https://www.foxnews.com/world/...bels-conquer-country
13-year-old Syrian civil war with more than 500,000 deaths reaches tentative end

By Benjamin Weinthal | Fox News
Published December 7, 2024 9:53pm EST | Updated December 7, 2024 10:08pm EST

JERUSALEM — Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, who used chemical weapons multiple times on his population, has fled Syria after rebels stormed the capital city of Damascus, according to Reuters.

Assad, who was trained as an eye doctor in the United Kingdom before succeeding his father, and his British-born wife, Asma al-Assad, fled with their three children, according to Syrian television reports. It was not known where they were headed.

Syria has been embroiled in a bloody, 13-year civil war as Islamist rebels looked to overthrow the Assad dynasty. The apparent collapse of more than 50 years of Assad family rule over the Syrian Arabian Republic would a monumental turning point in Middle East power politics.

A coalition of largely radical Islamist groups dislodged Assad’s Iran-backed regime. The U.S.-designated terrorist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist former Al-Qaeda affiliate that is part of the rebel forces, played the decisive role in evicting Assad, who inherited his presidency in 2000 following the death of his father, Hafez Assad.

Abu Mohammed al-Golani, the Islamist leader of HTS, who has a $10 million bounty on his head from the U.S., seeks to present a toned-down version of the radical Islamism that has defined his years of fighting in Syria and in Iraq against American troops. Al-Golani was detained by the U.S. military in the first decade of this century.

Syrian experts have told Fox News Digital that HTS seeks to impose a totalitarian Islamist regime on the population. Phillip Smyth, an expert on Iranian regime proxy groups and Syria, who is with the Atlantic Council, told Fox News Digital, "HTS is a group that is an outgrowth of Al-Qaeda and has connections to Turkey. Their endgame is to create a Talibanesque society with a few tweaks."

Assad’s decision in 2011 to launch a violent crackdown on pro-democracy Syrian activists during the Arab Spring revolts, which engulfed Egypt and Tunisia, resulted in the protracted civil war. Assad’s scorched-earth policy against the citizens of his country caused the killing of over 500,000 people. The UN recently announced that it has stopped tracking the mounting death toll.

TRUMP URGES US TO STAY OUT OF SYRIAN CIVIL WAR, BLAMING OBAMA FOR FAILURE AS ISLAMISTS CLOSE IN ON CAPITAL

The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Egyptian and Jordanian officials urged Assad to flee Syria and form a government-in-exile. Jordan’s government denied the report.

In 2015, Assad’s regime was teetering when Russia intervened to save the dictatorship. The U.S.-sanctioned Lebanese terrorist movement, Hezbollah, and its main sponsor, Iran, both threw their weight behind Assad’s regime.

The rebel forces who routed Assad’s forces—with the swift capture of the major Syrian cities of Aleppo, Hamas, and Homs—jolted both Putin and Iran. Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion of its territory has weakened Moscow. Israel has inflicted a number of aerial attacks on Iran’s military infrastructure since Tehran’s ally, Hamas, launched a surprise attack against the Jewish state on October 7, 2023.

The United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 2254 in 2015, which called for a cease-fire, UN-run elections and a new constitution. Assad rejected the resolution’s implementation.

After Assad launched a shocking mass chemical weapons strike on Syrian civilians in 2013, in which more than 1,400 people were killed, former President Obama’s administration reneged on its promise to take military action against Assad.

The origin of Assad’s forced departure can be traced back to a group of schoolboys in the southwestern dusty city of Daraa—the cradle of the Syrian revolt—in 2011. The young boys used cans of graffiti to write on a concrete wall:"The people / want / to topple the regime!"

Assad’s cousin, Gen. Atef Najeeb, oversaw an operation that involved reported torture of the arrested 15 boys between the ages of 10 and 15. Syrian officials ripped the boy’s fingernails out and burned and beat them.

Just read some reports on X that Assad has been killed in a plane crash.

Don’t know if it’s true…

Things look to be going from bad to worse over there.

Now you’re going to have a new form of al-Qaeda / ISIS taking over a country next to Israel.

What a mess.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: PR64,

So old dictator bad, new dictator better, same, worse?

Now what are the liberal/uniparty trash going to throw at Tulsi Gabbard now that Assad is out of Syria? These are some of the same mouth breathers that were worried that Gabbard would leak intel to Assad because of a fact finding mission she went on to Syria.

quote:

Originally posted by 911Boss:
So old dictator bad, new dictator better, same, worse?

Worse, if HTS is allowed to seize/keep power.

