My thoughts on Syria

My two pennies worth: I was in Damascus twice, before the Civil War, for the second time for IADL with Palestinian lawyers for the Arab Lawyers Union Congress in 2004. I was sitting just in front of Assad (who became President in 2000), an extremely unimpressive speaker. He was a pale shadow of his father, who had had some of the remaining lustre of the Baathist anticolonial movement for Arab unity, led by Nasser, supported by the USSR. Even then it was clear that Assad Jnr’s days were numbered.

When the Civil War broke out in 2015, Assad was saved by Russian intervention on a grand scale, and Russia got the warm water naval base at Tartus and the air base at Latakia. Russia has now suffered a real blow and the loss of its massive investment in Syria. In early January 2017, the Russian Chief of General Staff, Gerasimov, said that the Russian Air Force had carried out 19,160 combat missions and delivered 71,000 strikes on “the infrastructure of terrorists”.

All four powers concerned, Turkey, Russia, Israel, and the USA, were taken completely by surprise by the HTS move out of Idlib, and the collapse of the Syrian army. Turkey is said to have given the green light to HTS, which is an enemy of the Kurds, but did not expect this result, the law of unintended consequences. What has happened is quite different from the direct Western interventions for regime change which led to the murders of Gadaffi and Saddam Hussein. What happens next is completely unpredictable.