Last week, after 50 years of tyranny and repression, the government of Bashar Assad fell in Syria. It fell thanks to a combination of three forces. First, Israel’s military utterly eviscerated Assad’s foreign military support base, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia. Second, Ukraine has bled dry the Russian military coffers over the course of the last several years, leading Russia to withdraw its support from the Syrian theater. And third, the Turkish government, led by Islamist authoritarian Recep Tayyip Erdogan, stepped into the breach, with its favored radical militia, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, cruising through the country with almost no opposition.
Assad was a vicious and brutal dictator; according to the Syrian Emergency Task Force, opposition groups and rescue workers are uncovering mass graves that could hold upward of 100,000 bodies of Assad’s enemies. Assad…
