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How chaos could return to Syria once again
‘The only certainty in war is human suffering, uncertain costs, unintended consequences.’ So said Barack Obama in a speech in 2015, defending the historic mistake of his Iran deal. What an irony it is then that ‘unintended consequences’ should apply once again to another of his failures, this time in Syria. Obama’s failure to enforce his red line against Bashar Al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in 2013 led to the country being torn and split multiple ways between the Assad regime, various ethnic and jihadist military groups and their external backers. Syria has had a lost decade as a result.
The fall of the Assad regime should be celebrated. But it may well be hard to celebrate what comes next
For those past ten years, the chaos in the country has been exploited by Iran, which has used Syria as a ground supply route to Hezbollah in Lebanon. It is fitting, therefore, that Hezbollah’s destruction at the hands of Israel set off a chain of events leading to the collapse of the Assad regime now.
Hezbollah provided critical fighting power to Assad. With Hezbollah shattered, and their Syrian forces running for the border, there was little to stop insurgent forces driving off Assad’s troops and seizing Damascus with barely a fight.
Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) or ‘Assembly for the Liberation of the Levant’ were the main victors. A proscribed terror group in the UK and America, HTS started life as the Al-Nusra Front, an Islamic State spin-off that recruited heavily from Al Qaeda in Syria. After a very public falling out between Al-Nusra and Islamic State, Al-Nusra went it alone. Following a series of rebrandings and amalgamations with other Salafi jihadist groups, HTS was born.
Their administrative wing, the Syrian Salvation Government (SSG), are in charge of the areas they have captured. Until this week, the SSG was running north west Syria with some legitimacy, providing aid to civilians, and running its own bank and oil company. SSG and HTS have been keen to present themselves as having moved on from their jihadist roots. They no longer talk about a global caliphate but describe themselves as an anti-regime, anti-Russian and anti-Iranian force. The words of their leader, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, have reinforced this message. He has appealed to all sects of the Syrian population since the fall of Assad. Still, HTS will want to consolidate its fundamentalist rule in the areas under its control, which may well lead to the disintegration of Syria into autonomous statelets. Other independent regions in the country are unlikely to cede authority to HTS in Damascus without a significant fight.
We must not overlook therefore the importance of the Syrian National Army (SNA). This Turkish-backed group of thugs have contributed significant fighting power to the downfall of Assad. Turkey is vehemently against the idea of a federated Syria, as this could lead to a permanent autonomous Kurdish region on its border. HTS’s plan would also cement the position of the ‘Rojava region’, or Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, which also has a sizeable Kurdish population which Turkish also fears. In the post-Assad area, there is going to be an immediate tension between two heavily armed actors. This situation could turn vicious in short order.
More broadly, the fall of the Assad regime is a disaster for both Russia and Iran. Putin has lost the critical port of Tartus – Russia’s only port in the Mediterranean. Russian warships will now have to pass through the Turkish straits to resupply in the Black Sea, exposing them to Ukrainian missiles.
A similar blow has been struck to Iran’s hopes of rebuilding Hezbollah after its decimation at the hands of Israel. It has seen the destruction of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iranian-backed Iraqi militias reportedly refused to fight for Assad. And Iran’s own air defences have been laid to waste by the Israeli air force. Iran’s proxy strategy lies in tatters. With a hostile Trump presidency due in January, the situation looks dire for Iran. It is now or never for its nuclear programme: something Israeli and western intelligence agencies will be watching closely.
The fall of the Assad regime should be celebrated. But it may well be hard to celebrate what comes next. It is highly likely there will be conflict in Syria between HTS, the SNA and the huge numbers of militias dotted around the country.
There may also, however, be an opportunity for the wider Middle East. Hezbollah is so weakened as an armed force that Lebanon has the sliver of an opportunity to escape from the terror group. If HTS can maintain the upper hand over Turkish-backed forces in Syria, the country may be fragmented but have a more stable future, to Erdogan’s chagrin. Ukraine’s hand may now be stronger when Trump begins ceasefire negotiations with Russia. Israel has reinforced its Syrian border in the Golan Heights, and the cessation of the Iran-Lebanon resupply route will make Israel’s northern border with Lebanon safer in the long term.
As Obama said, there are few certainties in war. There are even fewer in the Middle East. The situation is delicate, with endless religious, military and ethnic variables. Only the most foolhardy of analysts would make a confident predication as to what happens next. There is one certainty, however: Assad is a weak, venal monster and his regime met the end it deserved.
Watch more on SpectatorTV:
Revealed: the 53 peers silent for five years
The wind of change is sweeping through the Upper House. What with Labour’s plans to expel the last hereditaries and Gavin Williamson’s effort to boot the bishops too, soon the House of Lords will be devoid of any colour. How will the sketch writers cope eh? Today brings more bad news for traditionalist lovers of the lords and ladies in ermine.
For Politico reports that there are growing calls to exclude members of the House of Lords who rarely attend or take part in debates. The convenor of the crossbenchers Lord Kinnoull has suggested that expelling those who attend 10 percent or less of sitting days could cut the size of the Lords by 100 peers. Peers are understood to be pushing for tighter attendance requirements as part of the Hereditary Peerages Bill – though ministers are expected to resist such changes.
So, in the spirit of open government so sadly lacking in Whitehall, Mr S has done some digging into the identity of these so-called absentee peers. According to House authorities, there are 53 members of the House of Lords who have been members for more than a year that have not made an oral contribution in the Chamber or in Grand Committee between 1 January 2020 and 15 November 2024. Oath-taking has not been counted as an oral contribution, with membership dated from the first issue of a writ of summons.
Of the 53 peers, the 26 members who were on leave of absence or subject to statutory disqualification for some or all of the specified period were:
- Lord Barker of Battle
- Lord Boyd of Duncansby
- Baroness Campbell of Loughborough
- Lord Christopher
- Lord Collins of Mapesbury
- Lord Cooper of Windrush
- Lord Davies of Abersoch
- Lord Feldman of Elstree
- Lord Fink
- Lord Hague of Richmond
- Lord Hanningfield
- Lord Hardie
- Lord Irvine of Lairg
- Lord Leitch
- Lord Llewellyn of Steep
- Lord Magan of Castletown
- Lord Malloch-Brown
- Baroness Morgan of Ely
- The Duke of Norfolk
- Lord Oakeshott of Seagrove Bay
- Lord Palumbo of Southwark
- Lord Reed of Allermuir
- Baroness Scotland of Asthal
- Lord Stevens of Ludgate
- Lord Sugar
- Baroness Vadera
The other 27 members were:
- Baroness Adams of Craigielea
- Lord Alliance
- Baroness Billingham
- Lord Carter of Barnes
- Lord Chadlington
- Lord Currie of Marylebone
- Lord Donoughue
- Baroness Eccles of Moulton
- Lord Elis-Thomas
- Lord Fellowes of West Stafford
- Lord Filkin
- Lord Glendonbrook
- Baroness Golding
- Lord Hameed
- Lord Haughey
- Baroness Hogg
- Lord Levene of Portsoken
- Lord Levy
- Baroness McGregor-Smith
- Lord Paul
- The Earl of Rosslyn
- Lord Saatchi
- Lord Sawyer
- Baroness Smith of Gilmorehill
- Lord Smith of Kelvin
- Lord Turner of Ecchinswell
- Lord Verjee
The trouble with Amnesty International
How perfect was it that Amnesty International’s report on Israel’s ‘genocide’ in Gaza landed on the same day that the war in Syria got even bloodier. As Islamist rebels swarmed Hama in the west of Syria, a city of a million souls, days before they seized Damascus itself, the virtuous of Amnesty had only one thing on their minds: Israel. It’s official: nothing, not even the return of carnage to Syria, can dislodge the activist set’s obsession with the Jewish State.
Rarely has the Israel myopia of the campaigning classes been so starkly exposed
Rarely has the Israel myopia of the campaigning classes been so starkly exposed. Five hundred thousand people have perished in the Syria calamity since it started in 2011. Many millions have been forcibly displaced, fleeing towns turned to rubble by the warring forces of Islamist militants and Assad’s heavies and their Russian backers. Yet look to the pious left and all you’ll hear is: ‘Did you see what the IDF did in Khan Younis this week?!’
Amnesty’s report is titled ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza. That it was published on the day Hama fell to a movement that makes al-Qaeda look milquetoast raises tough questions for Amnesty. Primarily this: why is it a ‘genocide’ when Israel fights Hamas but not when various factions in Syria try to slay their way to power? Why is the Gaza war, with its alleged death toll of 44,000, a modern-day holocaust, but the Syria war, in which half a million lives have been extinguished, just a war?
How striking that of all the wars of recent times, including wars whose death toll dwarfs Gaza’s, it is only Israel’s pursuit of the army of anti-Semites that attacked it on 7 October that is so hotly talked up as ‘genocide’. Four hundred thousand died in the war in Yemen, some from bombs, others in famine, yet no G-word for them. Millions perished in the Congo wars of recent decades yet I don’t recall Western influencers hitting the streets to wave swastikas and say ‘They’re just like the Nazis!’.
Yet the minute the Jewish nation pushed back against the militants who raped and murdered more than a thousand of its people, the cry went up: ‘GENOCIDE.’ Sometimes it feels like Jew-taunting. The great Howard Jacobson once asked why activists love to ‘call the Israelis Nazis’ and to ‘liken Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto’ when there’s an untold number of wars from history they could reference instead. It’s because, he said, the very aim is ‘to wound Jews’, to ‘punish them with their own grief’.
This is the inescapable conclusion now: that the words ‘genocide’, ‘Nazis’ and ‘Hitler’ are used against the Jewish State more than any other state precisely because people know those words hurt Jews.
One is reminded that, back in March, activists from Amnesty UK descended on the Israeli Embassy in London and put up street signs saying ‘Genocide Avenue’. Look, I know sympathising with Israelis is very much out of style, but I invite you to wonder how the embassy staff will have felt when they saw that word emblazoned outside their offices. When the word that describes the greatest crime known to man, a crime that devoured so many of their forefathers, was pasted on the street where they work. And only on their street. Not on the street where the Russian Embassy is based, just a stone’s throw away. Only Israel commits genocide.
Activists from Amnesty UK descended on the Israeli Embassy in London
Amnesty’s report is a moral void. The very first sentence will leave you agog at how far from moral reason Amnesty has drifted. ‘On 7 October 2023, Israel embarked on a military offensive on the occupied Gaza Strip of unprecedented magnitude, scale and duration’, it says. Didn’t something else happen on 7 October 2023? I don’t know – the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust?
Then there’s the report’s handwringing over ‘narrow’ definitions of the word genocide. Sometimes there is an ‘overly cramped interpretation’ of the G-word, Amnesty moans, which can ‘effectively preclude a finding of genocide in a context of armed conflict’. Is it just me or does Amnesty sound nervous? At some level these people know full well Israel is engaged in ‘armed conflict’, not ‘genocide’. It seems they want a looser, broader definition of that crime against humanity so that even something as rational and just as Israel’s pursuit of the racist militants who slaughtered its citizens might be damned as ‘genocidal’.
I’m starting to think Amnesty is a menace to humanity. It bemoans Israel’s war on the neo-fascism of Hamas. It accused Kurds of committing ‘war crimes’ in their valiant war on Isis. It slammed the Ukrainians who have risen up against the neo-imperial aggression of mighty Russia for ‘putting civilians in harm’s way’. Amnesty is the school snitch of global affairs. Brave people rise up against foreign invasion or Islamist supremacy or militant anti-Semitism and there’s Amnesty, every time, with its clipboards, saying: ‘Are you following all the rules?’
