The speed of the takeover has taken everyone by surprise. Most thought that the Syrian forces, albeit without the scale of support once available to them from Russia and Iran would still be able to take on this rag bag of factions led by the extreme HTS leadership.
Instead, the West's intelligence services have been caught napping.
As Assad’s plane flew him and his family off to exile in Russia, no one has a clue now as to what HTS and the other groups will do and perhaps most importantly whether this takeover by HTS is good news or bad.
What is certain however is that this is a defeat for Russia and even more importantly, Iran.
The collapse of Assad's regime started 24th February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine.
For as Russia got more and more bogged down in that terrible war of attrition, with their armed forces taking a terrible pounding, their ability to project force in support of Assad had disappeared.
Yet it was Hamas, no doubt directed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that put the final nail on the coffin of Assad’s regime when it brutally attacked Israel on October 7th massacring 1250 Israeli civilians and taking 250 hostages.
That’s because in retaliation, Israel didn’t hold back. Its response has gone much further than even its strongest ally the USA could possibly have imagined.
The point is that Israel didn’t just target Hamas - which it has done relentlessly but it decided it had to deal a severe blow to Hezbollah in Lebanon as well.
As a putative ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel now shows, Hezbollah’s ability to fight, as Iran’s military proxy, has been hammered by Israel.
As its two Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah are a shadow of their former selves and with its ally Assad ousted, Iran looks weak and worried.
They aren’t the only ones to be worried. The West needs to do some hard thinking. That’s because we don’t seem to have learned from the so-called Arab Spring. We assumed then that as regimes toppled people would crave democracy yet that didn’t happen. Instead, many turned to Islamic extremists often turning to chaos and civil war. We would do well to recall how ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) grew in power and territory very quickly and in plain sight.
What is clear is that Turkey has been supporting HTS for its own reasons, it’s likely it’s to get back at the Kurds which control the Northern area of Syria at the moment and for whom Erdogan has deep hatred.
What is nonetheless clear is that HTS isn’t a coalition of well-meaning democrats and freedom lovers. HTS is a jihadist group with origins in Al Qaeda. It is highly likely that things could get even more volatile in the Middle East. I am sure Israel will not welcome HTS’s presence on its border, complicating things. We shouldn’t assume that the end of Assad and his brutal regime will be on balance any better for us at all. We have made that mistake too often in the past.
The very least Starmer should now do is, like other countries, shut the borders to Syrians until we can understand what kind of a government HTS will be. After all, they certainly won’t be short of weapons to take care of Assad’s arsenals, which could end up in Palestine igniting even more violence.
This now calls into question Kier Starmers policy of giving the Chagos Islands away when the Middle East is in such turmoil with a real possibility of the violence intensifying. It isn’t just Chagos, it's also that the decision has given impetus to others to renew their demands for their territorial rights. I see that in Cyprus there are growing demands for the end of the two sovereign bases, as Spain now eyes Gibraltar.
The deal with the Chagos Islands was unnecessary and will be a deal which we and our allies will regret for some time to come. Act in haste, repent at leisure.
Whatever now happens in the Middle East, these events show how ill-prepared we are, making the case for the UK to move to at least to defence spending to be increased to 2.6% of GDP is now becoming urgent.
