The Fall of the Syrian Arab Republic

The fall of Damascus and the 60 year-old Assad dynasty of the Syrian Arab Republic to a lightning Turkish-backed jihadist offensive has been a geopolitical and informational shock. Events moved so swiftly that columns written by Scott Ritter and Pepe Escobar, among other multipolar world advocates, proved erroneous within hours or even minutes of publication. Even Telegram and X channels could not keep up with the speed of what was clearly a pre-arranged surrender of Syrian Arab Army generals, many of whom we now know ordered their men to stand down.

The Neo-Ottoman/Jihadist blitz, accomplished by a force barely 30,000 strong that the SAA and Hezbollah would've repulsed easily with Russian Air Force support a few years before, has also been a major black pill for believers in the multipolar world--let alone alt-media voices promoting the alignment between Russia and the regional Axis of Resistance against Israel. However, the unpalatable truth the pro-Russian Axis of Resistance channels never quite accepted was that Moscow never came to Syria to fight the Israelis. Indeed, Putin remains someone who for decades has extended his hand in friendship to Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and is friends with major Chabad donor Israeli passport-holding oligarchs in Moscow. Putin in fact has been one of the most Jewish-friendly leaders in Russian history. In return, Putin has received Israeli support for jihadists who may very well betray Israel in the near future, and loudmouth Likud politician Amr Weitmann supporting a Ukrainian government that glorifies WW2 era Galician Nazi collaborationist perpetrators of the Shoah. Well as they say, if you want gratitude in politics, get a dog.

Since the establishment of the Tartus base in the early 1970s, Moscow has always maintained a presence in the Levant to secure its own interests. Putin made the fateful decision to intervene to save the SAR for Russia's own interests in the Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, with the primary goal of destroying as many Western-armed and trained terrorists as possible before they could infiltrate into Russia. And as Moscow-based political analysts such as Andrew Korybko have noted for months, the signs of Moscow and even Tehran's patience wearing thin with Bashir Al-Assad's refusal to cede some power to an interim government that would include the non-terrorist Sunni opposition aligned with Moscow's increasingly close ties to the Gulf states led by the UAE and Saudi Arabia was there for all to see.

In retrospect, the signs were also visible of Syrian statehood being hollowed out, especially after Russia adopted the Astana peace process with northern Syria's occupier and NATO member Turkey. By February 2022, Moscow had turned its focus to the Special Military Operation in Ukraine, which has become a consuming struggle with a stubborn NATO armed and U.S./UK-led adversary. Ultimately, the SAA, which formed the spine of the SAR for sixty years, died by a thousand cuts. It bled out over years of grinding civil war, harsh sanctions, U.S./Turkish occupation stealing the country's wheat crops and oil--plus U.S. Israeli air strikes conducted with impunity. All of these cuts accumulated before the finishing blow of demoralized SAA generals accepting large bribes to abandon their men while fleeing to Iraq or Jordan.

Faced with these bitter facts, Russians should not doom, but they should not cope either. The combat lessons learned in Syria proved invaluable, but insufficient by themselves for 21st century peer warfare on the battlefields of Ukraine, in no small part because Ukrainians are not ragtag jihadists. Many terrorists who could have wreaked Crocus City-style havoc in Russia were destroyed, but many remain with now idle hands to do the Devil's work.

Nonetheless, it must be repeated: Syria is not Iran or Russia. A Russian and Iranian ally has fallen to over 13 years of combined Western/Turkish/Israeli siege. Iran still stands, and is likely to accelerate its long-delayed efforts to acquire a nuclear deterrent, knowing full well that after its Lebanese Hezbollah allies are finished off, the Persian homeland is next. But Russia still stands strong. Although Russia lacks the manpower of the USSR, the setbacks and losses Russia has encountered since 2022 are still a small fraction of the battlefield catastrophes Russians survived during the darkest months of the Great Patriotic War between the start of Barbarossa and Stalingrad.

Just as attrition worked against Assad's loyalists, attrition is also working against NATO, which is running out of Ukrainian males to hide behind. Indeed, the timetable to collapse Syria most likely was moved up precisely due to NATO running out of time and men in Ukraine. Russia continues to grind forward in the Donbass, while squeezing the combined NATO-Ukrainian forces salient in Kursk to death like an anaconda with its prey. And while contrary to NATO propaganda, there's been no proof of actual North Koreans anywhere on the Ukraine battlefields, Russia's Asian allies in the form of 26 million North Koreans backed by 1.4 billion Chinese have yet to actually enter World War III, and the Iranians have only sent drone designs and shells.

China continues to run major exercises simulating a blockade of Taiwan. Xi and his Politburo know full well that if Iran let alone Russia falls, China will be the next target. Expect many surprises for the Collective West in 2025, some of them coming from the East. Perhaps this would include Moscow deploying its new hypersonic Oreshnik missile in the Russian Far East, where in case of war, it could destroy US command posts in Japan and South Korea without needing nukes.

