The Syrian Revolution: Victorious At Last
It's a decade overdue. Nobody knows what comes next, but can we please, for at least this one glorious moment, let the Syrian people rejoice?
I’m at a loss for words, so I’ll just remind everyone about what the Syrian people have been telling the world since their revolution began in March, 2011. Ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an-nizām. “The people want to bring down the regime.” This weekend, they appear to have done just that.
Launched 11 days ago from Idlib, a loose alliance of revolutionary forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) swept through Aleppo, Hama and Homs and finally the capital of Damascus, on Saturday.
Nobody saw this coming. Not this suddenly. Nobody.
On Sunday, Russian state media reported that President Bshar Assad had decamped with his family in Moscow, where they’ve been granted asylum “for humanitarian reasons.” This morning, for the first time in 53 years, the people of Syria awoke to a country free of the bloodthirsty, sadistic Assad family.
Whatever pearls anyone wants to clutch about the early jihadist affiliations of HTS and its commander, Ahmed al-Sharaa, this is unimpeachably true: Assad’s ouster is an historical event that ranks with the overthrow of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Muammar Gaddafi, Benito Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Idi Amin and Slobodan Milosevic.
Except it’s more like the Berlin Wall falling. Following on Israel’s astonishing successes against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran’s Quds Force, the Syrian revolution has mortally wounded the entire Moscow-Tehran “axis of resistance,” including the Houthi Ansarullah in Yemen and the Iraqi militias led by Kata'ib Hizballah.
A generation’s worth of history has unfolded over the past couple of weeks, and not just in the Greater Middle East, but also South Korea, France, Hong Kong, Georgia, Romania and elsewhere. The world is turning upside down.
I had a full page in the National Post over the weekend setting out the connections among and between the differently-shaped dominoes that are suddenly falling everywhere: A world of trouble that's been years in the making. Do read it when youre done here.
Mostly because Syria was one of my main preoccupations over the decade that followed the first upheavals of the Arab Spring in 2011, I’ve been a bit inattentive to the Real Story lately. So thanks, subscribers, for your patience. I’m busy right now with more for the Post on this story. I haven’t had much sleep these past few days.
Also, that project I’ve been hinting at in this newsletter since August is expected to go live very soon. It’s a 7,000-word investigation that required a hell of a lot of research and 16 in-depth interviews and rigorous fact-checking and meticulous copy-editing. With one last run-through, it’s done. So watch this space.
Back to today’s main event. . .