The fall of the Assad Regime in Syria seemed to come out of nowhere. After 13 years of civil war, most of which had been a stalemate for years, one group of rebels takes over Aleppo, Homs, and finally Damascus in two weeks.
Fall of the Assad regime - Wikipedia
So who are the rebels? Tahrir al Sham
Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham - Wikipedia
They’re a faction that is opposed to Al-Queda and ISIS with some support from Qatar and Turkey. It seems like it’s mostly a remixing of Islamic groups which had led the civil war for a long time, but when Iran, Russia, Hezbollah, Israel, and The US got distracted elsewhere they were able to use some support from Turkey to finally overthrow Assad and capture Damascus. My guess is once they took Aleppo and discovered Assad wasn’t able to bring in help in a counter offensive then faith in the regime amongst its soldiers collapsed.
I’m personally really concerned about what will happen to the Rojava, the autonomous Kurdish region (
Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria - Wikipedia
). At the start of the civil war Kurds who are aligned with the Turkish PKK took over and liberated their own land, then got support from the US to defeat ISIS. The region has been effectively an independent country for the last 12 years. Ideologically the PKK used to be a Marxist group but they shifted to Social Ecology, a branch of left Anarchism founded by Murray Bookchin a couple decades ago. They do not believe in a centralized government and have run their region with a network of independent democratic local governments, associations, businesses, and militias. The US government maintains military bases and cooperation with Rojava. While many people in Rojava are religious the movement is multiethnic and non-Islamist in its political ideology. I find it kind of crazy that such an interesting radical political and economic project can emerge in what is clearly one of the most difficult and conflict ridden places.
Despite the US and Turkish governments being close allies and the US providing military support to the Kurds in Rojava, the Turkish government hates the Kurdish sovereignty movement. Turkey wants to prevent the emergence of any independent Kurdish country, even one without a state as such like exists in Rojava.
Will Turkey turn on and invade Rojava now that they have something like allies in power in Damascus? It doesn’t seem to make like Tahrir al Sham is an agent of Turkey, there are militias directly under the control of Turkey occupying land which is nominally Syrian, plus regular Turkish troops, but more like Tahrir al Sham is just getting support where it can. So we shall see.
One last thing I find interesting is the positive statements put out by governments around the world about the fall of the Assad regime to an organization that those same governments have declared a terrorist group. Does a terrorist grouping become a military when it gains control of a nation state?
