The funniest thing about Syria is that Bashar al Assad is an ophthalmologist. Trained at no less than Moorfields Eye Hospital. You wouldn’t necessarily go to him to have your cataracts sorted, or with a glaucoma issue, but if you needed 20,000 people murdered, he’s your man. If you need a few Kurds bombed out of existence, get a referral from your GP to Assad and he’d do it. On the NHS. Or using chemical weapons on entire towns which housed ‘the rebels’ (as of about 10 o’clock this morning, ‘the government’); it was one of his key ‘specialties’.

The hypocritical oath obviously has limits, if you rule Syria. All that ‘preservation of life’ stuff is obviously open to contextual interpretation. Like ‘assisted suicide’, but on an industrial scale and without the safeguards.

But now there’s a new kid on the block. Abu Mohammed al-Jolani is the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and now the de facto leader of Syria. I don’t know what kind of doctor he might be, preferring camo to scrubs, but he seems like a really nice man. Well, when I say ‘nice’…

Normally, in a war, there are the good guys and there are the bad guys. But in Syria, they simply don’t do ‘good’. Only in the relative. Lesser of evils, kind’a thing.

Assad was possibly the most evil tyrant in the world in terms of deaths of his population, before you even consider his alignment with Iran and Russia. So he’s definitely a bad guy. Yet the boys of HTS used to be part of Al Quaeda. They changed the name, a bit like the IRA becoming Sinn Fein, due to some ‘understandable baggage’ attached to the name. HTS are still proscribed as terrorists by the UK and loads of other countries. They are Islamist jihadis. Well, according to Abu, they were. No more. They’re going to be democratic. Hmmmmm. Like ISIS were? Like Afghanistan under the Taliban? Like Iran. How long before they impose the kind of sharia which terrorises its own population and reduces women to total anonymity and irrelevance?

Except they’re not like the Iranians. HTS are Sunnis. Iran is Shia. They hate each other. So Iran will no longer support Syria. And Syria will no longer be providing massive infrastructure to Hezbollah. Putin will not deal with HTS, he spent the time supposedly ‘eliminating terrorists’, when ISIS occupied swathes of Syria, actually bombing HTS strongholds rather than ISIS.

Safe to say: Syria has not so much ‘been saved’ as gone from major fuckage to a different major fuckage. God help them. I wouldn’t.

Now I’m off to march (in the fucking rain) against antisemitism. In London. The place I was born. Yet needs this.

What a world.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx