Disclaimer #
This article is an Addendum to my War on Terror series, if you haven’t read at least the Syria section of that article series I would encourage you to read it and come back after, otherwise you might be missing key context on what I’m talking about here!
Addendum: A Busy Day in Damascus #
Well, so much for that.
I have to hold up my hands, I never saw this one coming, in fairness not many international observers, or even Syrians, did either, after 13 years of war (nearly 14) Assad’s government collapsed in just 10 days, I ended this article series by saying I believed in change and that the status quo only lasts for so long, but I didn’t quite imagine change like this.
For 4 years the Civil War had effectively been a frozen conflict, there were no major changes in the battlegrounds and combat had been reduced to tit for tat skirmishes, Assad’s international enemies had long given up the idea of trying to throw him out and many of those countries had begun reconciling with him, last year Syria was invited back into the regional Arab League grouping, after 12 years of exile, Gulf Nations like the UAE, Jordan and Saudi Arabia were knocking at his door again, it seemed that all he needed to do to break the deadlock and win the war was cut a deal somewhere, maybe with the Kurds and the other groups of the SDF to reintegrate with the government in exchange for autonomy, or with the Turks to convince them to stop supporting the rebels, making peace with one to allow him to finally crush the other, the idea of Assad actually being removed was practically a running joke, the Assad curse was infamous, the neverending meme of him laughing as everyone who said he needed to go got ousted while he stayed, “can’t Mossad the Assad” was another version of the joke, it went on for years and years and years.
But then, suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, it all came tumbling down.
It started when the Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham rebel group launched an offensive they called “Deterrence of Aggression” on November 27th, barreling through Syria’s Northwest, while the Turkish backed rebels moved eastwards to capture areas held by the SDF in an operation called “Dawn of Freedom" on November 30th, swallowing up the remaining SDF held parts of the Afrin region.
Neighbouring countries started panicking, Iraq sealed its border, the only people going through were PMF troops racing to bolster Assad, Israel, Russia, the US and Turkey all began launching airstrikes, everything went manic.
In just 5 days HTS captured most the country’s second largest city, Aleppo, with the rest being taken by the SDF and the Pro-Turkish groups, 3 days after that they captured the 4th largest city, Hama, and began moving down to Syria’s centre, aiming to capture the 3rd largest city, Homs, and then follow the road all the way down to Damascus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Northwestern_Aleppo_offensive_(2024).svg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Northwestern_Syria_offensive_(2024),_(topographic).svg
But it was the 2 days after that, the 6th and 7th of November, that seem to have been truly decisive.
On the 6th the SDF captured the city of Deir-ez-Zor in the southeast and the Abu Kamal border crossing with Iraq, cutting off the ability for the PMF to send reinforcements, then the US-backed Syrian Free Army, the faction which had been sitting in the Al-Tanf area on the border with Iraq and Jordan uninvolved in the wider war, suddenly sprung to life, barreling into the city of Palmyra by the 7th, but more crucially than all of this was what happened in the southwest.
The southwestern region of the country had been firmly under government control for years by this point, but suddenly the rebels reemerged, forming a faction called the Southern Operations Command, and rapidly captured the southwestern regions of Daraa, Suwayda and Quneitra, charging forward to Damascus, within a day they had reached the city, Assad and other top officials fled the country (to Russia, it turns out, no surprises there), the Syrian Army discharged its troops, ex-soldiers rapidly changed into civilian clothes and left, prisoners were released from Assad’s jailhouses like the Sednaya Prison, some who had been in there, disappeared, for decades, one man who went in as a teenager just came out as a grey old man.
Red = Syrian Arab Republic Government (Syrian Army), White = Syrian Salvation Government (Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham), Light Green = Syrian Interim Government (Syrian National Army), Dark Green = Syrian Free Army, Yellow = Autonomous Area of North and East Syria (Syrian Democratic Forces), Pink = Southern Operations Room
The Syrian state, which had clung to power for 13 years, effectively collapsed without a fight, when the rebels showed up the Armed Forces either folded immediately or put up a token resistance then vanished, over and over again, cities and regions fell like dominos.
