SYRIA UPDATES
G7 to meet on Syria, government pledges ‘rule of law’
By AFP
December 13, 2024
A broken statue of late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad lies outside the Baath party offices in Damascus - Copyright AFP/File SURYO WIBOWO
G7 leaders will attempt Friday to forge a common approach to the new government of Syria, which has pledged to protect the rule of law after years of abuses under ousted president Bashar al-Assad.
Assad fled Syria after a lightning offensive spearheaded by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group and its allies, which brought a sudden end to five decades of repressive rule by his clan.
The collapse of Assad’s administration closes an era in which suspected dissidents were jailed or killed, and caps nearly 14 years of war that killed more than 500,000 people and displaced millions.
It has allowed Syrians to flood to prisons, hospitals and morgues in search of long-disappeared loved ones, hoping for a miracle, or at least closure.
“I turned the world upside down looking,” Abu Mohammed told AFP as he searched for news of three missing relatives at the Mezzeh Air Base in Damascus.
“But I didn’t find anything at all. We just want a hint of where they were, one percent.”
Sunni Muslim HTS is rooted in Syria’s branch of Al-Qaeda and designated a terrorist organisation by many Western governments, who now face the challenge of how to approach the country’s new transitional leadership.
The group has sought to moderate its rhetoric, and the interim government insists the rights of all Syrians will be protected.
“We respect religious and cultural diversity in Syria,” government spokesman Obaida Arnaout told AFP on Thursday.
He said the country’s constitution and parliament would be suspended during a three-month transition.
“A judicial and human rights committee will be established to examine the constitution and then introduce amendments,” he said, pledging that “rule of law” would be instituted.
“All those who committed crimes against the Syrian people will be judged in accordance with the law,” he added.
– Desperate searches –
Leaders of the Group of Seven democratic powers, who will meet virtually at 1430 GMT Friday, said they were ready to support the transition to an “inclusive and non-sectarian” government in Syria.
They called for the protection of human rights, including those of women and minorities, while emphasising “the importance of holding the Assad regime accountable for its crimes”.
And they said they would “work with and fully support” a Syrian government that respected those principles.
In similar messaging, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, on a visit to Turkey, urged Syrian actors to take “all feasible steps to protect civilians, including members of minority groups”, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.
Inside much of Syria, the focus for now is on unravelling the secrets of Assad’s rule, and particularly the network of detention centres and suspected torture sites scattered across areas previously under government control.
UN investigators said they have compiled secret lists of 4,000 perpetrators of serious crimes in Syria since the early days of the country’s civil war.
And the US Justice Department on Thursday charged the former head of Damascus Central Prison, Samir Ousman Alsheikh, with torturing opponents of Assad.
Syria’s leadership said it is willing to cooperate with Washington in the search for US citizens disappeared under Assad, including US journalist Austin Tice, who was abducted in 2012.
Another American, Travis Timmerman, has already been located alive and Blinken said Washington was working to bring him home.
The search for other missing detainees has ended more painfully, with hundreds of Syrians gathering Thursday to bury outspoken activist Mazen al-Hamada.
In exile in the Netherlands, he publicly testified on the torture he was subjected to in Syrian prison.
He later returned to Syria and was detained. His body was among more than 30 found in a Damascus hospital morgue this week.
– Kurdish fears –
Assad was propped up by Russia — where a senior Russian official told US media he has fled — as well as Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group.
The rebels launched their offensive on November 27, the same day a ceasefire took effect in the Israel-Hezbollah war, which saw Israel inflict staggering losses on Assad’s Lebanese ally.
Both Israel and Turkey, which backs some of the rebels who ousted Assad, have since carried out strikes inside Syria.
Speaking on Thursday in Jordan, Blinken stressed the importance of “not sparking any additional conflicts” after mentioning both Israeli and Turkish military activity in Syria.
Washington hopes to ensure that Syria is not “used as a base for terrorism” and does not pose “a threat to its neighbours”, added Blinken, whose country has hundreds of troops in Syria as part of a coalition against Islamic State group jihadists.
Israel on Sunday said it had ordered troops into the UN-patrolled buffer zone that separates Israeli and Syrian forces on the Golan Heights, in a move the UN said violated a 1974 armistice.
And it has since carried out heavy strikes particularly targeting military facilities, including on Thursday night, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor.
Assad’s ouster has also given Turkey a golden opportunity to move against US-allied Kurdish forces that it sees as a major security threat, analysts say.
As the Islamist-led rebels marched on Damascus, Turkish-backed fighters began pushing into Kurdish-held areas. The fighting left at least 218 dead before a US-brokered ceasefire started Wednesday.
The semi-autonomous Kurdish administration that controls much of northeast Syria has adopted the opposition’s independence flag, but some Kurdish civilians acknowledged fears for the future of the country.
“We, the Kurds, as the second-largest ethnic group in this country, want it to be a federal state, not a dictatorship,” said Khorshed Abo Rasho in Qamishli.
“I still have bullets in my body from the war in this country, and I will not accept that it fails to become a democracy.”
Their country ravaged by war, sanctions and runaway inflation, Syrians also face a struggle for basic necessities.
More than a million people have been displaced since the rebel offensive began last month, and the UN’s World Food Programme is seeking $250 million for food assistance.
Jordan will host a Syria crisis summit on Saturday with foreign ministers from numerous Western and Arab nations as well as Turkey.
UN investigators say 4,000 Syrian rights abusers identified
By AFP
December 12, 2024
UN investigators have identified at least 4,000 Syrians accused of torture and other abuses during the rule of depose president Bashar al-Assad - Copyright AFP Simon Lim
Nina LARSON
UN investigators say they have compiled secret lists of 4,000 perpetrators of serious crimes in Syria and hope the fall of Bashar al-Assad will help ensure accountability up to the highest level.
“It is very important that the top level perpetrators are brought to justice,” said Linnea Arvidsson, who coordinates the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Syria (COI).
“The focus should be on those who carry the main responsibility for the violations that have been committed for so many years, rather than the lower-level perpetrators,” she told AFP in an interview.
Longtime president al-Assad fled Syria on Sunday as a lightning rebel offensive, spearheaded by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its allies, spectacularly ended five decades of brutal rule by the Assad clan.
Syrians across the country and around the world celebrated the end of repression in which suspected dissidents were jailed or killed, and nearly 14 years of war that killed 500,000 people and displaced millions.
The new rulers have pledged justice for victims, vowing that officials involved in torturing detainees will not be pardoned and urging countries to “hand over any of those criminals who may have fled so they can be brought to justice”.
– 11,000 testimonies –
The COI has been gathering evidence of crimes committed in Syria since the early days of the civil war in 2011, and has compiled lists of alleged perpetrators.
“Up to now, we have about 4,000 names on these lists,” Arvidsson said.
The lists have never been made public, but the investigators have shared details with prosecutors in jurisdictions that have investigated and brought cases against suspected Syrian war criminals.
Arvidsson said the team had “cooperated with 170 such criminal investigations”, leading so far to 50 convictions for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Syria.
But so far, “they haven’t touched the higher level perpetrators”, she said.
“Now there is an opportunity opening up potentially for them also to be held accountable.”
The Damascus government never granted the COI permission to enter Syria, but with Assad gone, Arvidsson said the team hoped it could gain access.
Until now, it has carried out investigations remotely, through thousands of interviews and studying mounds of documents and other evidence.
Arvidsson said the commission had more than 11,000 “testimonies” from victims of violations, detention survivors and witnesses.
– ‘Profound darkness’ –
The opening up of Syrian prisons has been “quite dramatic for our team for the first time to actually see and confirm… everything we have heard,” the UN investigator said.
She pointed to footage from the notorious Saydnaya Prison in Damascus that showed detainees were held in “basement rooms, no windows, no light”.
“That’s exactly what we have been hearing for so many years from detainees,” Arvidsson said.
“Some of them didn’t see the sunlight for years and years… They all describe it as darkness, profound darkness.”
The investigators, she said, were now “very, very concerned” about what will happen with the files found in detention facilities.
“It is incredibly important now that these (files) are protected and preserved, ideally in the site where they were found, not moved, not tampered with, not lost, not touched,” she said.
The evidence was needed to secure justice. “Almost every single war crime and crime against humanity listed … have been committed by at least one party,” including “genocide”, Arvidsson said.
She highlighted the “deliberate” disappearance of tens of thousands of people into Syria’s feared detention network, creating “the national trauma that millions of Syrians have suffered”.
“It’s very important that people are held to justice for this.”
The COI hopes for a national accountability process in Syria, and that steps would be taken to grant the International Criminal Court jurisdiction to prosecute crimes committed in the country.
“A combination of local and international efforts” might work, Arvidsson said. “We have a duty to leave no stone unturned in this quest”.
How an ex-inmate of brutal Syria jail overcame trauma by helping others
ByAFP
December 12, 2024
Thousands of inmates in Saynaya prison, some held since the 1980s, were freed by Syrian rebels who seized Damascus - Copyright South Korean Presidential Office/AFP Handout
Remi BANET
Riyad Avlar spent 20 years languishing in Syria’s jails, including a decade in the infamous Saydnaya prison, the scene of some of the Bashar al-Assad government’s most brutal abuses.
Those long years behind bars have left him with one obsession: documenting and healing the atrocities committed inside the prison where he himself was locked up.
“I am sure we’ll see Bashar al-Assad in court one day,” predicted Avlar, who is Turkish.
In 2017, just months after he was freed, he co-founded the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Saydnaya Prison (ADMSP), which advocates for those jailed for daring to defy Assad’s rule.
“We don’t want revenge, we want justice,” he told AFP at the organisation’s headquarters in Gaziantep, southeastern Turkey.
It is here that Avlar and others who survived the brutalities of Saydnaya collect and compile documentation and testimonies relating the horrors that occurred inside an institution Amnesty International has described as a “human abattoir”.
Thousands of inmates in the prison just north of Damascus, some held since the 1980s, were freed on Sunday by Syrian rebels who seized the capital in a lightning advance.
Images of the former captives walking free, haggard and emaciated, some needing help even to stand, were beamed around the world as a symbol of Assad’s fall.
“It made me so happy to see them (freed) but when I saw images of the walls and the cells, it took me straight back there,” said Avlar, who was arrested in 1996 while studying in Damascus over a letter sent to relatives relating the government’s abuses in Syrian prisons.
“I can still feel the trauma.”
– ‘So many people died’ –
Even today, he sometimes jolts awake at night believing himself to still be behind bars — he was once held inside a cell in pitch darkness for two months.
“I saw people die in front of my eyes, many from starvation,” said the activist with fine-rimmed black glasses, whose salt-and-pepper beard hides a scar from the torture he was subjected to 25 years ago.
The guards, he said, would often throw scraps of food into the toilet in front of starving prisoners.
“The prisoners ate it because they had to stay alive,” he said.
