Syria and the implications of the fall of Assad
By Simon Korner
Part 1 – BACKGROUND TO REGIME CHANGE AND SYRIAN RESISTANCE
From 2011-2024, Syria – supported by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah – withstood a sustained regime-change war orchestrated by the CIA that killed over 600,000 people and displaced half the country’s population of 23 million. The world’s most warlike powers sought to bring down by force the last secular Arab nationalist state, which was a stone in the shoe of the USA and its enforcer Israel, denying them complete geo-political control over the region with its oil and vital trade routes.
Since its inception as a state in 1946, Syria promoted pan-Arab unity. It fought against Israel in 1948, 1967, and 1973, hosted Palestinian training camps and Palestinian resistance group headquarters since the 1960s, and supported Hezbollah from its foundation in Lebanon in 1982. As a key element in Iran’s Axis of Resistance, Assad’s Syria provided a vital land bridge through which Iran could send arms to Hezbollah. In 2011, the then Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak declared: “The toppling of Assad will be a major blow to the radical axis, a major blow to Iran… it will weaken dramatically both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza.” (1)
LEAD UP TO REGIME CHANGE
Syria became a target of western interference early in the Cold War, when the US, attempting to break Syria’s growing ties with the USSR and weaken the powerful Syrian Communists, staged the first of several coups in 1949. This was only three years after Syria had gained independence from French control. (2)
The secular Arab nationalist cause was aided by the rise of the Ba’ath party to power in Syria in 1963. However consecutive military defeats at the hands of Israel, leading to the Camp David normalisation between Egypt and Israel in 1979, reversed the progress. The defeat of Soviet socialism two decades later set it back further. Following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Bashar al-Assad gave short-lived co-operation to the US War on Terror, including ‘extraordinary rendition’, and was awarded the French Legion of Honour that year, which he later returned. Western semi-acceptance didn’t, however, prevent Syria from remaining targeted for US regime change – one of seven countries, as General Wesley Clark revealed in 2007: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. (3)
In 2011, the CIA took advantage of the Arab Spring and discontent over Syria’s partial economic liberalisation to fan the flames of protests into full-blown war. Its secret Jordan-based Operation Timber Sycamore was a major training programme for Syrian insurgents, including Al Qaeda, as Jake Sullivan admitted in an email in 2012 to Hillary Clinton, clarifying that: “AQ [Al Qaeda] is on our side in Syria”. Timber Sycamore was “one of the costliest covert action programs” in the CIA’s history at over $1 billion. (4) It bore fruit finally in the fall of Assad on 8 December, 2024.
Throughout these years, Britain’s MI6 played a key role alongside the CIA, using its base in Cyprus to pass intelligence to the CIA-backed rebels, branded as the Free Syrian Army. SAS troops based in Jordan were also entering Syria on missions, according to Declassified. (5) At the same time, the MoD under Lt. Colonel Kevin Stratford-Wright was running the largest British StratCom (Strategic Command) operation since the Cold War, an operation which included the establishment of the White Helmets led by James Le Mesurier, an alleged MI6 asset. These purportedly humanitarian rescue workers, much lauded in the western press, were in fact jihadi fighters central to spinning the false-flag chemical weapons narrative that formed a pretext for increased western interference.
THE FIGHTING: 2011-2015
According to a US Defense Intelligence Agency document leaked in 2012, the US regime-change plan had early on envisaged dividing Syria up along sectarian lines to include a Kurdish statelet in the north-east and a Salafist principality on the Iraqi border. The first stage of this balkanisation process took place in 2011 when Turkey took control of the northern province of Idlib along the border, using several jihadi militias as proxy forces. One of these groups, Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), which had links to Al Qaeda, eventually defeated its rival militias and took over the province, ruling it brutally.
Meanwhile, in 2014, the US had sent troops from its Iraqi bases into north-eastern Syria, ostensibly to target ISIS. This gave it control over a huge triangle of territory, which contains the two main pillars of the Syrian economy, agriculture and oil. The 1,000 US troops (recently the number has been revised up to 2,000) relied on Kurdish PKK and YPG fighters in what came to be called the Syrian Defence Force (SDF) as their combat soldiers. This effective occupation gave the US enormous leverage over Syria, and continues today. In addition, the US occupied an enclave on the southern desert border with Jordan and Iraq around a large US military base at Al Tanf where ISIS fighters and families were given protection.
