Saber Dimisk

Completely unexpectedly, almost overnight, President Bashar al-Assad left Damascus with his family government in Syria have been taken over by armed Islamist groups, the most important of which is the Movement for the Liberation of the Levant. Her leader is yesterday's terrorist Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani, and his head is still being blackmailed at 10 million dollars.

After more than 50 years of rule by Hafez and then Bashar al-Assad, a British-educated ophthalmologist, power in this country has practically been taken over by one of the al-Qaeda factions. Assad has been granted political asylum in Moscow, and almost no one can say with certainty at the moment what will be the fate of this unusually important Middle Eastern country, which has been ravaged by civil war for decades. Unfortunately, the conflicting interests of several world and regional powers are visible on the territory of Syria. Until yesterday, Assad's allies were Russia and Iran, with the support of Hezbollah and Hamas, that is, the Palestinians from Lebanon and Israel. There are also the Houthis, who are the allies that brought him into conflict with Saudi Arabia. Opponents include Turkey, with whom a dispute arose over refugees, Israel and America, who saw the Syrian regime as part of the "axis of evil", but also the NATO alliance and the EU, who blamed Assad for the wave of refugees and the dictatorship that led to the civil war. war.

The media, even in Serbia, reported on this event in different ways. The American CNN, for example, made an urgent interview with Al Jawlani, even though he is a wanted terrorist. Moscow stopped calling Islamists terrorists and today refers to them as "armed opposition". Asylum was granted at the personal insistence of Putin for "humanitarian reasons". The large number of quotation marks in the reporting perhaps best speaks to the degree of hypocrisy that accompanies the attitude of foreign powers towards Syria.

Namely, the media in the West, including Al Jazeera from Qatar, actively supported the overthrow of Assad, so today they are mostly inclined to portray the ruins of an autocratic despotism and a truly cruel dictatorship. We learn about camps and prisons for political dissidents and mass executions of captured rebels. We are trying to find a rather faint and unconvincing trace of the long-dead "Arab Spring", during which the armed rebellion began. Videos of the luxurious presidential residence, the overpriced car park, the robbery of the state treasury, but also the demolition of Assad monuments across the country are being transmitted from social networks. It already looks a lot like the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the first days after his fall.

The domestic media is acting a bit crazy, because the defeat in Syria, which did not recognize Kosovo even though Turkey persistently demanded it, inevitably creates a parallel with Serbia, due to its relationship with Russia. It has kept two military bases in Syria, strategically very important in the eastern Mediterranean. Preoccupied with their own interests, Iran and Russia apparently "let" the government in Syria down the drain. The reporting from the EU is particularly strange, cheering wholeheartedly against the former government, but expressing concern about possible risks in the future.

Turkey broadcasts footage of convoys of cars carrying some of the three million refugees back to Syria on television. The celebrations of Syrian refugees across Europe are viewed with similar enthusiasm. The Western media is full of images of happy refugees who will now happily leave where they came from, their beautiful home far away. Of course, no one will mention that some countries from the NATO alliance actively attacked Syria, so now it would be logical for them to pay at least part of the damage. In fact, we will now see how much America, Germany, France or England are willing to pay for the reconstruction of Syria, if they would not repatriate the migrants, instead of returning them to, say, Albania.

In its depictions of the situation, Israel does not show any confidence in the new authorities, so it preemptively won positions on Syrian territory on the Golan Heights. "Temporarily" occupied part of the territory for security reasons, contrary to the demarcation agreement. Along the way, he bombed in detail all the military capacities of the Syrian army, so that the new government would not accidentally use them against Israel. Preventive humanitarian, so to speak.

Actually, the main question is - what will that future Syria look like, that is, will we get another quasi-state in the territory of the Middle East, like Libya or Iraq. There is an attempt to portray Islamists in the media as "moderate" or "reformed" radicals, like the Taliban in Afghanistan at one time after the withdrawal of the Americans. We see that Al-Jawlani applies the same media tactics and refrains from any form of extremism, telling the West what it wants to hear. The first step is to change his image, so today he looks more like Castro than Osama Bin Laden. Despite the dictatorship, Syria was a strong secular state in which, as in Iraq and Libya, the BAAS party, a pan-Arab version of socialism, was in power for a long time. Today, it is absolutely certain that it will be a country with a strong and radical Islamic regime, with or without the continuation of the civil war. But who in the West will care about the state of democracy or women's rights in Syria when there is already talk of removing this country from the list of risky countries to prevent the influx of new refugees. Syrians will no longer be able to seek political asylum, this can already be heard more and more clearly in the media from America or the EU.

The echoes of the fall of Assad's regime and his exile in Moscow are also reminiscent of the flight of Milosevic's family, so President Vučić found it appropriate to inform the citizens that he will not flee anywhere from Serbia. I am afraid that we have not learned any lessons from the example of Syria, but we pretend not to see where dictatorship, civil war, religious blindness, conflicts with neighbors and trust in the deceptive friendship of great powers can lead a country.

And I can only wish the Syrians peace from the bottom of my heart, after decades of suffering and suffering.