IT turned out that there were no speed bumps in the fast lane on the road to Damascus. The incredibly swift demise of the Assad regime appears to have astonished everyone, including the rebel force that led the unexpected charge.
The subsequent explosion of relief and joy across much of Syria is hardly a surprise, even though it is tempered with understandable anxiety about what might follow. After all, the regional precedents — from Tunisia, Libya and Egypt to Yemen and Iraq — are hardly reassuring.
Bashar al-Assad was the odd one out when the winds of change ushered in the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, and long-standing dominoes tumbled. As a popular uprising rattled the regime, provoking a deadly state response, it was assumed he would share the fate of Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Qadhafi or Saddam Hussein. As Robert Fisk recalled, any foreign correspondent who dared to accurately predict that the Syrian dictator might not immediately be toppled was dubbed an Assad apologist.
While Fisk never hesitated to describe in detail the ruthless excesses of the Baathist regime, often targeting unarmed protesters or other civilians, he also had the temerity to point out that the state did not enjoy a monopoly on violence. He noted the frustrations of Al Jazeera correspondents, whose visual evidence of attacks on government forces, and of armed insurgents entering Syria from Lebanon, was rejected by their employer.
Qatar, after all, was among the Arab brothers backing jihadist rebel factions in what had turned into Syria’s civil war, alongside the Saudis. Turkiye had its own favourites, and was particularly keen to contain Kurdish militias. The US and its European appendages detested Assad, but saw the Islamic State (IS) as a bigger threat. So did Russia, but unlike the US, it also considered Assad a useful idiot in the Middle East and helped to sustain his regime through force, including the air power that Damascus lacked. Iran proved to be another crucial ally, mainly through Hezbollah, which was keen to maintain the arms supply lines from Tehran via Iraq. That, in turn, gave Israel an excuse to pummel Syria.
The current euphoria might be premature.
There was barely any murmur of surprise when Bashar succeeded his dad in 2000 as the grand pooh-bah when Hafez al-Assad died after nearly 30 years in power. The West spotted a potential pawn in a UK-trained ophthalmologist who hinted at a reformist vision and released a few political prisoners. But soon enough, he reverted to the family playbook in repressing both secular/ democratic and Islamist dissent, and eventually overtook even his father’s nasty reputation for malicious excesses against perceived opponents and their families.
Many of the prisoners emerging from prison gates in the past few days hadn’t seen their families for years, even decades. Some of them had survived the Arab world’s most infamous torture chambers — facilities of which the US made full use during its ‘war on terror’. At the same time, some of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration salivated at the prospect of carving a road to Damascus via Baghdad and Tehran. The disastrous occupation of Iraq pre-empted further large-scale misadventures in the Middle East, but the realisation that the region would be best off without Euro-US interference is yet to dawn.
Joe Biden has claimed credit for Assad’s departure for Moscow, as has Benjamin Netanyahu, even as both the US and Israel have subsequently been pounding, respectively, IS strongholds and the Syrian army’s weapons arsenals. Or so they say. Israel has also pounced on the opportunity to overrun the 50-year-old buffer zone between the occupied (and illegally annexed) Golan Heights and enter Syrian territory. This ‘temporary’ land grab might not be reversed.
The leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), ancestrally closely related to both IS and Al Qaeda and a direct descendant of al-Nusra Front), hitherto known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, with a $10 million price on his head, has reinvented himself as Ahmed al-Sharaa, and is being paraded on Western media outlets as a ‘pragmatist’ who has overcome his allergies to Syria’s Alawite, Christian and Druze denizens. The Kurds targeted by Turkiye might be less enamoured of his uncertified credentials.
Whatever name he prefers, al-Jolani is destined for a key role in Syria’s purportedly 18-month transition, during which the ideologically and ethnically diverse patchwork of Assad opponents is expected to morph into a coherent government.
HTS’s terrorist designation might quickly disappear, but there are many other groups, backed by ill-intentioned neighbours or more distant contenders, jostling for prominence in whatever comes next. Syria’s sordid past is open to investigation, but the future is unwritten, and an inclusive, pluralist democratic entity in the short term might require a second miracle.
Published in Dawn, December 11th, 2024
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