Zaki Kaf Al-Ghazal
One of the earliest slogans of the 2011 revolutionaries in Syria was, “The Syrian people will not be humiliated.” They were right. In the end, it was their President, Bashar Al-Assad, who fled from Syria in the middle of the night without even notifying his loyalists. He made a quick exit knowing that all was lost.
The Assad family mafia, which has been in power for 54 years, has collapsed. The president of Syria for 24 years is now apparently in Moscow. After an uprising that has lasted 13 years, the significance of this news cannot be understated. Syria is currently the only bastion of the 2011 Arab Spring with a live revolution left. Egypt, Tunisia and Bahrain fell prey to the forces of the counter-revolution, whilst Libya and Yemen were engulfed totally by chaos.
Russia and Iran have essentially kept the Assad regime in place over the past few years; the former with diplomatic protection at the UN and constant air support, and the latter with its militias and proxies, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah, working on the ground to organise Assad’s forces.
Russia has had access to Mediterranean ports for its navy, whilst Iran has used Syria to expand its hegemony in the region and supply arms to Hezbollah with ease. Even Israel has benefited from the Assad family, and has been advocating quietly for him to stay. The Golan Heights, occupied illegally by Israel since 1967, have been quiet since 1973 and Israel has craved the stability that the Assad regime has offered.
Efforts to normalise and rehabilitate the Assad regime gained traction only 18 months ago as various Arab states rushed to readmit Bashar to the Arab League, with policymakers and pundits commenting that Assad has won and that the war is over. As mentioned on multiple occasions, though, Assad’s “victory” was both pyrrhic and short term. The swift collapse of his regime in a matter of days only lends credence to this view.
The governance of Syria by Assad and his cronies has been an utter failure. Syria is recognised by experts as a failed state. The economy is moribund, and life there has come to a grinding halt for most of its citizens. Emigration and the fleeing of hundreds of thousands of working-age men who are refugees across the Middle East and Europe because they fear living under Assad’s rule has hit the regime hard. There are no opportunities for the young, and unless its citizens have access to remittances from abroad or have support from benefactors in the state or pro-government militias, then even buying bread and groceries are difficult due to rampant inflation. Syria is now also a narco-state, and it seems that the regime has collapsed under the weight of its own incompetence and brutality.
Moreover, Assad’s allies have been unimpressed with him more recently.A number of senior Iranian army commanders have been killed in Syria in recent weeks and months, having been targeted by Israeli air strikes. The fact that this has been happening so often has led to questions about Assad’s officials leaking information to the occupation state. Whether intentional or a result of endemic corruption in the military, the Iranians are deeply unhappy that a regime that they have propped up for years can’t keep its benefactor’s commanders safe.
Russia, meanwhile, has been unhappy about Assad’s reluctance to engage with the Astana Peace Process, which, ironically, happens to be weighted heavily in his favour. It is also worth mentioning that the issue of Syrian refugees in Turkiye has become a challenge for President Erdogan, who has been keen to find a solution and resettle them after coming under domestic pressure to do something.
The Arab states which have pushed for normalisation with Assad over the past year and a half have not seen any fall in the captagon trade which his regime has fuelled, and are having to deal with the consequences. Assad has done nothing to show that he’s distanced himself from Iran which was part of the Arab states’ demand for normalising relations with Damascus again.
And although Assad has claimed for years to be a part of the “Axis of resistance”, the regime has said and done nothing as Gaza burned and its people continue to face a genocide, even as thousands of Palestinian refugees are still in Assad’s prisons, and people still remember his massacres of them.
The accumulation of all of these circumstances and events provided the opposition in Syria with the opportunity to strike now.
The opposition forces today are a different proposition to those of the early revolutionary years, when they were loosely organised factions with little access to weapons. There seems to be a sense of unity amongst them which has been missing. Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), operating under the Syrian Salvation Government (SSG), and other factions — including Ahrar Al-Sham, the Sham Legion and the Nour Al–Din Al-Zenki Movement, for example — used the element of surprise to launch an attack on Aleppo which was more successful than people thought it would be.
Assad’s forces, the Syrian Arab Army, are a hollow shell of their previous self; morale is low and funding has been cut for months due to economic problems. Even a last-minute attempt to raise the troops’ salaries didn’t offer any encouragement. The soldiers being called up were young men forced onto the front-line; professional troops were killed in combat years ago or had defected. These young men saw Israel as their enemy, not fellow Syrians.
Moreover, there were tensions with the few Iranian units still on the ground, with Syrian soldiers feeling that they were looked down upon in their own country, which didn’t bode well. When this is factored in alongside the absence of Hezbollah due to the movement’s weakening in the war with Israel, it should have been no surprise that the Syrian regime forces collapsed as quickly as they did.
