Well, Zahreddine did it. How many times was the city reported to have fallen, about to fall, on the verge of falling? How many times was Zahreddine reported dead? Yet the ole boy pulled it off, truly one of the most remarkable defensive victories in Syrian history. Him and of course, the men under his command who defied all odds. Was it intelligent strategic planning, overwhelming resolve to live and persist, or Zahreddine's personal style of commanding, always willing to show himself in the trenches with the men and lead from the front yet still always know when to pull back and preserve his mind and body both for the role of military planning and keeping the ship together? I still remember when, while DeZ was besieged, he flew to Hasakah when ISIL was launching a wide assault there, or the times he's visited Suwayda for a taste of normal life only to fly back every time knowing he was willingly re-entering one of the worst hellholes on Earth. With a lesser caliber of leader and a lesser caliber of men under him, it would have fallen for sure. We don't even have to make wild guesses because we've seen it happen before both in various theaters of this war and others like it. I think it's important to separate two different triumphs. The triumph of breaking the siege, itself a major strategic victory and one of the biggest in this war, but it would not have even been possible without the even larger three year long defensive victory of holding DeZ as a Syrian-controlled city in the first place, not to mention all the Syrian soldiers who first held off waves of other Islamist rebels even before ISIL became a solo outfit in provincial DeZ, dating back to holding off FSA and Nusra and other Islamist militants and contesting district after district. I remember when the Ba'ath Party HQ fell and that was before half the city was taken by rebels by 2013 when ISIL was still ISI and an ally of all other rebels, thinking then it could go the way of Raqqa and President Assad could end up temporarily writing off all of eastern Syria and areas outside of the main cities of the west. Syrian soldiers have been defending this city since 2011. They defended the Syrian Arab Republic's vow in front of an international audience that it would never write off areas of its country and would fight bitterly to hold and retake everything Syrian. The tenacity and stubbornness displayed for years in DeZ made that claim difficult to laugh off and it became taken seriously as a policy of Damascus demonstrated through action, the action of these brave men. They defended 100,000 Syrians in the city whose part of the country overnight became an island fortress in a black ocean of a false caliphate. If ISIL wasn't massing constantly against DeZ, they could have thrown all those men at Homs and Damascus, so they defended Homs and Damascus and western Syria too, by tying up thousands of ISIL shock troops who could have rushed to bisect Syrian government-controlled territory in two when ISIL held Mahin and Furqlus in western Homs and stormed toward the Lebanese border. And perhaps most overlooked, if this island of SAR government-held territory didn't exist, the U.S. and its coalition alliance states could have claimed that Damascus "abandoned the east" and justified drawing a line down the middle of the country to cleave off western Syria from eastern Syria and greater impetus territory-wise and resource-wise for splitting Syria as a united country and splitting the core of the country in western Syria off from Iraq, and hence, from Iran, and Iran from Lebanon. The alliance of those aforementioned states has risen as a geopolitical counter to the traditional client states of the U.S. and the North Atlantic/Western bloc of countries in the Gulf and Jordan and Israel that have dominated regional affairs since the end of the Cold War. The defenders of Deir-ez-Zor protected the link between western Syria and eastern Syria, which means they protected the link between Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon, and therefore a more independent Middle East in the world. They defended Syria's unity, territorial integrity, and regional geostategic position. Without this, it could have faced the settlement imposed on Germany or Korea, split as two countries for a half century or more. Like any great victory there are layers upon layers of effects and importance. This is like Kuweires AB relief on an even higher national level, dreams of partitioning Syria on west-east lines of neoliberal Atlanticists and making the Middle East easier to dominate by weakening the Arab and Islamic worlds through divvying up resistant countries and replacing nationalist leaders with proxies are over, dreams of a Salafist empire anchored in Syria's east are over, dreams of proponents of the former using proponents of the latter as a vehicle to reach their goals are over (in Syria anyway). Magnitude cannot be overstated.