How?
Well, it makes perfect sense in hindsight. Assad been relying for many years on his foreign allies to turn the tide of the war in his favour, and then keep it that way, those allies being the Russians and the Iranians, the Russians sent their soldiers, as well as PMCs like the Wagner Group, the Iranians offered their own troops as well as soldiers from their proxy, the Hezbollah militia of Lebanon.
The vast majority of Russian troops were tied up in Ukraine, and the PMCs had been kept on a far tighter leash since the Wagner Mutiny, while Hezbollah had to devote almost all of its manpower in Lebanon itself, after Israel invaded Southern Lebanon, the Israelis decimated much of Hezbollah’s leadership in the course of that war. The Iranians themselves have faced major instability, not only from the conflict with Israel but also from internal unrest.
In the end, Putin decided that it was better to hold on to his gains in Ukraine than to divert soldiers to save Assad, the Russian Air Force launched lots of airstrikes on rebel held areas, but you can’t win a war from the air, you need boots on the ground too, and Assad’s boots were far too worn out.
Much as in Afghanistan in 2020 foreign support had concealed just how much institutional corruption had rotted away the foundations of the Syrian government, and once that foreign support was withdrawn that rot became immediately apparent, years of the conflict being frozen also meant that the Syrian Army, which once had been very much battle ready and hardened by 9 years of combat experience, effectively went limp. Once the conflict heated up again Syrian soldiers simply decided they had no interest in killing or dying in this war, and so the whole military machine crumbled, saving Syria’s cities from being turned into rubble all over again.
How much of this was planned in advance and how much was spontaneity is an open question, a senior Syrian political opposition figure, Hadi al-Bahra, has stated that the rebel offensive had been planned for over a year but was actually delayed by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, as the rebels didn’t want to appear to be taking advantage of Israel’s actions, once a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah was agreed they were free to launch the attack.
The Ukrainian government has also reportedly been giving training to the rebels, keen to stick a thorn in Vladimir Putin’s side by destabilising a government closely aligned to Russia, this is one of several foreign ventures the Ukrainians have participated in but this seems to be the one that has by far borne the most fruit, they’re playing the Russians at their own game and it seems to have gone incredibly well, although Putin didn’t take the bait and withdraw troops from occupied Ukraine to try save Assad, which is probably what the Ukrainians were hoping for.
But while there was a plan, was the plan really to take all of Syria, or were HTS and their allies simply so surprised by how the Syrian Army dissolved on contact that they just kept pushing, expanding their ambitions more and more until they realised that they could lay eyes on the golden prize of Damascus? Were the SFA and the southern factions always part of the plan, or did they decide to rise up and branch out when they too saw how rapidly Assad’s forces collapsed? In other words, did they all intend to create this level of instability, or did they simply take advantage of it?
If I were a betting man I would lean more towards spontaneity, but I’d be a betting man betting with no idea of the odds, the intricate details of how this all came about will likely only trickle through with time.
So, what to make of all of this? Well, I have to be honest, for many years I was an Assad sympathiser, with my interest in politics I had started out as very much a staunch right winger, dragged into that headspace as a young teenager by people like Carl Benjamin and Paul Joseph Watson and outlets like Rebel Media, it was that kind of US-centric conservative right, the edgy right wing of “conservatism is the new counter culture” and “crazy SJW” compilations, it appealed to a kind of rebellious spirit in me, no doubt helped by the fact that most of my teachers, the most pervasive authority figures of all for someone my age, were vaguely liberal.
I loved Trump and as a result I was sympathetic to Russia, I believed all the talk about Russia interfering in elections was just a hoax, pretty much my whole friend group at the time was also in this media sphere, making it self reinforcing.
After about 2 years of that I moved leftwards, my whole worldview crumbled after I watched a huge documentary series called The Vietnam War with my dad, a 10 hour long series which aimed to show that bloody Cold War conflict in a balanced light, I came out with the impression that the leftist Vietnamese, not the right wing USA, were the patriots, I saw US imperialism at large and it shattered my poorly formed ideology.
