Syria/Bashar al-Assad: “Syria is a jungle, and Bashar is not yet a wolf,” former Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad had once said about his younger son, the now-ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, to a friend. Decades later, the prophecy seemed to have come true, as Bashar fled the country after rebel forces — under the aegis of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) — took over Damascus.
The fall of Damascus on 8 December 2024 had an eerie resemblance to the fall of
