Syria’s Stunning Fall to Rebels

 

Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

December 10, 2024

Syria’s Stunning Fall to Rebels

The swift and stunning rebel conquest of Syria has been met with a mix of elation and uncertainty among citizens, Damascus-based Madjid Zerrouky and Nissim Gasteli report for Le Monde.

“At a checkpoint on the freeway to Damascus, only a group of children, playing soldiers, stood there, while, around them, the roadsides offered the ghostly sight of a routed force: The Syrian regular army,” Zerrouky and Gasteli write, noting the strange scenes. “Immobilized tanks lay, motionless, across the emergency lane. Several all-terrain military vehicles stood here and there, their doors splayed open, as if they had been looted. At the foot of one of them, the lifeless body of a man in green fatigues lay face down, a symbol of the last stand of the regime's loyal soldiers—before many of them deserted, precipitating the regime's downfall. They had abandoned their uniforms, which lay along the roadside, under the many Syrian flags that flew alongside those of the regime's sponsor, Russia.”

It was a lightning advance for rebels led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former al Qaeda offshoot that launched its first major attack on regime forces on Nov. 27 and wrested control of the county in less than two weeks, as CNN’s Antoinette Radford explains.

Despite the surprise of many global onlookers, Alexander Clarkson wrote recently for the World Politics Review that “the dynamics that led to the rise of HTS and the collapse of Assad’s position have been building for a long time in rural villages and urban neighborhoods across northern Syria, the product of bitter historical legacies” that have left the north especially resentful of Assad’s torturous regime. At Project Syndicate, Barak Barfi writes that Assad’s government had been rotting from within: “[A] regime with so many similarities to the Sopranos could never concede its coveted rents, even if doing so would have brought social harmony. Like the fictional mafia family, Assad’s regime relied on kickbacks from wealthy business owners and shaking down foreigners. … Today, Syria earns almost twice as much from illicit exports of the amphetamine captagon as it does from legal trade.” After the rebels seized Aleppo two weekends ago, Middle East expert Joshua Landis of the University of Oklahoma suggested to Al Jazeera that underpaid Syrian soldiers likely were miserable and didn’t want to fight.

Meanwhile, some observers fear Syria “could descend into a strict fundamentalist Islamic state similar to Taliban-led Afghanistan, although the country’s new leaders have made pronouncements that seek to dispel that fear,” writes NPR’s Scott Neuman, hearing from Chatham House’s Sanam Vakil.

Of the rebels and their leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani (his nom de guerre), CNN’s Jomana Karadsheh, Gul Tuysuz, Brice Laine, Lauren Kent and Eyad Kourdi write: “Inside rebel-controlled territory in Syria, it’s clear he operates less like a wanted man and more like a politician. After forces loyal to him took control of Aleppo, he made a public appearance in the city’s historic citadel. Jolani says he has gone through episodes of transformation through the years. ‘A person in their twenties will have a different personality than someone in their thirties or forties, and certainly someone in their fifties. This is human nature.’” (Indeed, Jolani made those comments in an exclusive interview with CNN last week.)

Assad’s fall was welcomed, in particular, by two groups of people: longtime detainees in Assad’s network of prisons (and their family members) and the many refugees from Syria’s civil war. As Le Monde’s Zerrouky and Gasteli report, haggard prisoners emerged into the daylight, and refugees began to stream home past former checkpoints. An Al-Monitor headline notes jubilation among Syrian refugees in neighboring Lebanon.

Assad’s State of Terror

Assad’s regime is known for its many atrocities, including the use of chemical weapons, barrel bombs, and starvation against its opponents. CNN’s Clarissa Ward reports that as soon as the regime fell, desperate family members flocked to Syria’s notorious Saydnaya Military Prison—referred to as a “human slaughterhouse”—to search for disappeared loved ones, rifling through prison paperwork in attempts to locate them.

While many Syrians rejoiced at the regime’s fall, The Economist writes, “Thousands of others took no time for celebration. They headed straight for the prisons, thrown open by the rebels, in a desperate search for friends and family. Some had disappeared into Mr Assad’s labyrinth of secret jails and torture chambers more than a decade ago. Outside Damascus the traffic was stalled for miles on the road to [Saydnaya], a town in the mountains north of the capital, which was the most notorious site of the regime’s abuses. Rebels with rifles were acting as impromptu traffic wardens.”

“Saydnaya … held an especially dark place in the Syrian imagination: a facility of industrialized cruelty, it has long been synonymous with torture, death and despair,” Raya Jalabi, Sam Joiner, Alison Killing, Peter Andringa and Chris Campbell write for the Financial Times. “In a 2017 report, Amnesty International found that many of the tens of thousands of people who have been detained there over the decades were locked up for offences as simple as congregating in small groups during the 2011 uprisings that descended into war. They were subjected to routine beatings by prison guards that included brutal sexual assault, electric shocks, bone crushing and more. Rights groups say that dozens of people were secretly executed every week in Saydnaya, with Amnesty estimating that up to 13,000 Syrians were killed there between 2011 and 2016. An estimated 20,000 people were detained in the prison, it said.”

