You could be forgiven for never having heard of Deir ez-Zor. There is virtually no mention of it in the Western press, except by British journalist Robert Fisk. Yet this ancient Syrian city of just over 200,000 people on the banks of the Euphrates is the site of what looks to be the final defeat of the dream of ISIS of creating an ethnically cleansed, sectarian caliphate in Syria and Iraq.
Ironically, way back in 2012, a US Defence Intelligence Agency document suggested that the emergence of a 'declared or undeclared Salafist [fundamentalist Sunni] principality' in the area of Hasaka or Deir ez-Zor would be useful in isolating the Syrian government. While it is not known what exact status this document enjoyed, some more conspiratorially minded folk noted that that was indeed the area of Syria where ISIS first emerged two years later.
As it happens, the Syrian government held the city itself against a three and a half year ISIS siege, only lifted last month by a combination of Russian and Syrian airpower, Syrian special forces and ongoing counterattacks by the troops besieged within. Unlike the ongoing efforts of Kurdish forces, backed by US airpower, to liberate the other remaining ISIS centre in Raqqa, the Syrian Government's extraordinary successes in pushing back the terror organisation across most of the non-Kurdish regions of Syria has gone largely unnoticed in the West. These successes are important for a number of reasons.
Firstly, they give the lie to the oft-repeated claims of use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government. There are no angels in the Syrian war and Assad runs a government which is as authoritarian as many in the Middle East: it's hard to imagine that he would have ethical qualms about their use. Nevertheless, chemical weapons are weapons of desperation — while they can be effective under limited conditions, they are universally condemned and would almost inevitably drag other countries into the conflict. Why take such a gamble when you are winning — and winning handsomely?
Secondly, the nature of the forces the government has ranged against ISIS gives the lie to many of the glibly-repeated nostrums of the Syrian war. While it is often said that this is a Shi'a v Sunni conflict, with Iran backing fellow Shi'a Assad against the radical Sunni movements ISIS and Al Qaeda, this is also false.
Assad's family are Alawite, a monotheistic faith whose status within Islam