Syria

The rebel fighters descended the stairs into the gloom. The rhythmic beat of the sledgehammer was the only sound as it increased in speed. Eventually, a small hole appeared in the wall of Bashar al-Assad’s “human slaughterhouse”.

All morning thousands of civilians trudged up the hill to Sednaya, a prison on the outskirts of Damascus where, among the broken glass and discarded documents, they came to find clues to the whereabouts of thousands of Syrians jailed, tortured and killed by the regime.

Shocking images of the victims in the basement of the Sednaya prison of the assassin Bashar Al Assad. This is how they were found. pic.twitter.com/9sOYLRoX3o

— Mossad (@MossadUS) December 10, 2024

The Syrian rebel forces that successfully toppled the regime of former President Bashar Assad have installed a transitional prime minister.

Mohammed al Bashir, the leader of the terrorist group Hayat Tahrir al Sham’s political wing, will begin fielding a Cabinet to head the incoming government.

Bashir has served as the head of the oppositional Syrian Salvation Government in northern Syria since January, and his appointment indicates HTS is attempting to scale up its established, regional political bureau instead of building a new regime from scratch.

The regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has fallen. On November 27, a rebel coalition led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) launched a rapid-fire offensive against Assad’s forces. Barely a week later, Aleppo and Hama — Syria’s second and third largest cities respectively — were under rebel control. Emboldened by these successes, Syrian opposition forces carried out offensive operations targeting Homs and came knocking on the outskirts of Damascus, dreaming of regime change.

By the time he fled the country, ending a 24-year rule that veered from optimism to brutal repression and death, Assad was facing a revolt on three fronts. There was the HTS advance from the north, via Homs; an uprising in the east, where a US-backed alliance led by Syrian Kurdish fighters seized the city of Deir el-Zor; and in the south, where rebels said they seized control of the southern city of Daraa on Saturday.

Trudeau’s Syrians should now head home as well …

This is Dortmund, Germany.

One million Syrian refugees came to the country in 2015 to escape Assad.

As of today, they are no longer refugees. Assad is gone. They can now all move back to Syria and take part in this new government.

Germany should not be their home any longer. pic.twitter.com/KCy5Yo4x7W

— ♛ ✡︎ (@NiohBerg) December 8, 2024

I wonder if our cities will see combo Hamas and Syria celebration riots?

Abu Mohammed al-Golani, the rebel leader whose stunning insurgency toppled Syria’s President Bashar Assad, has spent years working to remake his public image, renouncing longtime ties to al-Qaeda and depicting himself as a champion of pluralism and tolerance. In recent days, the insurgency even dropped his nom de guerre and began referring to him by his real name, Ahmad al-Sharaa.

The extent of that transformation from jihadi extremist to would-be state builder is now put to the test.

The most significant news from the Middle East since the Hamas terrorist raid on Israel last year is happening in real time and for whatever reason legacy media is giving it the minimum required coverage as if it’s just another skirmish in the war-torn region. It’s not.

There is no incentive for factions to tread gently

The Syrian jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) surprised the world and probably itself with its almost unimpeded conquest of Aleppo at the weekend, conquering in hours territory that had been bloodily fought over for many years. And like an ancient bacterium released from melting permafrost, the sudden unfreezing of Syria’s assumed frozen conflict has released noxious old strains of geopolitical discourse into a very different world. One of the things that made the Syrian war, at its height, so hard for casual observers to understand was that it was a series of rapidly-shifting, amoral and pragmatic alliances and betrayals. Yet these convoluted dynamics were filtered for external observers through a moralising internet war, aimed at mobilising foreign intervention: the results were disastrous for Syria’s people, on all sides.

This time around, we may still hope that things turn out differently. Rather than a reversion to the great crisis of a decade ago, the dramatic events of the weekend, and the international reactions, highlight how far the region, and the wider world, have changed since the war’s bloody height.