They need to back off. Stick to holding candlelit vigils in your local park and let the courageous of Israel, Kurdistan and elsewhere get on with the rather more serious business of fighting the forces of darkness.
America is not prepared for Syria after Assad
On Saturday afternoon, US intelligence officials leaked an assessment: the Assad regime, which has ruled Syria for over half a century, could very well collapse in a manner of days. As one official told CNN, ‘Probably by next weekend the Assad regime will have lost any semblance of power.’
It turns out that Washington was giving Assad too much credit. Less than eight hours later, a regime that had locked up hundreds of thousands of prisoners in dudgeons across the country, and used chemical weapons against its own people on multiple occasions to keep itself in power, was burning up and heading for the ash heap of history. The Syrian army gave up; its soldiers discarded their uniforms; Damascus fell without a fight; Bashar al-Assad took a plane to Moscow to save his skin; and the victorious rebels, suddenly thrust into power, were attempting to manage a peaceful political transition.
Assad, for all his many flaws, was also seen in Washington as a counterbalance to the jihadists that would take over the country
Viewed from Washington, the feelings were bittersweet. As National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said days before the Assad family was deposed, nobody would cry for the House of Assad, backed up for over a decade by Russia and Iran. Assad’s Syria, after all, was the key corridor through which the Iranians sent Hezbollah all types of weapons, from precision-guided munitions and drones to anti-tank missiles to do battle against Israel. This was also the same regime that turned Damascus into a way-station for jihadists eager to travel to Iraq to kill US troops after Washington invaded that country more than two decades ago.
Yet Assad, for all his many flaws, was also seen in Washington as a counterbalance to the jihadists that would take over the country and perhaps cause even more problems for the United States and the Middle East writ large. Sullivan, in his remarks in California, expressed concern that the immediate power vacuum in a post-Assad Syria could add life to a relatively dormant Islamic State, whose territorial caliphate in Syria and Iraq was destroyed in 2019 under the weight of US airstrikes and ground operations from Syrian Kurds, the Iraqi army and Iranian-backed Shia militia groups. The Obama administration had a similar view years earlier; one of the reasons President Barack Obama didn’t enforce his infamous red-line and bomb Syrian government facilities after Assad gassed the Damascus suburbs was because jihadist armed groups in the area would have likely have benefited.
The US, therefore, will take a wait-and-see approach. The Biden administration has been relatively muted over the last two days, issuing boilerplate statements about the president receiving briefings on the situation. In remarks on Sunday, President Biden applauded Syrians for bringing down a dictator, while emphasising the fraught days ahead. A senior US administration official told reporters that Washington was in contact with all armed groups.
US officials looked like they were at a loss in these early hours of Assad’s fall. To be fair, you can’t blame them for feeling a little overwhelmed. Syria was a hard problem to begin with and there was never going to be an easy ‘made in America’ solution to manage it. Even if there were easy options, the US would be wise to keep them on the shelf. Time and again, well-meaning US officials, driven by naïveté, hubris and gross self-confidence about their faculties, have deluded themselves into thinking they can create a better political future for this region. And time and again – Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Syria during the first years of the nearly 14-year civil war – they’ve failed and made things exponentially more complicated.
The international community hasn’t been much better. Outside of negotiating aid packages to areas of Syria outside of Assad’s control, the United Nations was unable to resolve Syria’s civil war due to intense disagreements between the United States and Russia, who backed opposing sides. A UN Security Council Resolution designed to bring the war to a close through the establishment of an interim government of national unity, the writing of a new constitution and free elections was a useless document which gathered dust. Confident in Russian and Iranian military, economic and diplomatic support, the stubborn Assad had no reason to dilute his own power for the sake of an opposition he viewed as terrorists.
In the end, this proved to be fatal for Assad and the regime his late father, Hafez, created in the early 1970s. Assad’s confidence in Russia and Iran, two countries distracted with bigger problems and tired of underwriting an ungrateful partner, was as misplaced as it was dangerous to his own self-preservation.
Syria is now in a moment of transition. Transitions can go well or poorly. Right now, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the head of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) rebel movement, is saying all the right things. During a speech at the Umayyad mosque in Damascus, Jawlani, who still has a $10 million US bounty on his head, called the downfall of Assad a victory for Syrians of all sects, religions and regions. The former Al-Qaeda member-turned de-facto head-of-state is engaging in a media blitz, trying to convince the West that HTS is interested in building a new Syria, not attacking infidels.
The United States, however, won’t be taking those words for granted. The best case scenario is the emergence of a Syria that is somewhat stable, where the focus remains on keeping the boot on Isis’s neck. The worst-case scenario is rebel infighting leading to sectarian-based cantons, anarchy and an uptick in jihadist activity. It’s too early to say which side of the coin Syria will land on.
The absurdities of a ‘meritocracy fund’
‘Go woke, go broke,’ runs the catchphrase. Now, at last, we are presented with the welcome opportunity to put this proposition to the test. A new exchange-traded fund has been launched in the US whose unique selling point is that it will refuse to invest in companies which use Diversity Equity and Inclusion criteria in their employment policies. DEI delights not Azoria 500 Meritocracy ETF, no, nor ESG (environmental, social and governance) neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
The fund has just been launched with some fanfare at (where else?) Mar-a-Lago, and its founders say they hope to raise a billion dollars by the end of next year. They declare their intention to use their investing strategy to pressure companies listed on the Standard and Poor’s 500 index to drop their DEI and ESG policies. Its founders told USA Today that the fund ‘will allow retail investors to vote with their portfolios and play a role in pressuring the nation’s largest companies to roll back diversity, equity and inclusion policies’.
If you squint at it from the right direction, the cause could even be described as noble
They have, bless them, something of a mountain to climb if that’s really the plan. For a start, their billion dollars under management is currently imaginary. And even if they do raise that much – hard not to picture Doctor Evil from Austin Powers twisting his little finger in the corner of his mouth at the prospect – it’s not really the sort of dough that moves markets and panics S&P 500 companies into changing their way of doing business on the fly.
As of October this year, the world’s 500 largest asset managers had $128 trillion under management, which is 128,000 times what these plucky upstarts in their publicly-declared wildest dreams hope to be playing with. The image that popped into my head when I first read about this scheme was that of Kipling’s wise and funny story ‘The Butterfly That Stamped’; but I don’t think you could see Azoria Meritocracy as being anything like so consequential as a butterfly. They’re working up, perhaps, to being a mosquito.
And their plan of battle seems a little confused, too. They claim that the ‘woke’ companies in which they are refusing to invest have lagged the S&P 500 over recent years – but they have so far declined to name any of the companies they’re proposing to boycott. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that these brave activists would be only too happy to name and shame their enemies and revel in the hard figures that back up their plan for investment success.
The FT reports that the coffee chain Starbucks is on their blacklist, but since Starbucks told the FT it doesn’t have DEI quotas anyway it’s hard to see why Azoria would take against them. A finance professor at the University of Florida, Jay Ritter, speculated to USA Today about the potential customer-base: ‘Some investors will want to buy them as a political statement, just as some investors buy other ETFs as a show of support for another cause.’ He warned, though, that ‘ideologically driven’ investment funds in the past have tended to draw meagre investments even as they charge hefty fees. Well, fancy.
A counter to the go-woke-go-broke argument, that said, has always been that it misses the point. If you support the principles behind them, you can make the case that having diversity quotas isn’t just about making money: it’s about doing the right thing. In fairness to the folk at Azoria Meritocracy: they can make the same argument. Refusing on principle to invest in certain firms, they can say, is just the right thing to do – and if it means our clients’ portfolios grow sluggishly, that is a price worth paying.
Which is, of course, their absolute entitlement – and if you squint at it from the right direction could even be described as noble. But a less charitable view we’d be entitled to take is that the whole thing is not so much a statement of principle as a publicity stunt designed to capitalise on Donald Trump’s re-election: the stock-market equivalent of Trump Bibles or Trump sneakers or Trump NFTs.
No asset manager of that size seriously imagines that they’re going to change the DEI policies of huge corporations by not investing in them. Nor can they imagine it’ll be the high road to making their clients rich. If you’re serious about getting the best return on investment, you make it much harder for yourself by refusing to invest in certain stocks regardless of how well they may be doing. If there is any direct correlation between DEI/ESG policies and poor financial performance – if ‘woke’ corporations really aren’t making any money – nobody else will invest in them either.
The people it might make rich, mind you – if they can find enough turnip-headed MAGA rubes willing to pile their money into an ‘anti-woke’ investment vehicle – are the asset managers who collect percentage fees on the fund whether it outperforms the market or underperforms it. This is a class of people for whom the word ‘meritocracy’ may or may not seem suitable.
Why men join the manosphere
The obsession with ‘toxic masculinity’ shows no sign of abating. As reported this weekend, Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, has warned of ‘the misogyny increasingly gripping our schools’.
In response to this threat, the government is to issue guidance for teachers to look out for signs in the classroom of ‘incel culture’ stemming from the ‘manosphere’. Teachers of pupils aged over 14 are to be told to look for clues that boys were being drawn into aggressive misogyny, behaviour that could lead to violence and sexual abuse. They are to be on guard for rhetoric indicating teenage boys are being radicalised into ‘hating women’.
A preferable route would be to stop teaching boys to hate themselves in the first place. This is the source of so much discontent among teenage boys, the reason why so many are becoming dysfunctional to begin with, and the reason why many take refuge in the manosphere.
A good first step would be to cease the narrative of ‘toxic masculinity’. Teenage boys are fed a relentless diet which implies that men and masculinity are the problem. A report from the Family Education Trust (FET) in September showed that a third of schools teach pupils about ‘toxic masculinity’. In one school’s teaching materials on the subject, the FET found that children are told that while masculinity ‘in and itself is not necessarily a harmful thing’ certain masculine traits can be ‘problematic’. The FET concluded that current teaching presents the idea that ‘men and boys possess traits that are inherently toxic and negative for society’.
In our current anti-male climate, even the term ‘toxic masculinity’ seems redundant, a tautology even. Masculinity by itself is perceived as ‘problematic’, to use that weasel word. Competition, fortitude, stoicism, individuality: all such traits are frowned upon in a society that sees co-operation, fragility, empathy and compassion as more important. Society at large reinforces this message, with books such Caitlin Moran’s What About Men?, from last year, seeking to liberate the reader from all the ‘rules’ about ‘what a man should be’ and all that ‘swagger’ and ‘the stiff upper lip’ stuff.
Men have become the new Second Sex, the new inferior, imperfect human template. ‘Traditional gendered roles’ are scorned because these roles are regarded as outdated and pathological. A boy displaying classic male teenage behaviour, such as boisterousness or competitiveness, or even taciturnity and unsociability, is regarded as a boy with problems, rather than a boy just being a boy.
Many have argued for some time that the problem of dysfunctional behaviour of boys begins in the classroom. In March last year, Mark Brooks, a co-founder of the UK-based Men and Boys Coalition, said that schools should shoulder part of the blame for the popularity of Andrew Tate, following a survey found that almost a third of young men think society does not care about them. ‘Boys don’t feel that schools are listening to them or taking the problems they face seriously enough’, he said.
The manosphere and the allure of poisonous types such as Tate is indeed a problem. But it is as much a symptom as a cause. Many boys, some without fathers or father figures, and raised in a culture that fails to impart positive masculine values, seek a haven where they aren’t constantly derided merely on behalf of their sex. It is in this forum where they learn instead the worst, old-fashioned masculine values: aggression and misogyny.