They'd be going from a brutal totalitarian nonreligious regime that's friendly with Iran and Russia, to a brutal totalitarian radical Islamic jihadist regime that's friendly with all the various terrorist groups in the Middle East and Africa.

Syria would be the new Afghanistan, where terrorist groups can grow and thrive with state backing, only now just a quick boat ride across the Mediterranean Sea from mainland Europe.

However, HTS is only one of a few dozen groups within the overall anti-government/anti-Assad forces, so the hope is that when the dust settles some of the more moderate groups will prevail in establishing the new Syrian government.

But there's bound to be plenty more infighting along the way, since the opposition forces are basically just a loose confederation of paramilitary groups with wildly different motivations and backers, brought together by their shared desire to oust Assad. So while Assad may now have been successfully ousted, the civil war itself is almost assuredly far from over, as these groups turn on each other in their scrabble for territory and power.

It's much too early to make an accurate prediction of how this might turn out.

Careful what you wish for.
The Shah and Saddam are good examples.

It only shows without outside support they fold like a house of cards. Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon would be the same way.

The WSJ has reported that Assad has fled the country to an unknown destination. His wife and kids left for Russia last month…

BBC is reporting Russian and Iranian advisors have fled the country.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/...rom-key-border-city/


Israel bombed Hezbollah last week same city

South of Homs, rebels also captured the smaller city of al-Qusayr, which had been held by the Iran-backed Hezbollah since the terror group captured it while fighting in support of Assad. The city sits next to a border crossing with Lebanon considered to be a major smuggling route used by Hezbollah to bring in Iranian arms, with Israel allegedly carrying out a number of strikes in the area, including one late last week.

I wonder how many cookies were handed out by the State Department to make this revolution happen?

quote:

Originally posted by 220-9er:
Careful what you wish for.
The Shah and Saddam are good examples.

Replacing a ln asshole dictator with ISIS/Taliban/Shari'a law government is probably not good.

I am reading reports that Israeli forces have moved into Syria from the Golan Heights. I think this is to be expected.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/08...olan-intl/index.html

quote:

Originally posted by 12131:
BLAMING OBAMA FOR FAILURE AS ISLAMISTS CLOSE IN ON CAPITAL.

Thing is, Bathhouse Barry the closet muslim doesn't believe that it is a failure. It's his wet dream.

quote:

Protests against the Assad regime kicked off with the Arab Spring in 2011 and grew into an outright civil war, with multiple parties fighting for control of sections of the country. Iran and Russia in 2015 helped Assad crush the uprising with air power and proxy forces.

Both signaled to the Syrian leader that they couldn’t or wouldn’t intervene this time, people familiar with the messages said. At the same time, one of the people said, the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham rebels, with 25,000 fighters, don’t appear to have the personnel to control and govern the vast territories it has gained in recent days.

WSJ Article

Could well mean the sort of instability Libya has experienced since Obama and H. Clinton inexplicably decided to topple the Gaddafi regime.

This was inevitable. Syria has been locked in a civil war for well over a decade, Assad and the military largely ceded the Eastern half of the country given the pathetic state of their forces.
Neither side in they fight was/is particularly competent in warfare, as outside support (Iran, Turkey, Russia, etc..) for materials, weapons and general planning support was always necessary. Russia and Iran are distracted and stretched, and the weather is favorable for making advances so, a combination of factors have opened the door to march on the capitol.

Assad and his father before him are not nice guys, the guys working for them are even worse. The 'rebels' that took over Aleppo and have pushed into Damascus are largely an amalgamation of various Islamist groups and ideologies. They wrap themselves and their cause in the religion they know, which provides the only organization they know, but actual practice of it varies widely.

While its early, we'll see how prolonged the various factions battle over influence and supremacy. I'll take a guess that given the 70+ years of violent repression that the Syrians have suffered at the hands of the Assad's, society there is going to be quite chaotic for a few years. Turkey will push hard to make it a puppet-state, Hezbollah will re-constitute itself after the beating Israel gave it, and the many minorities (Syria is quite diverse ethnically, similar to Lebanon) will likely be targeted (particularly Alawites) by enthusiastic Islamists.

This is probably what they are heading toward, but I sometimes think the most stable thing for that part of the world would be feudal micro states.

They’d constantly have low level wars with one another, but it might be the only thing they would be able to tolerate.

I’d hate to be a Christian in Syria right now.

Replacing a ln asshole dictator with ISIS/Taliban/Shari'a law government is probably not good.

“Meet the ‘new boss’; same as the ‘old boss’.”

Looks like the plane crash rumor was just that.
Russia has announced he's there and they are giving him asylum.