Assad’s Downfall

It seems like the beginning of the end for the Baath regime. Its closest ally Iran is already looking to a future beyond Assad. General Manaf Tlass, a scion of the Tlass family — the keystone for four decades of the Sunni-Allawi alliance — has also had enough of the regime brutality and defected to Paris. Wikileaks has also started releasing Syria Files, a trove of documents that include 2,434,899  email exchanges between regime officials and some cronies. So far there isn’t much that’s particularly interesting, except evidence of continuing Italian support for the regime and this PR advice that the regime received from Brown Lloyd James (BLJ) to brush up its image after its bloody crackdown.