The manosphere is awash with resentful and nasty ‘incels’, involuntary men and boys who believe they will have never have sex with women due to their own looks and social standing. But alongside their misogyny and bitterness, and consistent with these themes, are narratives of self-loathing, worthlessness and talk of suicide. The manosphere has emerged as a refuge for a culture that deprecates men and masculinity.
There is nothing wrong with teaching boys to be tough and resilient. Girls should be taught to be the same. To blame ‘toxic masculinity’ is not only misleading, it perpetuates the problem it seeks to address. The longer masculinity is treated as a problem in itself, the longer boys will fail to develop into strong, proud and self-reliant men and degenerate instead into nasty resentful individuals who hate women and hate themselves.
How will HTS rule Syria?
Yesterday we woke to the astonishing news that the rebels from the Syrian opposition had taken Damascus and President Assad had fled. The joy is huge and infectious, even if tempered with trepidation. In 2007, I was assured by a soldier in Damascus that the Ba’athist regime had the solidity of rock. That could be said to be the line Assad repeated throughout the civil war from 2012 onwards. Yet in a few days from 27 November to 8 December this year, opposition forces spearheaded by HTS – Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (‘the Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant’) – swept out of their bases in rebel-held Idlib and the Turkish controlled north, and the rock-solid regime crumbled to dust. Although its ideology of Ba’athism began with high principles, these had long since decayed through repression worthy of Stalin, combined with bribery at all levels and crowned by kleptomania at the top. Beware what happens if you lose your moral compass.
Not all Islamists are like Osama bin Laden
Everything will now depend on whether there is a functioning government in Syria and whether law and order can be maintained. Although severely decayed through the years of civil war and sanctions, the Ba’athist state was strong and centralised, even if sclerotic and riddled with corruption. The rebels in Idlib have also established their own administration, the Syrian Salvation Government. It will take political and administrative genius to blend these together in a productive manner. A strong, central authority is essential. Syria is diverse in both its human and physical geography.
One of the great dangers is that, as in Libya after the fall of Gaddafi, local armed groups will expect a reward and will create rival fiefdoms which then become permanent.
If central authority can be maintained, then, there is the possibility of hope. But the challenges any new government will face are massive. It will preside over a ruined, bankrupt and poverty-stricken country where many people are starving. In 2010, there were fewer than 50 Syrian pounds to the dollar. Immediately before the rebel offensive there were more than 15,000. In 2018, I saw the desolate swathes of eastern Aleppo, the Ghouta around Damascus and most of Homs which had been destroyed by the bombing and shelling of the regime and its allies. Those pulverised areas foreshadowed today’s Gaza, and extended for mile after mile. Little has been rebuilt since then. As many Syrians fled – either to areas where their kith and kin lived, or abroad as refugees – the regime tinkered with local demography. Loyalists were settled in abandoned housing or given opportunities to build. War profiteers have also taken over houses and other property. The problems to be sorted out are legion, and that’s before we even mention the task of reconciliation.
The leader of HTS, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, was declared a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the US Department of State in 2013. He was accused of pledging allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al Qaeda, organising suicide bombings, and leading an organisation with a ‘violent sectarian vision’. Over the years he seems to have become much more moderate, as he showed in a CNN interview on Friday.
Is this a rebranding, a genuine change of heart, or pragmatic politics? We are going to find out. Perhaps it does not matter – what matters are the results of how he uses his power. That, after all, was the test of Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland. Because Jolani is an ‘Islamist’, many will fear the worst. But take it from the Cambridge English Dictionary: an Islamist means nothing more than ‘someone who believes strongly in Islam, especially one who believes that Islam should influence political systems.’ Not all Islamists are like Osama bin Laden. The Islamist Rashid Rida (1865-1935), who was president of the elected Syrian National Congress in 1920, worked hard with liberal politicians to establish a democratic constitutional order in Syria after world war one. His vision was frustrated by France, acting with British connivance, and left him deeply embittered. He believed democratic government based on the principles of Islam would provide greater security for Christians and Jews than government based on ‘national fanaticism’. If he were alive today, he would be able to point out to us that the Ba’athist regime of the Assads was indeed based on ‘national fanaticism’.
And geo-political implications? In Syria, at least for the moment, the optimism of the Arab Spring seems to have been rekindled. Let us pray this time its delicate flame will not be snuffed out. If it survives and the revolutionary spirit spreads, Sisi in Egypt and the family-based regimes of the Gulf may fear trouble. They will worry that their citizens will look to the Syrian model for inspiration. It may also be unwelcome in Israel, because a democratic government in Damascus will be well placed to ramp up pressure for the return of the Golan.
The big winner will be Turkey, which has stood by the opposition and been its mentor throughout. Now it has an important new friend in Damascus which it will want to support. Its position viz-a-viz the Kurds will therefore probably be strengthened. Russia has been humiliated. Iran has lost its best supply routes to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Does its ‘axis of resistance’ even still exist?
Suella Braverman’s husband joins Reform
Well, well, well. In a rather curious turn of events, it now transpires that Rael Braverman – husband of former Home Secretary Suella Braverman – has started campaigning for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. How very interesting…
Farage took to Twitter to announce that Braverman had not only been canvassing for the party on the streets of Hertfordshire on Sunday, but had actually become a member of the right wing group, noting:
He has received a great reception after joining the fastest growing movement in British politics.
Good heavens. It’s certainly a good time to be in Farage’s group after a FindOutNow voting intention survey put Reform in second place, ahead of Sir Keir’s lefty lot and just two percentage points behind Kemi Badenoch’s boys in blue. It follows a rather interesting speech by Farage at The Spectator’s Parliamentarian awards, where the Reform leader insisted to the audience: ‘At the next election in 2029 there will be hundreds of newcomers under the Reform UK label. We are about to witness a political revolution the likes of which you’ve not seen since Labour after the first world war.’ Strong stuff, eh?
For her part, Suella defended her husband’s move on Sunday, saying:
My husband and I have a healthy respect for each other’s independence – he doesn’t tell me how to do my job, and I don’t tell him how to pick a political party.
It does beg the question, however, whether the former Conservative minister will jump ship too. Already, ex-Tory MP Andrea Jenkyns left her former party for Nige’s crowd and onetime ConservativeHome founder Tim Montgomerie also defected last week. Might Suella be next? Stay tuned…
A middle-aged man’s guide to ageing gracefully
Middle-aged men might be feeling persecuted at the moment. But we bring so much of the opprobrium upon ourselves. The MasterChef host Gregg Wallace has, it should be remembered, not been charged with any crime. But the allegations of his inappropriate, predatory and downright cringe-worthy behaviour towards women have inspired the kind of reaction among my male colleagues and friends that I haven’t heard the likes of since the arrival of David Brent and The Office some 20-plus years ago.
Nobody finds your Tommy Cooper impression funny because the only other person old enough to remember Tommy Cooper is outside hectoring a stranger about the smoking ban
‘You don’t understand, Rob,’ said the editor of the magazine I worked for at the time. ‘As a boss, I’m terrified watching every episode. I always think that Brent is going to do something or say something where I think “I’ve done that”.’
Fast-forward two decades and it seems many men of a certain age are plagued by a similar fear of recognising themselves in the stories about Wallace – not only those who genuinely have something to feel guilty about, but also generally well-meaning blokes who would be horrified to learn that a female in their workplace or social circle regards them as a middle-aged creep.
I’m 46 years old and so am entering the Indian summer/early autumn of my years. I’m no paragon of virtue and physical virility myself: I’m divorced, don’t live with my current partner and have legs that ache after around two minutes of standing up in a pub these days. But what I’ve noticed over the years – from observing my male brethren in action and, more importantly, from listening to what the women I encounter have to say – is that it’s actually ridiculously easy to not be a Gregg Wallace type. But I’ve also noticed that some of my male friends have needed a little bit of nudging.
So, in the spirit of festive giving, here’s my six-point plan to ageing gracefully as a middle-aged man:
1. Do keep your waistline relatively trim – and your music tastes relatively contemporary
Everything about ageing gracefully, both physically and mentally, spans out from these two core points. In short, if you don’t subscribe to the above then you’re the podgy Neil Young fan – and women don’t want to hang out with, let alone flirt with, that guy.
You don’t need a gym membership: if all you want to do is lose the belly fat then you can achieve this by diet alone in four to six weeks. Simply replace the bread in your cupboard with rice cakes and when you want a snack have a few of those with hummus, spinach leaves and some mackerel or herring. Ditch the cereal and eat porridge with honey or Greek yoghurt with nuts, raisins and blueberries. Eat lots of avocados, lots of scrambled eggs and plenty of tuna. When you want a drink, make a martini or pour a glass of champagne as they’re the tipples with the lowest calories. Limit your drinking days to two a week, eat as above and, I promise, the weight will fall off your middle without you so much as reaching for a squash racquet.
As for music, there’s no need to start going clubbing (most venues are closed anyway as Gen-Z stays in to scroll through TikTok of an evening), but you should ask yourself: do I think that the 1970s/80s/90s (delete as applicable) was the golden age of music because it genuinely was? Or is it just that this was the only era when I was actually open to listening to new music? Once you’ve decided that the latter is probably the most truthful answer then start paying for Spotify and stop playing music from ‘back in my day’. Need some help? OK, listen to An Evening With Silk Sonic (the 70s funk sound will be comfortingly familiar), then keep the party going with Hit Parade by Roisin Murphy before you recline with Emails I Can’t Send by Sabrina Carpenter. There’s nothing to scare the horses here – and once you open your mind to new music, so many of the other worst excesses of mimsy middle-aged male sadness trickle away.
2. Don’t take cocaine at dinner parties
Skip this entry if you’re already appalled at the prospect. But so many forty-, fifty- and even sixty-somethings still seem to think that the way to cling on to their youth is to snort some lines off a kitchen table after a three-course meal with friends. Some might argue there is an age when taking drugs is the gateway to quite a few awesome things. But those days are over. Taking cocaine after 45 just looks incredibly seedy in the eyes of anyone younger who may be watching.
Also, it’s hysterically hypocritical to complain about crime in your area and then lean into the mirror with your credit card. Sorry to sound sanctimonious but the county lines wars are being waged over who gets the right to supply cocaine to people like us. Youthful narcissism and a subsequent disregard to this truism is forgivable. But us older men should know better.
3. Don’t look up to Jeremy Clarkson
Idolising Jeremy Clarkson is a folly of Ceausescu’s palace type proportions when it comes to ageing well. Many men seem to believe that, because Clarkson has a hairdo like an arthritic cloudburst and wears stonewash denim and leather jackets with an elan last seen in 1980s West German nightclub owners, it’s perfectly OK to mimic the look then recline with a self-satisfied middle finger aimed towards everything younger and prettier.
Woe betide us. Nobody has aged worse than Clarkson. And this is borne out by the fact that it’s only people of his chromosome who actually like him. Women figured out long ago that not only is Clarkson not a man of the people (he was educated at Repton, for goodness’ sake) but he’s also a saliva-flecked comfort blanket for men who think complaining about the price of beer is an excellent conversation starter with the opposite sex. Reading Clarkson, watching Clarkson and, good lord, dressing like Clarkson is a fast track to a land of tragic solitude. And you’ll get there faster than any vehicle that has ever appeared on Top Gear.
