The Dominoes Are Beginning To Fall In The Mideast -- July 13, 2015

If Damascus falls, the dominoes begin to fall -- The Fiscal Times. The most interesting story line: how this was kept off the front page of America's newspapers for the past six months. I posted it some time ago that ISIS would eventually take Syria but it was just a one-off. No follow-up. And now The Fiscal Times has a huge article.

Hindsight is 20/20 but it appears that the president's statement that the US government had no strategy for dealing with ISIS was very, very disingenuous. It looks like the US government may not have had a "published" or "stated" strategy, but there was certainly a strategy in the President's mind.

From the linked article:

The Assad regime now controls no more than 35 percent of the country, leaving the rest to ISIS, the Kurds and the other rebel groups like al-Nusra front. Allepo, Syria's largest city is almost surrounded completely by the rebels. The Syrian Kurds have increased the territories they control in the north to include most of the border areas with Turkey.

Assad is also the de facto mayor of Damascus and the coastal areas. If this trend continues, which is likely to happen, the Syrian regime will probably fall by the end of this year. The two competing forces to occupy Damascus are ISIS and al-Nusra front. 

If either of these two terrorist organizations capture Damascus, the world will witness an unprecedented chain reaction. It would be the first time that al-Qaeda or ISIS controlled a national capital. “ISIS's strategic target is to control one of the historical capitals of the Islamic caliphates: Damascus, Baghdad or Samarra. These cities are very symbolic for its followers,” says Hisham al-Hashimi, an expert on ISIS and the author of the book, The World of ISIS.  [Samarra is 80 miles north of Baghdad.]

After the fall of the Assad regime, the Syrian people's different ethnic and sectarian components would cause the society to fray further.

“Imagine that you wake up one day to find out that the ruling party in Damascus is no longer the Arab Baath Socialist Party; it is al-Nusra front.... Imagine you wake up to hear that another caliph has appeared somewhere else.... I say to those who complain about what is going on in our region: you haven't seen anything yet. Civil wars don't end suddenly, unless there is a victory that left many massacred,” says Harith Hasan, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University who is researching ethnic violence and identity in the Middle East. 

I wonder how long it would take the Obama administration to recognize the new ISIS government in Syria. One hour, one day, month?