Part of his recovery was through theatre and learning the saz, a long-necked lute popular in Turkey — which for him was “art therapy”.
But it has also helped being part of the association’s work, through which he has been able to help countless families acquire proof of life for loved ones held inside Saydnaya.
That was thanks to “insiders”, prison employees who secretly passed internal documents to the organisation, he said, without giving further details.
– ‘No more’ –
Saydnaya, where hundreds of Syrians rushed this week in the desperate hope of finding their loved ones, now stands empty.
More than 4,000 inmates were freed by the Islamist-led rebels, the ADMSP said.
The group estimates that more than 30,000 people were either executed or died as a result of torture, starvation or lack of medical care between 2011 and 2018.
And with so many bodies, the authorities were forced to use rooms lined with salt as makeshift morgues to make up for the lack of cold storage.
Haunted by his grisly memories, Avlar has no interest in going back there but acknowledges he has long dreamed of the day when “Saydnaya would be turned into a place of remembrance”.
“I am so happy there is not a single prisoner left in there,” Avlar said.
“And I just hope there won’t ever be any again.”
The Roads to Damascus
None but a few corrupt cronies will be shedding tears at the tyrant’s departure. But there should be no doubt that what we are witnessing in Syria today is a huge defeat, a mini 1967 for the Arab world. As I write, Israeli land forces have entered this battered country. There is not yet a definitive settlement, but a few things are clear. Assad is a refugee in Moscow. His Baathist apparatus did a deal with the Eastern NATO leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (whose brutalities in Idlib are legion), and offered up the country on a platter. The rebels have agreed that Assad’s Prime Minister, Mohammed Ghazi al-Jalali, should continue to oversee the state for the time being. Will this be a form of Assadism without Assad, even if the country is about to pivot geopolitically away from Russia and what remains of the ‘Resistance Axis’?
Like Iraq and Libya, where the US has a lock on the oil, Syria will now become a shared American–Turkish colony. US imperial policy, globally, is to break up countries that cannot be swallowed whole and remove all meaningful sovereignty in order to assert economic and political hegemony. This may have started ‘accidentally’ in the former Yugoslavia but it has since become a pattern. EU satellites use similar methods to ensure that smaller nations (Georgia, Romania) are kept under control. Democracy and human rights have little to do with any of this. It’s a global gamble.
In 2003, after Baghdad fell to the US, the exultant Israeli Ambassador in Washington congratulated George W. Bush and advised him not to stop now, but to move on to Damascus and Tehran. Yet the US victory had an unintended but predictable side-effect: Iraq became a rump Shia state, enormously strengthening Iran’s position in the region. The debacle there, and subsequently in Libya, meant that Damascus had to wait for more than a decade before receiving proper imperial attention. Meanwhile, Iranian and Russian support for Assad upped the stakes of routine regime change.
Now, Assad’s ousting has created a different type of vacuum – likely to be filled by NATO’s Turkey and the US via the ‘ex-al-Qaida’ Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (the rebranding of its leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani as a freedom fighter after his stint in a US prison in Iraq is par for the course), as well as Israel. The latter’s contribution was enormous, having disabled Hezbollah and wrecked Beirut with yet another round of massive bombing raids. In the wake of this victory, it is difficult to imagine that Iran will be left alone. Though the ultimate aim for both the US and Israel is regime change there, degrading and disarming the country is the first priority. This wider plan for reshaping the region helps to explain the unstinting support given by Washington and its European proxies to the continuing Israeli genocide in Palestine. After more than a year of slaughter, the Kantian principle that state actions must be such that they can become a universally respected law looks like a sick joke.
Who will replace Assad? Before his flight, some reports suggested that if the dictator made a 180-degree turn – breaking with Iran and Russia and restoring good relations with the US and Israel, as he and his father had done before – then the Americans might be inclined to keep him on. Now it is too late, but the state apparatus that abandoned him has declared its readiness to collaborate with whomever. Will Erdoğan do the same? The Sultan of Donkeys will surely want his own people, nurtured in Idlib since they were child soldiers, in charge and under Ankara’s control. If he succeeds in imposing a Turkish puppet regime, it will be another version of what happened in Libya. But he is unlikely to have it all his own way. Erdoğan is strong on demagogy but weak on actions, and the US and Israel might veto a cleansed al-Qaida government for their own reasons, despite having used the jihadis to fight Assad. Regardless, it is unlikely that the replacement regime will abolish the Mukhābarāt (secret police), illegalize torture or offer accountable government.
Prior to the Six Day War, one of the central components of Arab nationalism and unity was the Baath Party that ruled Syria and had a strong base in Iraq; the other, more powerful one was Nasser’s government in Egypt. Syrian Baathism during the pre-Assad period was relatively enlightened and radical. When I met Prime Minister Yusuf Zuayyin in Damascus in 1967, he explained that the only way forward was to outflank conservative nationalism by making Syria ‘the Cuba of the Middle East’. Yet Israel’s assault that year led to the speedy destruction of the Egyptian and Syrian armies, which paved the way for the death of Nasserite Arab nationalism. Zuayyin was toppled and Hafez-al Assad was propelled to power with tacit US support – much like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, whom the CIA supplied with a list of the top cadres of the Iraqi Communist Party. The Baathist radicals in both countries were discarded, and the party’s founder Michel Aflaq resigned in disgust when he saw where it was headed.
These new Baathist dictatorships were supported by certain sections of the population, however, as long as they provided a basic safety net. Iraq under Saddam and Syria under the Assad père et fils were brutal but social dictatorships. Assad Senior hailed from the middle-strata of the peasantry, and passed several progressive reforms to ensure that his class was kept happy, reducing the tax burden and abolishing usury. In 1970, a vast majority of Syrian villages had only natural light; peasants woke up and went to sleep with the sun. A couple decades later, the construction of the Euphrates dam enabled the electrification of 95% of them, with energy heavily subsidized by the state.
It was these policies, rather than repression alone, which guaranteed the stability of the regime. Most of the population turned a blind eye to the torture and imprisonment of citizens in the cities. Assad and his coterie firmly believed that man was little more than an economic creature, and that if needs of this type could be satisfied, then only a small minority would rebel (‘one or two hundred at the most’, Assad remarked, ‘were the types for whom Mezzeh prison was originally intended’). The eventual uprising against the younger Assad in 2011 was triggered by his turn to neoliberalism and the exclusion of the peasantry. When it calcified into a bitter civil war, one option would have been a compromise settlement and power-sharing deal – but the apparatchiks who are currently negotiating with Erdoğan advised against any such arrangement.
During one of my visits to Damascus, the Palestinian intellectual Faisal Darraj confided that the Mukhābarāt agent who gave him permission to leave the country for conferences abroad always laid down a condition: ‘Bring back the latest Baudrillard and Virilio.’ Always nice to have educated torturers, as the great Arab novelist Abdelrahman Munif – a Saudi by birth and leading intellectual of the Baath Party – might have said. Munif’s 1975 novel Sharq al-Mutawassit (East of the Mediterranean) is a devastating account of political torture and imprisonment, which the Egyptian literary critic Sabry Hafez described as a book of ‘exceptional power and ambition, aspiring to write the ultimate political prison in all its variations’. When I spoke with Munif in the nineties he said, with a sad look on his face, that these were the themes that dominated Arabic literature and poetry: a tragic commentary on the state of the Arab nation. Today, this shows little sign of changing. Even if the rebels have freed some of Assad’s prisoners, they will soon replace them with their own.
The US and most of the EU have spent the past year successfully sustaining and defending a genocide in Gaza. All US client states in the region remain intact, while three non-clients – Iraq, Libya and Syria – have been beheaded. The fall of the latter removes a crucial supply line linking a number of anti-Zionist factions. Geostrategically, it is a triumph for Washington and Israel. This must be recognized, but despair is worthless. How an effective resistance will reconstitute itself depends on the coming clash between Israel and a besieged Iran, which is engaged in direct underground talks with the US and certain members of Trump’s entourage, while also speeding up the development of its nuclear plans. The situation is fraught with danger.
Tariq Ali
Writer, journalist and film-maker Tariq Ali was born in Lahore in 1943. He owned his own independent television production company, Bandung, which produced programmes for Channel 4 in the UK during the 1980s. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio and contributes articles and journalism to magazines and newspapers including The Guardian and the London Review of Books. He is editorial director of London publishers Verso and is on the board of the New Left Review, for whom he is also an editor. He writes fiction and non-fiction and his non-fiction includes 1968: Marching in the Streets (1998), a social history of the 1960s; Conversations with Edward Said (2005); Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London, Terror (2005); and Speaking of Empire and Resistance (2005), which takes the form of a series of conversations with the author.
Source: Jadaliyya
Featuring: Bassam Haddad & Omar Dahi
The swift collapse of the Syrian regime took everyone by surprise, after 54 years of rule and a prolonged uprising. Within ten days, a Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS)-led coalition literally marched through Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and Damascus, as other armed groups mobilized in Der`a and Sweida. On Sunday, 8 December 2024, the Presidential residence and state banks temporarily became public property, notorious prisons were broke open. The regime had collapsed. The Syrian political class, army, party echelons, and the once infamously frightening security services’ heads were nowhere to be seen. Poof! Bashar Asad and family were now in Moscow. We will discuss the context of these developments as well as the notable absence of regime allies’ support, in addition to regional and international implications, including Israel’s continuing genocide.
The Fall of the Assad Government in Syria
Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, military leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Screengrab from CNN interview. HE CLEANED UP PRETTY GOOD THANKS TO SYRIAN BARBER
As the rebel forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (Syria Liberation Committee) seized Damascus, Syria’s capital, on December 7, 2024, the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad boarded a flight to Moscow, Russia. It was the end of the rule of the Assad family that began when Hafez al-Assad (1930-2000) became president in 1971, and continued through his son Bashar from 2000—a 53-year period of rule. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which seized Damascus, was formed out of the remnants of the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra (Front for the Conquest of Syria) in 2017, and led by its emir Abu Jaber Shaykh and its military commander Abu Mohammed al-Jolani.
For the past seven years, HTS has been restrained in the city of Idlib, in Syria’s north. In 2014, a group of al-Qaeda veterans created the Khorasan network (led by Sami al-Uraydi, the religious leader), whose intent was to control the city and the Islamist movements. Over the next year, al-Nusra tried to form alliances with other Islamist forces, such as Ahrar al-Sham, particularly for the governance of the city. The Russian military intervention in 2015 damaged the ability of these groups to advance out of Idlib, which led to the formal break of many of the Islamists from al-Qaeda in 2016 and the creation of HTS in January 2017. Those who remained linked to al-Qaeda formed Hurras al-Din (or Guardians of the Religious Organization). By the end of the year, HTS had seized the initiative and become the major force inside Idlib, took over the local councils across the city and declared that it was the home of the Syrian Salvation Government. When the Syrian Arab Army, the government’s military force, moved toward Idlib in early 2020, Turkey invaded Syria’s north to defend the Islamists. This invasion resulted in the Russian-Turkish ceasefire in March 2020 that allowed the HTS and others to remain in Idlib unscathed. HTS rebuilt its ranks through alliances with Turkish-backed armed forces and with fighters from across Central Asia (including many Uyghur fighters from the Turkistan Islamic Party).
Operation Deterrence of Aggression, launched by HTS in November 2024 with Turkish and Israeli support, whipped down highway M5 from Aleppo to Damascus in about fourteen days. The Syrian Arab Army dissolved before them and the gates of Damascus opened without enormous bloodshed.
The Jihadi Blitzkrieg
The surprise victory of HTS had been predicted in November by Iranian officials, who informed Assad about the weakness of the state’s defenses because of the sustained Israeli attacks on Syrian army positions, of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and of the war in Ukraine. When Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi met with Assad in Damascus after Aleppo fell to the rebels, Assad told Araghchi that this was not a defeat but a “tactical retreat.” That was clearly illusionary. Araghchi, knowing this, told Assad that Iran simply did not have the capacity to send new troops to defend Damascus. It had also been made clear to the Assad government that the Russians did not have the surplus capacity to defend the government, not even the Russian naval base in Tartus. During the HTS drive against the Syrian army, the Russian presidential envoy for Syria Alexander Lavrentyev said that he had been in touch with the incoming Trump administration to discuss a deal between “all parties” over the Syrian conflict. Neither Russia nor Iran believed that the Assad government would be able to unilaterally defeat the various rebels and remove the United States from its occupation of the eastern oil fields. A deal was the only way out, which meant that neither Iran nor Russia was willing to commit more troops to defend the Assad government.
Since 2011, Israel’s air force has struck several Syrian military bases, including bases that hosted Iranian troops. These strikes degraded Syrian military capacity by destroying ordinance and materiel. Since October 2023, Israel has increased its strikes within Syria, including hitting Iranian forces, Syrian air defenses, and Syrian arms production facilities. On December 4, the heads of the militaries of Iran (Chief of Staff Major General Mohammad Bagheri), Iraq (Major General Yahya Rasool), Russia (Defense Minister Andrey Belousov), and Syria (General Abdul Karim Mahmoud Ibrahim) met to assess the situation in Syria. They discussed the movement of HTS down from Aleppo and agreed that with the fragile ceasefire in Lebanon and the Syrian government’s weakened forces, this was a “dangerous scenario.” While they said that they would support the government in Damascus, there were no concrete steps taken by them. The Israeli attacks inside Syria meanwhile increased the demoralization within the Syrian army, which has not been properly reorganized after the stalemate began with the rebels in Idlib in 2017.
When Russia entered the conflict in Syria in 2015, the Russian military command insisted that the Syrian government no longer permit pro-government militia groups (such as the Kataeb al-Ba’ath and the Shabbiha) to operate independently. Instead, these groups were integrated into the Fourth and Fifth Corps under Russian command. Meanwhile, the Iranian officers organized their own battalions of Syrian soldiers. The soldiers’ declining economic standards combined with the foreign command accelerated the demoralization. Even the Republican Guard, tasked with defending Damascus and in particular the presidential palace, had lost much of its historical power.
At no point after 2011 was the Syrian government in control of the territory of the country. Already, since 1973, Israel had seized the Golan Heights. Then, during 2011, Turkey had eaten into the borderlands of northern Syria, while the Kurdish resistance forces (YPG and PKK) had formed a zone alongside the Syria-Turkey border. Northwestern Syria had been taken by the rebels, who included not only HTS but also a range of Turkish-backed militia groups. Northeastern Syria was occupied by the United States, which had taken charge of the oil fields. In this region, the US forces contested the Islamic State, which had been pushed out of both northern Iraq and northeastern Syria, but which continued to appear in spurts. Meanwhile, in southern Syria, the government had made a series of hasty agreements with the rebels to provide an appearance of peace. In cities such as Busra al-Sham, Daraa, Houran, and Tafas, the government could not send any of its officials; these, like Idlib, had come under rebel control. When HTS moved on Damascus, the rebels in the south rose up as did the rebels in the country’s eastern edge along the border with Iraq. The reality of Assad’s weakness became apparent.
Israel’s Advantage
As if in a coordinated fashion, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to the occupied Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in 1973, and announced, “This is a historic day in the history of the Middle East.” He then said that his government had ordered the Israeli army to invade the UN buffer zone between the Israeli occupation of Golan and the Syrian army posts that had been established during the armistice of 1974. Israeli tanks moved into the countryside of Quneitra Governorate and took over the main town. The border between Israel and Syria has now been shaped by this invasion, since Israel has now moved several kilometers into Syria to seize almost the entire length of the border.
During the final days of the HTS advance to Damascus, the Israeli air force provided the rebels with air support. They bombed military bases and the headquarters of Syrian intelligence in the center of Damascus. With the excuse that they wanted to destroy weapons depots before the rebels seized them, the Israelis struck bases that housed Syrian troops and stockpiles of weapons that the Syrian army might have used to defend Damascus (this included the Mezzah Air Base). Israeli officials have said that they will continue these air strikes, but have not indicated whom they plan to target.
The Israeli assault on Syria deepened during the protest movement in 2011. As fighting between the rebels and the Syrian government spread across southern Syria, near the Israeli border, Israel began to fire across the border at Syrian forces. In March 2013, for instance, the Israelis fired missiles at Syrian military posts, weakening them and strengthening the rebels. At the end of 2013, Israel created Division 210, a special military command, to begin engagements along the Israel-Syrian armistice line. Importantly, when the HTS predecessor and al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra began to make gains along the Israeli line of control, Israel did not strike them. Instead, Israel hit the Syrian government through shooting down Syrian air force jets and assassinating senior Syrian allies (such as General Mohammad Ali Allahdadi, an Iranian general, in January 2015, and Samir Kuntar, a Fatah leader, in late 2015). A former press officer in Damascus told me that the Israelis effectively provided air support for the HTS assault on the capital.
Syria’s Future
Assad left Syria without making any announcement. It is said by former government officials in Damascus that some senior leaders left with him or left for the Iraqi border before the fall of Damascus. The silence from Assad has bewildered many Syrians who had believed fundamentally that the state would protect them from the onslaught of groups such as HTS. It is a sign of the collapse of the Assad government that his Republican Guard did not try to defend the city and that he left without any words of encouragement to his people.
The country is polarized regarding the new government. Sections of the population that had seen their way of life degraded by the war and sanctions welcome the opening, and they have been on the streets celebrating the new situation. The larger context for the Middle East is not their immediate concern, although depending on Israel’s actions, this might change. A considerable section is concerned about the behavior of the Islamists, who use terms of disparagement against non-Sunni Muslims such as nusayriyya (for Alawites, the community of the al-Assad family) and rawafid (such as the large Shia population in Syria). Calling non-Sunni Muslims ahl al-batil or the “lost ones” and using strong Salafi language about apostasy and its punishment sets in motion fear amongst those who might be targets of attacks. Whether the new government will be able to control its forces motivated by this sectarian ideology remains to be seen.
Such sectarianism is only the opening of the contradictions that will emerge almost immediately. How will the new government deal with the Israeli, Turkish, and US incursions into Syrian territory? Will it seek to win back that land? What will be the relationship between the Syrian government and its neighbors, particularly Lebanon? Will the millions of Syrian refugees return to their home now that the basis for their migration has been removed, and if they return, what will be awaiting them inside Syria? And centrally, what will all this mean for the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians by the Israelis?
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
Shattered Lands: A Short History of the Syrian Conflict
Image by Levi Meir Clancy.
This piece was first published on CounterPunch in March 2011.
When the Arab Spring came to the Middle East ten years ago, most on the left welcomed the protests, except in Libya and Syria largely out of geopolitical concerns. If the world was made up of opposing camps, you had to support Washington’s enemies even if their secret police were torturers and their governments little more than family dynasties. Libya was far more up-front about being the wholly-owned property of the Gaddafi clan but didn’t Syria have elections? Most notably, you can find references to Bashar al-Assad being re-elected to President in 2014 with close to 90 percent of the vote, a seeming anomaly given the depth of the civil war.
It turns out that he did even better in 2007, when he got 97.29 of the vote, a total redolent of Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman’s studies of demonstration elections. But you had to avoid making such a charge since you didn’t want Assad to be mistaken with José Napoleón Duarte’s victory in El Salvador in 1984. He got 54 percent of the vote but—who knows—maybe Assad deserved such overwhelming support. Yes, it’s true that it wasn’t exactly an election but a referendum on whether he should take over for his father after Hafez’s death that year. With word of posters being plastered on Damascus’s walls and songs blaring from cars and loudspeakers “We love you”, who could deny his popularity? Of course, anybody caught writing graffiti on the walls denouncing such a rigged election might end up hanging upside down in a police station and beaten for hours. That would the norm in 2011, when Syrians lost their fear.
Between 2007 and 2011, not much attention was paid to Syria. For many, the charms of the country were irresistible. Visits to Damascus and Aleppo were a perfect alternative to the usual resort spots. What could be more fun than strolling through the bazaars in search of cheap rugs? Even after the country had been torn apart by civil war, you could always count on Vanessa Beeley and Max Blumenthal to report back on the glories of the nightlife and their favorite hotels.
It was left to the intrepid anti-imperialists to keep a close eye on Syria since it bordered Iraq, a country that was the victim of regime change. What was to prevent the USA from making war on Syria alongside its allies like Saudi Arabia that feared and hated Syria’s ties to Iran? Proof of the danger materialized in a secret document titled “INFLUENCING THE SARG (Syrian Arab Republic Government) IN THE END OF 2006” that Wikileaks got its hands on. After all, it stated, “Actions that cause Bashar to lose balance and increase his insecurity are in our interest because his inexperience and his regime’s extremely small decision-making circle make him prone to diplomatic stumbles that can weaken him domestically and regionally.”
Despite these words, the period beginning with Assad’s assumption of power were seen as one of rapprochement rather than confrontation with the West and its allies. If you were going to believe Wikileaks in 2006, why not believe it in 2009 when the shifting sands of Middle East deal-making had produced new outcomes. A Saudi cable titled “SAUDI-SYRIAN RAPPROCHEMENT BACK ON TRACK?” concluded:
Asad’s visit to the Kingdom is the latest in a series of steps towards a fuller Saudi-Syrian rapprochement. Whether the meeting will lead to the King visiting Damascus– and whether this visit will become before, or after Lebanese government formation– is still unclear. Saudi Ambassador Abdullah Al-Eifan’s arrival in Damascus on August 25 was confirmation that the Saudi-Syrian relationship was ready to enter a new phase.