It is worth remembering also that since 1973 Israel had occupied the strategically important Golan Heights in Syria’s south-west. All in all, Syrian territorial integrity was severely impaired.
Syria fought alone against the western-proxy jihadis before requesting infantry reinforcements from Iranian-backed militias and Hezbollah and, crucially, Russian airpower, which began bombing the insurgents in 2015. With the aid of its allies, Syria managed to prevent the country’s total dissolution and a fragile ceasefire was agreed in February 2016, though fierce fighting continued in Aleppo until government forces liberated the city at the end of that year.
PRECARIOUS PEACE
When the main fighting subsided, President Assad controlled scarcely two-thirds of Syria, though that was up from only a fifth at the lowest ebb of the government’s fortunes in 2015. He presided over a war-ravaged country that needed an estimated $400 billion to rebuild its economy. The ensuing US economic siege tightened the noose, reducing the Syrian economy by 85%, from a GDP of $60 billion in 2011 to $10 billion in 2024, pushing 70% of the population below the poverty line. Post-conflict reconstruction was deliberately prevented. Dana Stroul, the top Pentagon official for the Middle East said in 2019 that the US should “hold the line on preventing reconstruction aid and technical expertise from going back into Syria.” (6)
Before the war, Syrians had enjoyed “one of the best-developed health systems in the Arab world” according to a 2015 World Health Organization report, providing universal free healthcare. Education was likewise free, with an estimated 97% of primary school-aged Syrian children attending school and literacy rates of over 90% for both men and women. Syria was also self-sufficient in food. Daily caloric intake “was on a par with many Western countries,” with prices kept low via state subsidy. (7) Subsidised electricity reached most Syrian villages by 1990. War and US sanctions destroyed all these achievements. (8)
In the face of this campaign of immiseration and division, most Syrians nevertheless understood that Assad and the Syrian Arab Army represented the only hope of preserving a unified pluralistic state in which minorities were protected. Syria has long been home to many different religious and ethnic groups, including Shiites, Alawites, Christians, Druze, Kurds as well as the majority Sunnis. In 2014, Assad won a landslide election victory on a very high turnout. People wanted peace and stability above all, and supported the president and the army for these reasons, even if there was discontent over corruption and a desire for democratic constitutional reform.
As part of peace terms agreed after the liberation of Aleppo and consolidation of government rule, Assad gave the various groups of jihadi terrorists in southern Syria a choice of integrating into the Syrian army or being bussed to the Turkish-controlled northern Syrian province of Idlib near the border, designated a ‘safe zone’. The concentration of terrorists in this province by 2018 solved an immediate problem of what to do with demobilised rebels, but stored another one up in the future, representing the limit of what could be achieved at the time. It was from Idlib that Hayat Tahrir al Sham would launch its successful military coup against the Syrian government.
The intervening years of neither war nor peace allowed the jihadis under Turkish auspices to be reorganised and reinforced by thousands of foreign jihadi fighters, including Uyghurs from Xinjiang. Some 30% of HTS fighters are non-Syrians, according to Jolani, the leader of the group which emerged out of the Al-Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda, to lead the jihadi forces.
During the same period, Syria was unable to rebuild its strength. The devastation caused by the war, the massive refugee drain and the crippling American ‘Caesar’ sanctions completely disabled its economy. Its major commercial and industrial cities Aleppo and Homs were in ruins and its foreign currency earnings from oil exports were appropriated by America. Moreover, Israel continued its campaign of softening up Syria through sustained targeted bombing of military and civilian targets.
The stalemate meant that the country remained fragmented and could not recover. It was thus a severely weakened Syria that succumbed to the lightning assault by jihadi forces lavishly funded by Qatar, directed by Turkey and aided by high performance drones operated by Ukrainian advisers. It finally fell in December last year.
