Regarding your editorial (The Guardian view on the fall of Assad: a tumultuous, fragile hope in Syria, 8 December), the downfall of Bashar al-Assad is welcome, but it is more than a decade overdue. The scenes we have witnessed this week could have taken place in 2013, if western leaders had only shown the courage and resolve to take action against Assad after he used chemical weapons on his own people. It is entirely plausible that, if the US and UK had given full military support to the rebels in 2013, the regime might have fallen, and the war ended then rather than continuing for another 11 years.
Instead, the following decade saw thousands dead, countless more imprisoned and tortured, the rise and fall of Islamic State, and a refugee crisis that shook Europe. The failure to intervene in Syria in 2013 stands as one of the worst decisions in recent British foreign policy history, every bit as wrong as the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003. The first tragic mistake led to the second.
Those who opposed military action in 2013 on the grounds that it could escalate the conflict, first among them Ed Miliband, ought by now to have resigned in shame.
Alasdair Murray
Westminster, London
What a moving and heartrending article by Ammar Azzouz (I wept and wept as I watched the Syrian regime fall. At last, I have a home again, 9 December). As the stories emerge of the brutal repression of the Syrian people by a man who was supposed to be a moderate and a modernist, one can only hope and pray that life will now be better.
A few pages earlier, above Andy Beckett’s article, I see the prime minister cosying up to the face of modern fascism, Giorgia Meloni. His refusal to challenge the far right in this country means that social media is now full of posts ordering Syrians domiciled in the UK to “go back home” – most of them written by supporters of Reform UK. Mr Azzouz states: “I am afraid of tomorrow.” So am I.
Carol Hedges
Harpenden, Hertfordshire
