Road to Damascus
Tom Stevenson
The Syrian civil war lasted twelve long years, but it ended in twelve days. The speed of the rebel advance that brought down the regime of Bashar al-Assad was remarkable. On 27 November, the coalition of opposition forces based in Idlib province and known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham announced their first major operation for years. Within days they had swept through Aleppo, Hama and Homs. By 8 December they had taken Damascus and sent Assad fleeing for the safety of Moscow.
From a military perspective there was little to analyse. The government forces fled or collapsed. Even in Damascus there was no last stand by the Republican Guard or 4th Armoured Division, the core of the loyalist forces. It is unlikely that HTS itself expected such success. The group is not averse to grandiloquence (the administration it ran in Idlib from 2017 was named the Syrian Salvation Government), but its campaign bore the modest name of Operation Deter Aggression. Perhaps they thought they had a chance at seizing Aleppo. Bringing down the regime must have been well beyond their hopes.
The scenes in Damascus were reminiscent of government collapse elsewhere. Statues were torn down. Militiamen wandered around the presidential palace, gawping at the furniture and going through the fridges. HTS’s leader, Abu Muhammad al-Julani, was feted in the Umayyad Mosque. Bashar al-Assad, Julani said, had spread corruption and sectarianism but now Syria was being cleansed. There were signs of looting and disorder. The state immigration building was burned. A twelve-hour curfew has been declared to prevent petty criminality. Meanwhile Saydnaya military prison was stormed and thousands of prisoners released. The relatives of the tens of thousands of disappeared are visiting the prison complex looking for any sign of their family members. Many will have to search for their bodies in the mass graves in Najha, on the edge of the capital.
The horrors of Assad’s Syria were similar in kind, though of a greater magnitude, to those of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s Egypt. Since the uprising in 2011, the government had survived principally by its own brutality. To the extent that it remained a political system, it was one built on mass detention and torture. In Saydnaya there were regular mass hangings in the basement of the prison’s ‘white building’. Political power, which had once been expressed through the Baath Party, was increasingly concentrated in Assad’s immediate circle and once powerful autonomous institutions were hollowed out.
Part of the reason for Assad’s rapid collapse is that his international backers – Russia, Iran, Hizbullah – were all at the same moment distracted or weakened. But that doesn’t explain why the regime had been unable to strengthen itself in the preceding lull. Since 2020, the intensity of the civil war had declined. The half-hearted attempt by the US and its allies to fell Assad was in the past. The armed opposition was for the most part contained in Idlib, and the Syrian Kurdish forces remained in the north-east. Under those conditions the regime might have consolidated its hold over the areas still under its control. It is now evident that it did not. Perhaps US sanctions, which came into effect in 2020 and doubled the number of Syrians without enough to eat, played some part. But clearly the Assad system of minority rule by brutal repression was also exhausted.
The Baath Party of Assad’s early rule, which more or less functioned as a ruling party with a large membership and a limited form of cross-sectarian representation in the state elite, had already ceased to exist. First the ruling party was hollowed out in favour of the army and the air force intelligence service, then the security forces themselves became a shell. Perhaps, ruling Syria required a relatively decentralised authoritiarian system, but fighting the civil war needed a centralisation of power in Assad’s immediate circle that was ultimately the regime’s undoing. In any case, that system is now finished. What will replace it?
HTS is mostly composed of former al-Qaida figures and takfiri-jihadist veterans of the civil war. Julani is from a petit bourgeois Syrian background. Having grown up in Damascus’s wealthy Mazzeh district, he turned to religious fundamentalism in his youth. In 2003 he travelled as a volunteer to fight the Americans in Iraq. There he joined al-Qaida and spent five years detained by the US in Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca. In 2011 he was released, in time to travel back to Syria and found an al-Qaida affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, the forerunner to HTS. In 2016 he cut ties with al-Qaida and its transnational vision in favour of focusing on the more immediate problem of keeping the armed opposition going.
In the early years of the war I spent time in the border towns of southern Turkey. Hatay, Urfa and Mardin were regular haunts for both jihadist and religious-conservative militias (Western support for the armed opposition was run from Gaziantep). But HTS’s relationship with Turkey is complex and Turkey is unlikely to have foreseen that the group would bring down the Assad regime. HTS ideologues used to deride Turkey and its ‘infidel army’. But such talk declined over time, since it was Turkey that provided protection for the opposition statelet in Idlib.
HTS has effectively ruled the province since mid-2017 in an uneasy alliance with Turkey’s proxy forces. If it is to play a larger part in a future Syria, the group’s record in Idlib could be an indication of what that might be like. It provided basic services, collected taxes, imposed conservative social rules and made short work of its rivals. Its closest international analogue would probably be the Taliban in Afghanistan. Past iterations of HTS had a record of carrying out massacres in Druze and Alawite villages. There has so far been no repeat of that and the group has shown military discipline.