In the process of picking up the pieces, trying to build a new mindset, I grasped at straws. I wanted to fill the vacuum left in my headspace and that meant I accepted a lot of ideas without bothering to scrutinise them too closely, now fed by Pro-Russian, sometimes Pro-Iranian propaganda I convinced myself that dictators like Bashar Al Assad and his dead Libyan buddy Muammar Gaddafi were really democrats and it was just the lies of the Western media making them look bad.
Look at Assad, he responded to the protests by reforming his country out of its one party state, while the rebels were bombing polling stations! How horrible! I didn’t bother to look into whether those elections were free or fair or anything like that, because obviously they weren’t1, or to look into the thorny issue of how the war started in the first place, if I had to face the fact that the rebels turned to arms because Assad’s troops had shot at them when they were carrying banners instead, it would’ve been a lot harder to maintain that attitude. I paid attention to the rallies of their loyalists and dismissed or didn’t look for the rallies of their opponents. With these convenient omissions I imagined Assad as a brave hero, standing with his people and standing up to Western imperialism.
I watched his interviews, taken in by how he spoke well and seemed unphased by the pressure of journalists asking him why he was killing his own people or why he was dropping indiscriminate munitions on their streets, he said that there was no such thing as a good war, that it would be impossible for him to stay in power if he didn’t have public support and was killing his people. He was asked about barrel bombs and simply responded with “What is this barrel bomb? We have bombs, bullets and missiles.” and saying there’s no such thing as indiscriminate weapons, that was good enough for me, I guess there’s no such thing as a barrel bomb then, oh and those chemical weapons? That must be another hoax.
I was drawn to the fact that Assad had never been intended to lead Syria, he had been an eye doctor in London and only began the ascent to power because his brother Bassel, the heir apparent to his father Hafez, died in a car crash, I struggled to believe that this soft spoken man who didn’t initially seek power was some kind of bloodthirsty, power hungry monster under the surface, this soft, wise seeming image didn’t match the image the Western media were painting and I chose to believe Assad’s.
I was, of course, also influenced by the genuinely true information that many of the rebels were extremists and that many of the more moderate groups were willing to collaborate with them, I literally watched footage from VICE of “FSA” moderates giving artillery support to Al-Nusra, the Al-Qaeda affiliate, I watched those affiliates training with child soldiers and units named after Osama Bin Laden, pledging to commit Jihad, waving the black standard and declaring an Islamic State, singing songs boasting about the destruction of the twin towers and bringing the fight to the West.
I saw those kids brainwashed into commemorating the idea of being a suicide bomber, the prisoners tortured and executed by Al-Nusra, it wasn’t hard to believe Assad’s rhetoric that everyone against him was a terrorist when a lot of the people against him genuinely were terrorists, I just didn’t know about and didn’t care to look into the truth of the casualty count, the fact that Assad’s army had killed literally hundreds of thousands more civilians than any other faction in the war, killed more than Daesh, the SDF, the FSA, the SNA and every other damn group combined.
I rolled my eyes at the insistent use of the phrase “Assad regime” instead of just “the Syrian government”, “regime” being a seemingly meaningless propaganda phrase for “a government we don’t like”, just one of many instances of stupid euphemisms.
I read about war crimes committed by the rebel groups and rumbled Anti-Assad propaganda, like the story of the little boy, Omran, who became the poster child of Syria. His dirtied and bloodied face had been used as propaganda, a striking image that served as a symbol of the violence Assad was inflicting on his people, but it later turned out his father supported the government and had condemned the use of his son’s image to support the rebel cause. I never considered the fact that there were plenty of other children who had been bloodied because of Assad, and parents that would curse his name because of that, there was no shortage of bombardments after all.
It’s true that Assad had been willing to live a quiet life before and maybe he really did believe he was doing all this to protect the people, but whatever he believed he was presiding over a machine of terror, sitting on a throne of skulls, what he believed was less important than what he was doing, I chose not to look that fact in the eye.
