Syria Falls

The Assad regime in Syria is gone. 

A tectonic shift in the Middle East just happened over the weekend. On Sunday morning, Syrian rebels finally took Damascus. They took Bashar al-Assad’s palace. The Assad regime is no more. Assad has fled to Moscow where he is being granted some sort of asylum because the Russians backed the Assad regime.

It’s important to remember that Syria is an artificial creation, post-World War I by the West, French, and British. Because of that, like many other states in the Middle East, it is unworkable and has been unworkable for a very long time.

There are a large number of groups of various religious belief systems — many of them unbelievably radical, many of them terrorists — all fighting one another.

The Syrian civil war is likely to continue for a long time to come because this is an unworkable patchwork of various groups in various areas of the country.

There are numerous interests involved. The Russians are exceptionally interested in Syria because they wanted to secure ports on the Mediterranean Sea in Syria, which they actually did with the acquiescence of the Assad regime.

Iran used Syria as a thoroughfare and helped prop up the Assad regime.

Turkey, on the other hand, did not like the Assad regime and was also attempting to make its own incursions into Syria. That is because many people in Syria are Kurds and the Turks don’t like the Kurds in the same way they don’t like the Armenians.

Israel wants to defend itself and make sure that it is not the victim of yet another land incursion from Syria.

So Syria, as is geopolitically evident, is just a mess. That’s without even getting into the internal politics.

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Syria is split into many different territories. Certain opposition groups in the south of Syria border the Golan Heights and Jordan. Some of those are radical Sunni Islamists. Some of those are Druze. Druze are a different group who are Sunni Muslims, but they tend to be significantly less radical than many of the other Sunni Muslims in the area.

The main terrorist-rebel coalition is located in the northwest of Syria. That coalition is run by a person named Abu Mohammed al-Golani, an Al-Qaeda and ISIS-affiliated terrorist. He’s in the north and backed by the Turks.

The Kurds are in control of a large swath of the northeast area that was, at one time, not under the control of the Kurds but under the control of ISIS, where ISIS still has a presence. ISIS prisons held tens of thousands of prisoners in those Kurdish areas.

After the Assad regime fell, the United States started launching airstrikes in these ISIS-type hotbeds in the Kurdish area of Syria in order to prevent ISIS from reconstituting. Turkey also has taken over huge swaths of the north of Syria.

All the pretense from the media asserting that the people who just took over Syria might be moderate is flat wrong.

By 2024, the Assad regime basically had no money. Their currency was effectively worthless; there were massive inflation rates. The Assad regime had to be propped up by outside forces, Iran and Russia. Russia gave them weaponry and other resources; in return, they got access to some coastal bases in Syria.

Then, October 7 happened. Iran activated Hamas. Hamas murdered 1,200 Jews and pulled 250 more into Gaza, many of whom are still being held in the terror tunnels. Hezbollah started firing thousands of missiles over the course of a year into northern Israel, clearing out Israel’s north.

Over the course of the subsequent year, Israel proceeded to take out Hamas and virtually all of their military resources, then turned to devastating Hezbollah. They also conducted operations in Syria to prevent Syria from being used as a thoroughfare for Hezbollah resources. So Iran’s sphere of influence got absolutely shellacked.

Meanwhile, Russia was bogged down in their war with Ukraine. They simply didn’t have the money or the capacity to uphold the Assad regime.

As a byproduct of the Ukraine war and Israel’s efforts, Assad had no allies upon whom to call. The legs of the stool on which his regime was standing got kicked out from underneath him and, as a result, the stool fell.

What happened in Syria was not that the Sunni Muslim terrorist groups suddenly became good at war again. They were really low ebb at the beginning of 2024. What happened is that Assad was basically an eggshell skull. They tapped him. He fell. There was no one to come to his support.

Thus, the terrorist-rebels took advantage and toppled the regime. That’s effectively the story here. Turkey backed many of these Sunni Muslim terrorist groups that hated the Assad regime. Wishing to expand their own sphere of influence into Syria, they took advantage of the chaos caused by Iran and Russia’s withdrawal.

The two biggest losers in this situation are Russia, because they had backed the Assad regime, and Iran, which has lost their entire crescent of Islamic Shia terror. Hamas is gone. Hezbollah is gone. Assad is gone. These are all massive blows to the Iranian regime, all caused by what Iran started. It is one of the ultimate “f*** around and find out” moments in human history.

The Iranian regime is in serious trouble right now. They have failed on every possible front. And with the Trump administration coming in and presumably increasing sanctions on the Iranian regime, the Iranian regime is going to have one of two choices: Either they’re going to have to cut some sort of deal with the West in which they abandon their nuclear efforts and presumably move toward some form of non-tyranny or they’re going to be forced to collapse. The state of Israel is not going to sit around waiting to see what Iran does next with its nuclear weapons — not after Israel already took out Iran’s air defenses.

The big winner in Syria is Turkey. Turkey took an enormous amount of territory. The Kurds had basically cleared an enormous amount of territory. But now they’re going to be at war directly with the Turks, who are going to be pouring forces and resources into that region.

As for Israel, they can be happy that the Iranian regime has lost power to use Syria as its tool. But the people replacing that regime are Al-Qaeda and ISIS jihadists.

The fate of many people in Syria remains very much in doubt.

Welcome to the Middle East, where there are no good solutions.

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