In Depth

The dynamics of the Assad regime’s downfall

Anne Alexander looks at how the Syrian Revolution of 2011 and its defeat shaped the toppling of Bashar al-Assad

‘Russia has the port, America has the oil, Iran has the border crossings, the gangsters have the bank and we’ve got each other’ Protest sign in Sweida in 2023

 (Picture: Al-Suwayda 24 via Facebook)

Monday 09 December 2024   SOCIALIST WORKER Issue 2935

In the end it looked deceptively easy—just a push by determined fighters was needed to bring down the Assad regime in Syria.

The march of the Islamist fighters of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) has upended politics in Syria and sent shockwaves through the Middle East. How can we make sense of these sudden shifts?

The first and most basic point to stress is that the Assad regime was never “socialist” or “anti-imperialist”. Revolutionary socialists stood with the popular revolution from below of 2011, which was part of a wave of revolt that shook the region. And we were unequivocally against Assad and the gang of thieves and mass murderers who launched a sectarian civil war to save their dictatorship.

We share in the thrill of hope at the sight of prisoners stumbling into the light after more than a decade in hell-holes such as Sednaya prison. But the last ten days aren’t a simple completion of the revolutionary process of 2011, despite HTS leader Abu Mohammed Al-Jolani’s claims.

How Assad fell shows two sides of a paradox. On the one hand, it reminds us of the depth and breadth of the revolutionary crisis of 2011 and its long-lasting impact. But it also shows how the embryonic democratic movement from below was defeated by Assad’s counter-revolution. In the armed insurgency that ensued, other political forces came to dominate the Syrian opposition.

Al-Jolani’s own political background is strongly influenced by an elitist, authoritarian and conservative strand of Islamism, which has frequently imposed deeply reactionary policies in areas it controls. As writer Leila al-Shami notes, HTS is an authoritarian militia and does “not represent the aspirations of the majority”. The same is true of the other armed groups it welded together into the coalition which pushed the regime over the brink.

Al-Shami points out that this should not mean falling into crude characterisations of HTS and other armed groups as “non-Syrian”. HTS is, she argues, “a Syrian nationalist, not foreign jihadist, organisation”. She warns against “supporters of the regime who repeatedly slander all opposition to Assad as ‘terrorists’”.

The progress of HTS and its allies over the past two weeks demonstrates both sides of the paradox.

The rebel advance—beginning at the margins and sweeping to the centre of Syria—replays the trajectory of the 2011 revolution to a certain extent. The spark this time came from the north west in Idlib, which provided a springboard for the fall of Aleppo and Hama. Kurdish fighters, who have controlled parts of the north east of Syria, captured Deir al Zor on 6 December. Its fall came after Assad’s forces and Iranian-backed militias withdrew from the north eastern city.

Dera’a and Sweida in the south, where the 2011 revolution began, soon answered the call. Then, the HTS-led advance swept through Homs and south through the capital Damascus’ rural fringe

In 2011-12, Assad and his supporters successfully defended themselves by retreating to what they termed “useful Syria”. They held the capital city and the Assad family’s home region on the coast around Latakia and Tartus, where the population is largely drawn from the Alawite religious minority.

This time, however, the centre did not hold and Damascus fell to the opposition with remarkably little fighting. Politicians fell over themselves to hail the new order and distance themselves from the old regime.

The speed of the Assad regime’s collapse will send shivers down the spine of autocrats around the world. But it’s worth unpicking some of the differences with the wave of popular revolutions in 2011.

The political forces acting as the lightning rod for this explosion are very different to those that led to the 2011 revolution.

Armed Islamist groups grew out of the counter-revolution crushing a mass-based, popular and democratic revolutionary mobilisation in Syrian society. And, in some cases, they contributed directly to its defeat.

What were the key elements of Al-Jolani’s success? First, it appears that he had managed to turn HTS into a relatively cohesive and well-drilled military force. It had its own military academy—partially staffed by former regime officers—and its own drone assembly workshops equipped with 3D printers to make spare parts. HTS shifted military doctrine towards the creation of a small force of “professionals” while the regime relied on demoralised and brutalised mass conscripts.



Second, Al-Jolani picked his moment well and took advantage of the slow and steady degradation of the regime’s capacities. This had been underway for years under the relentless hammer blows of economic isolation and social crisis.