My anger at Western hypocrisy made me a massive hypocrite, it was this attitude that the US, the Western world, was so so wrong that their key enemies just had to be, to one degree or another, right.
I thought that sure, Putin might stamp out free speech, rig elections and arrest his opposition, but in Syria he’s standing up to terrorists! And that of course isn’t foreign meddling, that’s fine, it’s not imperialism because the legitimate government, Assad’s, invited him. What made it legitimate? Well it was there before the war started and that’s pretty much good enough.
Sure, Iran might have elections where they simply disqualify any candidate that’s too moderate or critical of the system, but at least they have elections, that makes them better than the Gulf Countries backed by the West, right?
Sure, China may be a dictatorship that practices mass incarceration and threatens to swallow the Taiwanese without bothering to ask what they might think about it, but they’re polite enough to not invade the rest of the planet, so they’re a much more mature power, these were the sorts of views I had.
That’s the reason hypocrisy is such a sin, it can make a democrat cheer for a dictatorship, someone who doesn’t follow a religion support a theocracy, a protester cheer for the kind of leader who would have him shot, it’s the greatest sin to me because a person who is just genuinely evil is ultimately playing true to type, a person who is good who supports evil out of hypocrisy or selective empathy is someone who does, or should, know better, but decides to get dirty anyway.
I did start to show a little more nuance over time as I learnt about the conflict in Rojava, Northeast Syria, admiring the Rojavans for their proclaimed democratic socialism, their secular, progressive, inclusive and libertarian values, as well as the leading role they came to take in fighting Daesh, but if push came to shove between them and Assad I was still rooting for Assad.
As I read more, watched more and talked to more people and had a lot of these attitudes scrutinised they waned, I actually spoke to lots of people from the Middle East, to Libyans and Syrians, and some of them indeed did support Assad and Gaddafi, but a lot of them didn’t and denounced them as brutal dictators, telling me about how they had shot and bombed protesters, that while there may have been thousands who rallied for these leaders there were just as many, if not far more, that were rallying against them.
After a lot of scrutiny I recognised the obvious, that Assad and Gaddafi were dictators who preferred to respond to protestors with bullets rather than listen or step down, I reflected more on Assad’s Ba’athist, Arab Nationalist agenda and how noxious it had been, not only because its stated goal of Arab Unity had been a complete disaster, with the Arab Nationalist groups clashing with each other just as much as their opponents, but because its emphasis on Arab identity had left minorities, who make up something like 20% of the Syria’s population, out of the picture of Syria’s national identity. This had been obscured by Assad’s image as a protector of Syria’s minorities, but he only gained that image in the first place because of the sectarian extremism of some of the opposition groups, but looking good by comparison isn’t the same as actually being good.
I started to seriously internalise the true lesson of the Cold War, that the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend, that some stories have very few heroes and trying to pretend villains are heroes to plug that gap only does more harm, over time I learnt to truly embrace nuance, I’m still a card carrying leftist and anti-imperialist, but one with much more sense, more consistently held and thoroughly developed principles.
That’s why by the time I’d really started putting together this series I painted the Civil War in a different light, Assad was no hero. The extent of that might not have come across in the article because I wrote it from the angle of how Western governments contributed to the problem of terrorism, and since the West didn’t support Assad he was somewhat sidelined in the story, but I talked about how the Arab Spring started with mass protests overthrowing an autocrat and how the war in Syria started when the Syrian government responded to protests in their country not just by promising reforms but with the use of force, a crackdown.
I compared what Assad did with what the Gulf Countries did, that was probably the most telling break with my old attitudes towards Assad, the Gulf Monarchies had always been leaders I detested, the fact that they were blatantly authoritarian and cruel and that Western leaders had simply ignored that behaviour, or rated good relations as more important than doing something about it. Even when the Saudis sliced up Jamal Khashoggi and carted him away in boxes we effectively did nothing, there were no red lines at all, our support for countries like that was the poster child for Western hypocrisy that I so hated.
