Gimme clocks or trashcans, but I just can't wrap my head around how the entire Syrian regime which had been resilient for 13 years, just suddenly collapsed in under 2 weeks after a literal who military force comes out of nowhere and starts fucking shit up. It seemed like things were mostly normal, least in big cities like Aleppo and Damascus. I know I saw pictures of people I'm acquainted with who were vacationing there (for whatever godforsaken reason) in the last year and it all seemed under control. can someone explain literally what happened???
Resilient is not the right word. They had failed to make any serious pushback against the rebels since 2015. They were held at a stalemate by disorganized ditch-shitting goatfuckers for 13 years- not the sign of a healthy regime.
The reason it collapsed is Syria had two major Allies: Russia and Iran. And both these Allies managed to punch themselves squarely in the dick at the exact same moment.
Russia's forces are tied up in Ukraine. Russia has been slowly degrading their Syria presence since 2022 to try to find more hardware for Ukraine, and Russian force projection has always been garbage, so they weren't in any position to try to stem the tide. Russian close air support is also utter garbage. They do better hitting large, static concentrations of men/equipment but the Rebels are too mobile for that.
Iran has been depleting their reserves selling them to Russia at a premium. Trump blew up their primary fixer in 2020 and Iran still hasn't found a successor. Iran's proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah who had rushed to Syria in 2014 to try to stem the collapse, were absolutely BTFO by the IDF. They are barely holding themselves together, forget being able to come to Assad's aid.
The question you might ask is "why exactly now?" and the answer is very likely that due to October 7, Turkey got the green light to turn their puppet loose.
Assad was relying heavily on Russia and Iran to stay in power. Russia is bogged down in Ukraine and was forced to disband their PMC group after they tried to pull a coup, and Isreal just finished crippling Hezbollah's leadership, giving Iran a really bloody nose in the process. With those two allies out of the way, Assad effectively had no one to protect him.
small point of order:
Wagner isn't disbanded. They still exist but they are deployed foreign-only. They removed the PR spokesman and the actual real hard special forces nigga who really ran the saw and had recruited the better talent. and then both these morons decided to get on plane together and got blown up.
I take then turkey is probably the main beneficiary here.
Yes. This is a massive win for Turkey and Erdog. They control the guy in power, so now anyone who wants to do business in Syria is going to have to go through Turkey.
Iran has lost their primary vector of being able to fuck with Turkey (and russia to a lesser degree). And they've lost it at the worst possible time, having had Hezbollah getting utterly turned inside out my Mossad; there is a non-zero chance Iran loses Lebanon.
the head scratching bit will be how they will handle the Kurds.
thinking. In the turmoil, anybody not the right kind of Muslim will be purged, and that definition of "right kind of Muslim" will switch hands enough times that Europeans can expect another Refugee Crisis. Somebody will use chemical weapons on Israel causing the entire region to explode again and another 20 years of GWOT.
