Making Sense of Assad’s Ouster

Clock gears

Clock gears

A Conversation with Dimitri Lascaris

Dictator deposed .. more powerful, conniving & lawless men move in

On December 8 — against all odds, and after almost a quarter century of iron-fisted rule — Syrian president Bashar-al-Assad (widely referred to as a dictator) was overthrown by a seemingly ragtag but clearly well organized alliance of Syrian rebel forces led by a group called Hay’at Tahrir-al-Sham, or HTS.

According to Wikipedia, HTS pursues a “”Syrianization” programme; focused on establishing a stable civilian administration that provides services and connects to humanitarian organizations in addition to maintaining law and order.”

Prior to December 8, the US and other Western states labeled HTS a “terrorist” entity — with ties to the Al-Nusra Front, an offshoot of Isis in Syria. A bounty was placed on its leader, a man named Abu Muhammad al-Jolani.

Al-Jolani now calls himself Ahmed al-Sharaa, shucking his military fatigues for a sharply cut suit, and is now meeting with Western officials, including a representative of the US State Department and Turkey’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.

In the wake of Assad’ ouster (as if it couldn’t have been expected, and without pausing for an instant), Israel launched a savage bombing campaign up and down Syria, destroying much of the Syrian air force and navy, such as they are, and other Syrian military and scientific facilities.

And, it promptly seized lands north and east of the Syrian Golan Heights, expanding the area of Golan territory it occupied in 1967, and illegally annexed in 1981.

Israel will hold these lands “for eternity,” says Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu (now facing an international arrest warrant), and double the number of Jewish colonists now living in the Golan.

Making its position perfectly clear, Israeli soldiers have fired on and injured Syrian villagers, protesting Israel’s brazen land grabs. Read here and here.

They may be happy about Assad’s downfall; they’re not happy to see Israeli soldiers and settlers steal more Syrian land.

Meanwhile, Turkey and its ‘Free Syrian Army’ double down on their assault on [US-backed] Kurdish factions in northern and northeast Syria (‘Syrian Democratic Forces’). “Terrorists,” Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan calls them.

For wisdom on Bashar al-Assad’s downfall, who engineered it, and wider developments across Southwest Asia, from brutalized Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank, up to Lebanon and across to Iran, the GPM reached out to Dimitri Lascaris.

Dimitri Lascaris is a Montreal and Greece-based lawyer, rights advocate and journalist, and the founder of a new media platform, Reason2Resist.