THE SPEED OF THE FALL
The war and US sanctions had fatally weakened the Syrian military, which by 2020 only had 130,000 soldiers remaining, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies thinktank Military Balance, citing desertions and other “wastage”. Though some brigades remained strong and intact, parts of the army had been irregularly structured into weaker militia-style organisations. Bribery was reportedly a problem, understandable given the severe economic hardships suffered by the largely conscript troops: Syrian officers earned $40 a month, compared to HTS fighters earning up to $2000 a month. (9) Several poorly paid generals may also have been turned, as diplomatic contact with between Syria and the Gulf states increased. Some generals gave orders, apparently without government approval, to abandon Homs without a fight - the last city before Damascus.
As for Russia, criticised by several observers for not saving Syria a second time, it had no choice but to avoid being dragged into a chaotic quagmire, according to US realist John Mearsheimer. Russia avoided the trap laid out in the US Rand Corporation’s 2019 strategy document Extending Russia, Competing from Advantageous Ground, which advocated sparking wars in Syria, the Caucasus and Belarus to deliberately over-extend Russia’s military. (10)
Though Putin put on a brave face in an interview after Assad’s fall, Russia could not afford a second front against Turkey and Israel – effectively US surrogates – and had avoided such a war for the past 10 years through careful diplomacy. While its regional standing may have been damaged, and the future of its two Syrian bases rendered uncertain, Russia made an orderly retreat to avoid fighting a second, potentially existential, conflict. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that Russia made real sacrifices to support Syrian unity. Its humanitarian teams suffered attacks in Aleppo in 2016, for example and it bombed ISIS positions in the US-created exclusion zone around the illegal base at Al Tanf. (11)
Iran likewise lacked the capacity to send new troops to defend Damascus a second time. It too had sacrificed much for Syria, having spent $30–50 billion and lost many of its Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) during the war, for instance at the battle of Khan Touman in 2016 as well as two senior IRGC commanders killed by Israeli airstrikes in 2024. (12) This, on top of the damage done to Hezbollah’s leadership in Lebanon, had substantially diminished Iran’s capability. Moreover, many of Iran’s commanders in Syria had had to return to Iran following Israel’s airstrikes in 2024. The US assassination of General Suleimani in January 2020 had clearly been a very heavy blow to the unified resistance in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq. Hezbollah similarly had had to move most of its fighters in Syria back to south Lebanon to fight off Israel’s invasion.
While Iranian Fars News Agency claimed Assad had refused advice to make concessions to Turkey and ignored warnings from Ayatollah Khamenei of an impending HTS blitzkrieg, these claims have not been substantiated. Assad’s newly re-established ties with the Gulf states may have weakened close co-operation with Iran, but his position was an impossible one. The overall balance of forces by December 2024 clearly favoured the pro-imperialists, who seized their chance the moment a weakened Hezbollah agreed a ceasefire with Israel.
Thus, Netanyahu was partly right in describing Assad’s fall as “a direct result of the blows we have inflicted on Iran and Hezbollah, Assad’s main supporters”, including “perhaps a thousand airstrikes” in Syria before October 7th.
But his description ignored the broader reasons for Assad’s defeat: that the US’s war, plunder and sanctions had fatally damaged Syria; that Iran was dealing with the grave threat of war from Israel; and that Russia had a dangerous major war on its own doorstep. Meaning that neither Russia nor Iran was in a position to do for Syria what they had done in 2016 – a reminder that Russia is not a superpower like the USSR, and that the world’s anti-hegemonic forces cannot risk avoidable escalation with the West.
On the other side, by 2024 HTS could muster a well-trained and highly-paid army of 30,000 troops. Assad was also criticised by some for not finishing off the jihadi rebels in their Idlib redoubt before they could effectively regroup. But when the Syrian airforce did try to retake Idlib in 2020, Turkey inflicted significant casualties in response, including the destruction of huge amounts of Syria’s armaments, demonstrating Turkish and American preparedness to go to war to protect their terrorist enclave.
A consistent defender of Syrian national sovereignty, Assad stayed put throughout the entire western-backed conflict and waited until the very last minute to leave Damascus, even as the airport was partially encircled by jihadi troops. He only narrowly escaped the grisly fate of Libya’s Gaddafi.
Part 2 - CURRENT SITUATION IN SYRIA AND IMPLICATIONS FOR THE REGION
The jihadi terrorist leader of HTS, Jolani, now known as al-Sharaa, declared himself President of Syria on 29 January 2025 and immediately postponed elections for four years, annulling Syria’s 2012 constitution. Having dissolved parliament, the military and security agencies, and banned several patriotic parties, including the Syrian Communist Party, he is ruling as a dictator, controlled by foreign powers. The US has removed the $10 million bounty on Jolani’s head.