4. Don’t make ‘dad jokes’
Peter Kay can make dad jokes. You can’t. Chiefly because you’re not on stage in front of thousands of adoring fans. No, you’re at an office drinks event and you’re beginning to wonder why nobody thinks your Tommy Cooper impression is funny. The reason is that there’s only one other person in the room old enough to remember who Tommy Cooper was, and he’s outside hectoring a complete stranger about fracking and the smoking ban.
Ageing well means accepting that an ever-increasing amount of the people you work with or meet at parties are not plugged into your cultural references. The tip to getting around this is simple: if someone you’re talking to claims they haven’t heard of, let’s say, ’Allo ’Allo!, Arthur Scargill or Frederick Forsyth, don’t spend ten minutes explaining who and what they are. This is a party, not an ‘educate the young about the glorious things that happened when I was your age’ seminar. Try listening to other people instead. And don’t despair that the people you’re surrounded by haven’t heard of Peter Cook. Envy them. They’re also of a generation that didn’t experience thalidomide, Frank Bough and Happy Eater.
5. Don’t cling to the myth that all younger women really, deep down, want an older man
Yes, some women may well want that – but it’s likely the older man they have in mind is Jon Hamm, not you. Deal with it.
6. Do take ‘no’ for an answer
Finally, to make absolutely sure that nobody ever accuses you of the type of behaviour Gregg Wallace is being investigated over, remember this one thing. Women are stronger than us. They experience menstruation and still go to work (if men had periods, we’d get a statutory three days off a month), and they go through childbirth while we beg for a one-way trip to Dignitas when we have a verruca.
With this in mind, if a woman indicates she’s no longer interested in continuing a conversation then don’t keep talking, don’t implore, don’t persist and, whatever you do, don’t follow her across the room. If a woman is interested in you, she’ll let you know. Given that most women have long since found out the hard way that men are not very emotionally intuitive, this will happen in a manner that, you can be very sure, won’t pass you by.
So go forth, middle-aged men, and prosper. You have nothing to lose except your bootcut denim and your paperback copy of the Diddly Squat book.
When did the Beckhams become minor royals?
Seeing the snaps of David Beckham, Victoria in tow, smirking like the cat that got the cream-covered canary at the King’s state banquet for the Qatari royals, I was in two minds. It pleased me to think of Meghan angrily slamming the doors of her 17 toilets, as the trophy couple the Sussexes once saw as friends so firmly showed their allegiance in the ongoing War of the Windsors. But on the other hand, there’s something rather unappealing about a monarchy which sups with showbiz, using a short spoon. We’ve just seen in the example of the American election how profoundly unimpressed people are when the powerful, rich and famous flock together too much, when entertainers get too chummy with people who are there as representatives of a nation.
The eldest, Brooklyn, has already been a model, a photographer and a TV chef, but he will probably be remembered as a laughing stock
It’s almost like Becks sits just beneath the royals as a representative of modern Britain, exerting soft power all over the show. Remember the King’s plans to ‘streamline’ the monarchy? Then he and the Princess of Wales became ill and, with H&M off griping in the Golden State and Prince Andrew confined indefinitely to barracks, it seemed like there weren’t enough royals ready, willing and able to perform the daily round of shaking hands and cutting ribbons. How handy that the Beckhams were able to step into the breach. And there are so many of them, which is handy if they ever need some spares to greet foreign dignitaries and the poor ungainly York princesses are busy buying things; David and Victoria are proud parents to Brooklyn (25), Romeo (21), Cruz (19) and Harper (12).
It’s a not inconsiderable achievement to keep such a long union – 25 years – as the Beckhams’s together, even more so considering the scandal that has dallied with them in the past. They’ve played a clever hand on this issue; there was that moment in last year’s Netflix documentary in which Victoria said of the tabloid revelations of David’s rumoured affair with Rebecca Loos: ‘It was the hardest period for us because it felt like the world was against us. Here’s the thing – we were against each other if I’m completely honest.’ If only the Sussexes had done their Netflix doc like that – mea culpa instead of poor me – we’d have more time for them.
Rather less admirable was when, speaking about the press attention her family attracted after they moved to Spain, Victoria said: ‘It was a nightmare. Everywhere we went, we were followed. It was an absolute circus – it’s really entertaining when the circus comes to town, right? Unless you’re in it.’ This being the case, how puzzling is it that she has encouraged all of her brood to enter into attention-seeking professions which will guarantee that they will be part of that circus from an early age?
Romeo is a model and Cruz is a musician; they appear to be living pleasurable lives, and it is doubtful whether they lie awake at night wondering what it’s all about. But the other two highlight the less enviable aspects of being the offspring of a union that is as much a merger as a marriage, with their parents’ determination to build up Brand Beckham above all. The eldest, Brooklyn, has already been a model, a photographer and a TV chef, but he will probably be remembered as a laughing stock; Daniel Mac, a TikTok star who has won 12 million followers by asking rich youngsters with expensive cars, ‘What do you do for a living?’ put the question to Brooklyn when he was still only 23 and driving a £1 million red McLaren. It’s poignant that a devoted mother like VB, who made her fortune by standing to the side and allowing more talented people to take the limelight foolishly furthered the career of her untalented son in the glamour industries. That decision has led him into public mockery, which I’m sure wasn’t her intention.
At the other end of the dynasty, young Harper’s name has been a trademark (as are those of her brothers) since the age of five; she is already on TikTok demonstrating make-up techniques and will doubtless be marketing a teenage cosmetic line before she is old enough to vote. It’s odd that when the Kardashians treat their children like industries, we recoil at their vulgarity – yet somehow the Beckhams have managed to do the same while still coming on like the Waltons.
Are they empire-building for their children simply because they’re money-mad? The Beckham parents have a combined wealth of some £455 million, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, yet Tom Bower alleged in his Beckham biography that they are extraordinarily stingy, to the point of appearing to be annoyed at an employee who’d claimed for an £8 taxi ride. During Covid, Victoria attempted to use the government furlough scheme to pay 30 staff £150,000 of public money.
For someone who was thought to be shy in his youth, Beckham has certainly developed into a smooth showman. There’s apparently no blotting of his copybook that he can’t recover from, from the alleged sexual generosity displayed on his Spanish sojourn to all that effing and jeffing on the telephone when he didn’t get a knighthood. Again, I am in two minds, unusually; his 12-hour queuing to see the Queen lying in state while other famous people pushed in – which cynical souls say was a set-up – I found genuinely touching.
Who could blame the King for wheeling him out to the Qataris? After all, Beckham is practically fam, having signed a £150 million decade-long deal with them as an ambassador. Being the public face of a country where homosexuality is punishable with a jail sentence is bad enough, but as Douglas Murray wrote here:
The BBC did say that there might be protests around the visit because of Qatar’s record on ‘LGBT rights’. But more troubling is that Britain should ever have welcomed the leadership of such a sordid, terrorist-supporting statelet. For two decades now Qatar has been one of the leading supporters, funders and hosts of the proscribed terrorist group Hamas. They have transferred billions of dollars to Hamas, and the Emir and his family continue to host the group’s leadership in luxury hotels and apartments in Doha.
Despite all the pomp, there was something deeply sleazy about a state banquet where kings, footballers and the inevitable Keir Starmer ooze around celebrating the visit of a man who bankrolls Hamas, all linked by their limitless thirst for money and their swinish desire to build dynasties. One imagines a ghastly celeb-run dystopia years from now where Princess Charlotte makes podcasts with Harper Beckham and the Beckham boys holiday in Qatar while Lilibet Ltd and Archie Inc throw insults from across the pond. Where only rich and famous people’s children are allowed to be rich and famous – an adoption of the monarchical model into show business. So though it’s fun to imagine Harry and Meghan getting their knickers in a twist over those photos of Posh and Becks swanking about, there’s really not much to choose between the whole shady lot of them.
The tragedy of Anne Boleyn’s childhood home
Hever Castle was the childhood home of Anne Boleyn and played a not insignificant part in the Henry VIII story. The smitten despot, already planning his divorce from sonless Catherine of Aragon, would ride over from his hunting lodge at nearby Penshurst Place to woo Anne there. Then, when things didn’t work out as he’d hoped, Henry seized Hever from her family and gave it to wife number four, Anne of Cleves, as part of the settlement when he was divorcing rather than beheading her, as he had poor Anne Boleyn.
The first thing that I heard when I arrived in a teeming car park was the voice of Mariah Carey singing: ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’
It remains one of Britain’s best-preserved Tudor houses. Just last year historians discovered, lurking in a corner of the library, the actual book held by Thomas Cromwell in his celebrated portrait by Hans Holbein. So, finding myself on a recent wintry afternoon in the same corner of Kent with free time, and gripped by the second series of Wolf Hall, The Mirror and the Light, Hever seemed an obvious place to head.
I was imagining Hever with crepuscular rooms, candlelight reflecting off those Holbein canvases and dark wood walls, perhaps some choral music by Thomas Tallis or William Byrd to soften otherwise monastic silence. Instead, the first thing that I heard when I arrived in a teeming car park was the voice of Mariah Carey singing: ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You.’ And as I looked towards the castle, I saw that its walls were illuminated by giant spotlights whose colours shifted every few seconds across a lurid palette: pink, magenta, sapphire.
Outside were fairground rides. Would there be some bouncy castle next to the real thing? Quite possibly, it seemed. It was a festival of tat, more Winter Wonderland than Tudor tower. While taking all this in, I rummaged in my wallet for my English Heritage and National Trust membership cards, assuming Hever would be run by one or other, only to discover that it’s neither – and entry was a poky £26 each.
This was the final straw. I decided to keep my money and take our dogs for a walk in the grounds instead, soon finding a means to bunk in while my wife entered the house alone. My decision to abstain was vindicated: ‘It’s even worse inside,’ she messaged me. ‘There are the horrible lights there too and hammy actors in crappy costumes. And more shrill music. It’s awful.’
This sort of thing seems to be a contagion that has spread from those dreadful ‘traditional’ Christmas markets – all Cuprinol-hued sheds selling £8 plastic cups of over-sweet mulled wine. These now take over many of our towns each winter, even historic ones such as Winchester or York, but this was the first time I had seen this syndrome manifest somewhere quite as august as Hever.
It is, though, the second time that my attempt to indulge my fondness for Wolf Hall has led to disappointment: in the week of Hilary Mantel’s death a couple of years ago, we went for a Thames-side walk past Hampton Court – only to find the whole river frontage outside Henry’s best-known residence was covered in plastic safety barriers, something I mentioned here.
The National Trust seems particularly keen to tell us of the evils of many of the houses in their care – while replacing the butter in its scones with margarine to make them vegan friendly. But even these cultural warriors would surely baulk at Mariah Carey. While English Heritage’s idea of aggressive populism is asking children to identify different tree leaves on a chart – positively quaint. But privately-owned Hever clearly feels under no such constraints.
Hever was bought by American tycoon William Waldorf Astor in 1903 as a home, which it remained for 80 years before it was acquired by its current owners, Broadland Properties, who turned it into a tourist attraction. Last year the family-owned company made £15 million. With such healthy profits, I can’t see Broadland giving two hoots about my misgivings over their management of Hever.
But were I king for a day – a slightly trimmer and more virile version of Henry, let’s say – I’d compulsorily purchase offenders like Hever from the public purse and restore a more sober atmosphere. I feel certain my subjects would approve.
Assad’s demise, Isis’s rise?
The Iranian-dominated Shia arc has collapsed. The keystone to the arc was Bashar al-Assad’s regime and the partnership that his father Hafiz al-Assad forged with the Iranian regime in the 1980s.