What comes next may be couched by international observers in the aseptic language of ‘transition’, but is there a state left to takeover? Julani may not be able to control the forces that joined his push from the south, let alone the country as a whole. The predominantly Kurdish Syrian Defence Forces remain in control of large parts of territory in the north-east. The SDF commander Mazloum Abdi called the fall of Damascus a historic moment. But the tacit agreements the SDF had with Damascus are now gone. There are already signs of trouble in SDF-controlled territory in the countryside around Raqqa. At the same time, the Turkish air force has been bombing SDF positions in Manbij, Israel has been bombing Syrian air strips and its forces have crossed Mount Hermon into the demilitarised zone in the Golan Heights. The US has conducted what it described as ‘dozens of precision air strikes’ on 75 alleged Islamic State targets.
The speed of the march on Damascus meant that several wars (ethnic, political, petty material, regional) collapsed into one and were resolved as one. But in that resolution those conflicts will separate out and reassert themselves. Assad’s legacy is the death of hundreds of thousands of Syrians. It is difficult to imagine how to reconstruct a working Syrian state in these conditions, given the damage that has been done. The greatest risk might be a majoritarian correction to Assad’s sectarian system: that would be to rediscover the underlying forces which produced the Assad state.
Comments
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9 December 2024
at
7:35pm
M f Naguib
says:
It would be wishful thinking to expect the rise of a new democratic state from the ashes of the brutal Assad regime. It needs a great stretch of the imagination to expect a multi sectarian ( Sunni, Alawites, Druzes, Christians) and multiethnic nation (Arabs, Kurds , Turkomans) , torn by decades of internecine brutal fighting and with different agendas, secular and Islamist, to heal its divisions and come together within a single unifying nationalist vision. The two regional Superpowers Turkey and Israel, harbouring different objectives, will ensure that divisions persist in a weak vassal state.
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9 December 2024
at
8:08pm
Ian Ross
says:
While there are real causes for concern about the future of Syria there are also reasons to be optimistic. The majority of Syrians are in exile, either in neighbouring states or, to a lesser extent, further afield. There are reportedly only 7 million Syrians in Syria, but 9 million outside. Next door is Jordan, a monarchy that has been adept in maintaining a neutral stance and keeping its population - the majority of which are Palestinians if one excludes recent refugees - content enough to only protest about water and electricity prices and other domestic matters. I suspect that the Syrian diaspora would be happy to return if there was some form of representative government as long as it was tolerant of minorities and did not impose a jihadist social policy.
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9 December 2024
at
9:07pm
M f Naguib
says:
@
Ian Ross
I agree that so far Arab Monarchies have worked better than secular Republics at securing their population loyalty, despite their diverse origins and interests.
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11 December 2024
at
12:43am
whatnot
says:
@
Ian Ross
I don't know about this Sykes-Picot Muslim Brotherhood, but Lebanon and Syria could try some kind of federation for a change, fresh take on United Arab Republic!
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10 December 2024
at
10:13am
Graucho
says:
Israel was quick of the mark to grab more real estate.
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10 December 2024
at
8:28pm
Graucho
says:
@
Graucho
*off
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11 December 2024
at
12:49am
whatnot
says:
@
Graucho
they already had that crazy settler woman with CGI renders of condos in Gaza - soon in Golan Heights, extra 'for eternity' guarantee!
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11 December 2024
at
9:15pm
TheLRBisGoodForYou
says:
No mention of Israel's intentions in this article perhaps implies the author did not expect Israel to do anything. The future for Syria will be about resolving the increasing tension of Israel's actions and Turkey's strength of support for Syria. I am interested to know why Israel waited until Russia had withdrawn its forces from Syria before attacking. And why US, UK and other Nato countries did not do what Israel did well before now. The aim of the Nato countries should have been to remove Assad's regime as soon as possible before the terrorist (non Assad aligned) elements grew in courage. Now NATO etc want to bomb the "terrorists" in Syria. The very same "terrorists" who liberated Syria from the Assad regime. Make up your mind's NATO. Who is the more evil? Assad or some disparate group of rebels? Answer: NATO for not acting. Sorry if that offends, but it's the truth. Answers on a post card.
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12 December 2024
at
11:33am
Rory Allen
says:
@
TheLRBisGoodForYou
Why didn't NATO act to overthrow Assad? Perhaps because the previous Western exercises in toppling regimes - Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya - went so catastrophically badly that we decided not to repeat the mistake. Does that fit on your postcard?
Read moreThe 21st century history of the West in the Middle East has been disastrous for Moslem citizens and it own reputation in the region. The last thing Syria needs now is lectures about democracy. What it has also failed to recognise is the national boundaries in this part of the world were imposed by the Sykes-Picot line of French and Anglo influence. The reality is that Moslems, be they Palestinians, Jordanians, Lebanese, Syrian or even Turkish regard each other as brothers. And the vast majority of them want peace. Yes, there remains a rupture between Sunni and Shia which will take long to assuage, but neither want this to descend into warlord conflict. The lesson for the West is deal with it pragmatically with a realpolitik mindset, nudge rather than impose.
Unfortunately in Syria today, even the disparate Jihadist groups with similar agendas, have been at each other throat. Turkey will not tolerate the rise of an autonomous Kurdish entity on its borders. Israel will not exactly welcome another Islamist entity like Hamas on its borders.
We must remember that those who possess the weapons detain the Power, and this is not the scattered Diaspora , desperate to rebuild their lives and their homes. Let’s hope your optimism will prove me wrong.