Many of the foreign HTS fighters, like Jolani originally members of ISIS or Al Qaeda, have been rewarded with top positions in the new Syrian army. Out of five Brigadier Generals, three are non-Syrian Al Qaeda fighters, one of whom is infamous for beheadings. Of the new Cabinet, all but Jolani have dual Turkish nationality.
Meanwhile, propagandist western media reports of thousands of underground prison cells, prisoners “gasping for air” and women being released from Sednaya prison have been debunked and retracted in the weeks following Assad’s overthrow. (13)
PERSECUTION
Under the new order, minorities who until recently co-existed as equal Syrian citizens now fear for their lives, with good reason as reports come out daily of sectarian murders, torture and mutilation. Greek Orthodox Archbishop Paul Hazigi and Syriac Orthodox Archbishop Yohanna Ibraham have been abducted, their fate, shared with many other Christians, unknown. The new educational curriculum brands Christians as heretics, and eating during the daylight hours of Ramadan, even for non-Muslims, has been prohibited. Some Christians have fled to the mountains. An ancient community of 1.5 million now stands at under 300,000.
Meanwhile, the three to four million Alawites, a minority Shiite group associated with Assad, have suffered sectarian massacres by regime forces ever since the toppling of the government in December. In early March this year, a four-day genocidal rampage of sectarian violence, reminiscent of Sabra and Shatila in 1982, left at least 1,500 Alawite civilians dead (according to western sources), with some estimates numbering the deaths in the thousands.
The Kurds, who make up 10% of Syria’s population, have also come under renewed attack from Turkey’s second proxy force, the anti-Kurdish Syrian National Army and 100,000 Kurds have recently fled their homes in Syria’s north-east and east.
Altogether, Syria has very rapidly disintegrated into divided ethnic and religious groupings. One Syrian quoted by veteran reporter Vanessa Beeley said: “I no longer love this country that used to unite us as Syrians of all sects. Now we have all become enemies…We have begun to distinguish between people, such as this one is an Alawite, this one is a Sunni, this one is a Druze…” Now Assad’s government has fallen we can see its importance in preserving Syrian unity, its authoritarian rule a defensive response to decades of imperialist encirclement.
Women are now segregated on buses and endure strict dress codes, according to The Conversation. (14) The body of a well-known Alawite female academic was recently found murdered with her fingers amputated. Rape and consequent sexually transmitted diseases are rife, particularly in Idlib after years of HTS rule there.
Palestinian organisations in Syria have been forced to shut down and their military formations have been disbanded. Two high-ranking members of the Al-Quds Brigade have been accused of crimes against the Syrian people and other activists have been arrested. The key supply route from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon has been cut.
Meanwhile, the new regime has wasted no time in privatizing important state assets; over a hundred of Syria’s state-owned industrial concerns and ports are being sold off. Up to half of the one million public sector workers are being made redundant, and protests have begun over fears of a sectarian jobs purge. The HTS government has opened Syria up to western corporate domination; its former strict import and export controls are gone and the IMF has been welcomed in. This is an economy without monetary sovereignty. Free health care and universal education are things of the past. The end of Assad has seen an immediate 40% drop in purchasing power in an already devastated economy with 75% of the population now dependant on humanitarian aid. (15)
ISRAEL-TURKEY RIVALRY
Israel has been a clear beneficiary of Assad’s fall, which it helped bring about through its air support for HTS’s southward advance. As Damascus fell, Israel completely destroyed Syria’s land, sea and air forces in a massive four-day bombing campaign. It also killed Syria’s leading scientists in a series of targeted assassinations. At the same time, it rapidly sent reinforcements into the occupied Golan Heights and invaded the UN buffer zone with Syria (set up in 1974), with no objection from HTS. It occupied Mount Hermon, Syria's highest mountain, giving Israel strategic control over southern Lebanon and Syria, including Damascus, and has declared that it will stay there “indefinitely”. In addition, Israel’s capture of two important dams gives it control of 40% of the vital water resources shared by Syria and Jordan. Israel has since expanded into south-western Syria and prohibited HTS troops from venturing south of Damascus. It plans to annex a large strip of territory known as David’s Corridor connecting Israel directly to Iraq and the Kurdish statelet in the north-east, which it seeks to control.
