An anti-government fighter tears down a portrait of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad in Aleppo, after jihadists and their allies entered the northern Syrian city, on November 30, 2024.
CNN NEWS | Published December 1, 2029
“Our leader forever” was a slogan one often saw in Syria during the era of President Hafez al-Assad, father of today’s Syrian president.
The prospect that the dour, stern Syrian leader would live forever was a source of dark humor for many of my Syrian friends when I lived and worked in Aleppo in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Hafez al-Assad died in June 2000. He wasn’t immortal after all.
His regime, however, lives on under the leadership of his son Bashar al-Assad.
There were moments when the Bashar regime’s survival looked in doubt. When the so-called Arab Spring rolled across the region in 2011, toppling autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, and mass protests broke out in Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, some began to write epitaphs for the Assad dynasty.
But Syria’s allies – Iran, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Russia – came to the rescue. For the past few years the struggle in Syria between a corrupt, brutal regime in Damascus and a divided, often extreme opposition seemed frozen in place.
Once shunned by his fellow Arab autocrats, Bashar al-Assad was gradually regaining the dubious respectability Arab regimes afford one another.
Was the nightmare of the Syrian civil war coming to an end? Had Bashar al-Assad won? Certainly, that was the assumption of many, despite the fact that large parts of Syria were controlled by a US-backed Kurdish militia and Turkish-supported Sunni factions; that Hezbollah, Iran and Russia propped up the regime; that the US controlled areas in eastern Syria; that Israel conducted air strikes whenever and wherever it saw fit; and that ISIS, though defeated, still managed to launch hit-and-run attacks.
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SOURCE: www.cnn.com
RELATED: Putin ‘Letting Syrian Rebels Overthrow Assad’: Ex-Trump Intel Chief
NEWSWEEK| Published December 1, 2024
Russia appears to be “letting the Syrian rebels overthrow” President Bashar al-Assad according to Richard Grenell, who served as acting director of National Intelligence for a time during Donald Trump’s first administration.
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Grenell, who had been tipped as a possible member of Trump’s incoming administration, commented: “Russia seems to be letting the Syrian rebels overthrow Assad. Big. Time to play chess.”
Syrian rebels have made lightning gains across northern Syria since launching a major offensive on November 27, seizing the “majority” of the country’s second-largest city Aleppo on Friday according to the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Russia launched a military intervention to support Assad in 2015 and still has thousands of personnel in the country, but its air force has been unable to stop the rebels swift offensive.
Newsweek contacted Grenell via Instagram direct message on Saturday outside of regular office hours. The Russian and Syrian foreign ministries were contacted at the same time via email.
Grenell was the acting director of National Intelligence, a Cabinet-level role, under Trump from February to May 2020. Prior to this, he was appointed as the American ambassador to Germany by Trump in 2018. On November 22, Reuters reported Grenell was in the running to be Trump’s new special envoy for the Russia-Ukraine conflict, though former National Security Adviser Keith Kellogg ended up getting the position.
The rebel capture of large sections of Aleppo marks a sharp reversal from 2016 when Assad’s forces, backed by Russia and Iran, seized the city following several years of brutal fighting which left thousands dead.
The fresh offensive has involved a number of rebel groups hostile to Assad with the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham faction, formed in 2017 by a coalition of different groups, some of which were affiliated with Al-Qaeda, playing a key role.
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SOURCE: www.newsweek.com
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