One month ago, during a meeting in Beirut, a senior western diplomat was venting his frustration: when would international sanctions be lifted from the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad? Though the dictator had few friends, it seemed that the brutal killing and torture of hundreds of thousands of protesters had succeeded in finally crushing Syria’s 13-year revolution.
It was time to face facts, the diplomat said. Assad had won the war, and the world needed to move on.
As diplomats in Beirut talked, rebels in Syria were planning. A year earlier, figures in the Islamist opposition group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in north-west Syria had sent a message to rebels in the south: get ready.
Seriously mindblowing to me how you can have a military oppress its people like this and liberation not ending with killing like half of the population.
What about everyone who supported the military? Shouldn’t they be seen as enemies of the rebels going forward?
I don’t think they had much of choice. Most people are just doing whatever they can to not be imprisoned, tortured, or murdered. A policy of killing anyone not killed by the previous regime wouldn’t be great for hearts and minds either.