We’ve had a regime-change in Syria. The country is currently swarming with rebranded ISIS/Al-Qaeda mass murderers running around with black flags, shooting people, and posting it on the Internet. These are kinder, gentler Islamists, LGBTQ friendly with a DEI policy – demonstrating their new-found western-supplied values. Their mass murdering comes from a place of tolerance and inclusion.

Black humor aside, the situation in Syria is terrible, and will most likely evolve into Hell on Earth. A lot of people have been killed, are being killed, and will be killed. The likelihood of massive ethnic cleansing is high.

The sequence of events leading up to the invasion (which is what this was), and during the invasion, is extremely bizarre. Why did the Syrian Army fold and run away? Why was Assad behaving so strangely and passively in the months before the invasion? Why did Assad reject Russian and Iranian offers to shore up his army and economy in the years leading up to these events? Why did Assad run?

Very few people know what happened and they are not spilling the beans online. Still, every analyst and pundit seems to have his own theory about what happened in Syria. None of them really knows what happened and neither do I. Still, who doesn’t enjoy some speculative analysis? I’m completely aware that the analysis I’m providing here is completely speculative and could very well be partly or completely wrong. It most likely is. Still, a speculative analysis can be useful as a tool for further investigation. Keep that is mind as you read this. Consider everything, believe nothing.

A trap?

A theory gaining some traction is that the whole thing was a trap set up for the West. On the surface, none of what happened makes sense – and if something is too easy, it’s most likely a trap. The theory is that instead of fighting, Assad, the Russians, the Iranians and even the Turks, decided to just let all this happen. The result would be a giant vortex of uncontrollable chaos, sucking in western resources. No one would be able to control the rebranded ISIS lunatics and chaos would therefore be assured. Then perhaps, at the appropriate time, the Axis of Resistance would start supporting certain actors in Syria, pouring more fuel on the fire.

I think this theory is partly right but mostly wrong. As a premeditated ‘strategic’ plan this is unthinkable. The reason is that there are certain groups of people living in Syria who are essentially marked for death by the outside world. The only way they survived in the recent environment was under Assad’s protection. A strategic plan to fold and turn Syria into a nightmare would automatically include the risk of these people being exterminated. I don’t think Assad, The Russians or the Iranians would have come up with such a plan for this reason. I think it’s completely impossible.

The main groups living under Assad’s protection are the Christian community, the Druze community, the Alawite community, and Shia Muslims in general. It is these groups that the rebranded ISIS will now attempt to exterminate, preferably to the last man, woman and child. I’m exaggerating a bit though because some of the women will most likely be taken as sex slaves – a practice completely acceptable to the feminist West. During the prior ISIS invasion of Syria and Iraq, this is exactly what happened. Shia Muslims were shot into mass graves by the hundreds of thousands. Other groups, such as the Christians, Assyrians and the Yazidis were almost completely exterminated in ISIS controlled areas.

ISIS has basically two functions and two masters: Seizing control of the Middle-East for their western masters, and ethnic cleansing of undesirable ethnicities and religious beliefs for their Saudi and Qatari masters. You can guess which of the two the ISIS Jihadists are more enthusiastic about.

The earlier form of the now rebranded ISIS was trained, armed and supplied by the United States, Great Britain and the European Union. It was mostly financed by Qatar and Saudi-Arabia, who paid the salaries of the ISIS soldiers – although US financing was probably involved as well. With those two aims being advanced simultaneously it’s only fair to split the bill.

To understand what is behind this genocidal essence of ISIS, one must accept the real nature of their Qatari and Saudi masters. The Qatari and Saudi elites are not typical Sunni Muslims. They belong to or support the Wahhabi ‘sect’ inside Sunni Islam. More specifically, they support the ‘Takfiri’ ideology of Sunni Islam, which is essentially a genocidal ideology positing that anyone deviating even slightly from the strictest interpretation of Islamic law must be killed. This applies to Sunni Muslims who are seen to be straying, as well as automatically to all other Muslims, including Shia.

