Bashar al-Assad has fallen. Nobody will regret it. In twenty years of dictatorship and ten years of civil war, he and his clique will have succeeded in transforming Syria into a hellish dystopia.
Undoubtedly worse than Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and yet the latter had set the bar very high, Syria, or at least what was left of it, was nothing more than an immense Captagon laboratory, run by dealers as corrupt as they are vicious. They left those of the Syrian people who had not left this living dead country with only one perspective, misery and suffering and only one choice: to become a victim or an executioner.
No one expected the regime to fall this way, this quickly. This proves that he was rotten to the core and that he no longer held on to anything. Only on the fear he could still produce on those who were supposed to protect the State and by the grace of his allies. When the HTC (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham) offensive occurred, Hezbollah, which had fought alongside the Syrian army against Daesh, and Russia, which had repeatedly saved the regime, were no longer there. As for the soldiers of the Syrian army, they lowered their weapons rather than die for a Caligula.
A divine surprise for Netanyahu
Of course, not everyone is happy for good reasons. For the Israeli government, it is a surprise, undoubtedly a divine surprise. Also, the day after the fall of the Assad clan, the Israeli army launched a bombing campaign as illegal as it was unprecedented since the end of the Second World War which aims to destroy the entire military infrastructure of Syria, leading more than 600 keystrokes in less than a week. The latest one at an arms depot in the military port of Tartous created an explosion and an earthquake measuring 3 on the Richter scale. For how many deaths? No idea.
Today, Syria is essentially a demilitarized country. Above all, the Israeli state denounced the 1974 agreements and pushed into Syrian territory by occupying Mount Hermon in the Rif Dimashq to the north, about twenty kilometers from Damascus, to the west as far as Qouneitra and south in the first villages of Daara Governorate near the Jordanian border. At the same time, Netanyahu announced to the world that Israel would occupy the Golan for eternity, while his government proposed a law to double the population of Jewish settlers in the occupied Golan.
Israel’s colonizing machine
For the Israeli government, the genocide in Gaza, the destruction of part of Lebanon and now the occupation of new portions of Syrian lands are only the continuation of one and the same policy, that is to say the implementation of the messianic and fascist project of Greater Israel, the return to the biblical borders of the land of Israel. It doesn’t matter that the biblical land register is imprecise, and that even among messianic Zionists, it is difficult to agree on where to place the borders. To Sinai, to the Jordanian desert, to the Litani River in Lebanon and Mount Hermon in Syria, or to the Euphrates in Iraq? What matters is that the colonizing machine does not stop and with it the war against “the Arab jungle” neither. Netanyahu, who knows that if the war stops his power will fall, will continue as long as he can.
For Syria and the Syrian people, everything begins. We will have to emerge from the civil war in a ravaged country, try to find hope for a new life, create a democratic space for all Syrians, and all their communities. It will also be necessary to find a compromise with the Kurdish people. Faced with them, Israel, supported by the United States, but also Erdogan’s Turkey, which is already present in Syria and massing its troops on the border just in front of Kobane, view the carving up of Syria with relish.
Thomas Rid
