Things Speed Up

But over the last four years, the government and multiple rebel militias had settled into an ongoing stalemate, with occasional skirmishes but virtually no shifting of the map, which showed Assad in control of approximately 70 percent of Syria.

Then suddenly on November 27, rebel forces launched a major attack, and within days, they had captured Aleppo, Homs, and Hama, and were headed south to Damascus, the capital. A week after the conquest of Aleppo, government forces put down their arms, and Bashar al-Assad and family were on a flight to Moscow. Just like that, the 14 years of civil war and 53 years of brutal rule by the Assad family, father Hafez and son Bashar, were over.

The fall of the Assad regime once again reset the Middle East chessboard in Israel’s favor and to the detriment of Iran. Syria was the only state actor allied with Iran in the Middle East, and an irreplaceable transit point for Iranian arms being sent to Hezbollah. Without Syria, Hezbollah is effectively cut off.

David Wurmser, a Middle East expert from whom I once had the privilege of a private tutorial on Syria, compared the loss of Syria to Iran to the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Soviet Union. The so-called “ring of fire” that Iran laboriously constructed to surround Israel has now fallen brick by brick. In addition to threatening Israel, that ring of fire was meant to deter Israel from attacking Iran. Now, Iran’s deterrent capacity has been reduced to virtually nothing, and at the same time, Israel has rendered Iran virtually defenseless by taking out its anti-aircraft defenses.