Finally, a key point for the trans-Atlantic neocons gloating over Russia's own supposed Fall of Kabul moment--although Russian forces show no signs of evacuating the Kheimmim air base or port of Tartus along the ethnically Allawite Mediterranean coast, and Russian equipment has mostly been withdrawn in good order rather than surrendered to the jihadists in the way the Taliban recovered a small air force and multiple brigades worth of American vehicles in 2021. If Assad's battle-hardened army and their militia allies who endured brutal fighting for over a decade can crack and finally break apart after years of losses and aerial bombardment, then so can the Ukrainian Army when its soldiers realize getting badly wounded or surrendering are the only ways out. Sooner or later we expect by late 2025 through the winter of early 2026, NATO is going to have to determine how many non-Ukrainians are ready to fight and die to hold the frontlines for Ukraine. And NATO is also going to have to find some way to reconcile its second largest army member Turkey to the creation of a de facto U.S./Israel installed Kurdish state spanning northern Iraq and Syria. If they cannot, then Turkey could strike east and south in force through the Euphrates River valley to cut off any overland connection between Iraqi Kurdistan and Syria.

As Stanislav concludes below, Turkey's potential Neo-Ottoman land grabs, particularly an offensive the Gulf States and Iran would both find threatening, could sow seeds for a Biblical scale war, even the Middle Eastern theater of WWIII. Hopefully the Turks wise up before that happens and turn back to BRICS+ diplomacy rather than indulging in triumphalism. Because the rest of the Muslim world knows full well what Erdogan's pro-Palestinian rhetoric is worth.

– James Smith

Editor-in-Chief and Publisher, ExitStrategy.World

December 9, 2024

With the fall of the Assad government, Syria and all of the West Asia will face an blood bath that it has not seen in history since the arrival of the Mongols some 800 years earlier. With the collapse of the Syrian government and the soon annihilation of the Lebanese state, forces have been unleashed both of anarchy and jihadist regimes.

The biggest winners are first and foremost the Americans, who will of course have access to the natural resources of the area, while bragging about driving the Russians out. Do not for a second think that those sitting in Washington DC will shed a tear for the 20% of Syria that is Christian or Allawite and their genocide that Washington sponsored. No less than Washington was concerned by the mass murder of Christians during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, by the Obama-sponsored Muslim Brotherhood’s short reign of terror in Egypt before the Egyptian Army re-took power, or the present democide carried out by the Netanyahu regime in Palestine.

Israel has already rolled the IDF's tanks across the border from the occupied Golan Heights, seizing the Syrian side of Mount Hermon that looks towards Damascus. Whether the IDF will go beyond the Golan at this point remains unclear, it may depend on what resistance if any they will face. We know from the Israel Financial Minister Bezalel Smotrich that the Israeli aim is no less than the total annexation of Lebanon, Jordan, the southern half of Syria, south western Iraq, western Saudi Arabia, and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Smotrich described in detail to a journalist his goal to create a Greater Israel from the Euphrates to the Nile. Many IDF soldiers wear those from one river to another is Eretz Israel patches with pride. The Israelis have been breaking the Lebanese cease-fire daily and will soon go on a new offensive into Lebanon, confident now that Hezbollah has been isolated from Iranian resupply. So now Lebanon can be dismembered.

Another side of the two pronged attack to territorially dismantle Syria is the rise of the Neo-Ottomans under Erdogan. Northwestern Syria is now under Ankara’s control, that is Idlib plus Aleppo provinces and possibly Hama as well. Furthermore, the Kurds in NE Syria are about to find out that sleeping with the Devil won't pay off for them. Indeed, it will only bring the destruction so deserved of those who have made such Faustian bargains. Principally, the Kurds are no longer needed by the U.S. and their destruction is something Turkey craves. The Kurds of Syria are about to find out what “sold out” means, and will likely see the graffiti slogan (in Arabic and Turkish), "Your doctor will be a Turk, and your medicine will be Islam". We've already seen videos of the conquering Turkmen and other Turkish proxies in Syria throwing up the Grey Wolves gesture while singing 19th century Ottoman marching songs.

What will be the fate of the Kurds of northern Iraq, who have been selling out to Erdogan, is yet to be determined. The Turk will not stop at Syria, but craves oil-rich Irbil in Iraqi Kurdistan as well. Longer term, even Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, with their much smaller populations holding much of the oil and gas riches along the Caspian Sea should be nervous about where Neo-Ottomanism by Erdoğan's successor/s toward 'their Turkic brothers' could lead.

