Syrian Revolution

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It bothers me that the HTS was a breakaway from Al Qeada. As much as I don't like Al Assad, I think it would have been better if he was overthrown by the more secular rebels, like the Kurdish ones, because otherwise they may turn out to be worse than Al Assad. I just hope that this doesn't turn out like another Iranian revolution.

The Assad family’s decadeslong reign in Syria came to an abrupt end Sunday when rebel forces captured Damascus after a stunning lightning-strike rout across the country.

Hassan Abdul-Ghani, senior commander of the militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), claimed victory for the rebel forces that stormed across Syria in a matter of days and entered Damascus overnight.

“We declare the city of Damascus free from the tyrant Bashar al-Assad,” he said in a post on WhatsApp. “To the displaced people around the world, Free Syria awaits you.”

Videos circulating on social media and verified by NBC News appeared to show Syrians celebrating across Damascus overnight and into the day, as crowds honked horns, waved flags and fired their guns into the air, while others posed for selfies standing on top of a tank.

Photos and video showed people toppling statues of Hafez al-Assad, father of ousted President Bashar Al-Assad, in cities across Syria, including in the Assad stronghold of Latakia.

Assad fled the country and relinquished the presidency. That was confirmed by patron Russia, which supported the regime in crushing what started as a peaceful protest movement and became a vicious civil war.

“As a result of negotiations between Bashar Assad and a number of participants in the armed conflict on the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic, he decided to leave the presidential post and left the country, giving instructions to transfer power peacefully,” according to a Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry statement.

Russian state media reported Sunday that Assad fled to Moscow. A senior Biden administration official confirmed that Russia has given Assad asylum.

Syria’s prime minister, Ghazi al-Jalali, remained in his home, he said in an earlier statement, and does not intend to leave “except in a peaceful manner that ensures the continued functioning of public institutions and state facilities, promoting security and reassurance for our fellow citizens.”

He said the government is ready to cooperate with “any leadership chosen by the Syrian people.”

HTS General Command said it also freed the people being held in Sednaya Prison. The Syrian government has detained thousands at the military prison on the outskirts of Damascus, according to Reuters.

“We announce to the Syrian people the news of the liberation of our captives and the breaking of their chains, proclaiming the end of the era of oppression in Sednaya Prison.”

Syrian state radio, Sham FM, reported that Damascus International Airport had been evacuated, all employees removed and all flights suspended. It was not clear Sunday who was in charge of the state outlet.

International reaction
President Joe Biden on Sunday lauded the fall of the Assad regime.

“At long last, the Assad regime has fallen,” Biden said near the beginning of his speech.

He added, “It’s a moment of historic opportunity for the long-suffering people of Syria to build a better future for their proud country,” but he warned: “It’s also a moment of risk and uncertainty as we all turn to the question of what comes next.”

Biden outlined continued U.S. involvement in Syria, saying, “We will engage with all Syrian groups, including within the process led by the United Nations, to establish a transition away from the Assad regime, toward independent, sovereign and independent … Syria with a new constitution, new government that serves all Syrians.”

HTS origins
HTS grew out of the former Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and the United Nations.

It’s one of several competing forces in Syria fighting to bring down the Assad regime that, since the beginning of the country’s civil war almost 14 years ago, has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians.

A 2020 ceasefire left Assad in control of 70% of Syria, but some 6.8 million Syrians have fled the country.

Many have gone to Europe, where the sudden influx of Syrian refugees has fueled a resurgence of anti-immigrant far-right movements from Portugal to Poland.

The recent battlefield successes of HTS are the culmination of four years of trying to turn the rebel forces into a force capable of challenging Assad’s army and equipping them with drones and other high-tech weapons of war, experts have said.

“The expansion of units ... along with large-scale indigenous rocket and missile production — has created a force that Assad’s regime has seriously struggled to defend against, let alone outmaneuver,” Charles Lister, director of the Syria program at the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank, said on X.

Yes,,yes thought this all was good except that it smells of the USA attempting to maintsin destabilization in the middle east .Using Turkey and Israel.. But Netenyahu, wanted in on the spoils of War and take over part of another soveriegn nation . But this one is in trouble .. So opportunity for theft of land, while Syria is busy elsewhere . This seems obscene to me . Especially after Israel has done what it has to its neighbours Lebanon and Palestine.

Families and rescue teams have rushed to a notorious Damascus prison where detainees are feared to be held underground, as many Syrians who disappeared under President Bashar al-Assad emerged to reunite with their loved ones.

