Does Putin have any cards left in Syria?

Fareed Zakaria writes this week in The Washington Post that one lesson of the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is that Russia, Assad’s chief patron, is weaker than we think.

Of course, no one would have argued before or after Assad’s fall that Russia is “strong,” given the toll on Moscow of the Ukraine war and US-led international sanctions, along with the collapse of Iran’s resistance axis in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon and now Syria.

There is more to the story, however, than simply Russian “weakness.” For President Vladimir Putin, his actions in Syria are linked to both a weak hand, for sure, and what he hopes will be a reset with US President-elect Donald Trump over the Ukraine war and maybe Iran.

In Syria, there was a possibility, until the final days if not hours, that Assad would hunker down in Damascus and the Alawite heartland. He had tens of thousands of loyal forces — mostly Alawite — who could have put up a fight with the sectarian Sunni jihadist forces, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which took Damascus.