By John J. MetzlerThe Assad family dictatorship which has run Syria for 53 years and has withstood 13 years of bitter civil war, has now collapsed in just over a week. A sweeping series of Islamic rebel attacks starting in late November, captured key cities from Aleppo in the north to Homs and Hama which fell like dominos creating an unstoppable military momentum on the road to Damascus.
The recent round of dizzying Mideast events confronts the current lame-duck Biden Administration with complex policy challenges amid a looming power vacuum.
Assad’s regime was both brutal and brittle. In the early stages of the so called “Arab Spring” in 2011, it appeared it would crumble quickly. It almost did. But contrary to the rosy-eyed expectations of foreigners viewing the Middle East, the core of the Assad security state held, with Russian and Iranian support to roll back or at least freeze rebel gains. Bashar al-Assad never won, but neither did the gaggle of Islamic fighters opposing him. Until now.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in a passionate plea to the Security Council stated, “Syria is a crossroads of civilization. It is painful to see its progressive fragmentation.”
The civil war has raged for 13 years with hundreds of thousands killed on all sides and creating one of the world’s largest refugee crises. Among the Syrian population of 24 million there are staggering numbers of more than 6 million refugees and 7 million internally displaced persons.
As this column always stressed the spillover of the Syrian crisis has been the massive number of asylum seekers flooding into Europe and neighboring Turkey.
Under the Assads, Syria was a secular Arab dictatorship; The ruling Shia Muslim minority, was close to Islamic Iran but not to the majority of the Arab world, nor Turkey. Nonetheless Assad allowed for his socialist regime to allow limited freedoms for Christians not seen in much of the region expect for Lebanon and Jordan.
Let’s look at some of the losers and winners in this confusing Mideast puzzle.
Losers:
• Islamic Republic of Iran: As mentioned Iran shared the Shia faction of Islam with the Alawite Syrians minority to which the Assads belong. Significantly, Teheran has supplied weapons, cash and fighters from the Revolutionary Guard to support the Syrian regime. Equally, Lebanon’s Hizbullah terrorists (largely Shia) have provided military units to underpin Assad’s rule. Today, Iran faces a series of setbacks from its own corruption and military weakness.
The Teheran leadership is increasingly nervous about its own survival.
Moreover, Hizbullah’s calculated gamble to attack Israel massively backfired and hasn’t only seen its leadership and fighters decimated by the Israelis but has faced major setbacks throughout their southern Lebanese bases.
• Russia: In the beginning the Assads were a classic Soviet client regime in the Arab world. Syria was one of Moscow’s most valued assets long before Putin. Thus, Soviet conventional and chemical weapons were put at the regime’s disposal since the 1970’s. During the civil war when the Syrian army was losing the battle, the Russians intervened with massive air power and some troops reinforcing the Latikia/Tartus enclave in the northwest. Since the Russian intervention in 2015, Islamic rebel forces were often vanquished and the country “stabilized” along sectarian lines.
But following Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine in 2022, Russian military resources and forces
are focused closer to home. Assad’s collapse presents a major military and political setback for Moscow; all Russia gets in return is the exiled Assad family.
Winners:
• Turkey: The Turks share a long frontier with Syria and have borne the brunt of supporting Syrian refugees. To be fair Turkey has hosted over three million Syrians with the caveat, you shall return home when the situation stabilizes. Well, President Erdogan has many reasons to support the Islamic rebels, one of which he sees the return of these refugees to Syria. Since the start of the recent fighting the UN humanitarian agency says over a million people have been displaced.
Erdogan supports a callous calculus here too. Turkey is trying to neutralize armed Kurdish factions to create a “safe zone” buffer carved from Syria.
• The Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaida affiliate, morphed into the militant Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) which toppled Assad is designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. UK and the United Nations.
Many of the insurgents are Islamic jihadi’s not aspiring Arab Jeffersonian Democrats. This is likely an accident waiting to happen. Few in the West understand the magnitude of a largely Sunni Muslim militant movement seizing Syria. The HTS group are a witch’s brew of hardline factions we have yet to decipher. As HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani proclaimed in Damascus, the new Syria would “be a beacon for the Islamic nation.” Is any dialogue likely?
John J. Metzler is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is the author of Divided Dynamism the Diplomacy of Separated Nations: Germany, Korea, China (2014).
Free Press International
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