The Kremlin signaled that President Vladimir Putin personally approved asylum for Assad in Moscow, where the opposition flag was raised at the Syrian Embassy.

Israel said it had struck suspected chemical weapons sites in Syria to prevent them from falling into "the hands of extremists." The United States ordered more than 75 strikes on ISIS camps to stop the terrorist group from taking advantage of the upheaval.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which led the assault against Assad along with other groups, has historic ties to Al Qaeda and is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and the United Nations. It has recently appeared to renounce more extremist elements.

For much of its 13 years, the horrors of Syria’s grinding civil war felt unending. Now, after just 11 days, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad is gone, the dictator fleeing his country in the face of a sensational advance by rebel forces.

Many Syrians are jubilant.

Assad clung to power through domestic oppression, torture and murder, eventually suppressing a 2011 uprising with a mix of chemical weapons and deadly backing from Russia and Iran. That seems to be over, bringing to an end his family’s iron-fist dynasty that began in 1971.

However, this is far from a quick, simple fix. The rebels who toppled Assad are led by a group that the United States and others regard as a terrorist organization. And they reclaim a Syria deeply scarred by more than a decade of war — with no clear path to what happens next or how it might be governed.

“There is undoubtedly justified optimism in Syria today after the overthrow of the brutalizing dictatorship of Assad,” said Burcu Ozcelik, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank. “What is simultaneously true is that Syria remains fragile and faces an uncertain future.”

Here’s what to know.

Assad is gone
The sensational news that spread across Syria and social media was eventually confirmed in an announcement Sunday from Russian state media: This once feared strongman had fled the country his family had ruled for more than 50 years.


He did so as the rebels entered and seized Damascus, seemingly with little fightback from Assad’s government forces. Their lightning advance only began Nov. 27, quickly overrunning the cities of Aleppo, Hama and then the capital itself.

The rebels appear to have capitalized on Syria’s backers being distracted elsewhere: Russia in Ukraine, and Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah fighting Israel. Nevertheless, many experts did not see this coming. And Moscow was no different.

“What happened surprised the whole world, and we are no exception here,” Kremlin spokesman Dimitry Peskov said Monday.

Syria dominated international consciousness for almost a decade, its civil war erupting after Assad crushed peaceful protests during the region-wide 2011 Arab Spring.

It soon became a head-spinning, complex conflict, with Iran, Russia and Hezbollah lining up behind Assad and the U.S., Turkey and others supporting different rebel groups, which in turn fought not just each other but also the Islamic State terror group as it captured and then surrendered large swaths of Syria and Iraq.

But until last month the conflict had been largely at a stalemate, after Assad’s forces regained control of much of the country.

Syrians are celebrating — and searching
As the rebels swept through Damascus, celebratory gunfire reverberated around the streets as people swaddled themselves in the flag of the Syrian opposition and toppled statues of the former ruler.

More than 13 million people fled their homes in the war, according to the U.N.’s refugee agency, UNHCR. Some 7 million of them were displaced within the country and 6 million abroad — scattered throughout Turkey, other parts of the Middle East and beyond. The conflict in Syria partly contributed to a wave of mass migration into Europe, met by a right-wing backlash across the continent that is still reverberating today.

Much of this diaspora has also responded to Assad’s downfall with astonished glee, some rushing to return home.

Thousands of people rallied across European cities such as London and Berlin, capital of the continent’s largest Syrian population, Germany, where more than 1 million of them live. It wasn’t just the fighting they were escaping.

The brutality of the Assad regime was illustrated in stark detail Sunday as Syrians began freeing people from the regime’s network of political prisons — essentially dungeons — where rights groups say it disappeared, tortured and executed its own people.

One of these liberated gulags was Saydnaya military prison outside Damascus — known as the “human slaughterhouse” — where Amnesty International says people were executed every week, an estimated 13,000 in total. On Monday it was being searched after survivors reported the possible presence of secret underground jail cells, with families across the country looking for loved ones long held as political prisoners.

What next for the rebels?
That brutality has been replaced with uncertainty.

The rebels are led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a group that grew from an Al Qaeda affiliate. Its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, was involved with militants battling American forces in Iraq following their 2003 invasion. And the State Department has a $10 million bounty for information about him.

In recent years he has sought to project a more moderate image, however, cutting ties with al-Qaeda, renouncing international extremism and instead focusing on creating an Islamic republic in Syria. He says he supports religious tolerance and internal debate.

This was echoed in its order via Syria’s state newspaper Monday that there should be no controls on women’s clothing.

Even so, myriad complexities and problems remain.