It’s true that Lebanon was still a sticking point but it was possible that capitalist trade might speed reconciliation. Italian media (ANSAmed, October 28, 2009) reported that the Saudis had agreed upon a loan of 1 billion dollars to Damascus for “development projects” reached during “the historic summit” held in the Syrian capital between President Bashar al Assad and the Saudi sovereign Abdullah. The meeting marked the recovery of “cordial relations” after four years of tension between Iran’s ally Syria and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, supported by the USA. Next spring, the two nations would hold a “Syria-Saudi Arabia economic forum” in Damascus in line with the increase of Saudi investments in Syria increased by 25% between 2007 and 2008. Trade between the two countries stood at about 2 billion dollars in 2009.
Keeping in mind that the Saudis always had more to fear from an armed peasantry in Syria than a non-Sunni ruling party, things returned to normal between the two countries once again fairly recently. On March 11 this month, the Saudis declared their intention to work with Russia to bring peace to Syria because unrest there would nurture extremism among the region’s youth. Odd, I’ve always heard that Saudi Arabia intervened in Syria just to nurture extremism, the Wahhabi devils. Had the Saudi princes studied Kissinger? They apparently understand that they have no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.
They were not alone. At Hafez al-Assad’s funeral in 2000, the imperialists came to pay their respects, including Jacques Chirac and Madeleine Albright. Albright, with her nose for dictators and ready to play ball, gave Bashar thumbs up at a press conference. “It seems to me he is poised and someone who is ready to assume his duties. I was very encouraged by his desire to follow in his father’s footsteps.” Sarkozy joined the club, making a state visit to Damascus in 2008.
Nothing much changed under Obama since Bashar al-Assad was smart enough to exploit divisions in the American political establishment. In 2007, he welcomed Nancy Pelosi to Syria to see if there were grounds for a new approach in Mideast politics, especially after the odious George W. Bush presidency had ended. Next year, after Obama became president, Bashar told the Washington Post’s David Ignatius that he was ready to work with the new president as long as “regime change” was abandoned. The Syrian dictator sensed the new mood in Washington. In January 2009, Obama appointed George Mitchell as Mideast envoy. Part of his mission was to reengage with Syria.
Obama’s next step was to dispatch John Kerry to Syria, where he assured al-Assad that the new administration was going to be different. The USA was now ready to talk “respectfully and frankly with the parties in the Middle East.” At an elaborate dinner at al-Assad’s mansion, Kerry met Manaf Tlass, who was the dictator’s top enforcer. Kerry gushed, “I am happy that someone like you is at the president’s side.”
Perhaps a decline in the interest of Marxism explains the reliance on secret cables by much of the left rather than class analysis. If all that counts is where Saudi Arabia stands at a given moment, who needs to read Leon Trotsky, especially if you are still one of those people who admire Joseph Stalin. If Vladimir Putin was a fan of both Joseph Stalin and Bashar al-Assad, why quibble?
What could be a bigger waste of time than examining class relations in Syria when the USA is supplying the rebels with small arms? That’s the litmus test for people who like things simple. Yes, they were ordered to fight ISIS but it would be far better for Syria if they were disarmed. After all, a disgruntled FSA fighter might have decided to fire a machine gun at a Russian MIG-29 bombing a hospital. Couldn’t that lead to regime change?
And why would the West lose sleep over Assad’s economic policies? They were no different than any other dictatorship in the region. Dispensing with his father’s statist policies that were sufficient to put enough bread on the table to allow the masses to put up with torturing cops, Assad began to put big capital first as a way of “modernizing” the nation. In an important article for the March 2012, MERIP, Bassam Haddad noted:
After Bashar al-Asad succeeded his father in 2000, the architects of Syria’s economic policy sought to reverse the downturn by liberalizing the economy further, for instance by reducing state subsidies. Private banks were permitted for the first time in nearly 40 years and a stock market was on the drawing board. After 2005, the state-business bonds were strengthened by the announcement of the Social Market Economy, a mixture of state and market approaches that ultimately privileged the market, but a market without robust institutions or accountability. Again, the regime had consolidated its alliance with big business at the expense of smaller businesses as well as the Syrian majority who depended on the state for services, subsidies and welfare. It had perpetuated cronyism, but dressed it in new garb.
The economic consequences were disastrous for the country’s farmers.
Constituting 40 percent of Syrian territory, the Jazira province produced 70 percent of Syrian wheat, an obvious necessity for that bread on the table. In the 1950s, it enjoyed something of a boom as Aleppo merchants invested in the cotton industry. Just as is the case with cotton farming everywhere, irrigation without draining the land and monoculture led to the impoverishment of the soil.
The drought that began in 2007 only increased the already existing misery. Up to 75 percent of the farmers in Jazira suffered total crop failure of the sort that John Steinbeck depicted in Grapes of Wrath. Since wheat production relied on underground wells, a shortage of rain led to an increase in the price of a well. In Raqqa, the cost of a new well in 2001 was 16,000 euros—well beyond the capability of a small farmer to afford.
Herdsmen were also impacted. With insufficient water for cattle and goats, livestock had to be sold at 60 percent below cost. As fodder prices rose by 75 percent in January 2008, the flocks were decimated by half.
Not only were agricultural supports removed by the dictatorship, fuel was also no longer subsidized. The price for a gallon of gasoline rose by 350 percent. This meant that motor pumps, so essential to drawing water from underground wells, became difficult to afford. All in all, the economic institutions that had been created by Hafez Al-Assad and abolished by his son came together in a perfect storm with the advent of a crippling drought.
The conditions of life in the Jazira could not be more distinct from that enjoyed by Damascus yuppies—both Alawite and Sunni—that were benefiting from a neoliberal boom. In 2009, 42 percent of people in Raqqa developed anemia because of a shortage of dairy products, vegetables, and fruit. Malnutrition among pregnant women and children under five doubled between 2007 and 2009. Furthering their misery, farmers in drought-stricken northern Syria used polluted river water to irrigate their crops, causing outbreaks of food poisoning.
When the ruined farming class migrated to the cities, they tended to end up in the suburbs of Aleppo or Damascus where they struggled to find employment or entered the informal economy—in other words, peddling fruit on the street. Or perhaps they would seek refuge in a city like Homs that was in the agricultural heartland and hardly a city to be profiled in Vogue magazine.
It was in Homs that Assad’s economic restructuring had its greatest and most damaging impact. As the largest capital of a drought-affected province, it became a major destination from both the west and from the Jazira to the east. Between 2008 and July 2009, 3,037 households relied on food assistance. Researchers discovered that six percent more residents of Homs were unable to cover basic food expenses than the average Syrian rate.
The people of Homs were the first to use small arms to drive Assad’s butchers out and to enjoy relative freedom until tanks, helicopters and MIG’s unleashed a merciless attack that left the rebel-controlled neighborhoods looking like Stalingrad in 1943. All this is documented in the 2013 Syrian-German documentary film “The Return to Homs” written and directed by Talal Derki. The film can be rented on Vimeo. Anybody watching it back then might have anticipated the suppression of the Syrian revolt given the asymmetrical character of the warfare.
Given the analysis of the Assadist left, one wonders how anybody could have possibly expected Syria to go the way of Iraq, especially since the country was not particularly endowed with oil and gas. Despite the ceaseless warnings about “regime change”, Obama was content to see the rebels crushed underfoot. The bulk of the billions spent in Syria were not allocated to weapons that could have deterred Assad’s air force. They were used against ISIS. FSA fighters were warned not to confront Assad’s military or else they would lose their funding. For Obama, this was realpolitik since there was no competition between a massive professional military and the largely untrained FSA. In 2014, he pretty much wrote them off in a statement: “Oftentimes, the challenge is if you have former farmers or teachers or pharmacists who now are taking up opposition against a battle-hardened regime, with support from external actors that have a lot at stake, how quickly can you get them trained; how effective are you able to mobilize them.”
I don’t know. If you give a pharmacist a MANPAD (Man-portable air-defense system), he could do quite a bit of damage. Given the supposed animosity of Sunni-ruled states in the region to Assad, you’d think that they’d be happy to put them into the hands of a pharmacist. As it happens, there were class affinities between Assad and his ostensible enemies in the region that transcended the battlefield line-up. Like Obama, there was little interest in plebian militias forming a revolutionary government committed to reversing the disaster that had afflicted the rural and urban poor. Class equality can be catching, after all. The Wall Street Journal reported on October 17, 2012:
U.S. officials say they are most worried about Russian-designed Manpads provided to Libya making their way to Syria. The U.S. intensified efforts to track and collect man-portable missiles after the 2011 fall of the country’s longtime strongman leader, Moammar Gadhafi.
To keep control of the flow of weapons to the Syrian rebels, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar formed a joint operations room early this year in a covert project U.S. officials watched from afar.
The U.S. has limited its support of the rebels to communications equipment, logistics and intelligence. But U.S. officials have coordinated with the trio of countries sending arms and munitions to the rebels. The Pentagon and CIA ramped up their presence on Turkey’s southern border as the weapons began to flow to the rebels in two to three shipments every week.
In July, the U.S. effectively halted the delivery of at least 18 Manpads sourced from Libya, even as the rebels pleaded for more effective antiaircraft missiles to counter regime airstrikes in Aleppo, people familiar with that delivery said.
Even with Assad’s total control of the skies, his military found it more and more difficult to suppress the lightly-armed militias that lacked a central command, let alone political agreement on the future of the country. In 2015, Russia began flying bombing missions in Syria to compensate for a military that was bleeding defectors and suffering poor morale. Sunni draftees could no longer be trusted and even Alawites were wondering how it would all end.
To make sure that the rebel threat would disappear for good, Assad began to use chemical attacks. While sarin attacks have generated the most press attention, it was chlorine gas dropped from helicopters that did the most to drive Syrians away from rebel-controlled territory and into refugee camps. If you’ve paid any attention to one of Assad’s few remaining fan clubs in the West, Max Blumenthal’s Grayzone, you couldn’t miss the fervor its reporters have shown in absolving Assad for the death of more than 40 people on the steps and landings of a Douma apartment building nearly three years ago. It turns out that there have been 336 chemical attacks in Syria since the war began, with 98 percent of them attributed to Assad. Most have been chlorine rather than sarin since it tends to generate less outrage. For those exposed to chlorine, especially in repeated attacks such as took place in Douma, the consequences are not death but extreme pain and after-effects. This is enough to drive them into Idlib, where refugees have not only fled chlorine gas but barrel bombs, starvation sieges, artillery and other punishment.
Now triumphant, Assad evokes Tacitus’s observation that the Roman conquerors have made a desert and called it peace. Tacitus, of course, was referring to the damage done to his enemies but in a new twist on the Roman historian, Assad’s victory has been over his own supporters in the final analysis. A combination of American sanctions, Lebanese bank collapse and the failure of his Russian and Iranian benefactors to supply financial support have left cities under his control suffering nearly as badly as those he conquered. The UN News summed up the situation in Syria:
Citing “disturbing new food security data” published by the World Food Programme (WFP), Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Mark Lowcock stated that some 60 per cent of the population “do not have regular access to enough safe and nutritious food”.