He also seized on the shifts in the geopolitical landscape as Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, which had shored up the Assad regime, were weakened. Russia had diverted attention and military support towards Ukraine, and Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran had put them on the back foot.

Essentially, events since the HTS offensive began, demonstrate the dangers of the Assad regime’s geopolitical strategy. It sought to substitute the support of external powers and actors for a firm base in Syrian society.

Assad had won battles against Syrian rebel forces, and re-took Aleppo in 2016. But the regime had to rely on Hezbollah and Iraqi Shi’a Islamist militias to provide the disciplined, seasoned and ideologically-robust troops it could no longer produce internally. It looked to Iran for strategic direction and supplies, and Russian air power played a central role in the suppression of rebellious districts.

At the same time, the regime could no longer wield the ideological and political weapons which served it so well in derailing the initial phase of the 2011 uprising. Its Ba’ath party organisation and implantation in the fabric of society was hollowed out.

A few years ago, I interviewed a Syrian teacher who was working in a school in the countryside not far from Aleppo about his experience in 2011. He recalled a series of dramatic contrasts. By night, he would go into the streets with other revolutionary activists to protest against the regime. But by day, he continued teaching in his school.

When his headteacher told the staff to get into a coach and drive to mass pro-government rallies in the centre of Aleppo, he reluctantly complied. He mouthed chants of praise for Assad with tens of thousands of others.

It shows how people were unable to undermine the regime’s grip on public services and key industries from inside the major cities. This was a critical factor in the ability of the government to stem the initial tide of revolution and to shift towards a militarised response. The Syrian army besieged and bombarded rebellious towns such as Deraa. And this sparked a fragmented armed insurgency as local people tried to defend themselves and regime soldiers defected in a desperate bid to save their home towns.

In 2024 no one—not even ministers in his government—was prepared to lift a finger in Assad’s support as the rebel advance stormed south.

What are the lessons from this sequence of events? The fall of Assad is another extreme manifestation of the instability of the global system at several different levels.

It shows the difficulties major players on the world stage—the US and Russia in this case—and regional imperialist rivals—Turkey, Iran and Israel primarily—face in maintaining control of events.

The long-term decline of US power continues to influence the dynamics of imperialist competition at both a global and regional level. The US remains an important presence in Syria, but its ruling class is preoccupied with its own internal crisis and challenges in other parts of the world.

The fall of Assad is a blow to the Iranian regime and confirms that Hezbollah is unable to act on a regional level in the same way it did only a few years ago.

Another key moment in the Syrian rebel advance last week came when Iraqi Shi’a Islamist leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, came out with a forceful statement. He called on Iraqi Shi’a forces inside Syria not to intervene and support Syrian government forces. Al-Sadr represents a more Iraqi nationalist orientation among Iraqi Shi’a Islamist groups, than other currents closer to the Iranian regime.

Turkey’s leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan offered strong political support for the HTS offensive, especially once its momentum was clear. HTS was working with a constellation of Turkish-backed Islamist militias in the Syrian National Army, which occupies the north western corner of Syria close to the Turkish border.

Erdogan’s aims seem to be two-fold. He wants to weaken the Kurdish autonomous region in north eastern Syria, and the Kurdish movement in Turkey which is allied with Syrian Kurdish groups. He also wanted to create openings for the return of some of the millions of Syrian refugees inside Turkey.

Yet the dynamics unleashed by Assad’s fall will not necessarily play out in Erdogan’s favour. Kurdish military leaders hailed Assad’s fall as a historic moment. They immediately called for “de-escalation” with HTS and talks aimed at seizing the “opportunity to build a new Syria based on democracy and justice that guarantees the rights of all Syrians.”.

Erdogan wants to restrict space for Kurdish groups and prevent guarantees of Kurdish autonomy within the “new Syria”. But will he be able to control the outcome of horse-trading over the shape of post-Assad Syria? He will certainly try, but it isn’t certain he will succeed.

What about Israel’s leaders? Are their interests served by the downfall of Assad? At one level, they will benefit in some ways from the damage inflicted on Iran and Hezbollah.

But the last few months have underscored the futility of seeing Assad’s regime as any kind of bulwark against Israeli aggression. It offered no practical support for resistance on the ground in Gaza and southern Lebanon. That resistance was, and remains, rooted in Palestinian and Lebanese society and owed nothing to the dictator in Damascus.