First, the rebel coalition led by HTS appears to be fragile. Turkish-backed rebels have in recent days launched attacks on Kurdish forces in the northern town of Manbij, local officials said.

Meanwhile, HTS has started outlining the basics of a nascent state — publishing prison sentencing guidelines for theft and criminal damage, as well as a plea “not to settle scores or seek revenge.”

However, it remains unclear what HTS has in mind for Syria’s future, and stories of war-torn states rising from iron-fist dictatorship to flourish into democracies are rare. Syria’s will be as challenging as any.

Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank in Washington, called it a “now out of never” moment reminiscent of Eastern Europeans throwing off Soviet rule in 1989.

“The country is not fated to a violent future, but it would be remiss not to consider the possibility and plausibility of an insurgency against the new order,” he wrote in a briefing.

How does the U.S. fit into all of this?.
The U.S. has around 900 troops supporting Kurdish forces in northeast Syria, part of an 80-country coalition to keep ISIS at bay.

President-elect Donald Trump has said he wants to withdraw these forces, reiterating on his website Truth Social that the U.S. should “have nothing to do with” the situation in Syria. “This is not our fight. Let it play out,” he wrote.

Washington is “stuck between a rock and a hard place,” according to Ozcelik at RUSI.

“Two questions will be key to his decision,” Ozcelik added. Are the Kurds “the most effective or only option in the new post-Assad Syria to facilitate American interests”? And “How much of a clear and present danger do remaining Islamic State cells pose to stability in Syria and neighboring Iraq?”

A loss for Russia and Iran
Russia has been dealt a huge blow, the regime it so vehemently backed in 2015 being wiped out in the blink of an eye.

With it is likely much of Moscow’s influence in this part of the world, not to mention its strategic warm water Mediterranean port of Tartus.

Iran and Hezbollah have also been chastened, after a year in which Israel has dealt both significant blows in the conflict farther south. In Assad, Iran has lost a key pillar of its vaunted “Axis of Resistance,” after backing Syria with funds and armed forces.

The presence of Moscow and Tehran in Syria has therefore been severely diminished. The question is what steps into that void.

^ So why is Israel still bombing south of Syria and taking control of the entire buffer zone? Are you trying to turn the new Syria into an enemy as well? They were your allies of convenience when they were rebels.

A few years from now, you'll wonder why they are launching attacks against you.

Syria's armed opposition leadership has issued a decree prohibiting the forced wearing of hijabs, state-owned Al Watan reported on December 9.

Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) is a Sunni Islamist militant group primarily active in Syria, particularly in the rebel-held Idlib province. Formed in 2017, it is an alliance dominated by Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, which was previously affiliated with al-Qaeda. The group took several key cities on December 7 and 8,ultimately leading to the downfall of the Assad regime after 53 years.

The directive explicitly forbids compelling women to wear specific clothing or interfering with their choice of attire, according to the newspaper, which published details of the announcement.

'The High Command categorically prohibits forcing women to wear particular clothing or interfering with their right to choose their attire or making claims regarding their appearance,' the newspaper quoted the opposition leadership as saying.

The hijab, a traditional head covering in Islamic culture that conceals the hair, ears, and neck, has been a subject of debate in many Middle Eastern nations regarding personal freedom and religious practice.

In a parallel move suggesting broader social reforms, the opposition command also issued strict prohibitions against the persecution of media workers, including employees of Syrian television, broadcasting agencies, and social media platform owners.

^ So why is Israel still bombing south of Syria and taking control of the entire buffer zone?

Are you trying to turn the new Syria into an enemy as well?

They were your allies of convenience when they were rebels.

A few years from now, you'll wonder why they are launching attacks against you.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/sy ... r-AA1vwUU3

Interesting policy choice for Islamist militants.

Trying to get the pro-genocide bloc to recognize valid criticisms of Israel is like getting a narcissist to recognize valid criticisms of themselves.

(1) To destroy the arms and ammunition the Assad government stored there;

(2) To secure the land that the Assad government has abandoned

(3) To finish the job (there is still a lot more to do, btw).

I am involved as much as any other non-government person not currently living in the Middle East

Never MY allies.

Is that the "Camel's Nose" fallacy or the "Slippery Slope"?

While Syria celebrates overthrowing its longtime dictator, it is also being subjected to a new ground incursion and a wave of airstrikes from its neighbor Israel that drew growing international condemnation and concern Tuesday.

