In a rare act of political intelligence, Bashar al-Assad fled Syria rather than prolonging a probably futile fight to save his regime and life. Does this portend a better result for the Syrian people than the Libyan or Iraqi? The victorious rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa has also shown some political intelligence, saying all the right things, that the victory of the rebel forces is a victory for all Syrians and promising to respect the rights of minority communities. Thus far the transfer of power has been as disciplined as possible given that it comes at the end of a 13 year civil war. The government stepped down, the rebel forces have been ordered to respect state institutions, to refrain from looting and destroying public property, and to withdraw from heavily populated urban areas.
Most analysts that I have read were surprised by the rapidity of the regime collapse, but with two weeks of hindsight perhaps it was not so surprising as it initially appeared. The leading rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham was supported by Turkiye while Assad’s main backers, Russia and Iran, could not or were not willing to expend the resources necessary to blunt the rebel advance. Iran has over-extended itself in its conflict with Israel and Russia remains in a brutal slog against Ukrainian forces almost three years after its invasion. The Syrian army, now mostly poorly paid conscripts, clearly refused to fight. If only that had been the case thirteen years ago. Political wisdom, it seems, like Hegel’s Owl of Minerva, spreads its wings only at the falling of the dusk.
It also remains stoically silent. The fall of one autocrat teaches other autocrats nothing. Gadhaffi watched Saddam fall, but fought to the end. Assad watched Hussein and Gadhaffi fall and ultimately fled, but not before killing hundreds of thousands in the civil war and forcing millions of others to flee as refugees. One wishes that they if they were going to go, they would go before destroying the lives and life-conditions of their people for generations.
But now Assad is gone. Al-Sharaa is playing the role of the wise statesperson well. Is he sincere? Is he merely trying to build credibility with the foreign powers– and there are many (Iran, Israel, Russia, Turkiye, and the United States)– who hold the future stability of Syria in their hands? Is he buying time before eliminating rival factions? We will find out in the coming weeks and months. But the bigger problem than his intentions is whether he will be able to control the internal and external situation. What the Syrian people seem to be clamouring for more than anything at the moment is peace: time to breath and think about their future free from fear and intimidation by one side or another. The political signs, whatever al-Sharaa’s intentions, do not encourage hope that Syrians will get what they most need right now.
The streets of Damascus were full of cheering Syrians, understandably overjoyed by the collapse of the regime. Horror stories spilled out of the political prisons in which former dissidents and rebels were held and tortured. Hands flashed peace signs and faces remembered how to smile. But across the country Israel was destroying stocks of strategic weapons, air defences, and advancing into the buffer zone created by the treaty that ended the Yom Kippur war. Russia was securing its naval and air bases, while the United States was bombing what it said were Daesh positions in the east. In the North, Turkish sponsored forces were attacking Kurdish militias even as refugees streamed back into Syria.
It is impossible for those of us who live in politically stable countries to imagine what it is like to live in a environment in which at any time a foreign military can start bombing or shelling or launch an incursion. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham did nothing to resist the destruction of the Syrian military’s strategic weaponry nor did it act against American encampments in the south. It spokesperson wisely demurred when asked what its position on the Israeli incursion was. Perhaps they have learned the lesson that Hamas (and Hezbollah and Iran) have been learning painfully over the past year. It is politically insane to wage a primarily military struggle against vastly superior military forces. If their goal really is stability and reconstruction then they will have to arrive at and maintain a modus vivendi with all the major powers in the region, regardless of their ideological commitments.
Arriving at an agreement with Turkiye should be easiest, since they are Hayat Tahrir al-Shamm’s main sponsor. Nevertheless. if they really do want to represent all Syrians, they will have to end the fighting between the Turks and Kurds, and it is not clear how they could do that, if the Kurds choose to keep fighting (and why would they stop, so long as they are attacked and their national aspirations unfulfilled?) How will Russia react to the threat to its bases in Syria? These are vital to projecting Russian power into Africa and maintaining the laughable facade that Putin has constructed as an anti-imperialist. Does Russia have enough money to pay the rebels off to secure the future of their installations? It is unlikely that Russia would enter into an armed conflict against forces with a high degree of popular legitimacy at the moment, but if they have no money or Hayat Tahrir al-Sham won’t be bought off, how far will Putin go to protect these assets?
Even more worrisome for the new regime is Iran. All the analysts that I have read agree that Iran is the major loser in the fall of Assad. Al-Sharaa stated explcitly that the new regime will not tolerate Iranian interference in Syrian affairs. But without that cooperation,Iran will have extreme diff iculty re-arming Hezbollah. How far are they willing and able to go to undermine the new regime? They are not going to invade, but they are skilled in covert operations and must still have allies in the Alawite power structure and military. Can they accept defeat and walk away, even if it means abandoning Hezbollah? That would be the politically wise move: Iranians elected a reformer and are demanding concrete steps to improve their living conditions. But inertia and path dependency often trump intelligence in international relations.
Iran’s next moves will also be influenced by its knowledge that if it and Hezbollah are the main losers then Israel (and the US) are the strategic winners. Israel is sending a very clear message to the new regime: we retain overwhelming military superiority and can destroy whatever is left in the country. The United States has celebrated the fall of Assad. But Hayat Tahrir al-Shama has its origins in al-Qaeda and remains a designated terrorist group. There are still US forces on the ground. How will the US and Israel behave long term towards a terrorist group if they should end up forming the next government of Syria? On the other side, how will an Islamist government (terrorist or not) relate to Israel and the United States? If they ignore Palestinians, how can they claim that their victory is a victory for the whole Islamic nation? If they intervene, even with only ideological support, how will they avoid the wrath of Israel and the United States? Thus far they have chosen silence in favour of stabilizing their own country. But missionary fervor is probably drowning out clear reason in the heads of some members of the Islamist movements. Will al-Sharaa be able to keep the most radical forces in his own movement under control?
