Today Iran and Assad received a big blow by losing Khan Touman to the south of Aleppo.

The town fell to the moderate jihadists (Nusra and Ahrar), but this is still a good news, because Assad and Iran are far worse than those jihadists.

Assad and Iran are worse than the jihadists for two reasons:

1. Assad and Iran kill much more people than the jihadists do. Just this week Assad attacked a hospital and refugee camp by air strikes. It is obvious that Assad’s crimes far outweigh the jihadists’ crimes. If you are unbiased against the jihadists, you should be able to see that easily.

2. Kicking the jihadists out of the areas they control is easier than kicking Assad and Iran out of them (for both military and political reasons). So when the jihadists take an area from Assad it becomes easier to liberate that area in the future.

The opposition sponsored by Turkey and Saudi Arabia (the Syrian National Coalition) calls areas under the control of jihadists “liberated” (although, ironically, the SNC refuses to move into those “liberated” areas and prefers to stay outside Syria). That is one reason for why I am against the SNC. Life in the “liberated” areas is not different from life in Afghanistan under the Taliban. If you call such areas “liberated,” then you must have some problem.

The “liberated” areas have yet to be liberated, but the fact that Assad and Iran are out of those areas is a good step forward for the two reasons I mentioned.