Former UK Security Minister Tom Tugendhat argued that the decision by former President and President-Elect Donald Trump to approve the killing of Iranian Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimani was a key factor in the eventual downfall of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime.
“I’m always struck by how some people can be much more seminal, much more key, pivotal to an organization than you realize at the time. The reality is when Qassem Suleimani was killed in January 2020, he held in his head all the relationships, all the deals for everybody around the region,” Tugendhat explained during his appearance on the Conflicted podcast.
“He was replaced, but he wasn’t really, because nobody could replace the personal 20-year relationships that he held. That’s really the unpicking. So I have to say, I know it’s not popular, but President Trump, effectively, was the trigger that began the fall of the Assad regime,” he added.
Tugendhat mentioned that young members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are making two significant observations: “One, the old guard are corrupt and incompetent. That’s why Hezbollah has been hung out to dry and defeated. That’s why old allies like Assad have fallen. That’s one thing they’re saying.”
He elaborated, “The second thing they’re saying is that they’re hearing rumors, I don’t know how true they are, but they’re hearing rumours that the ayatollah and the government in Tehran wants to talk to the Americans to try and find a way out of this and perhaps hang on. And they’re saying that there’s absolutely no way that anybody can talk to the killers of Qassem Suleimani.”
“This means that there is a really big problem within the regime itself, a really big challenge, because actually there’s no way through. These young people, the extremists in the IRGC, so the extremists of the extreme, are trying to hold the regime to a level of purity that is just now completely inconsistent with reality,” Tugendhat continued.
He concluded by stating, “The Iranian regime will collapse within a few years, and if Syria is handled correctly, it could become an economic powerhouse in the Middle East within a decade.”
{Matzav.com}