Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
Syrians Oust Assad
Bashir al-Assad was the dictator of Syria up until this weekend. He is now a political asylum seeker in Moscow. The end of the Assad regime marks a huge shift in the power balance of the region. It also marks a significant defeat for his sponsors Russia and Iran. What it does not automatically mean is that Syria is free. Every revolution eats its children, and it leaves behind the slime of a new bureaucracy. Time will tell, but given who the alleged liberators are, one does not hold out much hope. Be that as it may, the end of the atrocious family of tyrants is a cause for celebration. It is the necessary but not sufficient condition for the true liberation of Syria.
The collapse seems to have been brought about by a general weakness in the regime on the battlefield and the inability of Russia and Iran to bail it out. The Financial Times summed it up this way:
When Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi visited Damascus last week, days after Syria’s second-largest city of Aleppo fell to the rebels, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad claimed that "his retreat from Aleppo was tactical and that he remained in control," said an insider in Tehran’s government. "Araghchi responded that Iran was no longer in a position to send forces to support him anyway. But we did not expect the collapse to come so quickly or expose such hollowness in his regime. This came as a shock to us, too."
As of now one cannot find any public statements that suggest Russia was unwilling to continue its support of the Assad regime. One can only conclude, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that the war in Ukraine prevented effective Russian intervention.
The Syrian Army on its own was not much opposition to the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Sunni rebel group with al-Qaeda ties. Its leader is Mr. al-Jolani, 42, born Ahmed Hussein al-Shara in Saudi Arabia, the child of Syrian exiles, according to Arab media reports. He had a $10 million bounty on his head offered by the American government, which also had held him in prison at one stage. Now, he is the likely next Big Kahuna.
The Israeli-Gaza-Hezbollah War is also going to be affected. Syria has been a transit route for weapons and supplies from Iran, through Iraq and Syria and onto Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. That route is going to be disrupted for a while, as HTS is radical Sunni and therefore anti-radical Shi'ite (which is what Iran is). It may take a while for funds and bribes to fix matters.
Israel may have a chance at peace with Syria if it can find a partner in HTS or elsewhere in Syria. The anti-Zionist propaganda of the Assad regime will make it difficult to engage the man in the street, but a peace treaty would benefit both sides. Indeed, if the Syrians want peace, this is the time to start the process.
The sudden fall of the Assad regime changes the political balance in Syria as well. The Assad clique was drawn from the Alawite community, a flavor of Shi'ite Islam. The Alawites are a minority in Syria, though, with a large portion of the population following Sunni Islam. Balancing majority rule with minority protections is difficult, but Syria will have to find a way to accommodate the non-Sunni Muslims, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians in the country. If they do not, another round of civil war is quite possible, even likely.
The situation is going to be fluid for a while, certainly through the end of the year. Power vacuums have a way of being filled by the unlikely, unpleasant and unpalatable. One hopes Syria avoids that. The people there deserve better.
© Copyright 2024 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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