“Israel’s alleged airstrikes in the Damascus region play nicely into the hands of Assad and the Syrian regime,” says professor Kais Firro from Haifa University. “In fact, they’re celebrating. It’s exactly what they needed.”
With Damascus reeling from a series of attacks, which Western sources claimed were conducted by the Israeli Air Force, I decided to approach Firro, an internationally acclaimed expert on Syria, Lebanon and minorities in the Middle East. He spent much of our interview flipping between one Arab news station to the next, trying to be as up-to-date as possible with every tidbit of information as it was released. In that time, he also managed to sketch out a complex outline of what is really going on in the great battle over Syria’s future.
