A nightmare ends, towards what hope in Syria?
Bashar al-Assad has fallen. No one will regret it. In twenty years of dictatorship and ten years of civil war, he and his clique succeeded in transforming Syria into a hellish dystopia, doubtless worse than Iraq under Saddam Hussein, although the latter had set the bar very high. Syria, or at least what was left of it, had become nothing more than a huge Captagon laboratory, run by dealers as corrupt as they were vicious. They left the Syrian people who had not left this undead country with only one prospect, misery and suffering, and only one choice: become a victim or an executioner.
No one expected the regime to fall in this way, so quickly. This proves that it was rotten to the core and that it could no longer stand on anything. Only on the fear it could still produce in those who were supposed to be protecting the state, and by the grace of its allies. When the HTS (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) offensive took place, Hezbollah, which had fought alongside the Syrian army against ISIS, and Russia, which had saved the regime on many occasions, were no longer there. As for the soldiers of the Syrian army, they laid down their arms rather than die for Caligula.
A divine surprise for Netanyahu
Of course, not everyone is delighted for the right reasons. For the Israeli government, it was a surprise, no doubt a divine surprise. The day after the fall of the Assad clan, the Israeli army launched a bombing campaign that was as illegal as it was unprecedented since the end of the Second World War, aimed at destroying Syria’s entire military infrastructure, carrying out more than 600 strikes in less than a week. The most recent strike on an arms depot in the military port of Tartus caused an explosion and an earthquake measuring 3 on the Richter scale. How many people died? We have no idea.
Today, Syria is essentially a demilitarised country. Above all, the Israeli state has reneged on the 1974 agreements and pushed into Syrian territory, occupying Mount Hermon in the Rif Dimashq to the north, some twenty kilometres from Damascus to the west, as far as Quneitra, and to the south in the first villages of the Daara Governorate near the Jordanian border. At the same time, Netanyahu announced to the whole world that Israel would occupy the Golan Heights for eternity, while his government proposed a law to double the population of Jewish settlers in this area.
Israel’s colonising machine
For the Israeli government, the genocide in Gaza, the destruction of part of Lebanon and now the occupation of new parts of Syrian land are just the continuation of one and the same policy, i.e. the implementation of the messianic and fascist project of Greater Israel, the return to the biblical borders of the land of Israel. Never mind that the biblical cadastre is not very precise, and that even messianic Zionists find it difficult to agree on where to place the borders. To Sinai, to the Jordanian desert, to the Litani river in Lebanon and Mount Hermon in Syria, or to the Euphrates in Iraq? What matters is that the colonising machine does not stop, and neither does the war against the ‘Arab jungle’. Netanyahu, who knows that if the war stops, his regime will fall, will continue as long as he can.
For Syria and the Syrian people, it’s all just beginning. They will have to emerge from the civil war in a ravaged country, try to find hope for a new life, and create a democratic space for all Syrians and all their communities. A compromise will also have to be found with the Kurdish people. On the other hand, Israel, supported by the United States, and Erdogan’s Turkey, which already has a presence in Syria and is massing its troops on the border just outside Kobane, are looking forward to the dismemberment of Syria.
19 December 2024
Translated by International Viewpoint from l’Anticapitaliste.
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