“The increase may be shocking, but it cannot be said to be surprising”, he said via video link.
The UN official told the Council that average household expenses now exceed income by an estimated 20 per cent, leaving millions to resort to “desperate measures” to survive.
More than 70 per cent of Syrians say they have taken on new debt, and are forced to sell assets and livestock. Meanwhile, parents are eating less so they can feed their children, who are now working instead of studying.
“Those who have run out of options are simply going hungry”, he spelled out, flagging that more than half a million under-fives are suffering from the effects of stunting.
Despite the terrible losses suffered by the opposition, those activists who were not killed by Assad have told The New Arab that they have no regrets:
Dani Qappani documented human rights abuses by the regime and was pursued by its security forces, while his brother was arrested. After the regime lost control of Moadamiyeh to rebels, it used chemical weapons on the city, killing hundreds of people and later overrunning the rebel stronghold
“My experience during the revolution was one of a dream fulfilled, a dream of freedom of thought and expression, a dream of liberation from servitude to individuals, to the Assad family, from all the chains restraining our minds, our eyes, and our mouths,” he told The New Arab.
“Personally, I have never regretted my participation in the revolution and I will not regret it. It’s an inevitable result of the oppression, repression, and criminality that Assad’s gang has practiced for decades,” he said.
What does the future hold in store for Syria? Can the Assad family dynasty continue? Will the country’s ruling class finally decide that less clientelism and state-sponsored violence will be necessary for it to gain a new footing, especially with a fresh face in the presidency that could mollify the West into ending the sanctions? Although it is apocryphal, Mao Zedong was once asked for his judgment on the French Revolution. He answered that it was too soon to say. One can be sure that the final verdict on the mafia-state running Syria under the family name brand Assad will come in a lot sooner.
Syria: Hopes and Pitfalls
Image by Mahmoud Sulaiman.
The rapid collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime has taken both intelligentsia and analysts by surprise. It was a repeat of the unexpected speedy fall of the Afghan government during the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Both events share notable similarities: in Afghanistan, the government unraveled when its primary sponsor—the United States—decided to withdraw. Similarly, in Syria, Assad’s regime crumbled when his allies abandoned him.
However, contrary to Netanyahu’s narcissistic assertions that his attacks on Iran and the Resistance in Lebanon were a major driver in Assad’s downfall, Assad’s demise was largely due to his failure to confront Israeli belligerence in Syria and his abandonment of the Resistance in Gaza and Lebanon. Since October 8, Assad behaved more like other impotent Arab dictators as mere observers to the genocide in Gaza and the war in Lebanon.
In fact, when the Lebanese Resistance chose to support besieged Gaza by occupying the Israeli army on the Lebanese front. Assad made it clear that he would not partake in the United Resistance Front battle. Even after the loss of leaders in the Lebanese Resistance, and earlier when Israel targeted the Iranian diplomatic mission in Damascus, he refused to retaliate against Israeli assaults.
Furthermore, to gain favor from certain Arab Gulf rulers, and according to reliable sources in Damascus, unlike during the summer 2006 war on Lebanon, the public was prohibited from openly expressing support or displaying pictures of Sayyed Nasrallah and flags of the Lebanese Resistance.
Assad miscalculated by assuming he could distance himself from the Lebanese Resistance while believing they could not afford to lose him. His approach parallels that of the Democratic establishment in the U.S. during the last presidential election, when they dismissed the anti-genocide voters, assuming they would have no alternative in Donald Trump as a president. In other words, Assad believed that, when compared to the alternative, he was indispensable. Eventually, his vain conduct turned him into a drag, not an asset, to the camp opposing Israeli intransigence.
The rift between Assad and allies widened by his determined intent to reclaim his seat in the Arab dictatorship club, AKA Arab League. Notably, his first reconciliation was with the United Arab Emirates leader, the God Father of the Arab normalization with Israel. Assad’s strategy hinged on self-preservation—warming up to Gulf dictators while dangling the “scary” alternative to blackmail his allies.
In 2012, I wrote on the civil protest against the regime’s corruption, and how that evolved into an open war, fueled by foreign interference on both sides. Foreign fighters financed by Arab Gulf States turned Syria into a fight of competing foreign interests, including Russia, Turkey, the U.S., Iran and even Israel. The foreign intervention ultimately extended his regime, denying the Syrian people the opportunity to voice their grievances and pursue a peaceful political transition.
Following his victory, instead of addressing the legitimate demands of opposition groups who resisted being drawn into the military conflict, Assad squandered funds from foreign sponsors to strengthen his special security units whose only task is to protect him, at the expense of weakening the Syrian national army. He misinterpreted his bloody victory as vindication of his brutal policies to silence dissent.
While cloaking himself in lofty slogans and preaching Arab nationalism and resistance, Assad’s arrogance was reinforced by the so-called intellectuals eager to rationalize his cruelty in the face of foreign intervention. More recently, the same pundits shamelessly defended Assad’s for not confronting Israeli aggression in Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza, attributing his impotence to Syria’s recovery from a decade-long war. Yet, Yemen which emerged from an even more devastating war and, despite being under international siege, it stood up to Israeli and Western might in defending Gaza.
At the end, Assad’s downfall became inevitable as his allies grew unwilling to support him as the fear of alternatives no longer outweighed his failures. When soldiers in his army refused to sacrifice their lives for a system riddled with corruption, his security forces crumbled as fast. A week before Damascus fell to the rebels, Assad secretly spirited his family and loads of money out of Syria. Few days later, he fled for his life leaving behind those who had defended his regime to face their fate alone. For him, it was always about Bashar al-Assad’s survival, not Syria.
Despite his rhetoric against Israel, Assad was predictable and well contained by Israel than what the change might bring. That’s why following his fall, Israel terminated the 1974 agreement with Syria on separation of forces, and occupied additional Syrian land. This could be part of Netanyahu’s attempt to create new facts on the ground to be used to exert concessions from the new government.
At the same time, Israel is seeding for the future conflict as Netanyahu expands his endless wars, targeting hundreds of locations inside Syria. In the absence of a Syrian air defense system, Israel seized a cynical opportunity attacking almost 500 sites destroying scientific institutions and research centers—mirroring the chaos created by Israeli-firsters during the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Israel’s only constant objective appears to be the dismantling of nations, leaving subsequent governments preoccupied by bedlam and turmoil. This pattern is evident in its actions in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iraq, and aligns with its broader strategy for Iran.
Meanwhile, the newly formed Syrian government faces a formidable challenge: navigating Western conditions to lift the illegal crippling sanctions on Syria. The U.S. administration is likely to use this opportunity to extract political favors for Israel, a move that could most likely compromise the legitimacy of the new leaders and undermine Syria’s sovereignty. Unfortunately, early signs from the new leadership are concerning. Their reluctance to condemn Israeli flagrant attacks raises real doubts about their ability to free Syria from outside influence and uphold Syria’s historical commitment to the Arab cause.
As for those celebrating Assad’s departure, it is vital to remember the lessons of Iraq, Egypt, and Libya to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Syria’s future depends on building a stable and just society while avoiding the pitfalls of replacing one dictatorship with another. The new government must represent all Syrians, regardless of religion or ethnicity, ensuring justice and equality for all, while upholding Syria’s historic role at the forefront of resistance against Israel and its local agents.
On the Syrian Revolution
Photograph Source: Shark1989z – CC BY-SA 4.0
I don’t remember when I began studying the Syrian revolution in any detail. I know that in its early years I pretty much accepted what had been handed down to me from commonplace sources on the left. I formed a quite typical image; Assad, for all his faults – was a secular leader in the image of a progressive pan-Arab-nationalism harkening back to figures such as Nasser – and his regime was, ultimately, a last stand against a toxic ISIS type religious extremism threatening to overwhelm Syria.
Once I started looking at the situation in more detail, however; once I started consulting accounts from Syrian activists locked into a life and death struggle against the regime, I began to form a very different picture. I learnt that – contrary to his ‘secular’ credentials – Assad had released leading members of ISIS from Syrian prisons after the revolution had broken out. I learnt that he had done this to help infect the revolution with the spore of religious fundamentalism. But more importantly, he had done this so he could bomb hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians into oblivion to secure his grotesque form of power, a repression which could then be couched in the language of a war against Muslim extremism – now where have we heard that before?
One of the few figures on the radical left in the western world who engaged with Syrian voices and made a systematic attempt to really understand and get to grips with the history of the Syrian revolution was my friend and comrade, Louis Proyect. Truly an unrepentant Marxist, he was someone who always placed the self-determination of the masses at the core of his analysis whether it be on Syria or Ukraine or Nicaragua or anywhere else. In his own grouchy, belligerent and brilliant way, he helped keep Marxism true to itself, rooted in the dictum ‘the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves’.
For Louis Proyect – as for Marx – freedom wasn’t something which could be handed to one from above; it was something which was called into being in the very act of fighting for it. So many on the left have forgotten that deeply important and deeply human point; so many have regarded murderous dictators such as Putin as some type of antidote to the horrors of capitalism projected out from the American heartlands, much in the same way that their ossified, wax-work predecessors regarded the crushing of the Hungarian workers and students in 1956 by Soviet tanks as a great leap forward in the story of human emancipation.
And, of course, such a conception passed across into the ‘radical’ left’s analysis of Syria. Its leading lights declared that Assad’s war on his own population was not, fundamentally, about the repression of a revolution but, ultimately, about Islamic fundamentalism. From absolute charlatans and publicity-hungry whores like Slavoj Zizek to genuinely decent and conscientious figures like Noam Chomsky, the view that the Syrian masses were inevitably and inexorably held in the grip of the most reactionary Islamic fundamentalism was the order of the day.
Those same figures would, now and then, make some sorrowful, handwringing concessions to the brutality of Assad, but the gist was always the same; the hundreds of thousands of Syrian dead were the collateral damage that comes from having to root out the fundamentalists sponsored by western imperialism. It is painful and sad to realise that a very similar defence is mobilized by Israel in its extinguishing of Palestinian lives in Gaza ‘ they are all terrorists, they are all Hamas’. The noble and worthwhile defence of Palestinian civilians mounted on the part of the international left was never carried across to the Syrians.
But, in my research on the real Syrian revolution, I would learn that the rebels who opposed Assad were not, in fact, all fundamentalists. I learnt that many were secular in their politics, creating the first free trade unions in Syria. I learnt that the rebels actually drove ISIS out of Syria, with a fury, in 2013. I suspect most people wont even have heard of these events such is the identification of the rebels with ISIS. But my point is a Leninist one; within the context of any great revolution there are all sorts of tendencies and forms struggling for expression. What a strong international left-wing movement should do is support and encourage the truly radical elements over and against the reactionary ones. It has let Syria down so badly in this respect.