However, this Greater Israel strategy faces a potential challenge from Turkey, whose neo-Ottoman ambitions have been encouraged by Assad’s overthrow. Turkey’s northern proxy, the Syrian National Army, has also moved quickly against the Kurdish Syrian Defence Force. This army has for a decade been providing the US occupation’s boots on the ground and safeguarding stolen US oil assets, and also looks to Israel for support. The SNA’s rapid territorial gains at the SDF’s expense have for now thwarted the Israel-to-Iraq land grab. Moreover, Trump’s purported plan to pull US troops out of Syria has left the Kurds especially vulnerable, forcing the SDF to accept a ‘breakthrough’ deal with the HTS government in which they agree not to secede and to dissolve their armed forces into the Syrian national military – though this remains highly uncertain. In terms of the Israeli-Turkish rivalry, this deal agreed in early March appears to disrupt Israel’s plans to use its ‘protection’ of the Kurds as a pretext for expanding into their territory, giving Turkey an advantage.
In addition, Turkey has not been slow to claim an economic exclusion zone off the coast of Syria, infuriating fellow NATO members Greece and Cyprus, and is also backing HTS sectarian incursions into northern Lebanon.
While Syria’s military was destroyed by Israel, a replacement is now under formation by Turkey. At two new Turkish military bases in Syria, in which fifty Turkish F-16s have been deployed under a joint defence agreement, Turkey is training Syria’s new armed forces. It is also placing its drones, radar and electronic warfare systems along the Syrian border with Israel.
All this sets the scene for an intensified rivalry between Israel and Turkey as they carve out their respective spheres. Already the rhetoric is heating up. Erdogan called Israel’s destruction of Syria’s military a “national security threat”. Turkish Nationalist Movement Party leader Bahçeli said Israeli expansion means “the confrontation between Turkey and Israel will be inevitable.” Israel, for its part, countered: “The last country that can speak about occupation in Syria is Turkey…” Not that this means imminent conflict. The two regional players have co-operated throughout the regime-change war, and Turkey continues to supply Israel with energy – notwithstanding Erdogan’s anti-Israel rhetoric, which is designed for domestic consumption. But the contradictions between these two ambitious regional players are likely to sharpen.
REACTION FROM OTHER COUNTRIES
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Jordan fear the rapid expansion of both Turkish and Israeli power and are also worried by the resurgence of extreme Islamism in Syria, which has brought HTS to power and could upset their fragile equilibrium at home.
In Iraq, the Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs), which historically supported Assad and the Palestinian resistance, now face a potentially hostile neighbour in Syria and are under pressure from the US to dissolve.
As for Iran, badly damaged by the loss of its Syrian ally, it has made pragmatic contact with the new HTS regime and says it won’t cut relations with such a big regional power. Iran still exerts considerable regional influence outside Syria, both through Ansarallah in Yemen and the Iraqi PMUs, while its normalization with the Saudis and other Arab countries has reduced its isolation, as has its strategic co-operation treaty with Russia signed this January.
Russia has held substantive discussions with Syria’s new leaders, who claim they want good relations. Meanwhile, the fate of the Russian bases in Syria at Tartus (navy) and Khmeimim (airforce) remains uncertain. Russia has pre-empted the potential loss of its bases by moving air-defence systems to eastern Libya, where it is seeking docking rights in Tobruk and Benghazi to enable it to continue supplying the Sahel countries struggling against French and US neo-colonial rule.
China for its part has concerns about the involvement of Uyghur terrorists in HTS, fearing their victory could encourage renewed secessionist violence in Xinjiang. In addition, its 2022 Belt and Road agreement with Syria is uncertain, though this doesn’t preclude China’s ongoing economic relations with the new government.
OUTLOOK GRIM
The potential for a united and peaceful Syria has been destroyed. Its coup government, dominated by Turkey, Israel and the US, is incapable of asserting national cohesion. Syria will be lucky to avoid the fate of Libya and Iraq. Its division into a Turkish Sunni centre, an Israeli south ‘protecting’ the Druze, and a self-governing Kurdish northeast is likely, while France may offer ‘protection’ to the Druze and Alawites as a way of regaining a physical presence in coastal Syria.