That alliance gave Tehran for decades its only state-level Arab ally, one that shares a border with Israel.
It was also critical in enabling supply of Hezbollah and providing forward bases and freedom of movement for Islamic Revolutionary Guard personnel. In return Assad’s Syria gained strategic depth in the form of an Islamic partner and patron.
The survival of Assad’s Syria was a point of strategic convergence between Russia and Tehran. That triangular relationship proved invaluable in 2015. It was the the IRGC-QF Commander Qasim Soleimani who tipped Russia into saving Assad.
But Iran may no longer be the key player in the region. With the disappearance of Assad, any hope Tehran may have had of reviving Hezbollah, battered by Israel to the point of no longer being a strategic asset, all but disappears.
What Hezbollah now becomes within Lebanon is an open and worrying question. But what Hezbollah isn’t any longer is a credible military force at the head of an Axis of Resistance.
Between them, Hai’at Tahrir Al Shams (HTS) and the Israel Defence Force (IDF), two deeply opposing forces, have blunted Hezbollah’s military capability and cut their supply lines.
For good measure, the US brokered cease-fire deal pushes Hezbollah back from their front line with Israel and leaves the IDF free to attack them inside Lebanon. They cannot now act effectively beyond their own borders.
Assad’s fall also deals a heavy blow to the credibility of Russia as an actor in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Arab World.
Putin was prepared, reluctantly, to bear considerable costs in order to save Asad in 2015. Now, with the loss of the naval and air bases which were its reward, Russia militarily ceases to be a presence in the region.
The eviction of Russian and Iranian influence from any country might ordinarily represent an opportunity for others.
But the HTS leader, Ahmed Hussain Al Shar’a, whose adopted name of Abu Mohamed al-Jolani reflects that his family are from the Golan heights, has posed the international community a problem if not a warning in his consistent positioning as a Syrian nationalist and therefore opposed to foreign intervention. His message will find resonance among Syrians for whom the expulsion of the French mandate forces in 1946 was a formative event and a national holiday (Id Al Jela’).
But Syria’s modern history has been dominated by foreign powers seeking influence over either the Assad regime, minorities or militias.
Jolani has been careful to temper his revolutionary zeal by calling for no revenge, no damage to state institutions, the protection of senior officials and even no celebratory firing into the air.
While the last may be unenforceable for a victorious army, the others will be a reasonable indication of his intent and sincerity.
So too will be his ability to construct a functioning coalition with other opposition groups, in particular the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the East which incorporate other Christian minorities and has been the sworn enemy of Isis.
He must also accommodate the emboldened opposition groups in the South and the proliferation of small groups with local agendas which have been caught up in the momentum of HTS’ advance. Among them, as the jails are emptied, will be many who are reluctant to lay down their weapon.
The large number of Isis members still in Syria will seek to pursue an agenda more extreme than that of HTS. The fate of Isis foreign fighters held in Syrian camps will be of acute concern to western governments, especially the UK.
At its worst, Syria could slide into the violent factionalism of Iraq or Libya. Much will depend on whether external actors intervene to promote their interests. With Iran and Russia evicted, the Gulf cautious and the US about to inaugurate a President opposed to armed intervention overseas, there will be fewer foreign powers intervening to fuel armed factionalism.
The early signs from Trump are that Syria isn’t on his to-do list
Turkey alone may see feel an imperative to intervene. While apparently having no influence over HTS (they claim they had no notice let alone being party to the planning of the latest advances) they have hard-core strategic interests, and an effective protectorate, in the North. They can be expected to take any opportunity further to weaken their enemy in Kurdistan, the PKK.
It remains to be seen whether HTS will stick to its nationalist agenda or be drawn into wider conflict in particular support for Hamas.
It may find its domestic agenda leaves no capacity for foreign adventures but revolutions create their own dynamic.
The early Iranian revolutionary state took a strategic decision to defend itself by exporting its revolution, which created the regional influence it has just lost.
HTS has a leader who is a proscribed terrorist. But Jolani also has credibility as a nationalist and now the prestige of being a successful leader of an armed rebellion. His agenda is, for now, one behind which Syrians, drained by the oppression of Assad and a decade of civil war, can unite.
Whether al-Jolani has the skills and the appetite to play the statesman or chooses to remain the Islamic revolutionary will determine the shape of the new Syrian state. It’s his choice.
If Jolani’s Syria fails and collapses into war-lordism it will be a further regional catastrophe. But if Jolani’s Syria succeeds it will be a problem. An austere Islamist state on the shores of the Mediterranean, led by former members of an Al-Qaeda affiliate, sympathetic to Hamas, and sharing a border with Israel was not in any state’s plan, least of all Israel’s. Trump and Netanyahu may consider it intolerable. But America and Israel may wait to see whether it turns its revolutionary zeal on them before putting it on their target list.
The early signs from Trump are that Syria isn’t on his to-do list. THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT,’ said Trump on social media yesterday. ‘LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!’
HTS have reminded the international community of an important phenomenon. Non-state armed groups tend to have strategic patience. Unlike external actors who move on, they have nowhere else to go.
Isis from whom Jolani split over their terrorist agenda, should not be forgotten. In these fluid times preventing the Islamic Stage resurging might prove an early, common cause between Jolani and a range of sceptical and nervous powers who, for the moment, will be willing him to be better than Assad.
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The SNP budget was one big letdown
Shona Robison’s big fiscal announcement this week should have been the Scottish government’s plans to mitigate the deeply unpopular winter fuel payment cut imposed by UK Labour. The nationalists went early on revealing the scheme, however, doing so a week before the budget after being pushed by some smart manoeuvring from Scottish Labour.
Anas Sarwar, the party’s leader, had stated he would mitigate the winter fuel payment cut should he become First Minister in Holyrood’s 2026 elections. This position puts him in opposition to his Westminster boss, but Sarwar needs to demonstrate to Scottish voters he can use devolution to prioritise Scottish interests, no matter what Keir Starmer might be up to. Labour then tabled two amendments to the draft legislation needed to allow Scotland’s benefits agency, Social Security Scotland, to administer the payment.
Anyone stopping to look closely at these amendments might note the changes would make the payment more expensive and more complicated to administer. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to force the nationalists to act on keeping Scots pensioners warm in winter or to be condemned for their inaction – so they acted. You could sense the fag-packet urgency of the thing by its details. Scottish Labour had been pushing the SNP to spend a £41 million funding pot from Westminster on mitigating the winter fuel payment this year.
But it isn’t merely a case of handing out cash. Legislation has to be drafted and approved to allow it; systems put in place to pay it out. Instead, the £41 million was split into parts: £20 million each for a warm homes scheme and the Scottish Welfare Fund, then £1m for, er, social landlords to help residents sustain their tenancies.
‘Not sure how that helps exactly,’ an SNP insider said. Other than that it simply makes the numbers add up. Behind the scenes, it was ‘pure The Thick of It’ another insider told me. You can imagine the Malcolm Tucker-esque screaming for ideas. Make an announcement, any announcement, as long as it totals £41 million.
With the would-be centrepiece of this week’s budget announcement gone, what else might be up the finance secretary’s sleeve? To the surprise of many, Robison revealed her government would also mitigate the two-child benefit cap. The Conservative policy of limiting families to benefit entitlement for only their first two children has been a politically toxic one in Scotland. Polling shows a majority of Scots support the two-child cap, but the SNP has campaigned long and hard to end it. They have used the cap, and the associated ‘rape clause’ to call the Tories cruel and out of touch.
The nationalists then revived their campaigning during the general election to call for Labour to end the cap, attempting to frame Keir Starmer as a man unbothered by the plight of impoverished children. While that clearly had little impact for the UK party, it was a stick with which to beat Scottish Labour.
The media coverage was exactly as the SNP had hoped it to be – they were abolishing the two-child cap and bringing the political fight to Labour. The SNP has performed a neat trick here: they have no clear plan to mitigate the cap. Rather, they have a plan to find a plan to mitigate the cap. The budget spending pledge is for £3 million to ‘develop the systems’ to be used to award the benefit. By the time they do that, they may no longer be in power.
John Swinney has previously stated that the Scottish government has no power to mitigate the two-child cap. Now, suddenly, it does. If it was possible all along for the SNP to move sooner, then it is impossible to defend the allegation that the party allowed families to suffer for longer than was necessary for nothing but the sake of political point scoring.
Regardless, Sarwar is now above a trap door on the SNP’s stage. Labour is vanishingly unlikely to support the SNP’s budget and will have to vote down a budget that will feed hungry children. The SNP will say it is stopping Labour from freezing Scotland’s pensioners and starving its children. Labour will point to the fact that the SNP can only do this because of additional funding presented to Scotland this year by the Chancellor.
So far, so predictable. What’s interesting is the urgency behind the scenes to move on these two policy pledges. They were last minute and they were rushed.
Yet what does this urgency say? During Labour’s sweep to power, Anas Sarwar had a spring in his step. The narrative north of the border was that his party would be propelled to power in 2026 and he was already styling himself as Scotland’s new First Minister.
The SNP, under the no-nonsense pairing of John Swinney and his deputy Kate Forbes, has clearly decided it is not going to allow Sarwar into Bute House without a fight. They have moved steadily away from the culture wars obsession of the last administration and are focusing on tangible issues voters care about.
These two fiscal counter-attacks from Swinney’s government show his steel and determination
These manoeuvres and counter-manoeuvres show the run up to 2026 is going to be more interesting than first thought – but the SNP will need more than mere tricks to see off Labour’s challenge.
Sunday shows: Rayner ‘welcomes’ fall of Assad
Deputy PM ‘welcomes the news’ that the Assad regime has fallen
Rebel forces in Syria have captured Damascus, and Bashar al-Assad has reportedly fled the capital, ending a regime that begin in 2000. On Sky News this morning, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner told Trevor Phillips she ‘welcomes that news’, but stressed that a political resolution is needed that protects civilian lives and infrastructure. Rayner said a plan had been in place to make sure any UK citizens were evacuated from Syria ahead of the weekend’s developments.
Priti Patel: ‘The Turkish footprint is relevant here’
Trevor Phillips also asked Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel about Syria, and the wider implications for the region. Patel said there was no question that Turkey has ‘equities’ in the situation, and would be an influential voice, although she wouldn’t speculate on whether Turkey knew in advance about the rebel push. Patel said it was clear that Russia had been ‘consumed with Ukraine’ and had scaled back their presence in Syria. She also stressed that the UK and its allies had to deal with the ‘longstanding issue of Iran’ and its proxies in the region.
Angela Rayner: ‘We are determined… to deliver the housing we desperately need’
The deputy prime minister also spoke about Labour’s plans to build 1.5 million more homes by 2029. On the BBC, Rayner admitted that the government’s plans are a ‘stretch target’ which would require a scale of house building not seen since the 1950s, but she said she is determined to deliver the changes needed to make that goal possible. One of Labour’s proposed changes is to reduce the power that local councils have to block planning applications. Laura Kuenssberg asked Rayner why she thought the government ‘knows better’ than local authorities. Rayner said that mandatory local plans for housing construction would mean local authorities can decide themselves where development should take place, and that combined with the national planning policy framework would mean housing construction doesn’t get ‘stuck in the system for years’.
