Last Tuesday, the Portuguese parliament decided to memorialize Aristides de Sousa Mendes (1885-1954), who served as consul to Bordeaux when World War II began, alongside the country’s other heroes in Lisbon’s National Pantheon. James Badcock tells his story:

It was mid-June 1940 and Hitler’s forces were days from vanquishing France. Paris fell on June 14 and an armistice was signed just over a week later. Portugal’s diplomatic corps was under strict instruction from the right-wing dictatorship of Antonio Salazar that visas should be issued to refugee Jews and stateless people only with express permission from Lisbon. For those thronging Bordeaux’s streets hoping to cross into Spain and escape Nazi persecution, there was no time to wait.

In Bordeaux, the consul had struck up a friendship with Rabbi Chaim Kruger, [who] had fled the Nazi advance from his home in Belgium. Sousa Mendes offered the rabbi and his immediate family safe passage across the Spanish border. . . . Kruger refused the offer, as he could not abandon the thousands of other Jewish refugees in Bordeaux.

At this point, Sousa Mendes suffered from what he termed a “nervous breakdown,” and was bedridden for a few days, during which, according to one witness, his hair turned gray. His internal crisis ended by June 17, when he announced that he would be giving visas to all who requested, regardless of their “nationalities, races, or religions.”

No one knows for sure how many transit visas [Sousa Mendes] issued, allowing refugees to pass from France into Spain and to travel onward to Portugal. But estimates range from 10,000 to 30,000; most [of the visa holders] sought to cross the Atlantic to a variety of American destinations. The U.S.-based Sousa Mendes Foundation has identified some 3,800 recipients of these visas.

As if possessed with a sense of mission, the consul even signed visas on the road as crowds in Bordeaux began to form a human column southward towards the border town of Hendaye. He stopped at the consulate in Bayonne to issue more papers. The foreign ministry in Lisbon began sending cablegrams to Bordeaux, ordering him to desist, amid reports from colleagues that he had “lost his senses.” Spanish authorities declared his visas invalid, but thousands had already made it across the Bidasoa river into Spain’s Basque region.

The Salazar regime relieved Mendes of his post a few weeks later, and he spent the rest of his life in poverty, supported by a Jewish soup kitchen.

On the same day the cease-fire went into effect along the Israel-Lebanon border, rebel forces launched an unexpected offensive, and within a few days captured much of Aleppo. This lightening advance originated in the northwestern part of the country, which has been relatively quiet over the past four years, since Bashar al-Assad effectively gave up on restoring control over the remaining rebel enclaves in the area. The fighting comes at an inopportune moment for the powers that Damascus has called on for help in the past: Russia is bogged down in Ukraine and Hizballah has been shattered.

But the situation is extremely complex. David Wurmser points to the dangers that lie ahead:

The desolation wrought on Hizballah by Israel, and the humiliation inflicted on Iran, has not only left the Iranian axis exposed to Israeli power and further withering. It has altered the strategic tectonics of the Middle East. The story is not just Iran anymore. The region is showing the first signs of tremendous geopolitical change. And the plates are beginning to move.

The removal of the religious-totalitarian tyranny of the Iranian regime remains the greatest strategic imperative in the region for the United States and its allies, foremost among whom stands Israel. . . . However, as Iran’s regime descends into the graveyard of history, it is important not to neglect the emergence of other, new threats. navigating the new reality taking shape.

The retreat of the Syrian Assad regime from Aleppo in the face of Turkish-backed, partly Islamist rebels made from remnants of Islamic State is an early skirmish in this new strategic reality. Aleppo is falling to the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS—a descendant of Nusra Front led by Abu Mohammed al-Julani, himself a graduate of al-Qaeda’s system and cobbled together of IS elements. Behind this force is the power of nearby Turkey.