Lessons From the US Disaster in Iraq

As HTS and its leader Jolani begin “to coordinate a transfer of power that guarantees the provision of services,” as a statement put it, Fareed pointed out last night on CNN’s The Situation with Wolf Blitzer that the rebels appear to be avoiding a significant mistake the US made after its 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Under a process known as “de-Baathification,” the US dismantled Saddam Hussein’s conquered government and military, rather than incorporating its members into a new state. That left Iraq with large contingent of jobless, dispossessed young men—many with military or weapons training—and sowed the seeds of a brutal sectarian civil war that raged alongside an anti-US insurgency. So far, Fareed noted, HTS appears to be doing the opposite, accepting the surrenders of former Assad-regime officials. (The Syrian embassy in Moscow, for instance, is open—under the Syrian resistance flag.)

Israel Seizes the Moment

Israel—which has warred with Syria in the past, including over the disputed Golan Heights along the two countries’ border—has seized the opportunity to strike Syrian military targets. The IDF claims to have destroyed Syria’s navy overnight. The Jerusalem Post and Reuters report: “Some 70%-80% of the capabilities of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's military have been destroyed. Most of the strikes were in southern Syria and around the city of Damascus, targeting Syrian army bases, with an emphasis on air defense systems and stores of surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles.”

Of particular interest to Israel will be chemical and other weapons that it does not want smuggled to the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, The Economist notes. But incursions into the Golan Heights, the magazine argues, were “neither justified nor necessary.”

Middle East Geopolitics, Reshuffled

What does Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s fall mean for major players in the Middle East—both those within the region and the large foreign powers with interested stakes?

For one thing, the rebel advance is a distinct blow to Russia. As Natasha Hall of the Center for Strategic & International Studies told Fareed on Sunday’s GPS, Russia was seen abandoning a key ally. Russia joined Syria’s civil war in 2015, contributing to Assad’s brutal recapture of Aleppo and obtaining for itself, in the process, control of an airbase and a warm-water port—far south of the icy Baltic Sea and the Turkey-obstructed Black Sea—seen as important to Russia’s ambitions as a global military power. Russia’s Cold War-style attempt to gain influence in the Middle East has now collapsed, Maxim Trudolyubov and Dan White write for the Wilson Center’s Russia File blog.

The only bigger loser than Russia is Iran. At the Middle East Institute, Fatemeh Aman notes that Syria has been a lynchpin in Tehran’s so-called “Axis of Resistance”—a network of allied militias and proxies across the region, including Assad’s Syrian government. Along with Russia, Iran-backed Hezbollah had helped to keep Assad in power as war raged in the 2010s. “The sudden downfall of Assad’s government not only disrupts Iran’s strategic foothold in the Levant but also challenges its influence in the broader Middle East region,” Aman writes.

Turkey may be the big winner, Laura Pitel and Ayla Jean Yackley write for the Financial Times. “It remains unclear to what extent Ankara backed the lightning offensive of the past two weeks that on Sunday toppled the government of Bashar al-Assad,” they write. HTS “has a complicated relationship with Turkey. But many analysts are convinced that [President Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan, who once called the Syrian president a ‘butcher’, stands to gain politically and economically from his newfound position as the most influential foreign actor in the country following the fall of Assad, who was backed by Russia and Iran.” Turkey’s construction sector will cheer its potential access to the business of rebuilding Syria, Gönül Tol of the Middle East Institute tweets. (Tol has noted elsewhere that Turkey’s construction sector is a supportive political base Erdoğan likes to reward.) Tol has written before for Foreign Affairs that Erdoğan’s agenda in Syria has included “getting rid of the millions of Syrian refugees who have made their way to Turkey over the years”; countering Kurdish nationalism, as US-backed Kurdish forces control much of northeastern Syria but are viewed by Ankara as a domestic problem in Turkey; and consolidating power at home and influence in the region.

As for the US, the Middle East Institute’s Charles Lister tweets that the case has never been stronger for keeping a small contingent of US forces in Syria—which President-elect Donald Trump, during his first presidency, sought to withdraw.

And as for the region as a whole, Rajan Menon writes cautiously for The New Statesman: “Post-Assad Syria raises many questions. Considering what has happened since 27 November,” when the rebels began their advance, “it is prudent to avoid predictions.” Ruslan Suleymanov writes more certainly for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Russian-politics blog Politika: “Syria will become part of the multidimensional conflict between Russia and NATO. Erdoğan has demonstrated repeatedly that he’s happy to use his influence over issues that are painful for Russia to improve relations with the West … Syria looks set to become a significant addition to this list, strengthening [Turkey]’s hand in its relations with both Russia and the West.”

Copied from a forwarded article, by the good political analyzer Fareed Zakaria, he surely captured from different sources the essence of what is happening nowadays in Syria, the real test is the future, near and long, to see how matters could develop and who are the real orchestrators and beneficiaries of this situation, whether Syria will remain unified or fragmented along the rest of the area is surely to be looked at carefully.     As always my many thanks to all.