I don’t know what is going to happen in Syria now. I know that HTS (the leaders of a coalition of forces that have overthrown the Assad regime) is an offshoot of Jabhat al-Nusra, a group that had strong ties with Al-Qaeda It evolved out of it politically, but I also know that it has broken with those same politics, repressing elements connected with Al -Qaeda and offering up the possibility of a more pluralistic and secular struggle.
Now maybe it (HTS) has been pushed to the left by broader and more democratic tendencies within in the revolution itself. Or maybe it’s just seeking cover as a way to later impose a religious dictatorship. I don’t know. But if the latter is true, if HTS seeks to disguise its true fundamentalist nature, by masquerading in more democratic clothes, doesn’t that mean that there are deep democratic and radical tendencies in the revolution which have once again broken out in Syria and which must be appeased for the HTS to behave this way?
And, once more, isn’t the job of the internationalist left to encourage and strengthen these tendencies in the Syrian Revolution? Rather than simply dismiss them. Rather than to declare in advance that the Syrian resistance and revolution is doomed to the most primitive form of backward religious extremism. The notion that the Syrian protestors across the board in a country where so many have been murdered by the government – the notion that all of these people are and can only ever be propelled toward Islamic fundamentalism – that notion in itself smacks of a racial categorisation of Arab backwardness that has been fed on the ‘logic’ and brutality of western imperialism. The very thing the radical left is supposedly struggling against.
In truth, the same people on the left who are giving some nod toward the sheer genocidal awfulness of Assad while asserting that the people who are fighting against him are simply the fundamentalist excretions of western imperialism, are inevitably the same people who assert that masses of Ukraine – in fighting and dying against a murderous strain of Russian imperialism – have no content of their own, no sense of self determination, but are merely the ‘proxies’ of Western and US power.
But however bloated windbags like George Galloway or Tariq Ali who form a rather perverse aristocracy on the left – or any other VERY IMPORTANT FIGURES – however high these people are on the sense of their own historical grandeur and importance – don’t buy into it. They are selling you the same type of Stalinism their predecessors did when Soviets tanks crushed workers and students in Hungary in 56. I imagine a faithlessness in the masses – in people living and dying far away – is an inevitable corollary when you are a VERY IMPORTANT FIGURE (and a rather wealthy individual like Tariq or George) , and you can’t help but realise yourself to be so far above the people you purport to be fighting for.
Sue Kellerman - Syrian Protest 11th June
The long-harboured aspirations of the US, Turkey and Israel to topple the Syrian government, mainly through their rebranded al-Qaeda allies, succeeded at lightning speed.
Damascus fell days after Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) forces under Abu Mohammad al-Jolani surprised observers by breaking out of their small north-western enclave in Syria and seizing the country’s second city, Aleppo.
Bashar al-Assad’s government and his army, it turned out, were paper tigers. Or they were, once their chief allies – Russia, Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon – had been forced onto the back foot. Preoccupied with troubles closer to home, they could no longer offer the military support Assad depended on.
Israel’s rampage across Lebanon and its military intimidation of Iran – as well as Nato’s increasing efforts to pin Russia down in Ukraine – unfroze the main battle lines in Syria, arrived at several years ago between Assad’s army, al-Qaeda’s franchise in Syria and Kurdish forces in the north-east.
Backed by Turkey, a member of Nato – and more covertly by the CIA and MI6 – HTS and the so-called Syrian National Army (SNA) were able to drive south unhindered.
HTS is proscribed as a terrorist group by both the US and Britain. The CIA has placed a $10m bounty on Jolani’s head.
Strangely, amid the excitement, the BBC and the rest of the western media forgot to mention HTS’s status as a proscribed organisation – as they do in kneejerk fashion every time the Palestinian resistance group Hamas is referred to.
Notably, the very western politicians and media now celebrating the “liberation” of Syria by HTS are the same ones insisting that the eradication of the “terrorists” of Hamas in Gaza is so important it justifies the bombing and starvation of the enclave’s two million-plus Palestinian population.
There are difficult questions that any rational observer ought to be pondering right now.
How are we to believe that the same ideological groups who are head-chopping, women-abusing, minority-oppressing terrorists when they operate in US-occupied Iraq, are now “moderate”, “diversity-friendly rebels” when they operate next door in Syria?
How are opponents of western complicity in Israel’s “plausible” genocide in Gaza, as the World Court describes it, supposed to feel about the West helping to shatter the “axis of resistance”, which stood alone in offering material support to try to stop it?
Is HTS pursuing a nationalist agenda that is truly about liberating Syrians from western imperialism, or is western imperialism – wielding both the stick of an Israeli attack dog and the carrot of the rich Gulf lapdogs – once again in the driving seat in Syria?
How much of what we see is the reality of the situation and how much perception management?
Iran in cross-hairs
There are plenty of clues to help us answer these questions if we go looking for them.
Wesley Clark, a former US Army general, recalled a moment weeks after the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001 when he visited the Pentagon.
He was shown a classified document that set out how the US was going to “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off with Iran”.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/FNt7s_Wed_4?si=_WPRk-4iGoKPVL8j
None of these states had any obvious connection to the events of 9/11. The one that did have such a connection – Saudi Arabia – was not on the list and has remained one of the United States’ most favoured client states.
The order of targets prioritised by Washington had to be modified – and the timeline was way off – but the realisation of that 2001 blueprint is closer than ever.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the US and UK, on false pretences, led to the removal of dictator Saddam Hussein and the collapse of the Iraqi state. The country was plunged into a devastating sectarian war from which it is still struggling to recover.
Nato meddling in Libya, again on false pretences, led to the removal of dictator Muammar Gaddafi and the collapse of the Libyan state in 2011. It has been a failed state run by warlords ever since.
Sudan and Somalia – the latter subject to a US-backed Ethiopian invasion in 2007 – are both basket cases, riven by all-consuming, horrifying civil wars that the US helped to stoke rather than resolve.
The destruction of these various states created the space for new ultra-violent, intolerant Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS) group to flourish.
Turkey’s open backing of the rebels in Syria – plus more concealed support from the CIA and MI6 – led to the removal of Syrian dictator Assad at the weekend and the collapse of what was left of the Syrian state. It is hard to imagine a unified authority emerging there.
Meanwhile, the terms of surrender foisted on Beirut to end Israel’s savage bombing of Lebanon do not look designed to hold. The already fragile sectarian arrangements barely glueing the Lebanese state together are almost certain to come unstuck in the coming months.
Iran, the last target on the Pentagon’s list, is now fully in the cross-hairs. Deprived of allies in Syria, and now largely cut off from its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon, Tehran is as vulnerable as it has ever been.
Bigger picture
None of this is accidental.
Were western publics not so deeply influenced by years of disinformation from their politicians and media, they might by now be starting to see a bigger picture gradually coming into focus.
One in which the fates of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Iran hang in the balance together. One in which the western powers, led from Washington, are once again meddling, in violation of international law, to destroy the territorial integrity of each of them. One in which Israel and the West’s geostrategic interests are paramount, not the freedoms or welfare of the region’s people.
Dictators are bad. Killing civilians is bad. But these truisms, selectively prioritised by our feckless media class, have been weaponised to obscure the wider picture.
When westerners see “enemy” governments fall, as Assad’s has just done, or civil wars break out in far-off lands, they are led to assume that these are the geopolitical equivalent of a natural event.
The unexamined premise is that the world is ultimately heading, in fits and starts, towards a liberal democratic order. That is why HTS is repackaging itself, ably assisted by the western media, as newly pragmatic and moderate.
“Moderate”, presumably, in the sense that Saudi Arabia is considered “moderate” in western coverage.
When the West intervenes, so this narrative goes, it is simply to assist the laggards on their path to a final utopia: something akin to the United States, but without Donald Trump, gun crime, opioid and mental health crises, and nearly half of working-age adults deprived of proper healthcare.
Such changes of power, westerners are encouraged to believe, only ever rise from the bottom up, signalling a dictator’s illegitimacy, or maybe the incremental trajectory of political systems from backwardness to greater enlightenment.
Sadly, world events – especially in circumstances where there is only one military superpower, the US, with some 750 bases around the globe – rarely follow such a straightforward path.
Access to oil
The 2001 Pentagon memo shown to Clark was, in fact, a reworking of a military blueprint for the Middle East that had been circulating in Washington for even longer – and had nothing to do with responding to 9/11 or terrorism.
It was all about securing Israel’s place as a forward base for US interests in the oil-rich region.
The champions of this idea were an increasingly influential group called the neoconservatives – or neocons for short.
By 1996, they had formalised their plan for “remaking” the Middle East into a document called A Clean Break. It proposed that Israel should tear up the Oslo Accords and any moves towards peacemaking with the Palestinians – the title’s “clean break” – and instead go on the offensive against its regional foes, with US backing.
What did that mean? Israel had to be helped to begin “weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria”, observed the authors, and then “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq”. The next stage would be to “wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran and Syria”.
Four years before A Clean Break, the neocons explained that the primary aim of US foreign policy in the Middle East was to “preserve US and western access to the region’s oil”. A close second was easing Israel’s path to ridding itself of the so-called “Palestinian problem”.
Later, in a document published in 2000 titled Rebuilding America’s Defenses, they clarified that the US must ensure it retained “forward-based forces” in the Middle East to maintain military dominance there “given the longstanding American interests in the region”. Those interests primarily being, of course, oil.
The ultimate concern, the paper explained, was stopping China from developing closer ties to key oil states such as Iran.
The authors of these documents would soon be holding key positions in the George W Bush administration that took office in January 2001.
Ensconced in the Pentagon and State Department, they were only too ready to exploit 9/11 as the pretext to fast-track their pre-existing agenda, as Clark understood from the Pentagon memo.
Bloody nose
Syria was viewed by the neocons and Israel as the lynchpin, the supply line, between Iran and Hezbollah, Tehran’s critically important military ally in Lebanon. Severing that link was a priority.
It was chiefly Hezbollah’s well-fortified and concealed positions in south Lebanon, as well as its large stockpile of rockets delivered by Iran, that kept Israel in check militarily.
Israel received an unexpected, bloody nose when it tried to reoccupy south Lebanon in 2006. It was forced to beat a hasty retreat within weeks. Israel also had to abandon plans to expand that same war into Syria – a failure that infuriated Washington’s neocons at the time.
Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal was also a brake on Israel’s ambitions to ethnically cleanse – or worse – the Palestinians from their lands in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as current events have demonstrated.
Ultimately, Israel realised there was no way to complete its genocide of Gaza without neutralising Hezbollah and Syria, and containing Iran.
So how involved in practice was Washington in Assad’s fall?
There are plenty of clues marking the way.
