In 2013, Kassem Eid was present in one of the civilian areas subjected to sarin-gas attacks by Bashar al-Assad. After fleeing the country, Eid wrote a memoir of what he witnessed during the civil war, and tried to call the U.S. government’s attention to the atrocities being committed. He even met with then-UN Ambassador Samantha Power and hoped that she would bring his plea for help to the president. Based on Power’s recent defenses of President Obama’s failure to act at that time, Eid is now convinced of her duplicitousness:

I first met then-Ambassador Samantha Power at the U.S.-UN Mission on April 14, 2014. That was two months after I fled Syria and less than a year after I survived Assad’s sarin-gas attack. When I met Ambassador Power, she told me that she was trying hard to persuade President Obama to act decisively against the Assad regime and that she was ashamed of Obama’s inaction. She then told me about her personal experience as a journalist and activist while she was covering the Yugoslav wars and the genocide in Bosnia.

I was touched by what I perceived to be Ambassador Power’s sincerity and personal experience that led her to write A Problem from Hell, which explained how politicians lie in order to avoid intervening to stop genocide. . . . In [the book], Power explains how the U.S. administration tried to cover up the genocide in Bosnia by instead labeling it a “civil war.” Yet she and President Obama escaped responsibility for the documented and proven war crimes committed in Syria. . . . If Power was telling the truth, she should have resigned; [after all], she chided diplomats at the State Department for not resigning during the genocide in Bosnia.

The Assad regime taught us in schools that there was no Holocaust and hid the truth of the crematoriums and the concentration camps where millions of Jews were brutally killed. But the Obama administration also refused to act on—or reveal—direct eyewitness testimony it received of the crematorium in Saydnaya Prison in Syria, where an estimated 100,000 people were brutally killed and then burned to ashes to hide the truth. I’d begged the U.S. administration during my meetings at the State Department back in 2014 to investigate the Saydnaya Prison and Qasioun mountain because my fellow activists in those areas had repeatedly told me since 2012 how they smelled the awful stench of burning flesh.

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 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.