Syria After Assad

ABSTRACT: In 2015, a decade before the Assad family's fifty-three-year rule over Syria ended, the Obama administration was spooked by the advances of a rebel alliance from Idlib, which seemed poised to topple the government in Damascus. The administration reviled Bashar al-Assad's regime, but since the rise of ISIS in 2014, it had treated Syria as a front in the War on Terror, and it was loath to see Damascus fall to Islamists, some with links to Al Qaeda. When Russia intervened in September 2015 to shore up Assad, the White House was privately relieved. Then Secretary of State John Kerry spent the waning days of the Obama administration negotiating a counterterror alliance with Russia. Not long after, Russia's savage methods in Syria triggered the world's largest mass exodus in half a century.