And, of course, I even in the end of the article suggested that a Western intervention in Syria could’ve been a good thing if we had done it without the scummy corruption seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, if we had moved to quickly disarm all of those the armed groups and handed Syria to the Syrians, however unlikely that would’ve been, had teen me seen that he would’ve been fuming, I came out with a much more nuanced attitude about intervention, Western influence wasn’t some reverse midas that turned everything it touched to shit, in so many cases it has caused disaster because of willful ignorance and corruption, but everything has to be judged case by case.
And I applied that lesson of nuance across the board too, although I had come to see the Rojavans as the best (or maybe least worst) of Syria’s warring factions I noted the fact that the Rojavans did legitimately have ties with the PKK, a designated terrorist group with a grisly record. The ideological links were always obvious for those who knew where to look, Rojava’s proclaimed ideology of “Democratic Confederalism” is the ideology of the PKK’s founder Abdullah Ocalan, after he moved away from Marxism-Leninism in the 1990s, Ocalan’s face is plastered all over the place in Rojavan territory too, but it’s more than that, the links are systemic, with Rojava’s leading political party, the PYD, being spawned from a PKK led union of Kurdish political factions, as I ended up mentioning in the article.
Although it didn’t make it into the script since it wasn’t relevant I also came across the less rosy side of Rojava, how although they were less authoritarian than the other factions in the Syrian war, they still had their tendencies, reporters could only go so far in their criticisms before the screw was tightened and the Rojavan system ultimately failed what is probably the ultimate test of free speech, the freedom to reject the system itself.
For a long time I still believed an Assad victory, possibly with some sort of autonomy deal for Rojava, was the best plausible outcome, with the exception of some fragile local councils dotted around the rebels had never brought elections to Syria, HTS had outright denied them2.
Principles of Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, relevant amid infighting w/other rebel factions in greater Idlib & its environs. Rejection of democracy & secularism, not bartering with the muhajireen, establish relations w/actors that matter, & no 'surrender' in guise of political process. pic.twitter.com/4k972b5v8e
— Aymenn J Al-Tamimi (@ajaltamimi) January 9, 2019
It seemed like a choice between unity under a thuggish dictatorship, but one that was secular, and never ending war between different militias or a thuggish dictatorship under a group like HTS, a theocracy with religious persecution, and again thanks to VICE’s coverage, showing life inside the “Islamic State”, I had a disturbing picture of what that could look like, it was nothing good.
So it didn’t look like a contest between some kind of democracy with drawbacks, between unstable freedom and stable tyranny, but a contest between different kinds of tyrannies, Assad’s tyranny seemed the least worst, that’s what Syrian politics seemed to be, everyone deciding which was the least worst outcome.
In that I was partly thinking of one of my Libyan friends, over the years we had always had this back and forth where I asked him what he thought about Feb 17, the nickname for the revolution that overthrew Gaddafi.
He was always very clear that Gaddafi was deserved to go, he described him as a bloody tyrant, an ideological crackpot and a shit economist, someone squandered Libya’s oil wealth that could’ve been used to make the country the envy of the world, bathed in development like the Gulf Countries (although hopefully without needing slavery to build them).
But he had always been in two minds about the revolution, was it worth it?
Since the revolution Libya had become a failed state divided between rival militias, with the east primarily controlled by a coalition of groups that call themselves the “Libyan National Army” led by warlord Khalifa Haftar, who rules as a dictator, and the west held by a government a government that was inept at best and struggling to assert itself.
He was angry that Benghazi, the eastern Libyan city that had been the cradle of the revolution, had accepted Haftar’s rule, that they had traded one dictator for another.
My friend had always relished the fact that Gaddafi fell, but there was a part of him that was asking, what was the point? What’s the point of a revolution if you trade one tyrant for another, or you leave the country as a rotting husk, a shell of its former self?
He was far from the only Libyan with that kind of sentiment, I remember watching one VICE report from the country where in the midst of a mass protest against the instability of the country in the capital Tripoli an ex revolutionary said that he had fought against Gaddafi on several fronts, but that if he had the choice to go back he would’ve fought for Gaddafi instead, no one in the crowd reacted with any sense of surprise or anger.
