Syria’s New Prime Minister Says It’s Time for the Syrian People to ‘Enjoy Stability and Calm’

The overthrow of Assad has led to various answers to the question “who lost Syria?” The Iranians have no doubt that the arch-villain Israel, a charge that Israel happily accepts, for Prime Minister Netanyahu has already claimed that it was the IDF’s dismantling of Hamas, its destruction of Iranian ballistic missile sites and missile defense systems on October 26 and, above all, its devastating attacks on Hezbollah, that prevented any of those players — Hamas, Iran, and Hezbollah — from coming to Assad’s rescue. More on the aftershocks of the earthquake in Syria can be found here: “Syria’s Transitional Prime Minister, Hinting at Definitive Break With Iran, Calls for Refugees To Return to Their Homeland,” by Anthony Grant, New York Sun, December 11, 2024:

The blame game in Syria has begun….For Tehran’s hardline Islamist leader, however, “the main conspirator, mastermind, and command center are in America and the Zionist regime. We have evidence. This evidence leaves no room for doubt.”

Pile on the accusations, O Supreme Leader. The “Zionist entity” will happily take the major blame for the downfall of the mass murderer Bashar Assad. What is not in any doubt is that Syria’s transitional government shows no signs of wanting to have anything to do with Iran, Assad’s supporter and fast friend throughout the Syrian civil war, and even before.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, the prime minister of Syria’s new transitional government, Mohammed al-Bashir, said that after Assad’s ouster it is time for people to “enjoy stability and calm.”…

Calm? In Syria, there have been the near-constant barrages of rifles being fired in the air, a triumphant display to accompany the requisite Allahu-akbaring. There has been the ransacking and looting of Assad’s main residence, and the view of astonished visitors to Assad’s collection of dozens of cars — Ferraris, Maseratis, Bugattis, and Lamborghinis. There has been the excited pulling down of statues of Assads, father and son, their heads rolling in lieu of the real thing (Hafez is long dead, and Bashar is safely in Moscow). A general amnesty has been declared for low-level conscripts, but the regime’s big shots will not be spared; they are even now being rounded up for the inevitable trial and execution. There have been attacks on some of those regime big shots who did not make it out of the country in time, by those not ready to wait for the judicial system to kick in. There have been thousands of visitors to the torture chambers and execution rooms at Saydnaya Prison by relatives hoping against hope that their relatives, seized five or ten or twenty years ago, might still be alive.

Meanwhile, HTS’s leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, claimed that the rights of minorities will be respected. But a mob of Sunni Muslims attacked one of the most important Shia (the Alawite sect to which the Assad family belong is a branch of Shia Islam) shrines in Syria, that erected in honor of Zeinab bint Ali, the granddaughter of Muhammad, suggesting that not all of the rebels are prepared to follow Mohamed al-Jolani’s commitment to protect minorities, including Christian, Shia, Alawites, Druze, and Kurds, and their places of worship, Perhaps al-Jolani himself was not willing to protect such a shrine — employing his own loyalists — out of fear of a violent reaction by those maddened Sunnis who were determined to damage it.

In two days of bombing, the Israeli Air Force has destroyed roughly 70%-80% of Syria’s military strength. It destroyed Syria’s chemical weapons stores and its chemical weapons production plants. It hit storehouses of missiles, both air-to-air and surface-to-air. It hit three military airbases, outside Aleppo, Qamishli, and Damascus, destroying all the planes and helicopters inside. The IDF calculates that it has now “destroyed Syria’s air force.” On Tuesday, the IDF announced that it had sunk the entire Syrian navy. In all, the IAF had struck 510 military targets inside Syria by December 11, ending for a long time to come any possible military threat to Israel from jihadists in Syria. This destruction appears not to have been given much attention inside Syria itself — the Western press is a different matter. So far, there have been no anti-Israel demonstrations, no calls in Syria for revenge against the Zionists. After all, everyone of sense realizes that Israel’s fear is justified — the worry that some of the Syrian military’s weapons, no longer under guard (the army itself having dissolved overnight) might well fall into the hands of jihadists, and that would constitute a danger not just to Israel, but to those many Syrians who want a secular and democratic future, not an ISIS-ruled hellhole.