How do we know that the Saudi and Qatari elites are Takfiri? We know that from the actions of their ISIS minions in Iraq and Syria last time they were active. This was the policy of ISIS, and when you support ISIS financially, you also support their policy. There is no reason to believe that this has changed. While the current form of ISIS in Syria is doing the bidding of the West and Turkey, the influence of the Saudis and the Qataris can safely be assumed. Furthermore, the rebranded ISIS is the same as the old ISIS, and there is no reason to believe that their policy on ethnic cleansing has changed.

When the current Syria operation was planned, everybody involved knew that using ISIS, rebranded or not, might result in the genocide of these groups. The Turks knew it, the Americans knew it, the Israelis knew it, the EU knew it, and the British knew it. They just don’t care if these people get killed. However, perhaps there will be some kind of effort to stem the genocide by the West for PR purposes. PR is very important in this operation, as we can see from the careful rebranding of ISIS and the diversity and inclusion blather. This remains to be seen but there’s little reason to be optimistic.

The manipulation of Assad

After the Syrian ‘civil war’ ended (which was not a civil war but an invasion carried out by ISIS and the Turkish-controlled Muslim Brotherhood), Assad sought to re-establish his relationship with the Arab world. Syria was suspended from the Arab League in 2011 after the start of the ‘civil war’ but re-admitted in 2023. Assad’s efforts seemed to be bearing fruit and he and his country seemed to be, again, in the good graces of the Arab world. This particularly applied to Saudi-Arabia, which seemed to have changed position from earlier when they were trying to regime-change Assad using ISIS.

As the relationship with the Arab states improved, Assad gradually started distancing himself from Iran and Russia. He reportedly refused offers to strengthen his army and the Syrian economy, which was under crippling sanctions by the West. Nothing can explain this except assurances, probably from the Saudis, that Syria would be completely brought back into the Arab fold and would receive investment from the Gulf States. Syria’s security would be guaranteed, with the Saudis brokering security guarantees from the West and from Israel.

There was just one catch. To get this investment and security guarantees Assad would have to put some distance between Syria and Iran – and of course between Syria and Russia. He would also have to remove some people from his Army and security forces who could be perceived as Iranian proxies and replace them with people acceptable to the Saudis and the West. It was completely normal – and all in the spirit of reconciliation. Assad seems to have agreed to this – a result of his desperate need to secure a future for Syria. He truly believed he was solving the problem permanently.

This is somewhat speculative, but events strongly suggest this is what happened. However, we shall now descend into pure speculation. What I think happened is the following:

Assad self-identifies as an Arab and sees Syria as an Arab state. I don’t think the Saudis or the Qataris share that view. Assad is not really an Arab or at least not Arab enough for them. His ethnic and religious group, the Alawites, is an apostate sect to them. To the Saudis and the Qatari, Assad is just an apostate with blue eyes. There was a good reason (in their minds) why they wanted him dead earlier.

I believe that the Saudis and the Qataris never intended to reconcile with Assad. I think they just pretended to accept him and Syria, and set up a theater production to reel him in. I think they used the re-admittance to the Arab League as a part of that theater production. I also think that they managed to place people in important positions within the Syrian system which they controlled.

The next steps of the Saudi/Qatari operation would likely have been the following:

1. They delayed all economic promises they had made. Years passed by and nothing happened. This made the situation in Syria far worse than it could have been since they had earlier convinced Assad to reject Russian (and perhaps BRICS) investment. Syria’s economy was in such a state that he couldn’t even pay living salaries to his soldiers – partly because of this. In other words, Assad had been tricked into not tackling his country’s economic problems.

2. They activated their contacts placed within the Syrian system. These people started walking around, convincing others that Assad’s time was over and it was time to consider other options. Promises were made and assurances given. This was helped along with suitcases full of money – always a strong argument in times of economic destitution.

This worked well and Assad’s control system started deteriorating. The biggest inroads were probably made in the Syrian political machine and the Army, but care was taken to stay away from Assad loyalists in the Security Services and the Special Forces. It is likely that Turkish Intelligence was involved in this process, at least in its later stages. I believe that this process had gone so far this autumn that the regime-change had already happened without Assad realizing it.

Then we come to early September, and the three months leading up to the ISIS invasion from Idlib and Turkey. Information from Iran suggests that Iranian Intelligence had figured out what was about to happen around that time and they informed Assad. They described Assad’s response as strange and perhaps dejected. They weren’t getting the response from him they expected.

