“While we’re all waiting for Trump to start World War Three, we’ve not spotted that the military map of the Middle East has substantially, bloodily changed. It will be years before Syria and Iraq (and Yemen) are rebuilt – and the Israelis may have to go to Putin to clear up the mess they’re now in.”
This is how Mr. Robert Fisk started his article that was published Thursday 7, September 2017 in the “Independent” Newspaper. It is a must read article, specially for those who are still betting on ISIL winning in Syria. Do you want to understand a little bit more about this “Game” called politics, then I advise you to continue reading Mr. Fisk’s article, whether you are with or against the Assad regime.
“A message came through from Syria on my mobile phone last week. General Khadour kept his promise,” it read. I knew what it meant. Five years ago, I met Mohamed Khadour, who was commanding a few Syrian soldiers in a small suburb of Aleppo, under fire from Islamist fighters (..) At the time, he showed me his map. He’d recapture these streets in 11 days, he said.
And then in July this year, I met Khadour again,(…) he said,he is going to enter the besieged city of Deir ez-Zor before the end of August. I reminded him, a trifle cruelly, that the last time he told me he’d recapture part of Aleppo in 11 days, it took the Syrian army more than four years to retake. That was long ago, he said. In those days, the army had not learned to fight in a guerrilla war. The army were trained to retake Golan and defend Damascus. But they had learned now.”
“(…) Indeed they had. Out in the desert, Khadour said he was going to bomb the town of Sukhna – the Russians would do much of the bombing – and his Syrian troops would break through from there to Deir ez-Zor, which had been surrounded by Isis for three years with its encircled 80,000 civilians and 10,000 soldiers. Khadour said he’d reach Deir ez-Zor by 23 August. He turned out to be almost dead on target. Now he is heading towards the rest of Deir ez-Zor and then towards the Syrian-Iraqi border.”
“(…) It seems – after the capture of the city is complete and when Khadour is on the frontier, and now that Aleppo is totally in the hands of the regime and only Idlib province remains a dustbin of largely Islamist rebels (including al-Qaeda), many of whom were allowed to travel there in return for surrendering bits of Syrian cities – that what has always been unthinkable in the West is now happening: Bashar al-Assad’s forces look to be winning the war.”
“(…) The repeated victories of the Syrians mean that the Syrian army is among the most “battle-hardened” in the region, (…) As former St Antony’s College associate scholar Sharmine Narwani put it this week, this alliance now has political cover from two permanent UN Security Council members, Russia and China.
“(…) What will Israel do? Netanyahu has been so obsessed with Iran’s nuclear programme that he clearly never imagined – in company with Obama, Hillary Clinton, Trump, Cameron, May, Hollande and other members of the political elites in the West – that Assad might win, and that a more powerful Iraqi army might also emerge from the rubble of Mosul.
Netanyahu still supports the Kurds, but neither Syria nor Turkey nor Iran nor Iraq have any interest in supporting Kurdish national aspirations (…).
“(..) While we’re all waiting for Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un to start World War Three, we’ve not spotted that the military map of the Middle East has substantially, bloodily changed (…). Those in the Israeli political right who claimed that Assad was a greater danger than Isis may have to think again – not least because Assad may be the man they’ll have to talk to if they want to keep their northern border safe.”
(To read the entire article, watch videos kindly click here)
