How can the population afford this? This must be subsidized. It is also interesting that no one talks about the Al Qaeda roots of the apparently compliant new rulers any more.
Assad was obviously horrible, but can there be some kind of a middle ground?
Industrially mass-produced food is cheap.
> Assad was obviously horrible, but can there be some kind of a middle ground?
Ideally, yes. In practice, you play the cards you’re dealt. (And HTS, irrespective of their origins, are looking like a fair gift horse so far.)
I’ll quote a wise person [1].
Narratives must be clean-cut good versus evil. Assad evil (indeed he was), so logically any opponent must be the opposite of evil. Therefore Tahir al-Sham is now Good.
Tahir al-Sham/Al Nusra being classified as a terrorist organization[1] complicates that clean-cut narrative. Hence the downvotes you got.
[1] https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/ntnl-scrt/cntr-trrrsm/lst...
What does this mean? From the outside the choices are work to reduce sanctions and increase commercial and diplomatic ties or keep the Syrian economy in a stranglehold.
> if Israel keeps occupying territory and undermining HTS rule then we don’t know what will replace them
Israel is like problem number eight billion for Damascus right now. (Keep in mind that without Israel neutralising Hezbollah, HTS would have had a tougher fight with Assad. Damascus and Tel Aviv may have more to coöperate on than fight over.)
One of the primary reasons Assad fell is something like 40% of Syrian national funding came from oil revenue denied by US backed Kurdish separatists.
The US will have to make the hard choice between HTS success or sacrificing Kurdish autonomy.
Could an Iraq-style autonomous subnational government that pays some tax to Damascus not work? Does Syria fundamentally not work without those revenues?
What if we took over the lease at Tartus?
HTS & Ahmed al-Sharaa is reportedly not open to national partition [1], but the SDF is unwilling to integrate into the national military structure.
It might work as an uncomfortable trupple if the US and HTS are willing to be bedfellows, but it is unclear if that is attractive or even viable for either. Everything we know about Ahmed al-Sharaa indicates they they should be a ideological enemy, and the only thing that hedges against this is that it would be really convenient if they wern't. Maybe this will be shown in time, but military trust building is measured in terms of years or decades, while payroll is due weekly.
In general, I think Syrian Kurdistan is a fascinating example cognitive blindness, where the US public and media simply memory holes anything that happens there because creates too much cognitive dissonance. This was true when the US was fighting Russia for the oilfields, and is happening again now, as NATO allied Turkey is bombing Kobani cement factories to impede US base building. [2]
https://www.twz.com/news-features/u-s-reportedly-setting-up-...
https://hawarnews.com/en/renewed-bombing-by-turkish-occupati...
There's a decent chance that they'd be better off working with HTS to carve out some concessions about their position within a consolidated Syrian state than relying on continued foreign support, especially seeing how things went last "T" was in office.