Assad’s strange behavior continued. He seems to have isolated himself to a degree. He didn’t show up at the BRICS summit in Kazan in late October, which annoyed the Russians. It has been suggested that he didn’t want to meet his arch-nemesis Erdogan, but perhaps he also didn’t want to meet the representatives from the Gulf States who had betrayed him.

I suspect that Assad’s strange behavior was caused by the realization that he had been set up, and that he only realized it when the Iranians told him about the impending ISIS attack. I think he was in shock – utterly devastated. All the promises and all the normalization of relations with the Arab world had been a ruse. He had also been tricked into betraying his trusted friends, Russia and Iran. On top of all this, his wife had been very ill – putting even more pressure on him. At that point Assad must have felt he was overwhelmed, not to mention humiliated.

What happened next was the product of Assad’s humiliation. He didn’t inform the Iranians or Russians about what had happened. He didn’t tell them about the ‘normalization’ operation run against him by the Saudis and the Qataris – and probably the Turks. That was a major mistake because it’s obvious that such an operation might have an influence aspect within the Syrian system. This would have been the first thing suggested by the Russians and Iranians. ‘Return home and immediately carry out purges of anyone suspected of having a relationship with the Gulf States’ would have been their suggestion. Assad didn’t do that. Still, he must have perceived something. Perhaps he did carry out some kind of investigation which resulted in suspicions rather than proof. Perhaps he had started to suspect that things had gone too far and a purge would result in an immediate coup.

It is likely that the Syrian Army would have been able to contain the invasion if it had been functioning normally. Still, before the invasion it seems Assad wasn’t sure that the Army would function normally, or even accept his orders to fight. He even took precautions and left his family in Russia. The entire time from the beginning of the invasion until the fall of Damascus he never talked to his people. He remained quiet. The reason for that is fairly obvious – he had completely lost control of the Syrian State. What can you say to the people when you don’t even control the Army?

It is likely that during the first days of the invasion Assad finally told the Russians what had happened. This was probably right before the ‘Astana format’ meeting in Doha on December 7, which incidentally excluded Qatar as a participant. After the meeting Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov gave an interview to Al Jazeera where he was obviously very angry. It’s possible that his source of anger wasn’t just Erdogan’s betrayal but the betrayal of the Gulf States as well.

After Assad’s disclosure one thing became obvious to the Russians – as well as to Assad himself: an order to the Army to resist would probably not be followed. The Russians, ready to fight with the Syrian Army at the time, decided that they would withdraw if the Syrian Army wouldn’t fight. This is what happened. The Syrian Army was ordered by its compromised generals to stand down while the Special Forces fought. The corruption of the Syrian State had been wildly successful and Assad’s only option was to get out of Syria.

This is obviously wildly speculative, but it’s not impossible. We will find out the truth in the future – maybe.

What now?

It’s likely that the Syrian situation will turn into a trap for the West and Turkey, even if it wasn’t planned. It’s unlikely that the western PR people will be able to stop the ISIS atrocities, causing things to boil over. It’s likely that the Syrian Special Forces still remaining and elements of the former Syrian Army will take up arms. It’s also likely that the Iranians will start supporting them by any means necessary. NATO proxies in Northern Syria are already fighting each other and it’s likely that groups within the rebranded ISIS will not agree on certain issues, such as the ongoing Israeli invasion of Syria. ISIS and Israel have been allies from the beginning, but it’s not likely that all the ISIS soldiers see it that way.

Further escalation is possible – even an intervention by NATO and their proxies in Iraq to cut off Iranian assistance to Syrian resistance groups. Anything is possible at this point. All we know is that a lot of blood is going to be spilled.

Hopefully, there will also be changes in international perceptions and politics as a result of this. The Axis of Resistance, including Russia and Iran, have until now been governed by extreme naiveté. Russia is still open to a deal over Ukraine and Iran seriously still thinks a deal with the US is possible. They still assume that words are good and deals will be honored.

Also, after this, they have hopefully realized what their Turkish and Gulf partners really are: snakes in the BRICS grass. It would be a good idea to remember the lessons of the Syrian debacle if they want to survive.