Israel’s ferocious offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon brought mixed results. It devastated civilian infrastructure across the capital Beirut and the south and removed Hezbollah as a force inside the Syrian civil war. But it did not lead to the collapse of southern Lebanon’s defenders. Israeli forces were unable to penetrate far into Lebanon, relying instead on overwhelming air power to try and achieve their objectives. This is not exactly a “victory” as Hezbollah’s leaders have claimed, but neither is it a complete defeat for the Lebanese resistance.

Israel’s leaders cannot count on the new regime taking shape in Syria as an ally—at least in the near future. Al-Jolani’s grandfather fled the region of Syria occupied by Israel in 1967. Given his political and personal history, it seems unlikely that HTS’s leadership is going to be friendly to Israel. In a rare interview from 2021, Al-Jolani noted that the Palestinian’s Second Intifada in 2000 played a central role in his political development and steered him towards radical Islamism.

And, regardless of Al-Jolani himself, no one in charge of the Syrian state can escape from the destructive impact of Israel’s apartheid state. Syria’s history since 1948, when Israel was founded, is full of examples.

The aftershocks of the Nakba, when Zionist forces ethnically cleansed Palestinians, triggered waves of coups and popular uprisings. The military defeat of Syria’s radical Ba’athist leaders in the Six Day War of 1967 paved the way for the rise of Hafez al-Assad, Assad’s father. That war saw Israel seize the Golan Heights from Syria.

Today, a Syrian nationalist regime infused with a heavy dose of Sunni Islamist politics will not pave a straight road to normalising relations with Israel. In fact, it may well energise Sunni Islamist opposition movements elsewhere in the region, including in Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf states.

But what are the prospects for a revival of the other major “power” in the region—the mass movement from below. This force toppled dictators and shook regimes in 2011—and again in 2018-19 with the uprisings in Algeria, Sudan and mass protests in Lebanon?

Here, the picture is much less clear. It’s important not to confuse passive support for fighters with well-rooted political organisations backing the cause of the rebel leaders, or the revival of popular revolutionary organisation.

There are also clear dangers that the newly victorious armed groups, or the regional powers, will play up sectarian and ethnic tensions as they compete for influence. The Assad regime, despite its claims to be a protector of minorities, was a master at these dark arts. But during the years of civil war, both Sunni and Shi’a Islamist forces also whipped up sectarianism and ethnic chauvinism and committed atrocities.

In many ways the events of the last week feel like a replay of scenes from the early 1950s when a succession of coups toppled unpopular governments in Damascus. In February 1954, a military coup overthrew Adib Shishakli, a military officer who had instituted a kind of personal dictatorship the year before. It began in Aleppo and travelled with lightning speed to Damascus. Today’s “military revolution” has taken on a distinctly paramilitary feel, but there are similarities.

The revived agency of small military groups and their competition over the state will not meet the aspirations of millions of ordinary people in Syria. They hope for a real transformation which puts an end to poverty and war, opening up a route to escape from the deadly geopolitical trap surrounding them.

This means confronting not just the remnants of the Assad regime, but also the collective connivance of ruling classes across the region in the continuation of the existing order.

Relinking the struggle from below in Syria with the struggle against Israeli apartheid and occupation in Palestine and Lebanon will not be easy. But it is essential if those aspirations are to have any prospects of being realised.

It is significant also that ordinary Syrians continued to organise popular forms of protest, which sapped the foundations of the regime despite the horrors of repression. The mass movement which erupted in Dera’a and Sweida over price rises in 2023 provides one example. There were others in regime-held territory.

A placard held by protesters in Sweida sums up a common sentiment—“The Russians have the port, the Americans have the oil, the Iranians have the border crossings, the regime’s gang have the banks, but we’ve got each other.”

Equally importantly, the Salvation Government in Idlib which is supported by HTS faced repeated protests, which challenged its authoritarian tendencies.

The message from the top across Syria today is all about an “orderly transition”. The aim is preserving the same administrative structures under the three-starred flag of the 2011 revolution.

But if workers and the poor can seize the chance to organise themselves, then maybe the road has forked towards a more hopeful future.

