“Syria is free,” according to Washington Post columnist Josh Rogan. “The rebels won. The people liberated themselves from tyranny,” he went on.
While the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad is finally over, this does not mean his replacements are necessarily interested in the kind of “freedom” you and I would recognise as such.
Assad’s Iran- and Russia-backed rule crumbled within days last week following the lightning assault of the jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Hayat Tahrir al-Sham was formed by the merger of four jihadist groups in 2017, including the Al-Nusra Front, which in 2013 occupied and desecrated the Christian shrine town of Maaloula, and was one of the forces that occupied Sadad and murdered 45 Christians.
