By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Problem with Syria Today

In a recent interview, Syria’s de facto leader, Ahmed Al Sharaa, revealed that it may take up to four years before the country holds its long-awaited elections. This marks a significant revision from his earlier statement, in which he had indicated that elections could take place much sooner. Al Sharaa’s new timeline underscores the deep-rooted challenges Syria faces in its journey toward recovery after years of devastating civil war.

France’s Jean-Noël Barrot was in the Syrian capital Damascus alongside his German counterpart Annalena Baerbock, where they met Syria’s de facto leader Ahmad al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed Al Jolani.

As we know three weeks before the new year, Syria’s Assad regime fell from power, one that has been in power for 50 years. Syria now has an unprecedented opportunity to turn a new page and begin 2025 with a fresh start.

However, not everything in Syria is a fresh start. While Damascus has been taken by Syrian opposition groups and the new leader of Syria – Ahmed Shara’a, also known as Abu Mohammed al-Julani – appears to be trying to burnish his image as an inclusive leader, there are parts of Syria that are in stasis. This means that parts of northern Syria are still occupied by Turkey and the Ankara-backed Syrian National Army, a group of militias, many comprised of Sunni Arabs or Turkmen. Many of these groups have become infamous for committing crimes against locals.

Turkey, meanwhile, does not look ready to withdraw from the parts of Syria it occupies. This means that these areas, like Afrin and Serekaniya, may continue to suffer under Ankara’s oppressive rule.

While Damascus has been taken by Syrian opposition groups and the new leader of Syria – Ahmed Shara’a, also known as Abu Mohammed al-Julani – appears to be trying to burnish his image as an inclusive leader, there are parts of Syria that are in stasis. This means that parts of northern Syria are still occupied by Turkey and the Ankara-backed Syrian National Army, a group of militias, many comprised of Sunni Arabs or Turkmen. Many of these groups have become infamous for committing crimes against locals.

Turkey, meanwhile, does not look ready to withdraw from the parts of Syria it occupies. This means that these areas, like Afrin and Serekaniya, may continue to suffer under Ankara’s oppressive rule.

Priest Jalal Ghazal gives communion during a Christmas mass at the Church of St George, in Maaloula, some 60km north of Damascus, Syria.:

The foreign busybodies in the State Department, Foreign Office, and French Foreign Ministry, who are already pressing for the reconstruction of a unitary Syrian state, should reflect on the country’s history. Syria was never meant to function as a unitary state, nor under Sunni Arab majority rule, as it is likely to now.

Under Ottoman rule, the distinct national identities of its Alawite, Arab Christian-Orthodox, Druze, Kurdish, Armenian, Ismaili, and Arab Shia populations were all recognized. When France obtained the territory in 1919, it strove to accommodate plural identities by creating two separate states: an Alawite one in northwest Syria and a Druze one in the southeast.

But when the French gave up their attempt to control Syria in 1946, a Sunni Arab, Shukri al-Quwatli, became the country’s president. He did not discriminate against the minorities, but he did send troops with Transjordan and Egypt to invade Israel in 1948 in the name of Sunni Arab solidarity. He had high hopes of conquering the Galilee, because the Syrians had tanks and artillery left behind by the French, while the Jews only had rifles, some machine-guns, and a couple of antique 1906 howitzers.

The ensuing Arab defeat came as a terrible humiliation, which prompted the first of Syria’s many coups. The next president, General Husni al Zaim, only ruled for 137 days but set enduring precedents: although he had been in charge of the fighting as the Army Chief of Staff, he blamed civilian politicians for Syria’s defeat, and second, he was not an Arab but a Kurd — the first of a series of non-Sunni Arab rulers, found in no other Arab country.

During the next 21 years, 17 presidents followed one another. And three of those years were under Egyptian rule. In 1958 Gamal Abdel Nasser, then the very embodiment of Arab nationalism, had been invited to rule Syria as well, in what became the United Arab Republic. The Syrian elite, desperate for stability, had simply given up on independence.

This experiment in Arab unity lasted for three years and 219 days, long enough to teach the Syrian elite both civil and military that the rule of much larger but much poorer Egypt was very costly. A military coup dissolved the United Arab Republic on 29 September 1961, and six more presidents tried to rule Syria. But stability would come in November 1970 when Hafez al-Assad took control as military dictator before naming himself the president in February 1971.

With Hafez al-Assad there was no more beating around the bush on the question of ethnicity, never even mentioned by all his predecessors. He was an Alawite, therefore only a very nominal Muslim (they drink wine and believe in the transmigration of souls), and he relied very largely on fellow Alawites to control the levers of power, from the command of air force squadrons and every armored unit within reach of Damascus to the customs service that generated revenue much more reliably than taxes, and the police which recruited informants in every part of Syrian society.

It was Hafez-al Assad’s father, Suleiman, who had laid the basis of subsequent Alawite power over Syria. In June 1926, along with other notable Alawites, he sent a letter to the French Prime Minister Leon Blum, to explain why his people — mostly peasant farmers in those days — could never live under Muslim rule. “The spirit of hatred and intolerance plants its roots in the heart of Muslim Arabs toward everything that is non-Muslim,” he wrote, warning of the risk to Syrian minorities if France granted independence. At the time the French were organizing their colonial army for Syria and thought it prudent to favor Alawite applicants along with Druzes, Ismailis, and a few Christians, all much more likely to be loyal to France against majority Arab Sunni demands for independence.

The disproportionate number of Alawites in the officer corps allowed Hafez al-Assad to seize control of the armed forces in 1970. But the elevation of Alawite farmers into the ruling class would ultimately undo the 54-year long regime of Assad father and son that finally collapsed two weeks ago. The sons of farmers moved into Damascus and other Syrian cities to exploit their Alawite connections to occupy lucrative government positions or work in state-connected firms, and were less and less willing to serve as soldiers, gendarmes and spies to protect the regime from its enemies.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot met with Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and All the East John X (Yazigi), in Damascus

For many years this enfeeblement of the Alawites was masked by the rise of Iran’s power in Syria. Tehran’s militantly Shia rulers needed bases in Syria to build up Hezbollah in Lebanon, and to claim overall Muslim leadership against Israel. They therefore chose to accept the exceedingly heretical Alawites as both Muslim and Shia.

Iran’s support allowed the Assad regime to cling to power for years, even in the face of the mass “Arab Spring” protests led by the Sunni Arab majority that started in December 2010. The Revolutionary Guards trained Shia recruits from Iraq and as far as Afghanistan to repress the Sunni majority rebels all over Syria, while relying on higher grade Hezbollah units to reconquer strongly held towns and city quarters, with bombing support from Syrian aircraft and Russian fighter-bombers.

Farouq Habib (right) speaks to the hazmat team ahead of the mission.

Determined to resist by all means possible including the use of chlorine and mustard gas, the regime survived for another 14 years. But it could not survive Israel’s demolition of Hezbollah and its clear-cut aerial victory right over Tehran. The thousand or so Sunni fundamentalist rebels of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham who drove into Aleppo on 29 November, would easily have been stopped by a Hezbollah battalion in the past, but not this time. And neither could Iran’s Revolutionary Guards be flown to support the regime because the Israelis would not have allowed it. After Iran’s air force did not even try to resist Israel’s 26 October attack near Tehran, the entire edifice of Iran’s military power was exposed as a sham. Assad fled just in time to avoid certain death.

The Foreign Office, State Department Near East Bureau, and French Quai d’Orsay should pause to reconsider this history. The Alawites might be beaten down but not the Kurds in the north-east, nor the Druzes in the south-east.

 

 

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