Shadow Treasury Minister: ‘Labour seem to be saying… local people can be ignored’
Shadow Treasury Minister Richard Fuller told Laura Kuenssberg that the Conservatives were building houses at a rate of 1.2 million houses (if continued for a five year term) in their final year in power, and suggested that Labour’s target of 1.5 million was ‘reasonable’. However, he claimed Labour were ignoring local people, and that it was important that public services were improved in line with additional housing. Fuller did not say the Conservatives would refuse to back Labour’s plans, and suggested it was good news that Labour were looking into deregulation.
Emma Pinchbeck: ‘We have rarely talked about… the costs of not tackling climate change’
This weekend Storm Darragh killed two people and left thousands without power across the country. Speaking to Laura Kuenssberg, Climate Change Committee CEO Emma Pinchbeck said the country had to prepare for the worsening effects of climate change, including flood defences and preparing cities for extreme heat. Kuenssberg asked if the country should be spending more on these protections, and Pinchbeck claimed that there isn’t enough discussion about the costs of not tackling climate change. Pinchbeck called for more resources to help advise the government on how to prepare the economy for the impact of climate change.
Putin’s Middle Eastern house of cards
The Kremlin’s involvement in Syria’s civil war was always, first and foremost, about posing as a great multi-regional power rather than actually being one. Vladimir Putin’s deployment of a single squadron of warplanes to Hmemim airbase in Syria in 2015 brought a gun to a knife-fight. The Assad regime had been fighting insurgents with poison gas and infamous ‘barrel bombs’ rolled out of helicopters. Russian Su-24 and Su-35 fighter-bombers and Kamov helicopter gunships were quickly able to turn the tide against the growing rebellion and undoubtedly saved Bashir al-Assad’s regime. Unlike America’s multi-trillion dollar investment in Iraq and Afghanistan, Putin was able to change the fate of a nation by sending just 30 aircraft and deploying just 2,300 personnel on the ground – plus a few hundred Wagner mercenaries.
Putin’s intervention in 2015 allowed him to play the Middle Eastern power broker, just as his Soviet predecessors had done – except without the expense and effort of spending billions of rubles on military aid, building dams, universities and schools as the USSR had done for decades across the region. At the time the Kremlin was newly isolated in the wake of Russia’s snap annexation of Crimea in February 2014. The Syria gambit was Putin’s answer to those western leaders – led by the Obama White House – who sought to contain, downplay and ignore Russia. As the saviour and supporter of the Assad regime, Putin has to be reckoned with and respected as a player in the region alongside Iran, Israel and Turkey.
The Kremlin marked its victory over Syria’s jihadists with a spectacular piece of political theatre. On 5 May 2016, Russia’s leading conductor Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Symphony Orchestra were flown from St Petersburg to perform pieces by Bach, Prokofiev and Shchedrin at the Roman Theatre in the ancient ruins of Palmyra. An audience of Russian soldiers, government ministers and journalists sat where a year before Isis had filmed the public execution of its enemies – including the beheading of Palmyra’s Director of Antiquities Khaled al-Asaad. It was a brilliant set-piece of propaganda illustrating the triumph of western civilisation over Islamist obscurantism and violence – though Assad regime forces, assisted by Russian GRU military intelligence, wrought bloody revenge on Isis members wherever they found them, especially those originally from Russia.
Yet Syria never became a great patriotic project for Putin’s Kremlin. Russia’s airbase in Hmemim and a tiny naval base at Tartus, near Latakia, were always of more symbolic and diplomatic value than practical. Tartus, for instance, was notionally the forward operating headquarters of Russia’s grandly-entitled Mediterranean Sea Task Force. Yet (as a quick glance at Google Maps will reveal) the main wharf at Tartus is just a hundred meters long, and not long or deep enough for the larger ships of Mediterranean Sea Task Force – such as the missile frigate Admiral Grigorovich – to actually dock there. Furthermore since the beginning of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 the Russian fleet at Tartus has effectively been cut off from its closest home base of Sevastopol in the Black Sea under the terms of the Montreux Convention, which bars passage of warships though the Bosporus Straits in wartime (unless returning to base). Thus in practice, all Russian ships using Tartus would have to sail all the way from the Baltic or the Arctic. And in any case earlier this week all Russian warships and auxiliaries left Tartus and Russian personnel and aircraft have been evacuated from Hmemim, according to Ukrainian military intelligence.
Russian state TV has, so far, downplayed the dramatic collapse of the Kremlin’s sole Middle Eastern protege. Foreign Minister Lavrov called for ‘dialogue’ with the opposition. ‘The fall of Assad is tragic event’, tweeted ultranationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin. ‘He was ally of Russia and the axis of Resistance. We have to accept the blow… This is the fight, the war. But we should never give up. We will win.’
The fall of Assad is, doubtless, a blow to Putin’s prestige. But the swiftness of the regime’s collapse, the fact that Russian forces on the ground reportedly did so little to resist the rebel advance, and the fact that Moscow has already offered asylum to several members of the Assad family and possibly to the fallen President himself, suggests that the Kremlin was willing to sacrifice Assad for the sake of bigger diplomatic games.
Russia’s relationship with Turkey, the major supporter of the victorious HTS rebels in Syria and the big geopolitical winner of regime change in Damascus, has always been far more important for the Kremlin than anything the Assad regime can offer. Turkey is a vital customer of Russian natural gas and an indirect exporter to southern Europe. It’s a major sanctions-busting hub for commerce and passenger transit. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has remained effectively neutral in the Ukraine war and played a key role in brokering attempted peace talks in 2022, and a grain export corridor in the Black Sea for Ukraine which also allowed Russian grain to flow freely. Erdogan is also likely to resume his role as honest broker in future peace talks in 2025.
In return for this economic and diplomatic support, the Kremlin has been all too willing to betray its smaller allies to please Ankara. Earlier this year Russian peacemakers stood aside as Turkish ally Azerbaijan rolled into and ethnically cleansed the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. And now Russia has helped ensure that rather than being protracted and bloody, the end of its ally Assad was swift and relatively painless.
With its Syrian bases gone, Russia will now face difficulties in projecting power in Libya, the Central African Republic and other countries where its semiofficial mercenary forces are deployed. But on the other hand the cruise missiles of the Tartus fleet and the aircraft of the Hmemim base will now be freed for deployment in Ukraine.
For nine years, Putin successfully cosplayed a leader able to project power across continents. But in Syria that power has proved fragile as a house of cards – and Putin’s word, lest anyone doubted it, utterly fickle.
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This is Iran’s annus horribilis
Iran’s Axis of Resistance is falling apart. Israel has significantly degraded Hezbollah’s capabilities and decapitated its leadership. Hamas has been left decimated in Gaza. The regime of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad has collapsed. Intact for now are the Shiite militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen. Such a situation is not only a product of geopolitical trends but also an indictment of the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force. This will necessitate a reorienting of Iranian strategy.
2024 has been Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s annus horribilis. Tehran began this year in a stronger regional position, with Israel seemingly entrapped in an endless conflict with Hamas in Gaza leading to its growing international isolation and Iran’s increasing integration. But then events took a turn for the worse for Khamenei beginning in January, when Saleh al-Arouri, the deputy political leader for Hamas and a key interlocutor with Tehran, was killed by Israel. In March, Israel assassinated the Commander of the IRGC Quds Force’s Department 2000, which led its Levant operations, Mohammad Reza Zahedi and his senior deputies in Syria. This gutted the IRGC of institutional memory, networks, and experience in a critical theater for Tehran. Zahedi’s successor Abbas Nilforoushan was killed months later.
Then came May, when President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, who was an important diplomatic liaison with the Axis of Resistance and once known as a representative of the late Qassem Soleimani, died in a helicopter crash. That scrambled succession plans for the supreme leader as Raisi was thought to be a leading contender. In July, Israel eliminated Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in a Tehran guesthouse, embarrassing Khamenei. Fast forward to the autumn, when the Jewish state launched a series of devastating operations against Hezbollah, killing its leadership, including Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, his successor Hashem Safieddine, many members of its Jihad Council who were wanted by the international community for decades over terrorism, and longtime senior operatives who were the glue within the broader Axis of Resistance. Nasrallah himself was so influential as a strategist for Tehran that there was speculation that he could even succeed Khamenei as supreme leader.
This is not to mention two Israeli retaliatory attacks on Iranian soil that destroyed air defence systems, leaving its homeland vulnerable to attacks and created bottlenecks in its missile production lines. This has exposed Iran and eroded its deterrence.
Iran’s national security strategy has been unravelling in real time. For years, the proxy network of the IRGC has been a crown jewel in its arsenal, alongside its missile and drone program and nuclear capabilities. As then-Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani proclaimed in 2019, ‘over the past four decades, internal stability, national defence capability, strategic depth, and progresses in new and nuclear technologies have increased Iran’s role and influence in regional and global equations.’ But today, Iran’s internal stability is no longer a given after a series of protests, most recently after the killing of Mahsa Amini in 2022; the national defence capability has been dented after Israel’s strike on 26 October on sensitive military sites; and its strategic depth is crumbling with the losses in its proxy network, leaving only its nuclear program which is advancing.
Already, Iranian officials have been expressing fears that the advances of anti-Assad forces are part of a larger plot to weaken Iran. They see a through line from the losses by Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon to the evaporation of the Assad regime in Syria. Ultimately, Iranian decision-shapers fear that next Hezbollah will be even more exposed, their holdings in Iraq and Yemen will collapse, which will then ultimately pose a threat to the Islamic Republic’s grip on power in Tehran. As Mehdi Taeb, a cleric who is head of the Ammar Headquarters, a think tank that is close with the supreme leader, once said at the height of the Syrian Civil War a decade ago, ‘if we keep Syria, we can get Khuzestan back too, but if we lose Syria, we cannot keep Tehran’.
Therefore, this is an earthquake for Iran, given how much it has invested in Syria over years. Some estimates suggest that it provided around $11 billion worth of oil alone to Syria from 2012-21. Leaked documents reveal a total debt owned by Assad to Tehran to be around $50 billion and counting. Other assessments, including by Syria expert Steven Heydemann, in 2015 put the total Iranian support between $15 billion to $20 billion annually. Investments of this nature reflected Assad’s role as a guarantor of a logistics and supply corridor for Hezbollah.
Iran has long been Syria’s closest ally
Iran has long been Syria’s closest ally. The relationship between Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, and Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, began even before the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Hafez al-Assad as president of Syria reportedly offered Khomeini refuge in Syria after he left Iraq. Post-revolution, Assad was the first Arab leader to recognise Khomeini’s government, sent him a gold illuminated Koran, and was the lone supporter in the Arab world of Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. Damascus also historically provided a platform for Hezbollah operations. In September 1983, the U.S. government intercepted messages from Iran’s Intelligence Ministry instructing the Iranian ambassador to Syria to order ‘spectacular action against the United States Marines’ in Lebanon. A declassified U.S. intelligence assessment noted ‘Syria may have provided some logistic support to Tehran in the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait in December 1983’.
The first trip Ali Khamenei made when he was president was to Damascus to visit with Hafez Al-Assad in September 1984. This was one the few international visits Khamenei made when he was president and since he became supreme leader in 1989, he has never left Iran. In fact, Khamenei’s trip, which took place on 6 September, came weeks before the bombing of the US Embassy Annex in Beirut on 20 September, leading to suspicions of Iranian complicity.
But strains have existed in the relationship between Tehran and Damascus despite the warm ties and mutual support over the years. A Special US National Intelligence Estimate from April 1985 noted that differences between Syria and Iran centred over Lebanon, especially given the Assad regime’s openness at the time to ‘reaching limited tactical accommodations with Israel or restoring a balance in Lebanese confessional relationships’. In 1986, during an armed conflict between Amal and Hezbollah, Syria and Iran found themselves on opposite sides, with Assad supporting Amal and Iran backing Hezbollah. Years later in 2021, the IRGC’s commander in Syria Javad Ghaffouri was reportedly ousted from Syria over a ‘violation of Syrian sovereignty’.
