HOW and why the Assad regime collapsed like a house of cards in a mere 11 days, after battling foreign-sponsored rebel groups, including IS and Al Qaeda, for some 13 years with the help of its own foreign friends, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, will remain the subject of debate and analysis, even speculation, in the coming months and years.

Perhaps a little understanding can be gained by the events since the exit of former strongman Bashar al-Assad. He succeeded his father, Hafez al-Assad, the founder of the Baath Party dynasty who came to power after a coup in March 1971, after the latter passed away in 2000.

Just last weekend (on Saturday) Bashar al-Assad was still in Damascus and there was speculation whether he’d be able to defy the odds again and remain in the saddle. A week on, he has been long gone, and is, probably, by the side of his wife Asma, who is being treated for ‘acute blood and bone marrow cancer’ in Moscow.

What was once a unified Syria is now fragmented, with the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which has its roots in Al Qaeda, in control of major cities such as Damascus, Aleppo, Hama and Homs in addition to Idlib, that it has held for the longest time. This group has powerful backers in the US, Israel and most openly Turkiye, whose intelligence chief has already visited the Syrian capital, where he was driven around by HTS leader Al-Jolani.

The West and its key regional allies, Israel and Turkiye, have secured a huge win over the Iran-led ‘Axis of Resistance’.

As Ibrahim Kalin arrived at the historic Umayyad Mosque in Damascus to offer prayers, memories were revived of the expanding Ottoman Empire in the early part of the 16th century. However, this time round, the push will stop in Damascus and not continue to Jerusalem. That is a certainty.

Elsewhere, Turkiye’s claim of the Syrian pie was meeting with stiff resistance by the Kurdish Syrian Defence Forces (SDF) in the oil-rich north-eastern, north-central swathes of the country, where US troops are also present.

This tense stand-off did not dissuade Turkiye’s Energy and Natural Resources Minister Alparslan Bayraktar from saying that a gas pipeline project from Qatar to Turkiye via Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria could be revived now, that its main opponent in Syria has been ousted. He said if “Syria achieves its (territorial) integrity and stability, many other projects could be started too”.

On the other hand, the ‘liberators’ of Syria seemed content with having rid their country of the Assad regime and were celebrating their victory while Israel was rapidly moving to take over more (the remaining one-third) of the Golan Heights it captured in 1967 and illegally annexed in 1981.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted for genocide by the ICC, arrived at the Golan Heights the same day and claimed credit for the fall of Assad, which he attributed to his forces’ attacks on Hezbollah and Iran and not the militants who marched into Damascus.

This advance saw Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) overrunning the UN-supervised buffer zone and capturing the strategically important Mount Hermon which, at nearly 2,900 metres, towers over Damascus to its northeast and Lebanon in its north. Israeli troops have also taken over the Quneitra crossing further south.

Apart from its land grab, Israel’s air force has carried out some 450 bombing runs over Syria and claims to have destroyed the entire Syrian air force, navy, missile forces, chemical weapons, and defence production facilities. Syria’s electronic warfare capacity has also been denuded. The bodies of two murdered scientists working in the defence establishments have also been found.

This forced one commentator to remark: they have only left small arms, such as assault rifles and machineguns, that the disparate militant groups will use when they fight each other in a civil war. They have nothing left to threaten Israel with.

In other developments, some members of the pro-Israel Druze community straddling Israel, Syria and Lebanon have called upon Israel to create a (buffer zone) homeland for them in the Golan Heights so Israel’s security concerns are addressed adequately. The leader of the Israeli Druze community, which provides a large number of officers and soldiers to the IOF, also visited Abu Dhabi. It is not clear what was discussed.

What is clear is that the West and its key regional allies, Israel and Turkiye, have secured a huge win over the so-called Iran-led Axis of Resistance, which has been dismantled in Syria and weakened in Lebanon, with Israeli newspaper Haaretz reporting that Israel is to set up a military base in Somaliland, which is recognised by Israel, the UAE and two other countries, so that the Yemeni Houthis can be smashed.

For now, Iran can only issue bold and brave statements against the Zionist regime and its backers, as its options are severely curtailed. With Syria carved up to support the US-Zionist game plan in the region, and with plans to try and crush the Houthis from a base in the Horn of Africa looking more medium- to long-term, it is Iran which seems the next likely target of the West and Israel.

Much will depend on the incoming US president Donald Trump who, in the past, has had good relations with Russia and President Vladimir Putin, but has extended an invitation to the Chinese leader Xi Jinping to his inauguration in what some Washington commentators are ascribing to a US attempt to get China on board to isolate Russia. I doubt China will bite the bait.

With so much focus on these developments, Israel’s business as usual genocide in Gaza continues apace, with the pro-Zionist genocide Western powers and several OIC members happily playing their unconscionable part in this tragic, live-on-social media mass murder.

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
abbas.nasir@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, December 15th, 2024