Hamas seems hopeful that the fact that the victorious movement is Sunni will lead them to eventually offer some sort of support. If so, they have become even more delusional over the course of the war than they were when they launched the self-destructive attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023. I argued at the time that Iran and Hezbollah were not going to help them achieve the strategic victory they hoped they would. Iran and Hezbollah have been decisively weakened. A young government with its eyes focussed on domestic problems will not be keep to intervene in a doomed military struggle. But even if they did, without air defences (the fatal weakness of the so-called ‘axis of resistance’) they would accomplish nothing accept the further destruction of the country that they are promising to rebuild.
The final question concerns whether they will be able to re-build the country and create the political, social, economic, and cultural conditions for national unity. Western commentators have largely celebrated Assad’s fall but judged Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s Islamism a permanent obstacle towards achieving the goals of national reconciliation and progress. Some suspect that al-Sharaa’s conversion from terrorist to national liberation fighter to peaceful politician is a ruse. Perhaps. But Islamism and fundamentalist terrorism are not identical and there are other examples of Islamist movements consciously rejecting violence after advocating and practicing it. The best example is the conversion of Egypt’s al-Gama’ah al-Islamiyah, whose leadership ultimately rejected violent struggle without renouncing its fundamentalist interpretation of the primacy of Islamic law and the need for theocratic rule. What they rejected was the terrorist principle that religious rule could be imposed by force. If the people are not ready for religious rule then trying to impose it would be both unjust and impossible. (See Sherman A. Jackson, “Islam and Peace: A Muslim Fundamentalist Perspective,” Peace Movements in Islam, Juan Cole, ed). Will Hayat Tahrir al-Sham undergo a similar conversion? Perhaps, but there is an important difference. Egypt’s al-Gama’ah al-Ilamiyah were the losers in a long struggle with the Egyptian state. Their conversion to non-violence occurred in prison. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has just won the civil war. Victorious movements which see themselves as doing God’s (or History’s) work are rarely capable of the sorts of compromises that politics on earth requires. Those who would build (or prepare) the City of God on earth (whether Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim) are not looking in the right direction. They look up in order to build down below, whereas they need to look into the eyes of their fellow citizens and see them first as fellow human beings. That look of recognition is possible from different religious perspectives, but I cannot see how it is possible from any fundamentalist religious perspective. If Islam (or Jesus, or Yahweh) is the truth then those who belong to different faith communities or atheists who reject the truth of them all cannot but appear to be inferior. They might be tolerated, but how can they be regarded as equal?
Syrian socialists and feminists have joined in the celebrations unleashed by Assad’s fall, but are far more circumspect about the near term future of the country under its new fundamentalist leadership. Swiss-Syrian socialist Joseph Daher cautions that:”it is still an open question as to whether HTS will follow through on these statements. The organization has been an authoritarian and reactionary organization with an Islamic fundamentalist ideology, and still has foreign fighters within its ranks. Many popular demonstrations in the past few years have occurred in Idlib against its rule and violations of political freedoms and human rights, including assassinations and torture of opponents. It is not enough to tolerate religious or ethnic minorities or allow them to pray. The key issue is recognizing their rights as equal citizens participating in deciding the future of the country. More generally, statements by the head of HTS, al-Jolani, such as “people who fear Islamic governance either have seen incorrect implementations of it or do not understand it properly,” are definitely not reassuring, but quite the opposite.” That concern is amplified amongst revolutionary Syrian women. Writing in the Guardian Mona Eltahawy quotes Razan Zaitouneh, disappeared by the Assad regime in 2013, who warned against naive or opportunistic hopes that there was any important political differences between Assad’s technocratic and the Islamist’s religious terror:”We did not do a revolution and lose thousands of souls so that such monsters can come and repeat the same unjust history,” she wrote to her friend and fellow human rights activist Nadim Houry, in an email dated May 2013. “These people need to be held to account just like the regime.” What good would it do to replace one oppressor with a different one?”It would do no good at all.
Unfortunately, the victory of the rebel forces emphasizes once again the extreme weakness of the Left in the Arab world. In the West, the Left in power is synonymous with over-caution and practical betrayal of working class interests. In the Arab world, it is synonymous with authoritarian personal rule and top-down dirigiste state control of the economy. The promises made in the early days of Nasserism in Egypt and Baathism in Syria and Iraq failed to deliver shared wealth, universal education, and secular-socialist national solidarity. As in Iran in 1979, a movement which thinks that the solution to all life’s problems is found in a single book written 1500 years ago has the revolutionary initiative, weakening further the link between the practice of revolution and the value of social progress beyond “ancient, venerable prejudices” (Marx, Communist Manifesto). How can they lead a complex, pluralist society with a long history of secular (albeit violent and authoritarian rule) into the future?
The virtue of secular as opposed to religious rule is that the later can allow individuals to fully and freely develop their religious sentiments and rituals while leaving state institutions as public frameworks of interaction that do not rest on any sectarian basis. A theocracy, by contrast, cannot allow the full and free development of non-religious forms of life. The separation of Churches and state does not eliminate churches but allows for religious freedom in the private and non-political public sphere (civil society). But a fundamentalist religious regime can tolerate social and religious differences but cannot recognize their equal value. If a regime is fundamentalist then it will insist on the incorporation of its values into social fundamentals, especially law and education. Again, this problem is not unique to Islamic fundamentalism, but it is posed with extreme urgency today in Syria, where a generation’s hopes for revolutionary liberation are now threatened not by failure to overthrow the regime but success.