After Israel’s 2006 failure, the US looked for a new route to reach the same destination. Operation Timber Sycamore was born in secret shortly after the Arab Spring erupted in 2011.
This covert military operation was designed to work in conjunction with an increasingly draconian sanctions regime to throttle the Syrian economy.
The CIA, supported by Britain’s MI6, began working in secret to topple Assad. Saudi Arabia was intimately involved too, presumably because of its deep ties to extreme jihadist groups across the region, including al-Qaeda and Islamic State, that would soon become central to the regime-change operation.
Jake Sullivan, now Joe Biden’s national security adviser, was clear about who was going to help. In an email in late 2012, as Timber Sycamore was being put together, he wrote to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to avoid any confusion about Washington’s allies: “AQ [al-Qaeda] are on our side in Syria.”
An email sent to Clinton earlier, in spring 2012, had laid out the emerging thinking in the State Department.
“US diplomats and Pentagon can start strengthening the opposition. It will take time,” the email asserted. “The payoff will be substantial.
“Iran would be strategically isolated, unable to exert its influence in the Middle East… Hezbollah in Lebanon would be cut off from its Iranian sponsors since Syria would no longer be a transit point for Iranian training, assistance and missiles.”
The chief beneficiary was clear too: “America can and should help them [Syrian rebels] – and by doing so help Israel.”
Building the rebels
According to US officials, the CIA had trained and equipped nearly 10,000 fighters by summer 2015, at an annual cost of $100,000 per rebel.
Riyadh supplied yet more money and weapons, drawing in Islamist fighters and mercenaries from the wider region. Jordan hosted the training bases. The CIA and the Saudis jointly supplied the rebels with the intelligence needed to guide their operations in Syria.
Israel, which had long been lobbying Washington for such a covert programme against the Syrian government, took a leading role, too. It supplied weapons, and dropped thousands of bombs on Syrian infrastructure to keep Assad under pressure.
It supplied its own intelligence to the rebels and offered medical facilities to treat wounded fighters.
In 2012, Ehud Barak, then Israeli defence minister, explained Israel’s thinking to CNN: “The toppling down of Assad will be a major blow to the radical axis, major blow to Iran… and it will weaken dramatically both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza.”
After the CIA operation finally came to light in 2016, Washington formally shut it down.
But the effectiveness of Operation Timber Sycamore had already been severely hampered by the Russian military entering Syria in late 2015, at Assad’s invitation.
Eventually the battle fronts hardened into stalemate.
‘We love Israel’
Now, years later, the battle lines have suddenly come undone. As Washington envisioned 23 years ago, Assad is the latest Middle Eastern dictator not to Israel’s liking to be overthrown.
HTS is eager to reassure Washington that it poses no threat to Israel – or its continuing genocide in Gaza.
Interviews on Israeli TV showed rebel commanders praising Israel’s air strikes on Syria, citing them as among the factors in helping the rapid advances made by HTS.
Channel 12 interviewed an unnamed commander who also noted Israel’s ceasefire with Hezbollah had been critical to the timing of the HTS attack on Aleppo.
“We looked at the [ceasefire] agreement with Hezbollah and understood that this is the time to liberate our lands,” he said, adding: “We will not let Hezbollah fight in our areas and we will not let the Iranians take root there.”
In a separate interview with Israel’s Kan TV, a fighter said: “We love Israel and we were never its enemies.”
Both the US and Britain, caught by surprise by the speed of the rebels’ success, are scurrying to remove the $10m CIA bounty off Jolani’s head and take HTS off their terror lists.
Israel lost no time overrunning – and effectively annexing – swaths of Syrian territory to add to the areas of the Golan it seized in violation of international law in 1967. Contrast the West’s muted response to this Israeli invasion of Syria with the West’s outrage at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
At the same time Israel launched hundreds of air strikes across Syria, bombing the country’s military infrastructure to ensure the next government – if such a government ever emerges – will have no means to defend itself. Israel wants Syria as impotent and vulnerable as Palestine, where it is committing a genocide.
According to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel is “changing the face of the Middle East.”
The giant chessboard
Rather than viewing the world in simplistic terms as a battle between good and evil – one in which the evil ones suddenly become good guys, if the BBC says so – analysts of international affairs have traditionally used a different framework.
They understand world affairs as taking place on a global, geostrategic chessboard, in which the great powers of the day try to checkmate their rivals, or avoid being checkmated.
Surprises happen, as they do in chess, when a player doesn’t foresee, or can’t evade, the next move of its opponent.
Syria, very obviously, is not a great power. It is a pawn. But a critically useful one, nonetheless. As critically useful as Ukraine. The battlefields may look separate, but they are, of course, on the same chessboard.
And the players – the US, Russia and China, and to a lesser extent Iran, Israel and Turkey – must each use these pawns wisely to advance their strategic goals.
Ordinary people have agency. But the job of great powers is to limit, tame, and recruit that agency to advance their own interests and damage the interests of rivals.
Israel is the big winner of this round. Syria emerges broken from its long years of a proxy civil war and western sanctions. Either it will collapse into further sectarian discord, consuming all its energies – Israel can readily meddle to inflame such tensions – or its new government will seek rehabilitation from the West. A peace accord with Israel would doubtless be the entry requirement.
With Syria removed from the “axis of resistance”, Hezbollah in Lebanon has been severed from Iran, leaving both Israel’s surviving, main regional foes isolated and weaker. And in the process, Israel has opened the way to completing its genocide of the Palestinian people undisturbed.
Turkey’s interests in Syria do not conflict with Israel’s or Washington’s. It wants to return to Syria the millions of refugees it currently hosts and to eliminate any base for Kurdish factions in Syria to ally with, and assist, its own Kurdish resistance groups.
Avoiding checkmate
The losing side will now have to rethink their strategy.
Stripped of its Syrian ally, Russia is now more exposed on the chessboard. Unless it can win over the new government in Damascus, it risks losing its strategically important Mediterrranean naval port at Tartus, on the Syrian coast.
Washington will be aggressively arm-twisting whoever leads Syria to force Russia out.
It was the threatened loss of its other warm-water naval port, on the Black Sea, at Sebastapol in Crimea – after Washington’s meddling to help overthrow Ukraine’s Moscow-friendly government in 2014 – that led to Russia annexing the peninsula.
It was Washington’s tearing up of missile treaties and the threat of Ukraine being recruited into Nato’s fold so that the West’s nuclear arsenal could be placed on Moscow’s doorstep that led to Russia’s invasion in 2022.
The events of the last few days in Syria underscore how much the western narrative about Russia’s actions being entirely “unprovoked” is self-serving rather than explanatory.
Nato is working behind the scenes to move its pieces. And so is Russia to avoid a checkmate.
In this “game”, there are no good guys. There are only power plays. And the US has far more pieces on the board: 750 military bases encircling the globe to impose by force a policy of “full-spectrum dominance”.
Russia’s new advanced missile systems, the hoped-for deterrence of its nuclear arsenal, its alliances of convenience with others threatened by the undeclared US empire – chiefly China and Iran – are its remaining strengths.
Iran, now isolated from allies in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon, will have to think what other resources it can bring to the game. The voices calling for it to forego religious scruples and develop a nuclear weapon, to neutralise Israel’s existing arsenal, will grow much louder.
And, finally, China is only too aware that, in seeking to weaken and isolate Russia and Iran, the US is ultimately gunning for it. There can be no “full-spectrum global dominance” until China is cornered – until Washington can declare, “checkmate”.
Jonathan Cook is a British independent journalist, who has covered issues of Palestine and Israel for much of his over 20-year career. He formerly wrote for the Guardian and Observer newspapers and is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.
How can the fall of the admittedly brutal Assad regime create a “historic opportunity” for the Syrian people when the country is now under the control of jihadists?
The toppling of Bashar al-Assad in Syria was cheered by U.S. President Joe Biden and other major Western leaders, like French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, as it ended the reign of a brutal regime more than 13 years after Assad’s crackdown on anti-government protests ignited Syria’s civil war.
Indeed, Biden described Assad’s fall as a “historic opportunity” for the Syrian people, echoing Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the leader of the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group (HTS) that took over Syria, who said, “This victory, my brothers, is historic for the region.”
But wait. Isn’t HTS on the list of banned terrorist groups and Jolani a jihadist militant whose journey began in Iraq with links to al Qaeda and later to the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI)? So why is the West cheering for al Qaeda and its allies?
When all is said and done, forcing regime change rarely succeeds.
The European Union Agency for Asylum describes HTS as a coalition of Islamist Sunni armed groups that “frequently commit serious human rights abuses, including harassment, assassinations, kidnapping, and torture, as well as unlawful detention of civilians.” It goes on to say that “civilians have also been extorted and kidnapped for ransom” and that “the group has conducted formal military campaigns, assassinations, hostage takings, and ‘lone wolf’ operations, including suicide bombings,” while “members of religious minorities have been forced to convert to Islam and adopt Sunni customs.”
So, what is going on here? How can the fall of the admittedly brutal Assad regime create a “historic opportunity” for the Syrian people when the country is now under the control of jihadists? But we’ve been witness to this comedy drama before. From 1979 to 1989, the United States (along with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan) armed and financed the Afghan Islamist fighters known as the mujahideen who were fighting the Soviet Union. The plan from the beginning was to keep the Islamist insurgency going for as long as possible, thus sucking the Soviets into a Vietnam-style quagmire.
The Islamist fight in Afghanistan against the Soviets was “the good jihad,” according to Washington. The mujahideen were fighting for peace against an enemy of the Western world and deserved U.S. support. Of course, we know how that turned out.
The Bush administration embarked on a campaign against terrorism following the 9/11 attacks, with the first phase of the campaign focusing on “capturing or killing bin Laden, destroying his al Qaeda network in Afghanistan, and deposing the Taliban-regime.”
Undoubtedly, bombing into oblivion the Islamists in Syria if the new government, headed by Mohammed al-Bashir who has been appointed as interim prime minister, fails to lead a new path is a contingency plan that Washington has probably already considered. The job, in fact, could be given to Israel, for whom bombing is second nature. Since the fall of Assad, Israel has already carried out hundreds of airstrikes across Syria, targeting airports, naval bases, and military infrastructure. And the U.S. Central Command announced that it has struck more than 75 targets, including ISIS leaders, operatives, and camps.
Hypocrisy and duplicity, followed in the end by astonishing moral and political somersaults, are trademarks of the way Washington and its Western allies approach world affairs and conduct diplomacy. And these elements have been in full display since the start of Syria’s civil war. The Obama administration provided support to the anti-Assad forces, primarily to the Free Syrian Army forces and its affiliates, but the CIA began to support other groups as early as 2013 even though they had jihadi orientations. CIA’s covert operation against the Syrian regime, known as Timber Sycamore, was a joint effort with Saudi Arabia that had long ties with radical Islamist groups. But regime change is what Washington was after in Syria, so everything else was of secondary concern.
