© AP Photo/Hassan Ammar
The Damascus sky lights up missile fire as the U.S. launches an attack on Syria targeting different parts of the capital early Saturday, April 14, 2018. Syria’s capital has been rocked by loud explosions that lit up the sky with heavy smoke as U.S. President Donald Trump announced airstrikes in retaliation for the country’s alleged use of chemical weapons.
Syria's capital looks a bit like Washington, D.C.: Imposing government buildings, heavy traffic, busy streets, and imperious officials. Different, however, are ubiquitous checkpoints to thwart car bombs.
Although the threat of terrorism scares most Americans, it actually offers a form of relief to Damascus residents. Until recently insurgents controlled some suburbs, from which they fired artillery and mortars into the city. Today those neighborhoods, just a few minutes away, are wrecked and empty. But the fighting is over.
On a recent trip to Syria I found similar situations in Homs and Aleppo. Entire neighborhoods in the latter are just rubble. But other areas of the cities are recovering.
Moreover, the war there is over. The government has won.
The last area under insurgent control, surrounding Idlib, faces an imminent offensive by the Syrian military. Damascus is widely expected to prevail.
If so, only lands in the north, where U.S. forces are cooperating with Kurdish militias, and in the southeast, near the Iraqi border, the site of another American base, remain outside of Syrian government control. President Donald Trump said he wanted U.S. forces stay out of the Syrian conflict and remain only long enough to defeat the Islamic State. But the administration recently announced what sounds like a plan for an
essentially permanent, though lawless-without any congressional authorization-presence in Syria.
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