Syrian foreign ministry has announced that its forces will “end the presence of the US” in the country. In a separate statement reported by RT The Syrian government also warned Turkey against launching a bombing campaign in the Syrian province of Afrin, saying its air defenses may be used. Ankara had threatened airstrikes against Afrin-based Kurdish militias.
This looks like a true end game in the offing wherein Damascus, at last is able to reassert the territorial integrity of its lands. While western media continues to peddle Assad as a butcher, the fact that peace has actually returned into Government controlled territory is hardly missing anybody.
Previously Turkey had warned US that the deployment of an American-backed, Kurdish-led force in northern Syria along the Turkish border could force them to choose sides. Ankara was outraged over the United States’ confirmation they are creating a 30,000-strong border force with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to secure the Rojava borders. Now US seem to have back down on that project as well. “That entire situation has been misportrayed, misdescribed, some people misspoke. We are not creating a border security force at all,” US Secretary of State Tillerson told reporters.
The region which was carved out of remnants defeated ottoman empire by the victors of first world war has always been a powder keg of conflicting ethnicities, religions and philosophies. The Syrian civil war and rise of ISIS n Syriana and Iraq were an example of how this keg lights up if the central authorities are weakened. The same misunderstanding of the region by western powers is already in play at Libya.
When the respected western news outlets belittle Assad’s government as regime, they fail to answer the most important question of ‘what next?’.
The east does not play with the same rules as the west. US understood that when it ruled post war Japan in the name of its emperor and preserved the pre-war bureaucratic structures on the day one of that rule. It shaped an economic superpower by gently guiding Tokyo, instead of ordering the Victor marches.
So while Assad slowly takes back his country, the present day strategists in US either don’t have a clue about their own history or choose to be blind to it.