Given what the report later showed, a security environment dominated by militias, a government that was failing to even pay out salaries, the mountains of oil wealth being squandered away because of infighting, it was no surprise, that’s the kind of thing I feared for Syria and in many ways still do.
But I think the shift that happened, relatively unconsciously in my mind, was that I realised that I didn’t have to lock my mind into these sorts of least worsts or “realpolitik” scenarios that dilute my values.
When talking with Massi about this subject he mentioned numerous comparisons, the first one being the conflict between Israel and Palestine. The fact is that a lot of the Palestinian insurgents belong to very evil groups, Hamas is a faction that has committed immense war crimes, their militants even livestreamed themselves doing it, does their terror dilute my belief that Palestinians deserve sovereignty, justice, rights? Not one iota. Should their violence push me to support the Israeli government, a government which is 10x more violent? To see the best case scenario as Israel defeating the extremists of Hamas, defeating terror, by bombing all of Palestine into oblivion, a terror of far greater magnitude? Of course not.
Then there’s the War on Terror itself, was it justified for the US to terrorise the Afghans and the Iraqis for decades because of 9/11? Or because the Taliban and Al-Qaeda were terrorists? Did the terror campaigns of people like Osama Bin Laden validate the terror campaigns waged by people like George Bush? Again, no.
Then the Ukraine war: Was it justified for Russia to invade Ukraine because the Ukrainians have Neo Nazi units in their ranks? Or because Ukraine wanted to join NATO? No.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to avoid or ignore those topics, Israel’s atrocities don’t mean that Hamas are suddenly heroes, they’re a violent extremist group, they shoot up buses, suicide bomb cafes and restaurants, kill civilians, Bin Laden and the groups he inspired used the same tactics and went much further, they wanted to impose a radical theocracy on the people of the Middle East, in the case of Daesh they were dreaming of conquering the entire world, the Ukrainian Nazis have carried out racist pogroms and threatened to overthrow elected governments, the Ukrainian attempt to join NATO brought forward the war it was meant to prevent, and where my government has enabled these things I was right to condemn them, but I also didn’t lose sight of the root causes either.
Israel created their Palestinian terror problem by occupying Palestine in the first place, subjecting the Palestinians to degrading treatment and refusing to give them sovereignty, the US created their Middle Eastern terror problem by funding and training those very same terror groups for years, then occupying large parts of the Middle East, radicalising thousands through how they treated the Afghans and the Iraqis and creating a massive security vacuum, the Russians created their Ukrainian NATO and Nazi problems by trying to gobble up land, incessantly meddle, and treat Ukraine as “Little Russia”, the Ukrainians didn’t want to join NATO until the war started, Russian aggression changed their mind, they didn’t have the problem of Neo Nazi soldiers until those soldiers had a war to fight.
And that was what I lost sight of in Syria, that’s what I see now, the root cause of the war was Assad. There would be no HTS or any of these other groups if Assad hadn’t given them a war by responding to protests with bullets and bombs, Tunisia has its problems but it didn’t have a civil war, it isn’t a failed state or riddled with militias, because when the Arab Spring started their the President had the good sense to piss off into exile, if that had happened in Syria in the first place there wouldn’t be this catastrophic mess of militias and meddling foreign powers, and most importantly about 600,000 people would still be alive.
Which brings me to how I felt about Assad’s fall. At first when the rebel offensive started I was very unnerved, HTS was the one taking territory at a rapid rate and HTS does not represent democracy, the “Salvation Government” they created isn’t elected, despite HTS’s leader Jolani having relaxed hardline religious restrictions in his areas, allowing Christians to come back and pray in their Churches, and having moved to present a more moderate image, promising there would be no revenge or retribution, it’s worth remembering that HTS is literally a reformed faction of Al-Qaeda, because of that Jolani still has a 10 million dollar bounty on his head.
