When the Assad regime in Syria fell last year much of the midwit commentariat such as Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell enthused about the new regime that took over Syria. Some of this ‘centrist dad’ commentary community looked upon the new Syrian leader Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa as some sort of man the West could do business with, mostly because Al-Sharaa did Western media interviews and public appearances wearing a suit. He looked reasonable therefore he must be reasonable too many commentators seemed to be saying.

But some of us were not taken in by a jihadi choosing to wear a suit. A jihadi wearing a suit is still a jihadi and a shirt and tie does not suddenly make a savage fighter for Islam suddenly turn into a liberal democrat.

Many of us who are more cynical or maybe just more knowledgeable about the culture of Middle Eastern Islam and the politics of the region did not expect Syria to become some sort of democratic paradise following the deposing of the Assad regime. We realists knew that Syria would descend into jihadist violence not because we wanted that to happen, but because we know that this is the way that things too often happen in the Islamic world.

Sadly those of us who are cynics about the Middle East have been proven to be correct. Syria has descended into a jihad hell hole. The jihadis who are now in charge of Syria to mass murder Syrian religious and cultural minorities such as the Christians, Druze and Alawites. Those who thought that a jihadi wearing a suit represented a new and liberal democratic start for Syria have been left with an awful lot of egg on their faces.

I don’t think that that there is any real future for Syria as a unified entity. It was held together by brutal strongmen for decade after decade after the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the French League of Nations Mandate ended and now that the Ottomans, the French and the brutal strongmen are gone jihad, as expected, has taken over. Western politicians and commentators need to realise that the only future for many of the minorities in Syria is to create several ethno-religious states which would either be completely sovereign or semi-autonomous out of what is left of Syria. There should be an area for the Alawites, an area for the Syrian Kurds, another for the Sunni Muslims and self government for the Druze, As the Sunni area is likely to be a jihad hell hole for the coming decades Israeli help to create a Druze majority buffer zone between the screaming jihadi nutters and Israel might look like a sensible plan.

I look in horror at some of the images of the slaughter in Syria and know and understand that it will only get worse as that is the way of the Islamic world. Syria is effectively a dead parrot of a nation and no amount of wishful thinking by idiots or treating a jihadi in a suit as some sort of liberal democratic Syrian will change that.