Designated in 1979 as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, Syria continued its political and military support to various terrorist groups.  The regime continued to provide weapons and political support to Hizballah and continued to allow Iran to rearm and finance the terrorist organization.  The Assad regime’s relationship with Hizballah and Iran remained strong in 2022 as the regime continued to rely heavily on external actors to fight opponents and secure areas.  The U.S.-designated Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remains present and active in the country with Assad’s permission.  Assad remained a staunch defender of Iran’s policies, while Iran exhibited equally energetic support for the Syrian regime.  Syrian regime speeches and press releases often included statements supporting terrorist groups, particularly Hizballah, and vice versa.

Over the past two decades, the Assad regime’s permissive attitude toward AQ and other terrorist groups’ FTF facilitation efforts during the Iraq conflict fed the growth of AQ, ISIS, and affiliated terrorist networks inside Syria.  The Syrian regime’s years of awareness and encouragement of terrorists’ transit to Iraq to fight U.S. forces before 2012 is well documented.  The Assad regime released thousands of violent extremists from its prisons in 2011 and 2012, fueling a rise in terrorism within the country, in an attempt to justify its repression of the Syrian people and fracture international support for the opposition.  Those very networks were among the terrorist elements that brutalized the Syrian and Iraqi populations in recent years.  Throughout the Syrian conflict, terrorist groups in Syria have often cited the regime’s egregious human rights abuses and violations to justify their activities and recruit members.  The Assad regime has frequently used CT laws and special CT courts to detain and imprison protesters, human rights defenders, humanitarian workers, and others on the pretext of fighting terrorism.  Additionally, Iran-aligned militia groups from Iraq, some of which are U.S.-designated terrorist organizations, continued to travel to Syria to fight on behalf of Iran and the Assad regime.  Affiliates of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party also operated on Syrian soil and represent Türkiye’s primary counterterrorism concern in Syria.  ISIS cells remained active in parts of Syria and launched attacks on civilians and U.S. partner forces.  In 2019 and 2022, U.S. forces completed operations that resulted in the death of successive ISIS leaders Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi.  ISIS members in Syria continued to plot or inspire external terrorist operations.

As part of a broader strategy used throughout the past decade, the regime continued to portray Syria itself as a victim of terrorism, characterizing all internal armed opposition members as “terrorists.”