[Educational given to the Melbourne branch of Socialist Alliance, December 17, 2024.]
The extremely rapid and unexpected fall of Syria’s Assad dictatorship is a political earthquake in the Middle East. A regime (father and son) that had endured since 1970 is gone.
There were hardly any battles; the regime’s forces didn’t want to fight and just melted away (deserted, defected). Assad’s long-time backers — Russia, Iran and Hezbollah — had all been weakened by recent events but in any case they couldn’t support the regime if its own forces had lost all will to fight.