Syria: revolution, counter-revolution and war, a Socialist Worker pamphlet by Anne Alexander and Jad Bouharoun from 2016, is available as a PDF

Syria explainer: revolution, civil war and Assad’s fall

Arthur Townend answers your questions about Syria in the wake of Bashar al-Assad's overthrow

‘The Ba’th party is a terrorist’ a protester in southern Syria in 2023

 (Picture: Al-Suwayda 24 via Facebook)

Monday 09 December 2024  

SOCIALIST WORKER Issue 2935

Syrians are celebrating the fall of the Assad regime after more than five decades of bloody and repressive dictatorship.

Bashar al-Assad, who ran the country since the death of his father in 2000, fled the capital Damascus for Russia last Sunday.

Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), an armed Islamist group, launched a lightning offensive against the Assad regime at the end of last month. After storming the northern city of Aleppo, HTS made progress south towards Damascus and captured the capital.

It reignited the long-running civil war, which saw Assad drown the 2011 popular revolution in blood. Since then, rival imperial powers have intervened in the country.


After HTS took Damascus, people stormed the presidential palace, ransacking the symbol of Assad’s corrupt dictatorship. Rebels took control of the state’s media facilities to broadcast their victory and opened the regime’s prisons and torture chambers.

Around the world, from Washington DC to Berlin to Istanbul, Syrians flooded the streets in jubilation.

What was the Assad regime?

General Hafez al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad’s father, seized power in 1971 and built a brutal, corrupt dictatorship.

The Arab nationalist Ba’ath party had come to power in a military coup in 1963—and another coup in 1966 saw the left of the party take over.

It promised state-led capitalist development, social reforms and looked to Stalinist Russia.

After Syria’s defeat at the hands of Israel in the Six Day War of 1967, the right of the Ba’ath party went on the attack. Defence minister Hafez al‑Assad launched another coup.

He built a new regime based on a compromise between the new and old exploiters—the layer of state capitalist bureaucrats and the old urban capitalists and landowners.

The Assad regime’s upper levels included many Alawites and other religious and ethnic minorities. But it also drew support from the Sunni Muslim section of the capitalist class.

Despite the regime’s socialist rhetoric, Assad concentrated political and economic power in the hands of a small number of state officials.

In the 1970s and 80s, the Assad regime relied heavily on support from Stalinist Russia which supplied arms, loans and subsidies.

From the late 1980s, the Assad regime followed a similar path to other Arab nationalist regimes that had adopted a state capitalist mode.

It began implementing neoliberal reforms aimed at building up a private sector at the expense of ordinary people. Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father in 2000 and pushed through more “reforms” and sought closer ties with the West. He, for example, worked with the United States during the War on Terror.

His programme of economic liberalisation led to an influx of foreign capital from the Gulf. But this in turn created a property boom that crushed the middle and working classes with spiralling prices.

Public-private partnerships created a new layer of crony capitalists as the rich benefitted from two-tier systems in education and health. This sharpened class conflict in Syria.

What was the Syrian revolution of 2011?

Syria followed the mass uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia as part of the Arab Spring. In March 2011, police kidnapped teenagers for writing, “The people want to overthrow the regime,” on their school’s wall.

The protests that followed quickly gained momentum. Following in the footsteps of his father, Bashar al-Assad tried to drown the uprisings in blood, shooting protesters and targeting and imprisoning activists.

But it became clear that would not be enough. Assad’s forces began to lay siege to rebellious towns and cities, bombing residential areas to crush the very social fabric of the revolution.

And Assad turned to ramping up sectarian divisions among the rebellious masses.

As Syrian soldiers began refusing to shoot protesters, people formed militias to defend their neighbourhoods. They took the name the Free Syrian Army (FSA), but it was a fragmented organisation without a centralised leadership.

From 2012, Assad pulled in imperialist support. Russian jets bombed Syrian towns, Iran sent in its forces and the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah intervened.

As Syria plunged deeper into civil war, armed Islamist groups thrived. They pushed the character of the revolution towards armed resistance, and away from its mass, popular base.

But, despite the brutality of the civil war, there were protests by revolutionary Syrians as late as last year.

What is Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS)?

Jabhat al Nusra formed in 2011 as a Sunni Islamist armed group, capturing territories and imposing its reactionary views on inhabitants.