Soleimani birthed and expanded the Axis of Resistance, and his successor Esmail Ghaani coordinated it following the 7 October massacre by Hamas in Israel. Throughout 2023, it appeared to be working, with coordination reaching unprecedented levels across the axis – with attacks coming from Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Iran even felt comfortable enough to launch its own direct strike against Israel twice. But Iranian leaders have overplayed their hand, leaving the regime dangerously overconfident, overextended, outgunned, and suffering from severe intelligence failures. The New York Times reported on an internal memorandum from the IRGC which suggested surprise over Syria as ‘unbelievable and strange’. A former Quds Force operative Mohammad Reza Gholamreza lamented this month that Turkey provided Iran reassurances that no operation was planned. This has resulted in the disintegration of chunks of the Axis of Resistance. The deaths of a significant chunk of the IRGC brain trust in the Levant over 2024 has only aggravated this situation. As Assad’s regime was sagging and along with it the infrastructure that Soleimani built, his successor Ghaani was pictured at a mourning ceremony in Tehran removed from the destruction.
However, despite the unprecedented defeats, it would be unwise to underestimate Iranian willpower to rebuild and protect its interests. Over the years, Iran’s leadership has made common cause and partnerships with not only Shiite militias but also Sunni extremists. This can be seen with Hamas, its harbouring of Al-Qaeda on Iranian soil, and its resourcing of the Taliban in Afghanistan, which has been a historic foe. Iran almost went to war with the Taliban in 1998 over the killing of Iranian diplomats. But years later, intelligence assessments surfaced that Iran offered bounties to Taliban fighters to kill US forces in Afghanistan. The Shiite presence in Syria will also continue to be a recruitment pool for Tehran. The Quds Force still retains roughly 5,000 officers, not to mention the IRGC’s other subunits which remain on the scene. Tehran may seek flexible partnerships with such Sunni actors to protect its interests as much as it can.
Thus, Iran’s grand strategy of seeking to eradicate the State of Israel and push the United States out of the region is unlikely to fundamentally change. But the regime’s strategic depth will be constrained and the means in which it achieves those ends – via its proxy network of partnerships – will have to shift.
The recent events are likely disorienting for Khamenei. At the age of 85 and planning for his succession, the Assad regime in Syria has been at Tehran’s side since 1979, for the totality of his presidency and much of his supreme leadership. Coupled with Hassan Nasrallah’s demise, this is likely to shake the regime, with voices in the political elite already questioning why Tehran has invested so much in Syria only to be left with colossal debts. Assad’s fall could also accelerate a debate within Tehran over whether to develop nuclear weapons, empowering the growing chorus of voices advocating for a change in the Iranian nuclear doctrine to protect the regime. There will be others in Iran who will likely instead counsel negotiations to buy the Islamic Republic time and space as a means of survival.
In the end, Iran faces losses that are unprecedented since the Iran-Iraq War and will have to contend with a new American president who is unpredictable and slated to employ maximum pressure against Iran. With this dynamic, will come a reckoning and a forced reconsideration of its strategy. Tehran may be weakened but is still dangerous.
Syria is up for grabs
After 13 years of war that began with street protests during the heady days of the Arab Spring and morphed into one of the bloodiest civil conflicts in the Middle East’s recent history, the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian strongman, collapsed in just over a week.
Sunni rebels – some of them former jihadists – who had broken out of the north-west province of Idlib swept into the capital Damascus after overrunning the major cities of Aleppo, Homs and Hama on their way south.
On the road into the city witnesses described seeing uniforms, military equipment and even tanks abandoned by the Syrian Army. On the country’s borders, queues began forming of displaced families desperate to return home after more than a decade as refugees.
In Damascus’s Umayyad Square, young men clambered onto tanks, shot in the air with automatic weapons, danced and took selfies. Many spoke of a moment of hope.
At Sednaya prison, one of the world’s most notorious penitentiaries where up to 30,000 inmates were reportedly tortured and killed, the cells were opened amid emotional scenes.
The unexpected fall of the Assad dynasty, which has ruled Syria since 1971, marks a seismic shift in the power politics of a region that is already aflame as well as a major setback for Iran, Russia and Hezbollah, Assad’s principal backers.
The rebel takeover of the country is also perhaps the most significant result so far of Israel’s taking a sledgehammer to the geopolitical architecture of the Middle East, in a bid to establish itself as the regional strongman.
Assad’s regime was on the brink of collapse in 2015 after opposition activists and rebel groups seized control of large swathes of the country. But it was saved by the intervention of Russian air power and Iran’s sending in thousands of fighters from Hezbollah, it’s proxy in Lebanon.
Now, however, Russia is stretched to breaking point on the plains of eastern Europe as President Vladimir Putin seeks to overwhelm Ukraine, and was unwilling to commit more resources to protecting Assad.
Hezbollah, meanwhile, has seen its fighting capacity gutted in its war with Israel which has killed much of its leadership. There were reports yesterday that several Hezbollah armoured vehicles had set off from Lebanon to bolster the Syrian regime only to be destroyed by Israeli air strikes.
Iran, the major Shia power in the region, is also on the back foot, with its economy teetering and its decades-long effort to build a regional axis of resistance to counter the power of Israel and Saudi Arabia in tatters.
With control of Syria now up for grabs, some analysts are comparing the significance of the fall of Damascus to the 1979 Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah in Iran, brought the Mullahs to power and set the scene for half a century of bloody power struggle in the Middle East between Sunni and Shia Muslims.
Syria now is at a crossroads. It could head down the path to turmoil and blood-letting as happened after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003 and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011.
But there is also hope that, having already endured such a brutal civil war, and with the old regime being swept from power with so little blood spilled, the various rebel factions will manage to unite to form a national unity government.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the leading rebel group, spent years burnishing its credentials as the government of Idlib, a north-western Syrian province that is home to 3 to 4 million Sunni Muslims, mostly refugees, who lived beyond the writ of Damascus.
There is fear that these Sunni militants – whose forebearers spawned a decade of violent international jihad and the horrors of al-Qa’eda and isis – will impose a hardline Islamist state that will persecute Shia, Christians and other religious minorities.
Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, however, the leader of HTS, has been at pains to stress that he intends to rule as a leader of all Syrians. When the rebels swept into Aleppo this past week he reassured residents that he would not be imposing Islamic strictures or banning worship by religious minorities.
In the capital Damascus yesterday HTS fighters and rebels from other groups were guarding government buildings, a far cry from the debacle that ensued after US soldiers reached Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Most Syrians, exhausted and demoralised after years of conflict, seemed at least ready to give HTS a chance.
Residents were out on the streets of several cities celebrating the demise of Assad. While some fighters shot in the air others joined arms and danced in the streets.
There was no early word yesterday of the fate of Bashar al-Assad although Moscow issued a statement saying he had left the country after negotiations with ‘other factions’. It said it did not know where he had gone.
Many of Assad’s close associates will probably have fled to a strip of land on the coast which is the heartland of the country’s Alawite community, from which Assad hailed.
It is also home to a major Russian air base in Latakia and Moscow’s only warm-water naval facility at Tartus from where it projects power into the Mediterranean and beyond.
Last week Moscow launched bombing raids against rebel targets, including against hospitals, in a response that did little to alter realities on the ground. But it has now indicated it is willing to negotiate with the leading rebel factions that are Syria’s new leaders.
Turkey will likely have an even big say in the future of Syria and could emerge as the major regional beneficiary of Assad’s fall. Of six million refugees forced out of Syria by the war, nearly four million currently live in Turkey.
Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan pressured Assad for months to negotiate a power-sharing deal with the rebels that might have allowed many of the refugees to return from Turkey.
But Assad, a cruel and uncompromising despot even by the standards of his benighted region, had refused. Ankara finally seems to have run out of patience with Damascus and given the green light for the rebel advance.
As for Syria’s future much will now depend on the role of other powers in the region. Israel will be pleased to see such a staunch ally of Iran and Hezbollah fall, but wary of a resurgence of Sunni fundamentalism.
Turkey will be looking for a greater role in the north of the country where it is in a decades-old fight with Kurdish guerrillas, and the Gulf states, which had begun to rehabilitate Assad, will also be jockeying for position.
Yesterday the Syrian prime minister Mohammed Ghazi al-Jalali, who is still nominally in control of the country, called for early elections. But others warned that after half a century of despotic rule and with 300,000 dead and half a million injured in the war, slowly rebuilding state institutions was more important than an early vote.
In the US meanwhile, the Biden administration said that it would not be intervening to support either side in the conflict.
Donald Trump, who will take the reins of power on 20 January, wrote on social media: ‘Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, and the United States should have nothing to do with it. This is not our fight. Let it play out. Do not get involved!’
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How Assad fell
The astonishing and abrupt fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus is a moment of historic importance for the Middle East, in which the shifting of tectonic plates can be plainly felt. But which plates in particular? And what are the immediate implications?
Firstly, it is important just to contemplate the dimensions of what has just taken place. The Assad regime’s beginning is usually dated to 1970. In that year Hafez Assad, father of the now deposed Bashar, launched a coup to topple his former ally, Salah Jadid, and proclaimed himself president. His family then ruled Syria, uninterruptedly, until this week. But it’s worth remembering that the Ba’ath party, through which both Assad and his predecessor emerged, had ruled Syria since 1963. So the fall of Bashar represents the end of 61 years of uninterrupted rule in Syria of this party.
The Assads of course long since emptied the structures and institutions of this party of any real role or content. Theirs was a family regime. The more meaningful broader foundation on which they rested was the support and cooptation of the Alawi community, from which the family hailed. The fall of the Assads represents the end of Alawi ascendancy in Syria, and the return of the domination of Syria’s Sunni Arab majority, from which the uprising emerged.
The end, when it came, was brief. A lightning dash by the Sunni Islamist Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) militia, down the spine of cities which fell like dominos in an astonishing ten days. First Aleppo, then Hama, Homs and finally Damascus. All with minimal resistance from the regime’s forces.
But while few if any Syria watchers predicted the speed with which the regime would fall, the decrepit and rotten nature of the Syrian government’s institutions under Bashar al-Assad had been apparent for some time.
Assad had survived the civil war launched against him in the period 2012-20 not because of the strength of his own forces, but because of the power and loyalty of his allies. Specifically, Russia and Iran stepped in to save him during those years. Within a year of the launch of the uprising, Bashar was on the ropes. The decision in 2013 of Iran to deploy its proxy militias from Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan plugged the gap in loyal manpower that would almost certainly have led to Assad’s downfall at that time. His army was large on paper. But it consisted mainly of conscripted Sunni Arab Syrians. Much of it therefore couldn’t be relied upon for use against an insurgency raised from among those communities.
The Iran-supported militias, Hezbollah among them, were able to stem the rebel tide. Then in late 2015, Russian aircraft were deployed for the first time over the skies of Syria. They successfully stopped a rebel advance toward the western coast under way at that time, which would have threatened the Russian airbase at Khmemim, and the naval facilities at Tartus and Latakia.
Thanks to these interventions, the regime was able to roll up rebel areas of control over the following three years. By 2019, only one zone of insurgent control remained, in the north west. This area proved impervious to the regime’s ambitions, because of the presence of Turkish forces in the area, and the guarantee they offered.
