A former member of al-Qaeda will take power in Damascus – and nobody knows what will happen next
Members of armed groups and civilians gather at the Umayyad Mosque after sixty-one years of Baath Party rule in Syria collapsed is the greatest political earthquake to strike the Middle East since the fall of the Shah in the Iranian revolution in 1979.
He wants a coalition government with full executive powers, but this might have little authority in a country as fragmented as Syria. After all, until recently its leading element, HTS, was a small if well-organised movement labelled by the West as “terrorist” in the opposition enclave of Idlib in northwest Syria.
Posters of Assad, previously omnipresent in government-held territory, were torn down while Assad family homes were ransacked along with the presidential palace where, until a few days ago, the Syrian leader received visiting foreign dignitaries. Day and night in Damascus, I used to hear heavy artillery firing from the mountains into opposition enclaves until they looked like contemporary Gaza. Sometimes, the buildings were still standing but empty, ghost towns where doors and window frames had been stripped out by plunderers and what had once been ornamental trees had grown forest-high.
An additional problem is that there is more than one civil war going on in Syria. The biggest and best known has been between Assad and the mostly Sunni Arab opposition, but a second largely separate conflict is between Arabs and Kurds, fought out mainly along the Euphrates river and in the great plains of northeast Syria.Here the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces backed by US airpower defeated the Islamic State.
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