Familiar Territory ?

(Familiar Territory ?)

When news broke this morning of the collapse of the al Assad regime in Syria, it was something of a surprise. Syria has been mired in a civil war for the last twelve years. One can go back to the so-called Arab Spring and the Damascus response. This was the Obama Administration and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Their intervention removed Muammar Qaddafi of Libya. President Bashar al Assad of Syria, however, was allowed to persist and wage a brutal are against his own citizens.


President al Assad has left Syria and is in exile in Russia.


That was when ISIS became active, carving out territory in both Iraq and Syria, what President Obama referred as the JV team. That terror group was all but eliminated by President Trump. Will the fall of Assad government allow for a resurgence ? There are some 900 American service members in Syria. There has also been a contingent of Russians in country including air assets. In fact Russia has been assisting the regime against the rebels. It has been Russian commitments elsewhere, like in the Ukraine.


The other sponsor is Iran. As a Syrian ally, a facilitator for both Hezbollah and Hamas, Iran has been losing as has its proxies. Of course, the remaining element is Israel. Over the past fourteen months or so, the Jewish state has defeated both terror groups and has chastened the Islamic Republic. So, why would any of this be familiar ?


Syria of Bashar al Assad was a Ba'athist government like the Iraq regime of Saddam Hussein.  His removal was followed by years of armed insurrection that took the U.S. military considerable effort to subdue. While Iraq is more stable, an American presence is still in country as the contingent in Syria.


How familiar this situation continues to will be up to Donald Trump who as incoming President and is not planning any escalation. The fall of al Assad will have consequences that at the moment have yet to be guessed.

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