syria’s minorities and the abyss.The rest of the world is free to keep pretending that the new boss in Damascus is fundamentally different from the old boss he replaced. The Druze, and the wounded paratroopers of the 55th Brigade, know better.

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Trump meets with former ISIS leader now identifies as Syrian president after getting rid of Assad

President Trump and Syrian Islamist President cum ISIS terrorist Ahmed al-Sharaa

President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he would order the lifting of sanctions on Syria at the behest of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, a major U.S. policy shift ahead of an expected meeting with Syria’s Islamist President Ahmed al-Sharaa. He met with the terrorist on Wednesday.

Can I get an 'allahu akbar.'

The U.S. is exploring the possibility of normalizing relations with Syria, Trump said. Hopefully, if this happens, Trump will make it conditional, specifically, recognizing Israel's statehood.

“We are currently exploring normalizing relations with Syria’s new government, as you know, beginning with my meeting with President Ahmed al-Sharaa,” he said at a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council. 

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was also present and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, joined by phone. The readout said both leaders schmoozed Trump’s decision to lift sanctions on Syria, where Sharaa became president/dictator in January after the fall of the longtime chinless dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Trump told the former terrorist leader that he had “a tremendous opportunity to do something historic in his country,” the readout said. He urged Sharaa to sign on to the Abraham Accords, a framework for Arab states to recognize Israeli sovereignty that the U.S. mediated during Trump’s first term.

He also advised Sharaa to tell foreign terrorists to leave Syria, deport Palestinian terrorists, help the U.S. prevent the resurgence of the Islamic State and assume responsibility for Islamic State detention centers in Syria’s northeast.

Sharaa, not to be trusted, affirmed his commitment to Syria’s 1974 disengagement with Israel and invited American companies to invest in Syrian oil and gas, the readout said.

We need to semi-trust Middle East leaders and verify the crap out of them.

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