Assad’s Fall

The​ Syrian civil war lasted twelve long years, but 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 (HTS) announced their first major operation for years. Within days they had swept through Aleppo, Hama and Homs, the ease of each victory a spur for the next. By 8 December they had taken Damascus and Assad had fled to the safety of Moscow.

From a military perspective there was little to analyse. Government forces fled or collapsed. Syria’s army and state security apparatus were revealed to be even more of a racket than had been thought. Even in Damascus there was no last stand by the Republican Guard or 4th Armoured Division, the core of the loyalist forces. At some point, the order was given not to fight. But this was nothing like the situation with Hosni Mubarak in 2011, when the Egyptian army high command shuffled the president off the stage and sought power in its own name. The broken pieces of the Assad state capitulated quietly. In Damascus, HTS’s leader, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, met Assad’s prime minister, Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali, who made a symbolic concession of power. The constitution was suspended and Mohammad al-Bashir, who had been president of HTS’s administration in Idlib, was installed as interim prime minister. 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 called the Syrian Salvation Government), but its campaign had a more modest name: Operation Deter Aggression. They probably thought they had a chance of seizing Aleppo, but 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 through the presidential palace, gawping at the furniture and going through the fridges. Julani was feted in the Umayyad Mosque. Assad, he said, had spread corruption and sectarianism but now Syria was being cleansed. There was some looting and disorder. The state immigration building was burned down. But a curfew to prevent petty criminality was lifted after only three nights. Meanwhile Saydnaya military prison was stormed and thousands of prisoners released. Relatives of the tens of thousands of disappeared have been visiting the prison complex looking for 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 Arab Spring uprising in 2011, the government had survived principally because of its brutality. To the extent that it remained a political system, it was one built on mass detention and torture. Hundreds of thousands were killed in the war and by the repressive machinery of the state. 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 formerly powerful autonomous institutions lost all influence.

Part of the reason for Assad’s rapid collapse is that his international backers – Russia, Iran, Hizbullah – were distracted or weakened at the same moment. But that doesn’t explain why the regime had been unable to reconstitute itself in the preceding lull. The intensity of the civil war had declined. The half-hearted attempt by the US and its allies to fell Assad was over. The armed opposition was for the most part contained in Idlib, and 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. The economic crisis in neighbouring Lebanon that began in 2019 affected the Syrian economy, so that even in loyalist areas the government was incapable of rebuilding and struggled to pay off local warlords. Perhaps US sanctions, which came into effect in 2020 and doubled the number of Syrians without enough to eat, played a part. It is harder to drum up an army if the potential conscripts are hungry. But 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 limited 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. Before 2011, the Syrian regime was not a caricature personalist dictatorship with no social constituency outside its ethnic Alawite core. But during the civil war it came to resemble one. Patronage flowed from Assad and his immediate family through alliances with unreliable local militia groups raised to fight alongside poorly equipped Syrian army conscripts and irregulars paid by Russia and Iran. Once the fighting let up, Assad found he was unable either to reconstitute the institutions of the Baathist state or to bring about a new equilibrium. It’s possible that fighting the civil war made necessary a centralisation of power 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 himself is from a petit bourgeois 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, Camp Bucca and elsewhere. In 2011 he was released, and returned to Syria where he founded an al-Qaida affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, the forerunner of HTS. In 2016 he cut ties with al-Qaida and its transnational vision, focusing instead on the more immediate problem of keeping the domestic armed opposition going.

In the early years of the war, I spent time in the border towns of southern Turkey. Urfa and Mardin were haunts of 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’, although such talk declined after Turkey provided protection for the statelet in Idlib.

HTS has effectively ruled the province since mid-2017 in an uneasy alliance with Turkey’s proxy forces. The group’s record in Idlib could be an indication of what its Syria might be like. It provided basic services, collected taxes, imposed conservative social rules and made short work of its rivals. The closest international analogue would probably be the Taliban in Afghanistan. In Aleppo, billboards have been erected dedicated to the ‘sons of the mujahideen’. Syrian state television is broadcasting an HTS nasheed called ‘Hand in Hand’ on a loop, interspersed with images of Julani. HTS has published a wanted list of figures from the old regime, but so far only a few mid-level commanders have been executed and conscripted soldiers have been amnestied. Past iterations of HTS had a record of carrying out massacres in Druze and Alawite villages. There has so far been no repeat and the group has shown military discipline.

The same cannot be said of the Turkish-backed militia with which HTS is allied. While Julani enjoyed Damascus, Turkey’s proxy forces, supported by the Turkish air force, launched a major offensive against the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Defence Forces (SDF), which control large parts of the north-east. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, described the campaign as an effort to clear out ‘terrorists’. But there is already clear evidence that Turkey’s proxies have engaged in extrajudicial execution, torture, looting and extortion. SDF forces have fallen back from Manbij to Kobani. When they left Manbij, Turkish-backed militia entered a hospital at the edge of the city and executed wounded SDF fighters as they lay in their beds. The SDF commander, Mazloum Abdi, called the fall of Damascus a historic moment. But the tacit agreements the SDF had with the old regime are now gone. Its position, particularly in Raqqa, is tenuous. During the capture of Aleppo, large numbers of civilians fled into SDF territory in search of safety. Instead the war has followed them.

Turkey is not alone among Syria’s neighbours in its opportunism. On 8 December, the same day Assad fled, the Israeli army crossed Mount Hermon, looking to extend its position in the occupied Golan Heights. The IDF has since crossed the UNDOF Bravo line and taken control of a Syrian military outpost north of the town of Hader. The Israeli air force simultaneously conducted hundreds of air strikes on Syrian military positions from Tartus on the Mediterranean coast to Mayadin, near the border with Iraq. The stated aim is to destroy Syrian military equipment, particularly air assets, putting them out of the hands of a new government. Israel’s defence ministry claims it has taken out 80 per cent of the Syrian army’s ‘strategic capabilities’. On 8 December the US also conducted what it described as ‘dozens of precision air strikes’ on 75 alleged Islamic State targets across Syria. A network of outposts and small garrisons houses the hundreds of US forces quietly stationed in the country. On 10 December, the head of US central command, General Michael Kurilla, flew to Syria to inspect those troops. There has been no talk of pulling them out, either from HTS or the US.

What comes next may be couched by international observers in the aseptic language of ‘transition’, but is there a state left to take over? Julani may not be able to control the forces that joined his push from the south, let alone the country as a whole. The SDF remains in control of large parts of the north-east. The possibility of a fragmentation similar to post-invasion Iraq cannot be discounted. The removal of US sanctions would help, but that would entail either the revocation of HTS’s designation as a terrorist organisation or the group’s dissolution. For now, there are the immediate problems of reopening the airport and the embassies. But at some point more vexing questions will have to be dealt with. Reassurances that ethnic and religious minorities will be tolerated are not sufficient; it is easy to talk of unity when the struggle over the national spoils is temporarily suppressed. Whoever attempts to govern the country will have to demonstrate that they have some answers.

The Syrian civil war came to define the post Arab Spring era. With Assad’s departure that era draws to an end. The speed of the rebel victory 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 a working Syrian state might be reconstructed, given the damage that has been done. The greatest risk could be a majoritarian correction to Assad’s sectarian system: that would be to rediscover the underlying forces that produced the Assad state in the first place.

13 December