We remain committed to bringing leading AQS figures in HTS to justice. #Syria pic.twitter.com/R8evqffWum
— U.S. Embassy Syria (@USEmbassySyria) May 15, 2017
The reason they have so much lower of a body count compared to Assad’s government is less to do with morality and more to do with the fact that throughout the war Assad had an air force with fighter jets and attack helicopters and the rebels didn’t, and when they did capture these kinds of vehicles they didn’t have fighters with the technical experience to use them.
When the news here reported on what was happening they made no attempt to hide this, as the takeovers were happening the BBC reported that many were fleeing the cities in fear, that minorities were scared of persecution and that was what was keeping many of them stuck to Assad, that many didn’t believe HTS’s friendlier face, there was no attempt to hide the fact that the revolution was being led not by moderates or pro democracy rebels, but extremists, the cynic in me says this is probably because we don’t have much skin in the game anymore, having not been seriously involved in the war for years the media doesn’t need to balance out the nonsense our governments are putting out with the facts on the ground, because our governments don’t have much to say.
I did see the bias seep through in one place though, a BBC post proclaimed Assad to be the last of the Arab Spring dictators, a completely ridiculous claim, the Arab Spring came for all the Gulf Monarchies too, we just didn’t support those opposition groups because the Gulf countries are our “allies”.
The post actually pointed to the Gulf nation of Bahrain as a positive role model, quoting its King saying he had survived because he made reforms, a narrative the post unquestioningly supported, although conceding that the country wasn’t a “perfect democracy”.
Well, yes, it wasn’t a perfect democracy because it wasn’t a democracy at all.
No mention was made of the fact that just like in Assad’s Syria the Bahraini government responded to unrest not just with reforms but with bullets, protesters were shot and tortured, neighbouring Gulf countries sent out the troops.
Authors: Mohamed CJ and Lewa’a Alnasr Licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0
But anyway, my reaction to the rebel offensive was a mix of being unnerved and a sense of perverse hilarity at how quickly the government was crumbling, but then when the 6th rolled around something changed: The southern groups rose up, the SFA moved out, suddenly the decisive thrust of the war was being carried out by someone else, not Jolani. I wasn’t exactly hailing these groups as heroic moderates, after all I was aware of just how divided the rebels had been in the past, but I was happy that HTS wasn’t winning the race to Damascus.
I followed the last days and hours live courtesy of the Liveua war map which shows territorial control and quick news headlines in conflict zones, and when Assad’s government finally fell I have to admit there was a great sense of joy, I put aside my anxiety about instability and the sinister nature of some of Syria’s “liberators” and smiled at the idea of it all.
A dictator who spent 13 years at war with his own people, 13 years clinging on to power, selling the country away to foreign powers like Russia and Iran, only for it to all evaporate in a week, I was joyful at the idea of Syrians stamping on his portrait in every city, of the fact that when he seemed at his most secure, winning over most of his neighbours, he had to sit back and watch it slip through his fingers, he got half a million people killed and it was all for nothing.
Of course I would’ve much preferred that he left 13 years ago instead of subjecting the country to this, but there was a kind of beauty in the idea of the whole house of cards crumbling at the time when it seemed the most stable.
Now I’m writing this on the 8th, the day after, and I’m more sober minded. HTS has entered Damascus, sharing ground with the other rebel groups, the old Syrian Prime Minister appointed by Assad has agreed with them to stay on as a caretaker leader before new institutions can be formed3, the country is still divided between territory controlled by the Salvation Government, the Interim Government, Rojava and this new caretaker regime.
There’s still a big question over what happens next, the fact remains that HTS is an authoritarian group, prisoners may have been released from Sednaya but HTS have their own Sednayas, Sednaya was referred to as a human slaughterhouse, just a few months ago protesters were rallying in Idlib calling HTS prisons slaughterhouses too, comparing Jolani to Assad, just this morning one of the BBC’s commentators mentioned that a group of mothers had been protesting the arrest of their relatives by HTS, and that HTS responded by throwing stones at them.
Is a leader like Jolani, who presides over things like this, really going to participate in state building alongside more moderate groups? Is he going to participate on a road towards democracy? To arrange elections? To release his political prisoners and embrace freedom? Really?
