Fall of the Home of Assad

The swift collapse, after 54 years, of Syria’s al-Assad dynasty has simply reworked the Center East’s geopolitical panorama. The lightning offensive by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militia took all of Syria’s neighbors – and everybody else – abruptly. The information that President Bashar al-Assad had fled to Russia confirms the one binding fact about wars: unintended penalties can lengthen far past the theatre of battle.