As it now turns out, the Turkish President’s decision not to entirely abandon the remnants of the insurgency was a historic choice. It made possible the quiet incubation of HTS military strength in the subsequent years, and its eruption southwards this year.
Reporting in Syria in those years, I observed the feebleness of Assad’s forces up close, and took careful note of it. On the ground in Damascus in 2017, I saw the helplessness of the local police force when faced with the antics of armed Russians on the streets of Syria’s supposed capital, and the crucial role played by Iran-created militias in carrying out daily security tasks there. Damascus didn’t look like the capital of a regime that had successfully defeated an insurgency. Rather, it looked like a city under foreign occupation, with the empty shell of a local regime maintained for convenience’s sake.
In 2019, in the Tal Tamr area in Syria’s north east, my colleagues and I similarly observed close up and with astonishment the decrepit state of Assad’s line infantry battalions sent to help defend against an expected Turkish push southwards at that time. In the positions we visited, the troops lacked basic provisions and medical supplies, and begged for these from neighbouring Kurdish units.
So it was plain that Assad continued to ‘rule’ because of Iran and Russia. Which raises of course, the question: why didn’t they help him this time? Why haven’t we just witnessed a repeat of 2013, and 2015, in which Iranian proxy manpower and Russian aircraft intervene to stop the insurgent march southward?
The crucial difference between those years and what has just transpired is that none of the forces which had saved Assad in the past were able to help this time.
Russia is committed to the strategic quagmire of its war in Ukraine, which is consuming thousands of lives every month. There was nothing to spare for the long standing client on the Mediterranean.
Iran, meanwhile, is reeling from a serious of blows inflicted by Israel in the course of the last two months. Most significantly, Israel’s crippling of Hezbollah left Tehran bereft of its most powerful proxy instrument. Jerusalem’s counter attack on Iran itself on 26 October left Tehran without air defence and unable to continue or escalate the direct confrontation with Israel. Recent events in Iraq have revealed that Iran’s client militias too were keen to avoid any possible clash with Israel, following an oblique Israeli threat of possible direct retribution for the militias’ not very effectual efforts to launch drones and missiles at the Jewish state.
The upshot was that Iran’s proxy militia system, which mobilised and saved Assad in 2013, was unavailable a decade letter.
Without any help from his friends, Assad’s hollow regime rapidly dissolved. Its demise is testimony to the determination of the Sunni Islamist insurgents, HTS’s Abu Mohammed al-Jolani chief among them, and their backers in Ankara. But the absence of Assad’s allies, reflecting the current weakness and vulnerability of Iran, is the single most significant factor behind the dramatic events of recent days.
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Syria is emerging from a nightmare
Gradually, and then suddenly, the regime of Bashar al-Assad has collapsed. This century’s most evil tyrant has fled Syria, and Damascus has fallen to the opponents of the regime. Across the country, a new political reality reigns. In towns and cities across Syria, the regime’s torture chambers are being opened, and the prisons liberated.
Men whose adulthoods have been stolen from them by the tyrant are emerging into the fires of day. Brothers are being united after being separated for 40 years. They were separated when one was 18 and the other younger, because the elder of them fell foul of a regime patrol and was taken away for torture for the remainder of his natural life.
There is a mother who lost her son 15 years ago, because he was accused of daubing some anti-dictator graffiti, or not reciting the right words in school, or conspiring to run a radio station that did not sing the praises of the leader, or demonise his enemies, or was conducted in a banned language, or contained the wrong history, the unapproved history, the things you were not then permitted to say.
The petty criminals, denied a stake in the economy because of their race or faith or region of birth, imprisoned for so long their whole families have died of old age and grief. They’re coming out now, with nothing left to live for.
Into the depths of Syria’s prisons have disappeared more than one generation. The refugees one speaks to, the people still in the country’s north, all have a detainee they know: someone they pray for nightly, someone whose fate is not known, someone they hope against all logic is still alive and might soon be photographed leaving somewhat anti-climactically through a newly sprung prison door.
The prisons are hell on earth. They cannot be described in ordinary language. I could give you estimates of the numbers held and tortured. I could tell you of the hundreds of thousands starved, beaten, and maltreated to death. There are, of course, thanks to the efforts of the defector codenamed Caesar, photographs of thousands of emaciated bodies fresh from the torture chambers.
You still wouldn’t believe me.
A decade ago, this was already said to be the most documented mass-killing in world history. That is still the case.
One day, Syrians told me and each other, for over a decade, we will open up the dungeons of Sednaya, the prison of all prisons, the Lubyanka of our own country, and we will make of it a museum.
Guides will show people the cells that were once filled with bodies in various states of dying and decay. We will read, with melancholy signs attached to translate, the final messages scratched into walls with ripped fingernails.
Now Sednaya has been liberated.
Will it be enough?
Many have died who might have told of what happened to them. They cannot testify. But all of this was recorded. Ba’athist states, of which Syria was one, suffer from bureaucracy like some suffer with a chronic illness. For a decade, foreigners have been told that if the international courts and tribunals decide to turn their hands to Syria, they will have so much evidence to weigh and to adjudicate that the inevitable trials will be difficult to stage-manage.
So many killings, so much torture. So many hands visible in the issuing of the instructions. If any of them are alive and captured, the people at the top will be easy, even a delight, to prosecute. Their indictments, their condemnations, already fill warehouses.
But I will make a prediction. The regime has fallen and its jails are opened. If they are kept, and not burnt down by their liberated inmates, and, temporarily, teary-eyed reporters and their camera crews mill about in these prisons, and document it – and people see all this on their phones and shed hypocritical tears about man’s cruelty to man – we will still, very easily, forget all of this.
Polite society forgot it for a decade. Easily and energetically, they forgot it for a decade.
People live fantasy lives. They make up their reality. Evil is a hard problem. Better to pretend it doesn’t exist. There is no evidence that can convince ordinary people that evil has been done, if peace of mind requires that they disbelieve it.
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The BBC has a ‘talent’ problem
So here we are again – another well-known BBC presenter is facing a growing list of allegations of misconduct, tarnishing the image of the state broadcaster.
This time around it’s MasterChef presenter Greg Wallace. In the depressingly familiar pattern of previous scandals, we’ve learned that concerns had been raised repeatedly with the BBC, but no meaningful action had been taken against Wallace until the scandal broke.
My colleagues and I, working in the newsroom as the Wallace story broke, ended up once again reporting on the failings and double standards of my employer, and wondering why our overlords seem unable to learn from past mistakes.
It’s worth stressing here that the dismay of the public is shared by the journalists who do the real graft at the BBC – the tireless staffers who make sure running orders are filled and hammer at their keyboards 24/7, writing the scripts their highly-paid presenter colleagues read out to unwarranted acclaim.
I vividly recall a key figure on the news desk ranting with genuine outrage about what he saw as the obstruction and obfuscation of the BBC’s higher-ups and PR spinners over the Huw Edwards affair, a reputational disaster that should surely have prompted resignations from the corporation’s executive tier. Instead of a major managerial shake-up however, more damage has been done to the BBC’s standing again.
My theory on why this keeps happening is that the BBC has its own internal cult of celebrity that gives high-profile figures greater leeway to behave as they wish, rather than as they should. From what I have witnessed, senior managers seem bedazzled and fixated with the ‘talent’, much to the chagrin of the people who do the spade work behind the scenes.
I have lost count of the times I have sat through presentations given by editorial bosses who insist on namechecking well-known presenters and correspondents whilst failing to acknowledge the lower-rung journalists who made such ‘amazing work’ possible. (These grating pep talks usually conclude with a morale-sapping rundown of the latest round of job cuts, with the axe invariably falling well clear of senior management.)
This undervaluing of regular hacks and overvaluing of overpaid ‘talent’ has created an imbalance in corporate governance. I have written here before about two-tier editorial policy on certain issues at the BBC. What is also clear is that the broadcaster takes a two-tier approach to policing the conduct of its employees.
It’s easy to come by examples. Section 15.3.5 of the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines concerns ‘Risks of Conflicts of Interest’ and enumerates four ‘principal areas of risk that may arise from an individual’s external interests and activities’.
One of these areas is ‘the risk of bringing the BBC into disrepute’. Another is ‘the risk of bringing the BBC’s impartiality into doubt’. I decided to put my two-tier theory to the test by contacting the BBC press office about the controversial social media activities of one of the broadcaster’s best-known presenters, Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine.
A cycling evangelist, Vine has for some time taken it upon himself to film motorists he deems to be dangerous as he rides through London. He then posts the footage for his 774,000 followers on X, with captions and dramatic sound effects. Unwitting drivers have been targeted and scolded by Vine, who acts as judge and jury in the videos.
A recent example shows Vine cycling through an amber light on his bike and nearly colliding with a bus. The footage zooms in on the face of the female bus driver, clearly identifying her as Vine intones gravely, ‘This is a very dangerous driver. That’s a bus driver who’s going to kill.’
Imagine how that woman might feel when she realises she has been publicly castigated with no right of reply (a basic tenet of journalism) by one of the BBC’s most high-profile presenters. What if she faced reprisals from Vine’s fellow cycling zealots or loses her job as a result?
You might think this kind of guerilla journalism clearly risks bring the BBC into disrepute. Yet a BBC spokesperson responded to my anonymised email with a curt: ‘Jeremy is aware of his duty under the BBC’s social media guidelines.’
Vine doesn’t limit himself to proselytising about road safety. In another post he writes: ‘I don’t know who cut down the Sycamore Gap tree, but if and when they are convicted, we need life sentences.’ In what world does this reflect impartiality? This case is currently going through the courts.
Another example of the two-tier approach taken by the BBC can be seen in the almost vertical career trajectory of the corporation’s disinformation specialist and BBC Verify star, Marianna Spring.
As first reported by the New European, Spring has been accused of embellishing her CV. But this has not stalled her meteoric rise. Following a path ingloriously blazed by Robert Peston (who during his stint at the Beeb was dubbed by newsroom wags the ‘ego-nomics editor’), Spring is one of the BBC’s new breed of celebrity reporters who are seemingly encouraged to put themselves at the heart of whatever story they’re covering. It doesn’t appear to have dawned on Spring or the BBC that this might be the answer to the question posed by her podcast title: Why Do You Hate Me?
The decision to ignore Spring’s CV has damaged BBC Verify’s credibility and has potentially made it impossible for the corporation’s own disinformation queen to pursue certain stories that fall within her remit. As Steerpike has noted, the BBC was initially strangely silent when the accuracy of Rachel Reeves’s CV first came under scrutiny in October. It doesn’t take a genius to work out why.
Only this week we learned Clive Myrie, the man BBC bosses hope could become the new Huw Edwards (but without the horrifying hinterland), has also blotted his copybook yet suffered no meaningful consequences.
It’s emerged Myrie failed to declare to the BBC at least £145,000 of earnings from engagements outside of the corporation. He’s said sorry and pledged not to take part in any more paid external events ‘in the foreseeable future, beyond a handful of pre-existing commitments.’ So that’s okay then. One might forgive Myrie for a side-hustle or two if he was paid peanuts, but the news anchor and Mastermind host took home at least £310,000 of licence payers’ money this year.
Although a universe away from some of the appalling scandals that have rocked the BBC in the past (the unspeakable Jimmy Savile revelations being the most notable), all of this demonstrates that no matter what the corporation claims, it continues to be lax in policing its stars.
And until this approach changes, you can be sure that it won’t be long before another top BBC name is making headlines again for all the wrong reasons.