I registered under an alias to join a workshop organized by the Syrian American Council (SAC), the leading voice of the lobby that aims to starve and destabilize Syria into submission to the West’s demands.

The man leading the workshop, Wa’el Alzayat, a Syrian American veteran of the State Department who recently authored an op-ed entitled, “Don’t lift sanctions on Syria to help earthquake victims.”

During the workshop he helped to lead, Alzayat called for Syria to be broken up into a series of “independent states,” making way for a new de facto Caliphate in the region of Idlib led by a rebranded Al Qaeda offshoot designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the US government.

The dynamic proposed by the anti-Syrian activists was framed innocuously, with the group urging their members to call on elected officials to pursue a “diplomatic track” to a political solution and request that they “work toward formalizing a nationwide ceasefire across Syria.”

But the pretense of progressivism quickly evaporated when Alzayat inadvertently revealed the group’s actual agenda. If they could pressure US policymakers to force a ceasefire in Syria, the lobbyist explained, they’d be one step closer towards their ultimate goal of attempting to “help” the country’s northwestern and northeastern regions “become independent.”

In practice, this would mean converting the terrorist organization which publicly described itself to be the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda until 2016 into a nation-state, and permanently consigning the estimated 4 million Syrians living under their rule to a barbaric salafist-jihadist interpretation of Sharia. 21 years after President Bush famously insisted that “no nation can negotiate with terrorists,” the influential anti-Syrian lobby has apparently decided that not only can we negotiate with the terrorists, but that we should help them establish their own caliphate.