The opposition forces in Idlib, meanwhile, were organising and preparing themselves over a longer period, had established a local governing system and had even managed to make and produce some of their own weapons, including the “Shaheen” drones which helped in their quick advance towards Aleppo and Damascus.
When Aleppo was liberated, the Assad regime repeated the same tactics it has used over the course of the 13 year conflict, shelling the city and bombing hospitals to terrorise its citizens into submission. This time though, due to Russia’s preoccupation with Ukraine and its own exasperation with the regime, its support was much more limited, and Assad’s air strikes alone weren’t enough.He was arrogant and thought that he was his father, Hafez, who was well-known for the “hamburger trick”; he would toy with other leaders, pretending to offer something substantive (the “hamburger”), while actually just giving the bread. In the meantime, he kept playing political games, dragging his heels on the Astana Peace Process and barely pretending to engage with the Geneva Peace Process.
Turkiye’s Erdogan has been trying to meet him and rekindle a normalisation process, but Assad in his arrogance refused. The US is going through a presidential transition, of course, and Biden is a lame duck who at this stage of his time in the White House won’t be making decisions of any strategic importance.
Assad thought that he could play states off against each other and it seems to have blown up in his face. Given that he escaped any real punishment from the international community for repeated use of chemical weapons and years of dropping barrel bombs on hospitals and schools, it’s obvious why he became so arrogant.
As opposition forces declare a Syria free from the Assad dynasty’s rule for the first time since 1971, there are a plethora of challenges to face.
They will now need to build institutions and prove that they are serious about governing the country. They must be able to work with state bureaucracy and deliver basic services such as electricity and water. The early signs are encouraging, with reports from Aleppo that residents have access to electricity. The security situation is also crucial, and looting and chaos must be prevented. The fact that former Prime Minister Mohammed Ghazi Al-Jalali is supervising state bodies until a transition goes ahead to provide some continuity of service is good news. The north east region which has been ruled by the separatist Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and other Kurdish groups will require a delicate balancing act by the new authority in Damascus. The SDF worked tacitly with Assad in the past so must be convinced to work with the new government. Furthermore, the new authority must be wary of Israel’s cross-border incursions since Assad’s abrupt departure.
It is imperative for HTS to kickstart a political transition as soon as possible. Ideally, the group will be dissolved, as promised, and an independent body will govern day to day as an election date is set and a constitution is drafted.
HTS is designated as a terrorist organisation by the US, the UK, the UN and others, although its leader, Abu Mohammed Al-Jolani — real name Ahmed Al-Sharaa — has stressed the fact that it has long broken from Al-Qaeda. In a recent CNN interview, he promised that Syria’s minorities will be protected and that a proper legal system will be put in place.
It is too early to tell whether this is just good PR or is genuine and, if it is the latter, if he can ensure that opposition groups on the ground will listen. The Syrian people rose up in 2011 against the Assad regime to demand a system that respects human rights and the rule of law and gives the people the dignity they deserve. If any authority does not do this, they can expect resistance quickly. Ideally, the International Criminal Court will charge Assad with committing war crimes and crimes against humanity and issue an arrest warrant. There has been movement towards this in the past, but it has moved at a glacial pace.
This is the justice that the Syrian people crave.
The finality of seeing Assad and his cronies in the dock will not bring back the dead or disappeared, but it would go some way to easing the pain of their families. Ultimately, it must be for the Syrian people to choose their next leader and take their next steps. Russia, Iran, the US, Israel, Turkey and the Gulf states should not have a say, and any international effort should only be to help coordinate the operations of a transitional government which can facilitate free and fair elections in the coming months. The Syrian people overthrew Assad themselves; all it took was for Assad’s backers to abandon him.
The sacrifices that the people have made over the past decade are astonishing, and the stream of released detainees demonstrates this, as even women and children were amongst those detained unjustly. Syria will now be what is meant to be: a republic. It is no longer one of just two states with a hereditary presidency.
History tells us that empires rise and fall, and that nothing is guaranteed forever. The uprising of the Syrian people demonstrated this. Once-powerful states can crumble quicker than expected, and what was achieved in Syria can be an example for others. As we think about the aggression of Israel against the Palestinian people, we see that it’s sowing the seeds for its own demise in the future. As we learn from history, oppressive regimes set themselves up to fail, and the status quo which benefits the oppressor crumbles.
(Zaki Kaf Al-Ghazal is the Media and Advocacy Officer of the Syrian Association of Yorkshire having completed an LLM in Legal and Political Theory at the University of York, he is currently a PhD candidate at the same university’s Law School.)