Erdoğan has already stated plainly he considers southwest Georgia, Adjaria with the seaside city of Batumi, to be Turkish by historic right (presumably, this assumes all the Byzantine lands in what is now Georgia dating back 3,000 years to the original Greek colonists were acquired by Turks by right of conquest, when their ancestors seized Constantinople in 1453). If the Georgian Dream government were to somehow be overthrown and the country descend into a post-Maidan Ukraine 2014 style civil war, Erdoğan would be awfully tempted to intervene as a NATO peacekeeping force. This of course will logically drive Georgian patriots not wishing to resume centuries of Turkish rule fully into Russia’s arms. Russia will not allow the Turks to move up to the Russian borders and a military conflict could quickly escalate to the kind of End Times scenarios prophesied by the Athonite Elder Paisos (+1994) and other Orthodox saints concerning the return of Constantinople to the Greeks.

Given that the Abkhaz, who live totally off Russia, are also playing their games with Erdoğan, looking for a new Sugar Daddy, this has only increased tensions, enough that Moscow has cut Sukhumi off and now there is no money for salaries and for electricity in Abkhazia. Moscow's recent action is also seen by some in Sukhumi as a major nudge toward Abkhazia's return to the Georgian fold--that is, if a neutral to friendly Georgian Dream government can hold out against more Western Color Revolutionary pressure.

As for the rest of Syria and Lebanon: they face war and ethnic cleansing. The Alawites, Shia and Christians, who combined make up somewhere close to 40% of the Syrian population, face extermination and expulsion by the Washington, Tel Aviv and Ankara backed Islamists. The attack on the Sayyida Zaynab Mosque of Damascus in which a handful of Shia fighters bravely held out against Sunni jihadis was a hint of what's to come. This sectarian warfare will more than likely spill over into Shi'a majority Iraq and will force a full Iranian effort at waging a real war, not the limited missile and drone salvoes we've seen thus far. Moscow, needing to relocate its aeronaval bases out of Syria to Iran is likely to back its Persian ally. Waves of refuges will also flow in every direction. The masks of the “moderate” HTS Islamic radicals that many Washingtonians are lobbying to drop the terrorist designation from will continue to fall off.

Jordan’s and Egypt’s weak, Western-nation dependent leadership should be asking themselves what's in their immediate future. Jordan could be massively destabilized by the expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank and Egypt likewise from over a million Gazans. Both countries fully or partially are on the radar of the Israeli supremacists for partial annexation. Waiting and appeasing the crocodile so that he eats you last is a very lousy survival plan, especially in the longer term.

Greeks and Bulgars could also start to worry, starting with the Greek Cypriots, as the closure of Kheimmim and Tartus means jihadis with drones a mere 112 miles across the Mediterranean from southern Cyprus. The distance from Old Damascus to Limassol is a mere 203 miles, much too close for comfort now that Russia may be removed as a barrier to jihadi ambitions and drone threats towards Turkey's old adversaries.

As for the Balkans, with the unstable situation in the foreign-assembled Bosnia and Herzegovina between the Serbs and emboldened Albanians in NATO-occupied Kosovo, they've always been a hinterland for the Turks and their ambitions to avenge historic defeats, which date back to the Greek War of Independence. The Russian intervention in that conflict of 1821 has never been forgotten or forgiven by many Turkish nationalists. In fact, Turkey's record in its wars with Russia is only about 2 for 15. While some Russian analysts say Putin cut his losses and made a good deal with Erdoğan because Assad proved unwilling to negotiate, we think this take is not entirely accurate.

The inescapable fact, regardless of Erdoğan's mercurial rhetoric (and that of his extended family including his Bayrektar diplomacy drone manufacturing son-in-law) or calling himself and Putin the last two experienced leaders in the world, is that the Turks and Israelis are allied. Not a single drop of Iraqi or Azeri oil has been delayed or hindered in flowing to Israel via Turkey, regardless of Erdoğan's pro-Palestinian hot air. Ankara and Tel Aviv after the brief MV Mavi Marmara Gaza Flotilla lovers' spat (coincidentally or not, a few weeks before the CIA tried to coup Erdoğan in July 2016 and a tipoff from Putin saved his life) have resumed their old alliance. Ankara and West Jerusalem have been working together to carve up the western Middle East. War and turbulence will shake the entire region and may easily result in the region becoming a major theater for World War III.

We hope that Turkey, which under Erdoğan has been highly critical of the SMO, supposedly in defense of Ukraine's sacred Soviet-drawn 1991 borders, can respect his neighbors' sovereignty, rather than going for a sweeping radical solution to the problem of Anglo-French drawn Sykes-Picot borders. But hope is not a strategy. For many Syrians particularly Christians, Allawis and Shi'as including those who have already fled their homeland for Lebanon, it's time to prepare an exit strategy to leave for the UAE or Russia. Our team can help. Contact us at: info@exitstrategy.world