Assad’s Opponents Are Building a New Order
6 min read
A carnival of joy has erupted in Syria with the fall of the strongman Bashar al-Assad. Syrians have waited a long time and paid a heavy price for this jubilation. Thirteen years ago, the country’s revolution began with peaceful demonstrations; since then, by one estimate, more than 600,000 Syrians have lost their lives. The dictatorship’s list of crimes is much longer than that, encompassing peacetime abuses and stretching back 54 years, to when Assad’s father, Hafez, first assumed the throne. The Ba’ath Party, which once sought dominion over the entire Arab world, has now lost its final foothold.
The relief and joy over the fall of Assad are more than justified, but soon they will give way to the tough work of building a new order in a country battered by years of war and oppression. The success of this task will depend primarily on two factors: the ability of Assad’s many different opponents to work together, and the willingness of neighboring countries, chiefly Turkey, to accept the outcome.
Within a year of its inception in 2011, Syria’s revolution devolved into a civil war, and the country’s territory has since been divided among a variety of armed groups. Even now, after the fall of Assad, several entities rule over different parts of the country. Damascus was liberated by three groups: the Islamist outfit Hay’at Tahrir al Sham (HTS); the Southern Operations Room, formed only a few days ago as a coalition of local anti-regime militias in the south; and the United States–backed Syrian Free Army, a militia that has long controlled the area near the Syrian-Jordanian-Iraqi triple border. Farther from the capital, two more groups compete over the northern and eastern regions of the country: the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), led by a left-wing Kurdish party with links to fellow Kurds in Turkey; and its mortal opponent, the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA). Even as Syrians celebrated the fall of Damascus, the SDF and SNA were clashing over control of Manbij, the only major town the SDF held west of the Euphrates.
To see what might divide these groups from one another, and set them at odds with Syria’s neighbors, is not difficult. The U.S. has designated HTS, which has roots in al-Qaeda, a terrorist group and maintains a $10 million bounty on the head of its charismatic leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani. HTS leaders have pointed to the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan as a source of inspiration, and the Taliban has been quick to congratulate Jolani on his group’s advances. The SDF, by contrast, is supported by a small contingent of U.S. forces and traces its lineage to Kurdish feminism and the late American socialist-anarchist thinker Murray Bookchin. The group is alleged to have ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a militia operating in Turkey that is also a U.S.-designated terror group. As a result, Ankara considers SDF’s consolidation in northeastern Syria a national-security threat and has repeatedly run brutal operations against it, both directly and through its support for the SNA.
These are just some of the groups that would need to work together to build a new order in Syria—and to somehow avoid the fate of post-2011 Libya or post-2003 Iraq. But as difficult as that cooperation may be, Syria has seen enough of the alternative to be invested in making it succeed. In the past week or so, leaders of Syria’s ethnic and sectarian communities—the country is about 70 percent Sunni Arab, and the rest consists largely of Kurds, Turkmen, Druze, Christians, Jews, and Alawites—have met in various cities around the country and pledged to work together.
HTS, in particular, has gone out of its way to assure minorities, such as Christians in Aleppo and Shiites in Salamiyah, that they have nothing to fear. And the statelet that Jolani has run out of Idlib, in northwestern Syria, since 2017 has hardly been a brutal fundamentalist beachhead. It hasn’t been a democracy, either; and both HTS and its earlier incarnation, Jabhat al-Nusra, stand accused of suppressing dissidents and harassing the region’s Druze minority. But in recent years, Jolani has turned his energy to building credible state institutions (these proved their mettle during the coronavirus pandemic and the earthquake in northwestern Syria last year) and effectively aiding the U.S. in suppressing the remnants of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Earlier today, HTS announced a new transitional government headed by Mohammed al-Bashir, an Idlib-born technocrat who has run HTS’s statelet since January. The new government is collaborating with the outgoing prime minister and cabinet ministers to ensure a smooth transition. HTS also issued an order that “categorically prohibits forcing women to wear particular clothing or interfering with their right to choose their attire or appearance.” Whether women’s rights can be protected in Syria will be a big test of the new order.
That Salih Muslim, a key figure in the SDF, has expressed an interest in working with Jolani’s group maybe shouldn’t be surprising: “They are Syrians first and foremost, and they’ve changed their ideas from when they were Jihadist,” Muslim told Al Arabiya on December 5, before praising the group’s “discipline.” Welcoming the fall of Assad, SDF’s military chief, Mazloum Abdi, said: “This change presents an opportunity to build a new Syria based on democracy and justice that guarantees the rights of all Syrians.”
But even more fraught than the collaboration between HTS and SDF will be the latter’s relationship with Turkey. Syria’s powerful northern neighbor has long been concerned about encouraging Kurdish demands for autonomy within its own borders, and these anxieties could condition how much autonomy it can countenance for those in Syria. To be sure, Iraq now has a semiautonomous Kurdish region, and Ankara has not only made its peace with that but established good relations with the regional government. But Syria’s SDF is more radical than the Iraqi Kurdish leadership and has extensive ties, linguistic and otherwise, to Kurds in Turkey.
The SDF could try to hash out a diplomatic deal with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Failing that—especially if President-Elect Donald Trump withdraws U.S. support from the SDF, as he has all but promised to do—the group may find itself imperiled. The SDF has run one of the most socially liberal and enlightened entities in the Middle East, and its downfall would not augur well for Syria’s future as an inclusive country.
Exhausted after almost 14 years of a murderous civil war, millions of Syrians want to put the past behind them and build a better future. The citizens of many other countries in the region, too, would prefer to focus on economic development rather than forever wars. Iran’s Axis of Resistance, a major cause of instability throughout the Middle East, has now entirely collapsed; even some of its supporters are writing its obituaries.
Nobody expects a flourishing liberal democracy to suddenly emerge from the ashes of the Syrian civil war. But if Syrians are able to put their differences aside, they could begin to build an effective polity that can advance the welfare of its citizens. That would be a win for the whole Middle East.
