Is ISIS About To Take Damascus?

by JASmius

Evidently Boy Assad seems to think they’re knocking on his door:

Bashar al-Assad urged more Syrians to join the army, saying a shortage of troops is the main obstacle preventing the military from winning the war.

Assad, speaking a day after he issued an amnesty for deserters, said that while more people have been joining the army, the number of soldiers wasn’t enough to win a conflict fought on multiple battlefronts. He also said that his appeal doesn’t mean the military is collapsing.

The amnesty “is one step, and the rest is up to society,” he said in a televised address on Sunday. “The people who don’t defend the homeland have no homeland.” [emphases added]

First, dictators and autocrats do not willingly and publicly admit to any weakness.  Indeed, they dare not.  For Assad to do so now is as clear an advance warning as we’re ever going to get that his regime is about to collapse.

Second, dictators and autocrats have deserters shot, not amnestied.  If Assad is so desperate that he’s begging betrayers and turncoats to come back and fight for him, he must be packing his bags and preparing to flee into exile as we speak.

And third, if he’s having to publicly insist that his military isn’t collapsing….his military is collapsing.

The interesting thing to watch for now is what Assad’s Iranian superiors do.  His regime and country have always been a key asset to the mullahs, providing them with an outlet to the Mediterranean and common border with Israel, along with Lebanon’s.  So far Tehran has only supported him with cash, military advisers, and proxy forces (Hezbollah and Shiite militias in Iraq).  If Damascus is about to fall to the Islamic State, completing the latter’s conquest of Syria, they may have to up their ante.

There’s also the question of how the Israelis will react to the prospect of having ISIS right on their Golan Heights frontier alongside Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, and the additional and growing likelihood that an ISIS conquest of Syria could push Jordan over the edge and into collapse.  Given ISIS’s already existing presence in the Sinai, and their infiltration of Gaza, the Jews could find themselves completely surrounded by bloodthirsty jihadists apart from the Palestinians, and not even counting the Iranians and their U.S.-supplied nukes.

And finally, given the new grand alliance between Barack Obama and the mullahgarchy, might The One be willing to come to Assad’s defense after flirting with bombing his regime into submission not quite two years ago?

Looks like the Middle East is about to get even more “interesting”.

God help us.