There’s a part of me that quietly hopes he realises he’ll be the next target of Syria’s guns if he doesn’t, and that this motivates him to choose wisely and really follow through on his messaging of peaceful statebuilding and reconciliation, hopefully seeing just how quickly Assad’s government collapsed will make him feel his feet are to the fire, that his sham of a government could drop dead just as rapidly if he incites Syria’s fury, but I don’t really know if I believe it.
Then there’s the conflict in the north between the Turkish backed groups and the SDF, will the Kurds be given some level of autonomy in exchange for peace? Or will there be a bloody effort to reintegrate them by force? After taking Afrin the SNA is already fighting to take the northeastern Manbiji region from the SDF, will the rest of the rebel groups intervene to stop the conflict or will they let it play out?
If these issues can’t be resolved diplomatically we could be looking at a situation similar to Afghanistan in the 90s, the doomsday scenario where the loss of the common enemy ignites the rebels into internal conflict, hashing out their ideological differences and competing ambitions for power with bullets and bombs, turning Syria into a warzone all over again.
And if that scenario could be avoided, and some sort of agreement made to build a unified state, there would still be the issue of demobilising all of the armed groups.
There are literally thousands of militias across Syria, if they refused to either integrate into some sort of new unified army or demobilise and continued asserting power over the areas they control they could collapse any state building efforts.
That’s exactly what happened in Libya in the early 2010s, when Gaddafi was thrown out they actually did form a new government and hold elections, but the raft of militias made it impossible for that new government to truly assert power. Instead the country was riddled with little groups and their bases, checkpoints and roadblocks all over the place, and the country ended up splintering into many different pieces until the Civil War restarted.
Playing true to type the Israeli government has also welcomed in their new neighbouring government by stealing land, invading more of Syria’s southwestern Golan Heights region, supposedly as a “temporary” measure, whether they can be peacefully talked down or if this leads to another front in the conflict is a question that comes with serious risks.
The rebel held areas (marked in green) aren’t actually controlled by the Salvation government/HTS, but I’ve used this mislabelled graphic because it was the most detailed free graph in the moment.
These outcomes could cause the fragile chance at peace, unification and reconciliation that exists in Syria to slip away and I truly hope that doesn’t happen, it’s what I predicted in the case of a rebel victory in the past and I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to be wrong more in my life, no one has to earn peace but if anyone has it’s the Syrians, they have suffered more than enough.
They deserve not just peace but a peace with justice, where they are treated with dignity and where they have the freedom to choose for themselves how to live their lives, that is the Syria many of its people are dreaming of right now, and I hope their dream comes true.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Revolution_is_an_Idea_and_ideas_cannot_be_killed_(51956738318).jpg
Changelog #
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Edit 1 - 11/12/24 - Added sources for HTS denial of democracy (Twitter Embed, Footnote Sources) and local council elections (Hyperlink)
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Edit 2 - 12/12/24 - Added another source to the footnotes that I forgot to add yesterday (HTS disbanding local councils)
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Edit 3 - 21/12/24 - Added some more background on my thoughts on Rojava and my watching of VICE’s Islamic State series, added sources on the unreliability of Syrian elections under Assad, added note under the Israeli invasion of Syria graphic
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Edit 4 - 25/12/24 - Added some more elaboration on my views on Rojava and Assad
Footnotes #
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https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/syrian-peoples-assembly-elections-parliament-4/
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/syrian-peoples-assembly-elections-parliament-2/ ↩︎ -
https://web.archive.org/web/20180919112904/https://syriadirect.org/news/hts-backed-civil-authority-moves-against-rivals-in-latest-power-grab-in-northwest-syria/
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/sites/default/files/pdf/PolicyFocus175Zelinv2.pdf - Page 42
https://www.aymennjawad.org/2019/02/a-hayat-tahrir-al-sham-perspective-on-democracy ↩︎ -
He has since been replaced by Mohammed Al-Bashir, Prime Minister of the Syrian Salvation Government, who was appointed by HTS on November 9th ↩︎