Above photo: Greg F. Walker/Boston Globe Staff.
While Removing Syria’s Sharaa.
Critics say the Trump administration is weaponizing counterterror policy for political ends while expanding justification for military force across multiple regions.
The US government is “pursuing an unprecedented expansion” of its list of foreign terrorist organizations by adding left-wing groups in Europe and drug cartels in Latin America, The Washington Post reported on 16 November, just days after removing a former Al-Qaeda leader and hosting him at the White House.
Led by neoconservative Zionist Jews, the US government launched the so-called “War on Terror” following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
After blaming Islamic extremists from Al-Qaeda for the attacks, US lawmakers passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), giving the George W. Bush White House the freedom to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and intervene anywhere in the world under the pretext of fighting terrorism.
The subsequent wars launched by the US killed hundreds of thousands of people.
President Trump is now shifting the types of groups designated as terrorists, days after lifting the terror designation from Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa and his group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), and hosting him at the White House.
Formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani, Sharaa was a member of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), which targeted thousands of civilians with car and suicide bombings. AQI’s successor organization, the Islamic State of Iraq, sent Sharaa to Syria in 2011 to establish a new wing of the group there and topple the government of Bashar al-Assad with the help of the US, Israel, and their allies. The operation was successful in December 2024, leading Sharaa to become Syria’s self-appointed transitional president.
At the same time that US officials were removing Sharaa and HTS from the terror list, they announced they would add four “violent Antifa groups” based in Europe to it: Antifa Ost from Germany; Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front in Italy; and Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense from Greece.
This follows Trump’s September move to label Antifa a “domestic terrorist group,” a designation critics say has no force, noting that US terror lists apply only to foreign organizations and that Antifa, described by the FBI director as an ideology rather than an organization, cannot be designated under existing law.
In January, Trump designated 19 drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, including Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, and El Salvador’s La Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13).
Trump has claimed that the Venezuelan President, Nicholas Maduro, is the head of Tren de Aragua and that he is responsible for trafficking drugs to the US.
The US president has provided no evidence for his claims but has used them as a pretext for a major military buildup in the Caribbean and a possible attack on Venezuela.
Trump has ordered air strikes that have killed at least 80 people in boats in the Caribbean in recent months, arguing that the “United States is in a non-international armed conflict with these designated terrorist organizations” in Latin America.
The UN and rights groups have deemed these attacks illegal, calling them extra-judicial killings with no basis in domestic or international law.
“The 23 entities that the Trump administration has added or plans to add is the most in a single year since the foreign terrorist list was established in 1997, when 28 organizations were designated,” The Post wrote.
The Post observed that targeting groups in Europe linked to antifa, a left-wing anti-fascist and anti-racist group, “was a highly unusual move,” considering they do not directly threaten the US and have not committed terror attacks.
Though the antifa groups added to the terror list are in Europe, the designation “could open US citizens perceived as having links to antifa to criminal investigation,” The Post added.
“These are four organizations that have been around for varying periods of time, but they don’t have one fatality associated with their activity,” said Jason Blazakis, a former official at the State Department’s Counterterrorism Finance and Designations Office.
Blazakis said the FBI could use designations of Antifa-related groups in Europe “as a cover to try to infiltrate perceived antifa cells in the United States.”
In a statement, Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that these groups used “revolutionary anarchist or Marxist ideologies, including anti-Americanism … to incite and justify violent assaults domestically and overseas.”
White anarchist activists from Antifa played a wide role in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests against the police across the US in the summer of 2020 following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Antifa helped turn peaceful protests into violent riots that led to the burning of neighborhoods in some major US cities.
Conservative critics of the group contend it was a tool of Democratic activists and billionaire George Soros seeking to carry out a “color revolution” against Trump and ensure the election of President Joe Biden.
The State Department declined to answer further questions about why it was expanding the foreign terrorist list and how the designated groups were chosen.