The group was linked to al-Qaeda, but broke with the organisation in 2016.

After a series of mergers, Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) emerged in 2017. Unlike some other forms of Jihadism, HTS has nationalist aims and looks to take control of Syria, rather than establish a trans‑national Muslim caliphate.

Before overthrowing the Assad regime, HTS ran large parts of north west Syria.

The Syrian Salvation Government, which HST supports, provides public services to these areas, but there have been protests against HTS’ governance due to its reactionary politics.

Led by Abu Mohammed al-Jolani since 2017, HTS is proscribed by Western states. But as it establishes a new regime in Syria, British cabinet minister Pat McFadden has said his government will review the terror ban on it.

How does the fall of Assad affect imperialism?

The tangled web of imperialist tensions in Syria has been thrown into chaos after the collapse of the regime.

Competing powers will now look to protect their interests by integrating themselves with the new regime. But they may not get their way.

Iran, a key backer of Assad, has already tried to distance itself from his collapsed regime. President Masoud Pezeshkian said last Sunday, “It is the Syrian people who must decide on the future of their country and its political and governmental system.”

While Russia is sheltering Assad in Moscow, HTS reportedly guaranteed the safety of Russian military bases in Syria.

Both Iran and Russia’s defence of Assad’s regime was muted with Russia occupied in Ukraine and Iran hammered by Israel’s attacks.

It’s clear both are trying to make concessions with the new regime in Syria, but it is unclear how that will play out.

Turkey supported HTS’ offensive. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wanted to weaken his rival Assad—and to further repress the Kurds in north east Syria.

But after HTS toppled Assad, Kurdish fighters called for “de-escalation” of the conflict and for a “new Syria” with rights for all. Erdogan isn’t guaranteed to get what he wants.

What will happen with Israel and Palestine?

HTS leader al-Jolani has said he was inspired by the second Palestinian Intifada in 2000. It’s unlikely HTS will normalise relations with Israel amid its genocide in Gaza.

Israel has pushed into Syrian territories in the Golan Heights, between north Israel and south west Syria. After Assad’s fall, Israeli forces marched into the demilitarised buffer zone.

In 1974, there was a disengagement agreement between Syria and Israel, but Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has said that agreement has collapsed due to the fall of Assad.

Netanyahu is using the instability of Syria to expand Israel’s influence in the Middle East.

On Sunday, Israel bombed Damascus, targeting weapons depots. Israel claimed it is thwarting potential threats in Syria, but with its seizure of Syrian territories in Golan it is clear Israel is escalating its violent warmongering to further cement Western support.

What about the Kurds?

The Assad regime drove through a process of Arabisation, forcing Kurdish farmers off their land to make room for Arabs.

It prohibited the use of the Kurdish language and repressed all forms of Kurdish culture.

At the same time Hafez al-Assad used the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which fought for the liberation of Kurds in Turkey, as a bargaining chip against his neighbour.

But in 1998, under pressure from Turkey, Assad expelled PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan and his party from Syria.

During the Syrian revolution of 2011, the PYD party and its YPG forces fought to establish Kurdish-controlled regions in Syria. This led to the establishment of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, known as Rojava, in 2016.


The Kurds—a history of agony

But Kurdish liberation efforts also have a history of embroilment with Western imperialism. In 2014, as the Syrian revolution faltered, the YPG became the main part of the Syrian Democratic Force (SDF).

SDF was a US-backed coalition of Kurdish, Arab, Assyrian, Armenian, Turkmen and Circassian militias fighting Isis and Jabat al-Nusra.

Today, as Kurds look to defend their autonomy in Rojava, PYD co-chair Salih Muslim appeared to back HTS as it advanced towards Damascus.

Despite HTS attacking Kurdish communities as it began its lightning offensive against Assad’s regime, Kurdish forces are looking to maintain control of their autonomous region.

But this could create tensions with an HTS regime. And Erdogan will seek to build relations with HTS to repress Syrian Kurds.

As Donald Trump looks to begin a second term in January, he is hesitant about intervening in Syria. But he also supports Erdogan’s regime, further throwing the Kurdish struggle into uncertainty.

Kurdish independence will require a reinvigoration of the spirit of the Syrian revolution—mass resistance from below free from the imperialist powers.