Bashar Al Assad, 2011. Wikicommons/Fabio Rodrigues Pozzebom. All rights reserved.After four years of fighting the world has come full circle when John Kerry announced that the United States is willing to talk to Bashar al Assad. In 2011, the Syrian President Bashar al Assad, warned that if the west touched Syria the whole region would burn. Four years on these words have been prophetic.
The Middle East has not been this unstable perhaps since the Mongol invasion of Baghdad. Even the tumultuous fall of the Ottoman Empire and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 did not bring with it the levels of uncertainty and extreme violence that the Syrian war has unleashed on the whole region. Once again, exactly one hundred years on, Damascus is the key pivot on which the whole region’s stability hinges.
If only America and its allies in the so called ‘Friends of Syria’ committee had studied how Hafez was the rock on which the Arabs relied, we would not have had to wait so long for Kerry to talk about Assad as part of the solution.
