Dr. Sebastian Gorka, who will be the deputy assistant to the president and senior director of counterterrorism in the soon-to-be-minted Trump administration, said during a special Founders Roundtable on Breitbart Fight Club that the fall of the Assad regime in Syria is a mighty blow to Iran.
During the nearly hour-and-a-half-long discussion with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow and Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle on Tuesday, multiple Breitbart Fight Club subscribers asked Gorka questions about Syria through the chat.
One subscriber, Eric Kadow, asked Gorka who is poised to seize control of Syria now that there is a power vacuum and if there is a possibility that whoever does take over is friendly to the United States. Another Fight Club subscriber asked Gorka how Assad’s fall affects both the Ukrainian and Middle Eastern wars and how it changes the arms movements in the region.
Gorka said that no one knows who will rise to power in Syria, and anyone who claims to know “is an absolute liar.”
“The person that they’re lauding as the new person in charge is Al Qaeda. He is a bad guy. The person who says, ‘Oh, don’t worry, I’m going to protect the minorities.’ No, he’s actually a jihadist,” Gorka said.
Gorka said the effect Assad’s fall will have on peace in the Middle East depends on what transpires before Trump enters office but emphasized that the toppling of the regime represents a problem for Iran and a potential opportunity for stabilization in the region.
“The loss of that regime is a sucking chest wound, to use military terminology, for the regime in Iran,” Gorka said. “Iran needed Syria, not just as a client state, but as a vassal state through which to siphon its arms, its proxies into Israel, across the region, and to threaten other Arab-Sunni states.”
“If the collapse of the regime can be so leveraged that the people of Syria get some kind of representative government that they create, and not the jihadis, and that the Kurds in the north aren’t weakened, and that Israel maintains its assault against the jihadis in the South, then – I don’t tempt fate – but we could see a stability in the Middle East, the likes of which we haven’t seen in generations.”
“So there’s everything to play for if we do it right. The only question is: What is Joe [Biden] going to do for the next 43 days?” he concluded.