Ten days after the Bashar al-Assad regime collapsed, what is happening in Syria? What role is the HTS, which controls the regime in Damascus, playing in the transition, and what challenges does it face going forward?

Israel is celebrating the fall of Assad because it breaks the noose that Iran had been patiently tightening around Israel’s borders in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. Tehran’s pincer is now broken and rendered useless. From the point of view of Israel’s wider conflict with the Islamic Republic, the collapse of Assad’s regime is a strategic victory.

Syria’s iron-fisted leader Bashar al-Assad is the second generation of an autocratic family dynasty that held power for more than five decades and his disappearance amid a lighting rebel advance cap an astonishing reordering of power in a strategically vital Middle Eastern nation.