The overthrow of Bashar Al-Assad’s despotic regime in Syria this weekend has been cheered on by the UK government as well as much of the mainstream media.
Speaking on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg on BBC One, deputy PM Angela Rayner said that she ‘welcomed’ the news of Assad’s fall. Yesterday, foreign secretary David Lammy celebrated the Syrian president’s toppling, telling MPs that Assad is a ‘monster’, a ‘drug dealer’ and a ‘rat’.
In a sense, the government’s response is understandable. No one should mourn the end of the Assad dynasty’s brutal decades-long rule. Furthermore, Assad’s fall deals another significant blow to his despotic backers, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Russia, depriving both of a key strategic ally. Lammy’s geopolitical analysis leaves a lot to be desired at times, but he is right to say that Assad’s defeat is a humiliation for both Moscow and Tehran.
Yet too often, this understandable happiness over the fall of the Syrian dictator has morphed into an endorsement of the Islamist forces that toppled him. Sir John Sawers, the former head of MI6, even went so far as to describe Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group that led the offensive against Assad, as ‘a liberation movement’.
