Sunday December 8th the world was hit with a massive surprise.
The government of Syria had fallen. Syria’s dictator for life, Bashar al-Assad, had fled to Moscow. In a mere eleven days, rebels had swept through the cities of Aleppo and Hama and had taken Syria’s capital, Damascus.
Syria had been in the hands of dictators from the Assad family for 54 years. And the Assad family was known for its brutality. In 1982, the father, Hafez Al Assad, had killed up to forty thousand people in the city of Hama to cement his leadership.
In addition, during its half century in power the Assad government had killed or disappeared and tortured over 135,000 additional Syrian citizens. The Assads had used chemical weapons on their own people.
And the Assads had made Syria a member of the Axis of Evil—the alliance that includes China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.
With the fall of the Assad clan, a major piece of the global jigsaw puzzle is now up for grabs.
Iran may be the biggest loser. It has lost the strip of land through which it ran weapons to Lebanon for use against Israel. Equally important, Iran has lost a key component of its “ring of fire” around Israel, the circle of sock-puppet armies Iran called “the axis of resistance.” Which means that Iran’s strategy of using proxy armies to make war on Israel and on international shipping in the Red Sea has suffered a major blow.
More important, Russia may lose crucial military positions, including a major airfield and Moscow’s only port on the Mediterranean Sea.
And China may lose a vital link in its Belt and Road initiative.
But the fall of the Assad family could also be bad news for the United States. For example, Iran’s loss of Syria as an ally could push the Iranians to defend themselves by assembling the nuclear materials they’ve been enriching for thirty years using their more than ten thousand specialized centrifuges. The Iranians have enough enriched uranium to whip together at least four nuclear bombs. Nuclear bombs that Iran could fire at the United States with its new Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.
Equally bad, the fall of the Assad family may give 7,000 ISIS terrorists imprisoned by the Kurds in Syria the opportunity to break loose and resume their war on the west.
But what happens next with Syria depends most on the new leadership in Syria’s capital, Damascus. Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the man in charge of the so-called “rebel” forces, is saying many things designed to please American ears. For example, he declares that he will protect Syria’s religious minorities, the Christians and the Druse.
But is Jolani simply telling us what he thinks we want to hear? Or is he following the example of Fidel Castro? From 1959 to 1962, Castro mounted a major PR campaign to tell the United States he wanted Cuba to be a democracy. Meanwhile, Castro spent those three years in secret building a Marxist/Leninist government. Only when that shadow government was ready to take over did he reveal what he had intended all along—to be a Communist dictator. And to be an ally of Moscow.
The odds of the Syrian rebel forces becoming Marxist are zero. Remember, the leader of the rebels has spent time in the terrorist group ISIS and has run Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch. It is almost certain that he wants to run the Syrian nation according to the strict Islamic law known as Sharia. It is also possible that he will stop giving women an education and begin imprisoning them in their homes like Afghanistan’s Taliban. And it is possible that he will embrace the global jihad—the global war– against America and against Western Civilization. The global war dictated by the prophet Mohammed in 628 AD. The global war mounted by ISIS and by al Qaeda’s former leader, Osama bin Laden. The global war against America that led to the World Trade Center bombing on 9/11.
Donald Trump said four days ago that Syria is not our fight and we should stay out of it. But could he be wrong?
References:
https://english.aawsat.com/arab-world/5090693-russia-says-it%E2%80%99s-touch-new-authorities-syria
Revenge and Unease Shadow Effort to Restore Order
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https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/11/what-the-future-of-syria-might-look-like-00193792
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/fissile-materials-basics
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/11/politics/us-scrambles-to-quell-isis-resurgence-syria/index.html
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Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his eight books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. He does news commentary at 1:06 am Eastern Time every Wednesday night on 545 radio stations on the highest-rated overnight syndicated talk radio show in North America, Coast to Coast AM. Bloom’s new book, coming out in February, 2025, is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is wrong. For more, see http://howardbloom.net.