The return of Islamist terror is more tinder in a region that’s never been more explosive, says David Patrikarikos

Murdering dictator he may be, but Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is no Idi Amin.

When the Ugandan tyrant was finally forced into exile in 1979, he was able to scuttle off to Saudi Arabia and wallow in luxury for the next two decades.

Assad cannot do that, even though his wealth would guarantee him lifetimes of luxury. One Arab newspaper, citing British intelligence sources, estimated his fortune – largely stolen from his own people – at £13.5 billion. And that’s without an added 200 tons of gold worth another £10 billion.

After an emergency summit in Moscow with Vladimir Putin, last night Assad was believed to be back in the Syrian capital Damascus, where he is expected to remain as jihadist revolutionaries storm across the country.

Assad and his inner circle are Alawites – a minority sect of Shia Islam – in a largely Sunni dominated Syria, and this binds them irrevocably to the 2-3 million Alawites who support him.

If his regime falls, Assad is dead and the Alawites will fear for their future as a people. He has no choice but to fight, though he cannot count on Western intervention to prop up his power, even against Islamist terror groups.

His past barbarities, including the use of chemical weapons such as chlorine gas against his own civilians, put him beyond the reach of diplomatic compromises.

Assad maybe an ostrich-necked psychopath with a weak chin and shifty eyes, but he is cunning as well as brutal. And he’ll do pretty much anything to survive – and that includes allying with some of the most sadistic regimes on earth.

Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, left, meets the Syrian president in Damascus to deliver a message of support for Syria’s government and armed forces yesterday 

Russian president Vladimir Putin meets with Assad at the Kremlin in Moscow in July

For the past decade, he has relied on Russian and Iranian support to hold back successive waves of rebels, including the armies of the Islamic State death cult.

But Russia and Iran have their own, more pressing problems. Ostrich-like, too, they have buried their heads in the sand while resistance movements regrouped in Syria.

They, just like Britain and the US, appear to have been taken by surprise at the weekend when balaclava-clad fighters from the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) terror group stormed the cities of Aleppo and Hama, and invaded Damascus. 

HTS is led by veteran Islamist warlord Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, who has been wanted by the US for more than ten years, with a $10 million (£7.9 million) bounty on his head.

Al-Jawlani was a close associate of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the IS leader who died during a US raid in Syria five years ago. But his HTS army is more of an offshoot from al-Qaeda, the terrorist collective that downed the Twin Towers in 2001.

In the dizzying melee of tribal allegiances, ancient feuds, religious schisms and personal ambition that marks Islamist insurgencies, it’s impossible to predict how long pacts and alliances will last, or whether the rebels will turn on each other as they so often have before.

This has generally played out to Assad’s advantage in the past. His brutal but highly effective policy has simply been to kill as many of his enemies as he can, wherever he can, in the expectation that sooner or later they will begin killing each other.

In this, he has the unfailing loyalty of the Alawites. Together they have faced a succession of fundamentalist Sunni Muslim uprisings. They are backed, too, by the country’s Christians, who face death or exile if Assad falls.

Terror group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is led by Islamist warlord Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, who has been wanted by the US for over ten years, with a $10 million (£7.9 million) bounty on his head

For Putin, all this comes down to geography and access to the Mediterranean through the port at Tartus.

Here, close to the border with Lebanon, Russia leases a naval facility, with another military site, the Khmeimim air base, about 35 miles away. These are strategically vital to Moscow.

But for the past two-and-a-half years, as the war in Ukraine has consumed Russia’s resources, Syria has been a secondary consideration, exemplified when the commander of Russian forces there, Colonel General Alexander Zhuravlyov, was recalled in 2022 to head the campaign on the ground in Ukraine.

At the same time, Assad’s support from Iran is in disarray following Israel’s decapitation of Hezbollah. It’s not that Hezbollah doesn’t still have commanders; it’s that, following Mossad’s exploding pagers operation, so many of them no longer have eyes or hands.

I discuss the success of that operation in the Mail’s podcast 90 Seconds To Midnight, along with conflicts from Ukraine to Gaza.

The strike by HTS against three cities is well coordinated. They use sophisticated drone technology, comparable to the best of Ukraine’s weaponry, and this requires both investment and training. Most likely, this is coming from Turkey, where President Erdogan has a vested interest in expanding into northern Syria to repress Kurdish separatists.

He also wants to stem the tide of Syrian refugees into his country, not to mention the possibility of diverting water for agriculture.

All this is to add more tinder to a situation in the Middle East that has never been more explosive.

David Patrikarakos is the host of the Daily Mail’s weekly global new podcast, 90 Seconds To Midnight.