The fall of the Assad regime has staggering implications for security in the region, but the speed with which it collapsed suggests that, in the end, it may have been mainly internal rather than external pressures that made the difference. Syria was under imperialist attack for the past 13 years. The U.S. (along with Turkey) backed and funded mercenaries and terrorist forces against Assad’s regime, imposed economic isolation of the country through sanctions, and denied plans that would have contributed to reconstruction even though aid was desperately needed for civilians. In April 2017, the U.S. even ordered direct military action against Syria in retaliation for the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. The Trump administration claimed to have been moved by the deaths of some 80 civilians; yet then-President Donald Trump refused to lift his ban on accepting Syrian refugees into the U.S.
But the Assad regime had created a hellish place, with 90% of Syrians living in poverty and widespread malnutrition. The country was in a vicious downward spiral. The economy had plummeted by 85% due to nearly 14 years of civil war. The inflation rate had risen to over 120% in 2024 while electricity production had dropped by 80%, with power outrages having become a common phenomenon. And the only thing that the Assad’s regime had to offer was more repression.
Still, the collapse of the regime, now celebrated throughout the Western world, raises more questions than answers. There are too many actors, both inside and outside Syria, with diverse interests and conflicting goals and aims. Assad’s regime used secularism as a tool to repress opponents, but there should be no expectations for the emergence of stable secular nationalism in Syria anytime soon. The fear that Syria will face the same fate as Afghanistan is also unfounded. The country has too many hostile factions for a dominant group like the Taliban to take complete control of the country. If anything, it is probably destined to become a failed state like Libya following the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi in 2011 with the help of NATO, an event that was also widely celebrated by the Western leaders of the time.
Indeed, when all is said and done, forcing regime change rarely succeeds. In fact, U.S. foreign policy has been an unmitigated disaster in the post-Cold War period, creating more problems that it tried to solve. Think of the Balkans, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Middle East.
Syria will be no different. It was a hellish place under Assad but will more likely than not end up next as another “black hole” in the lost list of U.S. “achievements” in forcing regime change.
CJ Polychroniou
C.J. Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist, author, and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Currently, his main research interests are in U.S. politics and the political economy of the United States, European economic integration, globalization, climate change and environmental economics, and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He has published scores of books and over one thousand articles which have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (2017); Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors, 2020); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2021); and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (2021).
Aaron Maté discusses the nature of the new regime in Syria, the role of foreign powers in destroying Syria and preventing its recovery through support for Al-Qaeda and economic sanctions, the consequences for Palestinians, and the long-running US policy of destabilization and regime change in Syria.
Incomplete Coverage of an Ominous Syrian Situation
When Japan, already considered an enemy of the United States, sent its air force to U.S. territory and bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, the same date on the calendar that former opposition forces of the Iraq government entered Damascus, the U.S. government and media emphasized the more serious situation ─ the U.S. was at war with Japan. Press coverage and U.S. government response to the “fall” of the Assad government distracted from the serious situation ─ Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), successor to former Al-Qaeda affiliate, Al-Nusra Front, which the U.S. labelled a terrorist organization and enemy of the United States and previously fought to prevent gaining control of Syria, sent its forces to seize control of Syria.
The conventional U.S. media treated the ominous events as a tale of the daily lives of two individuals — Abu Mohammad al-Jolani and Bashar al-Assad — Jesse James vs the evil banks. Amidst their entertaining stories are misinterpretations, lack of depth in analysis, and inattention to details. More valid discussion of a momentous event and where the United States is centered in the crisis are helpful.
Bashar Assad had already fallen.
With half the population displaced or out of the country, with sanctions depriving the people of energy, and with foreign forces wandering at will throughout the countryside, Syria navigated on fumes. Its government hardly breathed. Assad had already fallen. Considering the coming winter chill, he decided to change residences.
The U.S. had no fingers in the cookie jar.
What a whopper.
- Is it a coincidence that the U.S. supported Syrian Democratic Forces launched an attack on villages in the northern countryside of Deir Al Zor province on Tuesday, December 3?
- Is it a coincidence that, on Nov 12, U.S. Central Command in Eastern Syria said, “it had carried out attacks against ‘Iranian backed groups’ in Syria, hitting nine targets at two separate locations in the country over the previous 24-hour period.”
- Didn’t the U.S. air force bomb, strafe, and repulse militias from the Iraq Popular Mobilization Forces, who tried to enter Iraq and assist the Syrian military?
- Why did the “US A-10s, B-52s, target dozens of ISIS sites in Syria? Air Force planes dropped roughly 140 munitions on a ‘very broad’ gathering of ISIS fighters early Sunday morning (December 8).” Why weren’t the attacks done before the walkover? Obvious answer ─ previously the U.S. encouraged ISIS’ needling the Syrians. Now, Uncle Sam did not favor ISIS needling the new favorites in the neocon world.
Another U.S. counterproductive and foreign policy failure.
U.S. foreign policy initiatives have one common thread ─ counterproductive and homicidal.
- Calculated to prevent North Vietnam from obtaining control of all of Vietnam, 10 years of war resulted in 1-2 million Vietnamese casualties and North Vietnam obtaining control of Vietnam.
- Fifty years of a Cold War struggle, in which the United States inflicted casualties on millions around the world, designed to prevent the Soviet Union from extending its hammer and sickle and challenge U.S. hegemony, resulted in a Russia that extends its territory and vigorously challenges U.S. hegemony.
- U.S. troops, sent on a mission to feed and stabilize Somalia, shot up the place, paved the road for al-Shabaab, a Salafi terrorist organization, and scurried out of an anarchic Somalia.
- The U.S. fought twenty years in Afghanistan to replace the Taliban with…..the Taliban.
- The U.S. invasion of a moribund Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, alleged as an opportunity to remove an international threat, triggered the emergence of a parade of international threats, which terrorized the Fertile Crescent, and solidified the Iraq Popular Mobilization Forces that challenge the U.S. in Iraq. These forces ally with Iran, which the U.S. State Department considers an international threat. The Iraq Body Count project documents 186,901 – 210,296 violent civilian deaths during the Iraq war. In 2007, due to sectarian violence that emerged from the U.S. invasion, Iraq had about 4 million displaced persons. Between January 2014 and August 2015, 2.9 million persons fled their homes in three new mass waves of displacement following offensives by ISIL.
- Together with NATO, the U.S. replaced Muammar Gaddafi, who suppressed al-Qaeda terrorists, with the same terrorists, and engineered the creation and arming of several terrorists groups in North Africa.
- After sending its military into Syria’s civil war, a war that estimated deaths at about 600 thousand, more than six million internally displaced, and around five million refugees, with defined purpose of preventing ISSIS from seizing control of Syria, the U.S. enabled Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the successor to al-Qaeda’s previous partner, Al-Nusra Front, to seize control of Syria.
The release of dissidents from prisons was an incomplete story.
Media attention to Saydnaya prison, “which had become synonymous with arbitrary detention, torture and murder,” would have been genuine if the same attention had been given to similar prisons in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. The horrific incarcerations of dissidents in the three mentioned countries cannot be adequately described in less than a 1000 page book. Here are some details.
Israel has, by magnitudes, exceeded Syria in the number of detainees of Palestinian dissidents.
On 11 December 2012, the office of then-Prime Minister Salam Fayyad stated that since 1967, 800,000 Palestinians, or roughly 20% of the total population and 40% of the male population, had been imprisoned by Israel at one point in time. According to Palestinian estimates, 70% of Palestinian families have had one or more family members sentenced to jail terms in Israeli prisons as a result of activities against the occupation.
From the New Yorker magazine, March 21, 2024, “The Brutal Conditions Facing Palestinian Prisoners”:
Israel has also detained thousands of Palestinians from Gaza; prisoners who have described extensive physical abuse from Israeli forces, and, already, at least twenty-seven detainees from Gaza have died in military custody. At the same time, Israeli forces have arrested thousands more Palestinians, mostly from the West Bank, at least ten of whom have reportedly died in Israel prisons.
The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (P.C.A.T.I.), a non-governmental organization, established in 1990, represents Palestinians and Israelis who claim to have been tortured by Israeli authorities. In the New Yorker article, they claim,
We’re currently looking at almost ten thousand Palestinian detainees from the West Bank and Gaza…We know that the International Committee of the Red Cross (I.C.R.C.) has been banned from visiting all Israeli prisons since October 7th. We also know—through evidence that P.C.A.T.I. and other N.G.O.s have collected—of what we view as systemic abuse and violence by prison guards toward Palestinian detainees since October 7th. We’ve documented nineteen different incidents of torture and abuse in seven different Israel Prison Service (I.P.S.) facilities by different I.P.S. units, all of which have led us to believe that we’re looking at a policy rather than just isolated incidents.
Although the number of arbitrary executions in Saydnaya prison is not known, much mention is made of the executions. Passing mention is made of the hundreds of arbitrary executions of Palestinians in the West Bank, shot while escaping Israeli military, and the tens of thousands murdered in Gaza.
Where are investigations into the number of dissidents held in Saudi and Egypt jails. We read of constant executions in Saudi Arabia and pay no attention to the reports. No execution has matched the grisly slicing and dicing of Saudi journalist, Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi, “who was assassinated at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018 by agents of the Saudi government.”
We now have good terrorists.
Questioned, in a CNN interview, as to why the U.S. accepts HTS, designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and with a $10m bounty on its leader, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan replied, “The group at the vanguard of this rebel advance, HTS, is actually a terrorist organization designated by the United States. So we have real concerns about the designs and objectives of that organization. At the same time, of course, we don’t cry over the fact that the Assad government, backed by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, are facing certain kinds of pressure. So it’s a complicated situation.”
Placed in words often described to the hypocritical U.S. government, “Yes, they are bad guys and they are a terrorist organization, but they are our bad guys and they are our terrorist organization.”
We know where Assad is; where is the United States?
Uncle Sam’s voices to the world give their usual empty and meaningless words to a packed and meaningful event — closely monitoring, historic opportunity, a moment of risk and uncertainty, work together with allies and partners to urge de-escalation and protect U.S. personnel and military positions, and strongly support a peaceful transition of power.
The U.S. should be forced to answer why it did not use its power to prevent a Civil War that caused an estimated deaths of about 600 thousand, more than six million internally displaced, and around five million refugees, and why it has not used its power to insist that the more democratically inclined opposition in Syria be immediately given leading roles in the new Syrian government. Isn’t it dangerous to have Mohammed al-Bashir, a deputy in Abu Mohammad al-Jolani’s National Salvation Front, serve as “acting” prime minister for Syria’s transitional government. Will Mohammed al-Bashir “act” for one month, one year, or one decade?
Israel has spoken forcefully; its terrorist country smells and recognizes another terrorist country. The U.S. has spoken by not speaking; it now has the clout of Albania in Middle East affairs.
It’s becoming shameful to be a U.S. citizen.
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