The Palestinian and wider anti-western cause has suffered a major defeat, but the continued resilience shown by Palestinian guerilla forces suggests that the fall of Assad may not, in the longer term, be as disastrous a strategic defeat as the Six Day War in 1967, which saw a triumphant Israel establish hegemony over the whole Middle East. For example, Hamas has shown that its organisation remains intact by staging military parades during the hostage handovers, while Hezbollah’s leader Naim Qassem declared: “Yes, Hezbollah has lost the military supply route through Syria at this stage, but this loss is a detail in the resistance's work.” Hezbollah will adapt to the loss of its Syrian supply line by increasing local manufacture – particularly drones that can be made using civilian technologies – and by increasing use of smuggling routes. The fact that a quarter of Lebanon’s population turned out for assassinated Hezbollah leader Nasrallah’s funeral in late February demonstrated the enduring ideological power of the resistance.
While the terrible suffering of the Palestinian people will continue, anti-Zionist sentiment has risen in the region due to the Gaza genocide, and Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan has come up against serious objections from Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia; the long-sought normalisation between Israel and the Saudis has yet to be secured.
The outlook for the Syrian people is grim. Secessionist conflicts are likely to worsen as the country is effectively partitioned. Meanwhile, a report from the UN Development Programme warns that in such circumstances economic recovery cannot expected before 2080.
(1) https://x.com/aaronjmate/status/1864017640857199024
(2) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/19436149.2023.2199487?needAccess=true
(3) https://www.democracynow.org/2007/3/2/gen_wesley_clark_weighs_presidential_bi
(5) https://www.declassifieduk.org/when-britain-aided-al-qaeda-in-syria/
(6) https://x.com/afshinrattansi/status/1863641871802658889
(10) https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3063.htm/
(11) https://beeley.substack.com/p/why-doesnt-russia-do-more-when-israel
(12) https://carnegieendowment.org/middle-east/diwan/2024/12/why-did-iran-allow-assads-downfall?lang=en
(13) https://thecradle.co/articles-id/28208
(15) https://www.arabnews.com/node/2591027/middle-east
TIMELINE OF SYRIAN REGIME-CHANGE WAR
2011 Demonstrations fanned into violence by foreign powers. Armed jihadi insurgency spreads
2011 Turkish-backed jihadi groups take control of Idlib province in the north
2012 Iran sends troops and militias to support Assad
September 2012 Ancient Aleppo badly damaged by rebels
Early 2013 Obama authorises CIA Operation Timber Sycamore
May 2013 Hezbollah troops sent to support Assad
June 2014 Assad wins landslide in election
May 2015 ISIS occupies Palmyra and destroys ancient artefacts
September 2015 Syrian government control falls to 20% of the country. Assad requests Russian intervention. First Russian air attacks.
2016 Fragile ceasefire following Syrian government’s successful counter-offensive, including recapture of Palmyra
July 2016 Partial Russian withdrawal
December 2016 Aleppo liberated
2017 Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) takes provincial capital and Syrian-Turkish border.
July 2017 Trump announces end of Operation Timber Sycamore
2018 Syrian forces retake southern suburbs of Damascus and south-western Syria. Jihadi fighters bussed to Idlib under ‘safe zones’ agreement
2019 Syrian attempt to recapture Idlib ends in ceasefire in 2020, brokered by Russia and Turkey
2023 Arab League invites Syria to rejoin
December 2024 HTS advances on Damascus
December 2024 Assad flees Damascus. Israel destroys Syrian military and expands into south-west.
January 2025 Jolani declares himself president. Turkey signs defence deal with new government
Former President of Syria Bashar al-Assad. Photo by Fabio Rodrigues Pozzebom
US boots on the ground in Syria. Photo by Jensen Guillory
European Commissioner for Preparedness, Crisis Management and Equality Hadja Lahbib with HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa. Photo by EC – Audiovisual Service
The potential for a united and peaceful Syria has been destroyed. Its coup government, dominated by Turkey, Israel and the US, is incapable of asserting national cohesion. Syria will be lucky to avoid the fate of Libya and Iraq.