Explosions rocked Damascus overnight, smoke billowed from a research center north of the capital and destroyed naval ships sat in the western port of Latakia — all while Israeli ground forces moved into Syrian territory.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Tuesday that he had order the military to establish a “sterile defense zone" in southern Syria, as Israeli forces seize control of the demilitarized and U.N.-patrolled buffer zone, established under a 1974 ceasefire agreement.

Israel says that its airstrikes and actions on the ground are aimed at preventing Assad's arsenal of rockets and chemical weapons falling into the hands of extremists who could threaten its borders or people.

But its advance has raised alarm at a time when the international community is already nervous about further instability as Syria navigates its transition away from 53 years of Assad rule. Arab powers condemned the incursion Tuesday, accusing Israel of violating international law and exploiting the chaos in Syria.

The exact location of Israeli forces was unclear.The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a U.K.-based monitoring group, said on social media Tuesday that "Israeli tanks were seen penetrating the far southwestern countryside of #Damascus."

IDF spokesperson Nadav Shoshani said in a post on X that "the reports circulating in the media about the alleged advancement of Israeli tanks towards Damascus are false. IDF troops are stationed within the area of separation, to protect the State of Israel."

Just minutes earlier, the IDF's Arabic spokesperson Avichay Adraee said IDF forces were inside the buffer zone "and at defensive points near the border in order to protect the Israeli border.”

Hours later, Katz said that together with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu he had instructed the IDF to establish a "sterile defense zone from weapons and terrorist threats" in southern Syria, "without a permanent Israeli presence."

Katz added that "the IDF is now completing its establishment in the buffer zone and in controlled areas in order to protect the residents of the Golan Heights and the citizens of the State of Israel."

It was unclear exactly what this would mean for the buffer zone.

While Israel frames its actions as a necessary response to the uncertain situation on its border, critics argued they were the latest example of the U.S. ally's destabilizing actions amid its devastating assault on the Gaza Strip and fragile ceasefire with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Israel’s “attempts to occupy Syrian lands will lead the region to more violence and tensions," calling the move a “flagrant violation of international law.”

Saudi Arabia said the actions "confirm Israel's continued violations of the principles of international law," and called upon the international community to respect Syria's "territorial integrity." Iran also condemned the Israeli military's movements, describing them as a violation of the United Nations Charter and calling for immediate action from the U.N. Security Council.

And U.S. NATO ally Turkey said Israel was "once against displaying its occupying mentality," condemning its actions while Syria strives for "peace and stability."

’Significant risks'
Israel is far from the only country acting in Syria.

Turkey backs one of the rebel groups, while Russia still has forces in the country that were there to support Assad’s regime. The United States also ramped up its military activity in the region after Assad’s stunning fall, carrying out more than 75 strikes against ISIS camps to prevent the terrorist group from exploiting the situation.

But Israel’s ground offensive carries “significant risks,” especially if they are going beyond the buffer zone as Netanyahu hinted, warned Michael A. Horowitz, a geopolitical and security analyst.

“If it pushes further, or stays permanently in areas it currently controls, then this will fuel instability and embolden radical elements who could use religious rhetoric to justify fighting Israel,” Horowitz told NBC News via email.

The roughly 155-square-mile buffer zone between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights was created after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the most recent of three wars fought between the two countries. Netanyahu said Sunday that the agreement that established the zone had “collapsed” after Syrian soldiers abandoned their positions amid the overthrow of Assad.

Meanwhile, Israel has carried out over 300 airstrikes on research centers, arms depots, and military infrastructure across Syria, including a naval base on the Mediterranean coast, according to SOHR.

Katz said Tuesday that the Israeli navy had destroyed Syria's fleet in the Mediterranean on Monday night.

Photos from news agencies also showed sunken Syrian naval ships in the port city of Latakia, with smoke billowing from the wreckage after they were laid to waste by Israeli air strikes.

At least two explosions were heard in the area of Barzeh, near Damascus, where the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Centre has an office, three witnesses in the neighborhood told Reuters. News agency photos showed the site destroyed on Tuesday.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the globally designated terror group that led the lightning assault to topple Assad, has pledged not to use chemical weapons or allow them to fall into irresponsible hands, according to a statement released Saturday, adding that it would “cooperate with the international community on all matters related to monitoring weapons.”

While the long-term intentions and consequences of Israel’s actions remain unclear, analysts said it could at minimum jeopardize any hope of a new era of relations between the two counties.

“It’s certainly not a great way to start a relationship," added Horowitz, while noting what he said were Israel’s legitimate security concerns. “But this also closes the door on any form of diplomacy between the new Syrian state and Israel, at least for a time.