About two weeks ago, seemingly out of the blue, an army of Sunni Islamists and fellow travellers spilled out of Syria’s Idlib region. Their offensive met with little resistance – the ‘official’ Syrian Army (whose soldiers are majority Sunni, too) simply disintegrated. The regime of Bashar Al-Assad fell like a house of cards, with a speed nobody (including yours truly) foresaw.
If anything, this shows how poor our understanding of the Middle East is: even people from the region, who are carefully following events, struggle to predict them; let alone the hapless West.
When has a Jihadi takeover ever been a blessing?
